We Spent Billions on Wind Power… and All I Got Was a Rolling Blackout

Too bad skeptics can be paid for being right most of the time.

I read that story. What I didn’t understand (give me the dunce hat award) but doesn’t it require more energy to cool Texas when it’s hot vs. energy when it’s cold? Or are air conditioners hard wired to run all the time while heat is an extra burden? I also noticed that private homes were the only ones affected. The article was careful to point out that industry was not included in the blackouts. That’s strange and not very condusive for quality of life for the masses. The article reminded me of the Enron blackouts in California.

I’m pretty cheesed about having to go through the rolling blackouts today – and with no warning! Just saw the local hospital director on the news saying that it would have been a lot easier to cope with if someone would have told them the power was going to be cut! Of course the hospitals have backup generators, but they had to scramble to put them online when all the power was cut with no warning at 7 am this morning.
Nobody in charge thought it was important to let anyone know in advance. Brilliant.
One other thing I’ve heard is that there was a big drop in pressure in the nat gas pipelines, due to a host of backup generation facilities all being kicked on at the same time and with no overall coordination. This only aggravated the problems the grid was having. Of course, a lot of these backup facilities exist to keep the grid supplied when the wind generators go down.

Really?
It took me less than two seconds to find this:
Early explanations for the widespread unit outages were slim. One state regulator — the Texas Railroad Commission — said power outages affected some fuel deliveries to gas-fired power plants, forcing them to reduce power output.
Rolling blackouts hit gas processing plants operated by Kinder Morgan and Enterprise Products Partners LP, which crimped deliveries to the Frontera electric plant in McAllen, the commission said.
Near Dallas-Fort Worth, frozen pipeline compressors spurred Atmos Mid-Tex to curtail gas deliveries to 300 industrial customers, it said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110203/us_nm/us_ercot_rollingblackots_5
No mention, anywhere, of turbines not “turbining.”
REPLY: I think what Mike was trying to point out is that the wind power didn’t pick up the load…it was offline for the most part too. Had it been online, the blackouts might not have been needed. – Anthony

this story reminds me of this one: “Power Blip Jolts Supply of Gadget Chips” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703766704576009071694055878.html
An Excerpt: “Toshiba’s troubles started early Wednesday when, according to power supplier Chubu Electric Power Co., there was a sudden drop in voltage that caused a 0.07-second power interruption at Toshiba’s Yokkaichi memory-chip plant in Mie prefecture.”
This very short interruption will reduce Toshiba’s chip production by “…up to 20% next year.”
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/business/asia/japan/2010/12/10/283067/Toshiba-says.htm
Wind power?
What a complete mis-allocation of resources and waste of money!
At some point, the insanity has to end.

I’m not sure how the wind power generation played into it, but the primary cause was burst water pipes at two coal plants, and difficulties getting natural gas plants running, both due to the cold. Demand is well below summer peak demand, even with the cold temperatures, but between failing plants and normal maintenance rotation, capacity fell below demand. Also, Mexico stepped in and provided some MW, which helped reduce the need for blackouts.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/7409400.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/03/us-ercot-rollingblackouts-idUSTRE71213420110203

Ah, the perils of guessing.

I think what Mike was trying to point out is that the wind power didn’t pick up the load…it was offline for the most part too.
Uh, I haven’t read anything about the turbines being off-line. Maybe I’d better put my glasses on and re-read the post.
All I read was that he was “guessing” that that was what happened. Is “guessing” good enough, now?

Davesix;
Stein’s Law: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

Billions of dollars later, wind doesn’t really help at all?

Anthony,
Thank you…that is EXACTLY what I was trying to say. If the money had been spent on conventional power plants, nuclear or coal, there would be power tonight. But, because of the calm winds, there isn’t any output from the wind turbines.
Mike

“Actually, it’s starting to sound, to me, like the windmills were the ONLY thing working.”
Incorrect. There is no wind tonight. See map above. You can check the current map of the generating region here: http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/surface/displaySfc.php?region=abi&endDate=20110203&endTime=-1&duration=0

I was all ready to start shouting about clean renewable energy until that b******d posted the article on the burst water pipes. Now, I’ll have to figure out somewhere else to spout my righteous indignation. Living in Marin County I am certain I won’t have to wait long until something pops up.

The purpose of windmills was to provide generating capacity. Perhaps digging in and finding precisely what, if any, capacity the windmills were providing would be useful. Is there a way to determine this, or is this something for which one needs FOIA and a legal team? Seems to me to be the penultimate test: the chips were down and a fossil fuel plant failed, so how well did the backup plan perform?

Simple- no back up period. No wind, no back up. more gas plants, more coal, more nukes,
Anthony’s point-it can’t take up the slack if it isn’t capable. Bonneville power is having
all sorts of problems with the erratic surge and slack and it will bite us here in the
NW US…

It is often stated with wind power that if you have a widely distrubuted windmill system, you will always have wind somewhere, generating power.
Have a look at the following website for wind farm performance here in Australia for the south eastern interconnected grid system. This is a grid that spans about 1500 km by 1000 km. The annual charts are telling, for 2010 there are quite often times when the wind farm system is generating less than 10% installed capacity, with at least once zero.
http://windfarmperformance.info/

Power interruption from a couple of coal-fired plants triggered a crisis.
I wonder what it will be called when they’re all shut down.

Coming from a country, Denmark, where 20%+ of the generating capacity is based on windmills and where blackouts are Exceptionally rare, this and related “wind power” posts were a hoot to read and quite in line with my impression of the author&readership of WUWT in general, exceptions noted:)
-The trick to providing a stable energy supply based to a large extent on intermittent renewables (or failing coal plants, for that matter…)? An inter-regional, modern electricity grid, which is what the US most certainly does not have in most regions.

Two plants failed, what was their output? Spinning reserve might be able to take up the slack depending on the amount of generation lost. Usually when there is a sudden shortage of generation there is load shedding and industrial load is usually the first to go off line. With spinning reserve and load shed working together the system should stay intack. There can also be a restriction on the capacity of transmission lines to carry power from an area with generation to an area short of generation. Windpower generally cannot be used for spinning reserve as it is kind of hard to turn up the wind.
Now I would say power system planning seems to have been biased toward wind to the detriment of conventional power and transmission.If planning was more conventional there may not have been blackouts. I am speaking with 35 years experience as a power system operator/dispatcher.
Hopefully the facts will come out and be reported here. There was not enough backup for bird mincers.

The author’s mistake seems to be that he assumes “cold means no wind.”
Well, I don’t know about Texas, but it was 25 degrees here this morning, and the wind was blowing like crazy. There may be something about the UK that the wind doesn’t blow when it gets cold, but I don’t think that applies to Texas (I know it doesn’t apply to Mississippi.)
As far as I can see the Wind Turbines did what was expected, but a couple of coal plants went down, and so did their nat gas “back-ups.” I’ll be danged if I can see how that was “Wind’s” fault.

Mods I am hiding my name as it is instantly recognizable in my industry.
But I have some things to say that can help everyone.
—
I spent most of the day dealing with the rolling blackouts in our various data centers in Texas. We buy power in huge amounts and we also have huge standby generation systems.
We moved to diesel systems two years ago because we felt NG had a flaw in that the pumping station could fail or the NG provider could move us to the back of the queue. Today vindicated that move. A number of other providers relied on NG systems which did not provide the load needed and drained their UPS systems and nearly failed. Some providers did fail. A number of large corporations lost their data centers.
We did not. We had from three to eight blackouts at our data centers in the DFW area and burned from 5% to 20% of our fuel reserves in order to stay up.
On site captive capacity is the only way to go. We plan to add an additional 18 hours of run time in the form of fuel tanks.
Another issue we had to deal with was the nearly complete loss of our staff . Most of them were working at home and the blackouts that took them down . We usually have stacked shifts on site to respond to issues and rely on being able to bring staff on line remotely, but most of the off site staff were rendered ineffective because they lost power at home.
This affected not only our operations but most of our clients as well. This was a big deal.
Another issue is remote access. We usually have 30% of the staff working at any one time on site. Due to the emergency we had to support customers failing over to colo DR and we had to support that RAS as well as our 100% surge in staff access. We have RAS systems at all our major sites and were able to distribute the load around those nodes and then reconfigure the network as needed. A lot of other people ran out of RAS capacity and had some major issues.
Redundant connections from two or more providers. Everyone worries about the fiber cut, but no one expects to lose network because of rolling blackouts. Well, it happens. BGP is your friend.
Food and water. Get a small freezer and keep frozen meals in it.
Here is my take on wind.
Complex systems :
The wind generation and NG generation capacity are coupled together and are a complex system. A linear stimulus will not generate a linear response and small events in different parts of the system will cascade in unpredictable ways. On a systems analysis basis, it is stupid to have both types of capacities in the same grid. ERCOT has warned about too much wind and something like this for years.
Opportunity cost:
Had Texas invested all that wind money in a bunch of nukes none of this would have happened. A nuke generates a steady load and has a very high availability rate – over 97%. And the plants are built to be highly reliable with multiple paths. They just do not quit unlike the BS we saw today.

Kristoffer Haldrup says:
February 2, 2011 at 10:36 pm
Interconnected grids sounds good, but in closely geographic countries this only works well when energy sources are not weather dependant. I do not dispute the 20% wind generation energy claim, but would point out that almost half of that is exported to close geographical neighbors. In return Denmark imports energy from countries that have coal and nuclear power to cover weather related variations in wind power.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf99.html
It should be noted that Denmark’s commitment to wind power is heavily subsidized, and projected viability of manufacturing was based on exports to nations now becoming increasingly dubious about intermittent un-storable energy sources.

Texas has, I think, three nuclear power plants with a total of five units. How many of those went down because of the weather? Zip as near as I can find.

“Kristoffer Haldrup says:
February 2, 2011 at 10:36 pm
Coming from a country, Denmark, where 20%+ of the generating capacity is based on windmills and where blackouts are Exceptionally rare, this and related “wind power” posts were a hoot to read and quite in line with my impression of the author&readership of WUWT in general, exceptions noted:)
-The trick to providing a stable energy supply based to a large extent on intermittent renewables (or failing coal plants, for that matter…)? An inter-regional, modern electricity grid, which is what the US most certainly does not have in most regions.”
Apparently you aren’t aware that Denmark exports most of the wind power to Sweden, which has a Hydro/Nuclear based power system which can handle sudden changes in power availability (and laws that require users to buy wind power whether they want or not).
Also Denmark can easily import reliable hydro power from Norway and Sweden whenever needed. Remember that no grid is yet smart enough to create power out of nothing.

Well, they did have a lowest temperature in 15 years.
That is not supposed to happen, ever…

That’s incredibly smart to reinvest in coal and nuclear. The world has an infinite supply of coal and we always can call upon the efficiency of Chernobyl as a prime example of nuclear power at it’s best.
Hey dummies….multiple power sources.. wind, geothermal, solar, R & D for radiant energy and better battery sources….and locally placed kinetic energy recovery systems to stabilize during brown-outs, and just good, old fashioned architecture that accommodates minimum energy consumption, like what those primitives did back in the day before air conditioning and central heating.
We have the technology today to enable buildings to generate their own electricity. The main power grid should be the backup, while modern architecture and retrofits are made as grid tie ins. You’d still have the need for utility service because you’d need a large number of trained employees to keep the grid-tie ins stable. Today it’s the reverse, because America hates innovators and the prospect of high end investment into technological breakthroughs…like the kind Bell Labs once practiced that lead to the transistor…back in the day when capitalism was functional. The investor class has already placed it’s bets on this country rotting into a third world mess.

@ George Turner says:
February 2, 2011 at 10:34 pm
“Brad, I guess in the old days they would’ve just shoved a couple sticks of dynamite in the pile to loosen it up. I had a 1920′s copy of the DuPont Blaster’s Handbook which recommended dynamite for loosening frozen coal and gravel in railroad cars. They also had lots of uses around the house … ”
Thanks George enjoyed that one. My mind visualised possible uses ‘around the house’ with my 3 teenagers. 
We’re having cyclones and floods up north, floods and bushfires down south and a little break from the heat here in Melbourne. I
‘m hoping to find out how the wind farm in the way of Yasi faired. Showed my lad the videos of the exploding fans from the other thread. This is such a great site for showing sciency stuff to kids. Also showed them the last data feeds from Willis Is – excellent stuff Anthony.
Thanks again Anthony, mods, posters and commentators. Best site evah. 
Cheers Jack

Misinformation here, including in the OP is stunning. No due diligence by Mike Smith. What an utter FAIL.
First of all Texas doesn’t pay for wind turbines. “We” didn’t spend billions. The subject line itself is 100% unadulterated drivel. Texas spends less than $2 million per year on wind subsidies and these “subsidies” are nothing more than property tax incentives of the same kind given to land used for agriculture, wildlife sanctuaries, and historical monuments.
http://www.window.state.tx.us/specialrpt/energy/subsidies/index.php#wind
Federal subsidies, in the form of tax incentives, are quite a bit larger – on the order of half a billion a year. These windfarms are owned by Shell, Exon, and Mobil among others. The accountants get to write off capital invested in the wind turbines and cost of leasing the land. Farmers are quite happy to lease land for a wind turbine as it pays about $5000/yr. per turbine and doesn’t impact farming activities at all which is essentially how phone companies lease land for their cell towers. Same scheme.
If you don’t like the federal tax breaks talk to your congressmen. Those have nothing to do with Texas.
The electricity itself is sold on the open market and has to compete just like all the electrical providers. Current rates in Texas average $0.12/kwh which is 10% below the national average and lower than both California ($0.14/kwh) and New York ($0.19/kwh) which are the only comparably sized state economies.
Last, this was only the second rolling blackout in the past 20 years. The last was in 2006 caused by a heat wave. The author, Mike Smith, if he’d done just a tiny scrap of due diligence, would have learned that two power plants, one gas and one coal, went offline due to broken water pipes and natural gas pipeline pressure was low due to some transient pump problem which contributed to people turning on electric heaters when their gas furnaces didn’t have enough pressure. It was something of a perfect storm of failures coupled with the coldest arctic air mass to hit the state in a decade. It had jack-diddly-squat to do with wind turbines.

It is becoming very obvious that politicians and civic authorities in the Western world have convinced themselves that continuous climate warming is a fact and are not taking the very high possibility of cold weather as a part of natural variation seriously.
The situation here in the UK is becoming increasingly worrying as said authorities have their heads stuck in ‘warm’ mode and policy has not taken cognisance of reality. This winter and the previous two winters have been cold enough to disrupt transport systems of every kind in quite major ways and at a major cost to the nation. It has also directly caused an increase in the incidence of the elderly dying of the cold through their inability to fund the costs of their basic heating needs; The huge recent rise in the price of heating oil has led to a sharp rise in the number of thefts of this commoditiy from household tanks in the countryside, which has left some elderly citizens in dire circumstances. The cavalier attitude of the politicians to the deaths is disgraceful, and their response is even more disgraceful – they promise to spend even more on expensive wind farms which cannot produce energy when the wind is insuficient to drive them during periods of very low temperature. The United Kingdom’s politicians have convinced themselves of a vicious fable and the citizenry will pay the price in high costs, death and misery.
I am convinced, after a quick look at the facts coming in from Texas, that windmills can not provide rational answers to their energy problems.

Kum,
What’s your day job ?…..i’m betting it’s not in engineering because all you’re giving us is (politician’s and media) rhetoric.
Jimmy

This is an unfortunate article, as it appears to rely heavily upon guesswork. It’s all very well coming back later and offering “What I meant to say was…”, but the nature of the raging debate on this issue means weakness of this kind undermines the credibility of the source, in this case, the author. I don’t doubt the extensive research behind the book, but a stab in the dark aids no cause.

There’s something about windmills having heating systems installed to enable them to continue functioning in extreme cold, even with wind blowing internal gubbins can seize up.

“Austin wasn’t even affected by the recent winter storm”
Bullshite. I live in Austin. We had 60mph straight line winds when the cold front arrived and temperatures plunged to 16F. That’s the lowest temperature I’ve ever seen in Austin and I’ve lived there 18 years. I have two homes, one is heated by gas and the other by electricity. You bet your ass Austin was effected as my electric furnace and many others worked overtime in that low temperature.

A point of detail – as far as I know, the UK has not so far suffered ‘rolling blackouts’ because the wind did not blow.
However, the crazy UK energy policy now in place means that regular blackouts are now almost inevitable before the end of the present decade, unless the decision to close down several coal-fired power stations is reversed, and amazing progress is made in building new fossil fuel generating capacity.

Regarding “Kristoffer Haldrup says:
February 2, 2011 at 10:36 pm
Coming from a country, Denmark, where 20%+ of the generating capacity is based on windmills and where blackouts are Exceptionally rare, this and related “wind power” posts were a hoot to read and quite in line with my impression of the author&readership of WUWT in general, exceptions noted:)”
Kristoffer, it is never a good idea to throw out blanket insults, however I find a little research on your claims of Danish sucess like accuracy and truth.
Especially controversial are the subsidies made to Danish wind power and problems connected with grid management. It’s pretty universally accepted among wind specialists that keeping the transmission system running smoothly gets tougher as wind power’s share grows.
In 1998, Norway commissioned a study of wind power in Denmark and concluded that it has “serious environmental effects, insufficient production, and high production costs.”
Denmark (population 5.3 million) has over 6,000 turbines that produced electricity equal to 19% of what the country used in 2002. Yet no conventional power plant has been shut down. Because of the intermittency and variability of the wind, conventional power plants must be kept running at full capacity to meet the actual demand for electricity. Most cannot simply be turned on and off as the wind dies and rises, and the quick ramping up and down of those that can be would actually increase their output of pollution and carbon dioxide (the primary “greenhouse” gas). So when the wind is blowing just right for the turbines, the power they generate is usually a surplus and sold to other countries at an extremely discounted price, or the turbines are simply shut off.
A writer in The Utilities Journal (David J. White, “Danish Wind: Too Good To Be True?,” July 2004) found that 84% of western Denmark’s wind-generated electricity was exported (at a revenue loss) in 2003, i.e., Denmark’s glut of wind towers provided only 3.3% of the nation’s electricity. According to The Wall Street Journal Europe, the Copenhagen newspaper Politiken reported that wind actually met only 1.7% of Denmark’s total demand in 1999. (Besides the amount exported, this low figure may also reflect the actual net contribution. The large amount of electricity used by the turbines themselves is typically not accounted for in the usually cited output figures. Click here for information about electricity use in wind turbines.) In Weekendavisen (Nov. 4, 2005), Frede Vestergaard reported that Denmark as a whole exported 70.3% of its wind production in 2004.
Denmark is just dependent enough on wind power that when the wind is not blowing right they must import electricity. In 2000 they imported more electricity than they exported. And added to the Danish electric bill are the subsidies that support the private companies building the wind towers. Danish electricity costs for the consumer are the highest in Europe. [Click here for a detailed and well referenced examination by Vic Mason.] http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wind-power-in-denmark/

So Kristoff, your Danish electric costs, just like electric costs in Texas, are a large drain on your economy. Wind power is a failure without large tax support and it is not clean or enviromentaly friendly.

Kum
Kum Dollison,
You really should read this before you defend wind. Your insistence on “facts” supporting wind is unfortunately hot air. http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wp-content/uploads/mason-windpowerindenmark-2008.pdf

I can confirm the the effects of power cuts and grid overloads due to wind power.
Where I live in Germany, the biggest test center of wind mill technology in Germany according to this web site: http://www.energystate.de/content2.php?lang=en&id=&subid=12
an ever growing number of wind mills is out of order due to technical problems with the gear boxes (20 to 30%)
First you see a brown colored oil slick covering the under site of the generator dome which grows slowly due to increased oil loss. These mills obviously don’t carry a sensor that shuts the wind mill down before any damage due to oil losses occurs. A few days later the wind mill is down and often it takes weeks before repair crews show up. They must be very busy or it must take that long for parts to arrive. Mind you these are practically new wind mills, not older than 3-5 years.
There are also these moments when the odd wind mill is constantly shifting it’s rotor head to pick up the wind but fails to do so for many hours on a role.
This must be due to electronics or sensor problems responsible for keeping the rotor into the wind. The wind mills are also completely down for days on record (10 days on row is no exception) when a high pressure are takes a hold of the region and the wind lies down. These are hot or cold periods when electric power is needed the most. Maintenance obviously is a constant requirement to keep them running and I am really having problems to accept wind power as a reliable source for electricity from what I observe here.
Besides that, since the wind mills are operational and connected to the grid we have experienced a hike in power cuts from once in five years to 6 times a year and also power spikes, a real killer for electronics and electric equipment from fridges to washing machines.
I have lost the content of the fridge several times and can no longer leave it unattended when I travel for a few weeks which simply is an annoying inconvenience.
The same goes for the phone, fax and computer server network that is in need of a manual reboot when the power comes back to the grid after a power cut.
Very, very annoying.
I really don’t understand the Government policies in Europe to push for this I.M.O. failed technology pushing the reliability of our grid to the level of a third world country.

I know of two CCGT stations in the UK that were unable to run during the cold spells in December, due to freezing of instrumentation.
At this time, the wind turbines I also monitor were stationary for the vast majority of this period.
The sooner the UK wakes up to the winters to come, and stops toeing the CAGW line the better.

Galvanize says:
February 3, 2011 at 3:22 am
I know of two CCGT stations in the UK that were unable to run during the cold spells in December, due to freezing of instrumentation.
At this time, the wind turbines I also monitor were stationary for the vast majority of this period.
The sooner the UK wakes up to the winters to come, and stops toeing the CAGW line the better.
———————
The only real alternative is nuclear, but people protest when you suggest bulding a nuclear power plant in their back garden.

R. de Haan says:
I really don’t understand the Government policies in Europe to push for this I.M.O. failed technology pushing the reliability of our grid to the level of a third world country.

Well, I am living in Navarre, the first in Europe to be self-sufficient in renewable energy, (or so they say) and I cannot remember when was the last time we had a blackout at home.
From
Navarre, Europe’s sixth largest producer of wind power, currently sustains approximately 70 percent of its electricity needs from renewable energy sources, wind farms being used most extensively, and has a 900-megawatt capacity of installed wind power.
(for a population of 500.000 people, I must say)
So, 70 % of our electricity comes from renewable energy sources, mostly wind power, and yet, no blackouts. The blackout problems other places have may have other causes and can be prevented with better management.
And, by the way, we are the world largest producers of VolksWagen Polo cars, or we were last time I checked.

guys, just because you want it to be true does not make it true, this article is just dead wrong about, well, everything, and Mike Smith shows a true lack of understanding in his comments.

@Mike
Yes, as I write, wind is by no means an effective energy solution on its own, we agree perfectly on that. But it is demonstrably effective as part of the cocktail, nevertheless, and I would not call it “useless” in any sense of the word…but then, nor would I resort to name calling 😉
@David
Thanks for thoughtful comments, which again serve to underscore that it there is not any cause to say that wind power alone is The next Big Thing, but nor is there any reason at all not to consider it as part of our future energy supply. In this context, the subsidies have been necessary to develop the technology to its present level and beyond, a development that would not have taken place had only “market forces” been allowed to determine the future of this particular technology 25 years ago. Incidentally, the high Danish electricity costs are only to a small extent due to wind in the mix, but rather to some pretty fierce taxation/VAT issues. -The really heavy energy users in the industrial sector are exempt from many of these, in order not to hamper their competitiveness on an international level. This makes it less of a drain on the economy, and basically just one more tax:)

Lets hope all those freezing windmills have effective de-icing strategies…

Precipitation, atmospheric and in-cloud icing affect wind turbine operation in various ways, including measurement and control errors, power losses, mechanical and electrical failures and safety hazard. Anti-icing and de-icing strategies are used to minimize these effects. Many active and passive methods are in development but few are available on the market. Active heating of blades is the most tested, used and reliable way to prevent icing effects.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V86-4Y5GXTN-2&_user=10&_coverDate=01%2F31%2F2011&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1629087646&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=c7e2814b0cd089db1f76ceeaeac30c94&searchtype=a

And best not to think about the power drain too much on those cold, clear, windless days….

The electro-thermal de-icer is used in some sites, such as Canada’s Yukon and Finland’s Pori and Olostrunturi (Laakso et al., 2003). The system can be easily installed on existing blades. The significant energy consumption is its main drawback. In Pori, the system was used for public safety reasons and the power consumption was 1% of annual production
http://www.isope.org/publications/journals/ijope-17-3/abst-17-3-p182-RF-37-Mayer.pdf

Falling shards of ice pose an obvious risk to people, buildings and vehicles if the turbines are close to habitations or roads. In the UK several instances of this kind were reported last winter, the ice sometimes landing on homes and in gardens in chunks of up to 2ft. Residents were wary of venturing out until the turbines were switched off.
http://social.windenergyupdate.com/industry-insight/blade-ice-detection-and-removal-technology-accelerates-europe

Urederra says:
February 3, 2011 at 3:53 am
http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wp-content/uploads/mason-windpowerindenmark-2008.pdf
You really need to actually read this link, your renewable and wind power in all probability has issues similar to Denmark, which only works due to the very flexible hydro from Norway and Nuclear and coal back up (hydro and nuclear are not an option in most places, heavy taxes as Kristoffer Haldrup almost admits to, BTW Kristoffer, where I come from we call that a misallocation of resources) Wind is NOT a clean, cheap, or efficient option even in the best of circumstances like Denmark where the high cost IS due to the extensive wind production and the VAT tax is necessary to pay for it.
Brad this article was unfortunately poorly done, as the cause of the issue in Texas was not researched. However the message in the article and most comments are about the overall issue of wind power. Texas does have those problems and if the resources had instead gone into clean coal or third and fourth generation nuclear along with a policy to support it and make it less expensive (easily doable) this would not have been an issue.

Look at that, this mornig, before sunrise, every area of Texas has wind speeds above the 6.7mph generation requirement for the Misubishi 1000A turbines at the largest wind farm in the world (west of Dallas).
http://www.usairnet.com/weather/maps/current/texas/wind-speed/

Best place to check the reliability of wind power is the Ireland wind output graphs.
http://www.eirgrid.com/operations/systemperformancedata/windgeneration/
Click back to Jan 29th/30th and you can see the 1200 MW of installed wind created almost NO ENERGY!

Brad says:
February 2, 2011 at 8:43 pm
More details on exactl;y which power PLANTS failed:
http://www.dentonrc.com/sharedcontent/dws/drc/localnews/stories/DRC_Blackouts_0203.117a7ba23.html
Haven’t scrolled through the comments, so this may have been addressed. Those two plants did indeed fail, but they only account for ~2600 of the ~7000 MW failing. It was the wind. It dropped off around 3 pm the day before, and they didn’t spin up the reserves. If the reserves were running, or the wind hadn’t stopped, the system could have dealt with the two plants that went down. As for the unexpected demand, this storm was predicted last week. The politicians only mentioned the two plants that went down, but not the wind failing at the root of it all. Hmmmm….wonder why?

R. de Haan,
we in Czech republic don’t like much the North German windfarms. Whenever they start generate, there’s a small problem – Germany does not have enough power lines from North, where the energy generation occurs, to South, where it’s needed.
Y’a know, these lines are sooo unsightly when on the surface and sooo expensive when buried. So what they do is, to load it out of sudden on Czech and/or Polish transfer grid, which has a higher capacity due to the good ole commie times. It happened several times that both countries experienced overload blackout due to this noble and clean wind power peak.
We tried to stop this by installing some sort of “fuses” on the grid interface to prevent such unloading, but Germans overrode this using EU institutions. So we have to let them do this to our energy balance and what’s really a cherry on the top of all that cream – apparently the Germans don’t have to pay to the other countries’ grid owners or energy producers for losses caused by their sudden wind energy overloads. And it seems that they don’t plan to increase their north-south transfer lines either. Why should they, when the Czechs will do it themselves just for protection of their own grid? 😉
So much for the really modern and up-to-date grids in Europe as well as for the spirit of friendly cooperation on renewables…
Here is a translation of Czech articles about this problem:
http://tinyurl.com/6l7gtru
http://tinyurl.com/4mvcrzm

Excellent article, and our strategy of filling the Internet with as much BS as possible seems to be working.. I just hope those stupid “warmers” with all their “critical thinking” and “science” don’t figure us out….

Is that really 7,000 megawatts of continuous reliable generated power or is it the maximum power the system can ever tolerate or maybe the average but not continuous output? Some of you seem to know quite a lot on this subject. (of course if there is no wind, it’s zero)

Part of the Texas problem is a result of the fundamental Texas psyche. They have a mental undercurrent of ‘specialness’ and independence and think that they might at any moment break away and be their own little nation, yet again, if things don’t go their way.
As a result, the Texas power grid was designed to operate almost independently from the rest of the world and only lately have they begun to have any meaningful grid- ties to neighboring states/nations. This wouldn’t have been a problem (and wasn’t) in neighboring Oklahoma, which had far worse weather conditions than Texas, since OK is tied into the rest of the nation’s grid.

Bikermailman-
Read the rest of the posts and reports, it seems the draw on natural gas caused low pressure in the lines to the plants that are supposed to come online to handle peak loads, and because of the low pressure they could not. We could have built 100 more nat gas which it seems the folks on this string wanted, and they would have failed as the delivery infrastructure failed to get the gas to them. We have multiple failure of backups here, but wind is not one of them.

Oh yes, anybody bet that the Federal Government would allow Texas to implement E-Cat units considering the recent drilling shutdown in the Gulf? The US Patent Office won’t even consider an invention based on “cold fusion”. Makes one ask the question: Is government the solution or the problem?

Placing blame on some other entity for our discomfort seems to be a place where common sense needs to be discussed at the individual level. Community service provider systems (public and private) have, at their very core, a huge risk factor. They are vulnerable to multiple large and small disruptions in the delivery of community service, be it groceries, hospital services, garbage pickup, electricity, gas, water, etc. If you do not have individual backup systems installed, you have given tacit approval that you are willing to shoulder the risks of being dependent on these service providers without complaint.
The more important issue here is an individual one. This is less about what happened to power in Texas than it is about who would survive just fine living under their own power.

curmudgy says:
February 3, 2011 at 12:56 am
That’s incredibly smart to reinvest in coal and nuclear. The world has an infinite supply of coal and we always can call upon the efficiency of Chernobyl as a prime example of nuclear power at it’s best.
_________________________________
More lefty garbage from people who don’t want to understand the truth.
Chernobyl was a military design (graphite reactor) with no significant containment. It was built to produce plutonium for weapons and had a secondary purpose of generating power. There are no commercial power plants using that design.
And please tell us, o sage thou art, where the terrible disaster with commercial nuclear power occurred?

Brad says:
February 3, 2011 at 5:35 am
We can all agree that drilling safely is a good idea. but lets both drill AND be safe about it. As for Obama he is a big proponent of both clean coal and nuclear (he comes from a top nuke state in Illinois).
Brad.you comments about Obama are incorrect. Obama has promised that under his plan electricity rates will necessarily skyrocket, and they will, and each and every time he talks about nuclear, it is in some far distance future when it is safe, as if the ghosts of chernobyl are remotely related to todays technology, or even first generation US technology. As to your comment, “Lat time I checked we were discussing Texas, not Ireland” No we are discussing that the wind power problems,
even in an ideal place like Denmark, our generic to all wind production. You however have failed to respond to any of these criticism and are fixated on the articles mistake of assuming wind power was the problem in this case. By the way your statement that 100 natural gas power generation stations would have all had the same problem is an absurd assertion with no evidence. Please step your game up.

A sage once said: “Nothing is more shameful than assertion without knowledge.”
This post was begun in almost complete ignorance of the facts, and should be struck from the archives of WUWT. Atypical and disappointing. Hopefully, mark the mistake with, “Lesson learned.”

I suggest more solar. Surely west Texas has a lot of sunlight going to waste.
No seriously, the boom in wind was offset by blocking expansion of coal and other sources. Texas is growing and they shouldn’t depend on an unreliable source to cover increased consumption. When all else fails, blame Bush.

I live here in El Paso and we have two power plants within the city and both were off line yesterday. Yesterday morning it was 8 degrees and it was 1 degree this morning.
At my house, no power yesterday morning for over an hour and again late last night.
Lots of homes in El Paso have water pipes freezing and bursting , some water service outages in some parts of the city as well and approx 1200 homes are without natural gas service due to low pressure because of the demand. This morning Texas is purchasing power from New Mexico however as I sit here and type this I wonder when and if the power will go off again as there is no warning, just kaput and that’s it!

Kum
China was the number 1 installer of coal last year and last decade. I have my doubts about your wind claim. China, bad as it is in many ways, doesn’t tend to do things that stupid.
Elsewhere the claim that the problem with wind is distribution and having it wide spread enough flies in the face of widespread systems in Australia and Western North America. If you think you can use wind in Australia to power something in Canada or even in New Zealand regardless of your “grid” than you really need to take a basic course in electricity. Power transmission wastes energy, and the farther and the more you transmit the greater the waste

A point of detail – as far as I know, the UK has not so far suffered ‘rolling blackouts’ because the wind did not blow.

No, that is quite true. Because they did two things, ramped up their conventional power output, but equally or more important, they were able to import from France. Now this was when wind is 2% or so of generation, and it goes totally, as it will most winters and some summers too, and electricity consumption rises dramatically, as it will every cold winter. They were a big chunk short, but covered. The gap is not just losing 2%, the gap is losing 2% when demand rises by 5-10%.
Now imagine that wind is 20% of supply, As happens every cold winter, it will happen that it simply vanishes. Its off totally, like someone turned a switch. At the same time, everyone in the UK wakes up and decides to boil water for tea, turn on the electric fires to warm up a bit. We now have, if we have not installed total backup, something like a 30% gap. The network falls over.
The only reason the UK did not have blackouts in December is that wind is such a small part of generation, and because the continent could supply. But when wind is 20% or more, either it will be in addition to conventional which will be able to supply peak demand, or the net will fall over. No question about it, the UK is, because of climate and geography, unsuited for migration to wind power to any much greater extent than now.
By the way, you can also figure the size of the task. If 3000 turbines will do 2%, but only really 1% with any reliability, and even then you have to be prepared to see them just go away for weeks in the year, figure how many will be needed to get to 20%. 60,000 is the answer. Do you have any idea how many ships, how much concrete, how many people are needed to get the things in offshore? And then to service the things? All winter in the North Sea?
It is completely insane to even consider it. Whatever anyone says, its not going to happen. Here is an idea. Why don’t we build the backup first, we are going to need it regardless. Then we can start adding the windmills at our leisure….

To those whom cite Chernobyl as an example of ‘efficient’ nuclear power:
No. Just no. It was an old style, (deprecated even at that time) design, which had a severe problem with xenon poisoning, insufficient reactor coolant circulation, and had an operator assigned that did everything wrong.
They used rod tips out of carbon, and dropped the power levels too low, which increased the xenon neutron moderation in-system to the point where the reactor could not produce sufficient power. Rather than closing it down, and recirculating the power with pumps, they pulled the auxiliary (safety) control rods. The power level (eventually) started to go up again, slowly burning through the xenon in the coolant solution. It then started on a runaway reaction. As the rods were reinserted, the carbon tips had less moderation effect than the coolant itself, causing a local criticality event, an explosion in the fuel rods blocking control rod reinsertion.
In effect, the test involved a reactor with an old design, with a very poor supervisor who did everything wrong (political appointment, expert, but didn’t research the design enough). Ignored advice on minimum power levels before the then-running test, on a reactor that contained severe low-power stability issues.
Anatoliy Dyatlov turned on the reactor at 200 megawatts, stability required 700 megawatts, and the main coolant pumps was powered off the turbines which were spinnng down. Meanwhile power levels dropped, to 50 megawatts, finally stabilizing around 200 no matter how far they pulled the control rods… so he ordered all the rods to be pulled.
There is an excellent documentary on Youtube of the reactor disaster, by the Discovery channel. Comparing Chernobyl to a modern design is like comparing the Stanley Steamer to a modern hybrid electric vehicle.
Combination of bad design, and bad decisions. Hardly a sterling example of what a ‘good’ reactor is.

So the windmills blew it, another sputnik moment. But we do have NASA doing Muslim outreach instead of going to the moon where there has been no climate change for four billion years.

There seems to be confusion about whether it was windy or not. Those not familiar with reading METAR maps as Mike provided can find a quick primer here:
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/jetstream/synoptic/wxmaps.htm

IIRC, the Texas power grid is pretty isolated from the rest of the US. Can this explain some of the blackout problems – that they weren’t able to tap efficiently into excess capacity from neighboring states? Of course, those states were probably running flat-out too due to the cold.

Richard,
I stand corrected – the figure is indeed 20%. I’m racking my brains to figure out where I got a 30% figure from. Oh well, it’s not as bad as I thought :).

Quick update: Texas has over 10,000 MW of wind capacity — not the 7113 reported in the article which was a 2008 figure. So if we accept the wind lobby’s numbers, wind was operating at 35% of rated capacity. In other words, over 6500 MW of rated wind capacity was not available during the crisis.

To John,
Please see: http://meteorologicalmusings.blogspot.com/2011/02/source-of-some-of-texas-wind-energy.html
It will answer your question. My facts were and are correct.
Mike

Apparently although Texas’s football superdome wasn’t effected by the blackouts, Critical Infrastructure to deliver propane to Northern New Mexico was shut down.
In Taos NM, half the grocery stores are closed, many homes have no heat (last night’s low was -20f !), and the nearby town of Questa has declared a state of emergency and set up a shelter.

ERCOT, the Texas grid operator calculated a capacity value of 8% for Texas wind power generation. This is because much of the time when the wind is blowing the power can not be taken due to low demand. And of course too often when it is needed the wind is not blowing. Therefore 10,000 MW is the equivalent of 800 MW of comparable fossil fuel generation.

I live near some of the newest and largest windfarms built in south Texas near Sinton. The farmers and ranchers are tickled pink to have the revenue from the leases! What they don’t understand is why they let less than 35% of the energy generated by the turbines enter the grid on any given day. There is no shortage of wind energy production. It is the lack of energy production between the ears of the average person walking this planet that is at critical mass and creating rolling mental blackouts.
I was born and lived in the Panhandle of Texas for 45 years. In Alaska when someone says, “It’s 20 degrees outside!” The response is, “Yeah, but did you see Amarillo’s temperature today?” The Teaxs Panhandle has been colder than a witch’s chi-chi since before there were witches and none of this shit happened. Remember when they would make us climb under our desks for “nuklar” bombs and tornadoes? Same shit, different boogey man; old man winter and global warming. Doesn’t that just sound fucking dumb to you?

Anthony and Mike,
I feel obliged to ask for a full correction or retraction to this article for the following reasons:
1. Wind energy output was extremely high throughout the period when ERCOT implemented rolling blackouts and leading up to that period, making your claims that wind was in any way a cause of this event entirely false. ERCOT data shows wind output blasting along at over 4,000 MW Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning. During the 5-7 AM window Wednesday morning, when ERCOT was forced to implement rolling blackouts, wind output was cruising along at between 3,600 MW and 3,900 MW. Throughout that time period, wind speeds on the ground were also very high across the parts of the state with the bulk of the installed wind capacity, with many areas under high wind warnings. A major problem with your article is that you are confusingly talking about the wind speeds and other conditions on Wednesday night, which has nothing to do with what was happening 12+ hours earlier when the blackouts actually happened.
2. As of mid-day yesterday, 8 hours before your post, it had already been widely reported that the blackouts were caused by roughly 50 fossil-fueled power plants totaling 7,000 MW of capacity tripping offline due to mechanical failures caused by the cold, including two coal power plants with 2,700 MW of capacity that were specifically identified in midday public statements by the Lt. Gov. Dewhurst. Why you proceeded to blame wind for the event many hours after directly contradictory evidence was broadly reported is an open question.
3. Great Britain and Minnesota have never experienced blackouts due to wind energy, contrary to your statement in the second to the last paragraph. I urge you to read the articles that you linked to, as they do not say anything remotely close to what you claim they do.
4. At the beginning of your article, you at least make clear that your attacks on wind energy are entirely based on conjecture: “The article didn’t give a clue as to what generating capability failed, but I can make a pretty good guess: Wind energy.” However, by the end, you somehow felt comfortable making sweeping statements like “Now, because of relying so much on wind power, the state is suffering blackouts.” Now that your conjectures have proven entirely false, you owe it your readers, and your credibility, to do the honorable thing and retract the article.
I hope you understand the need to issue a full retraction to stop the confusion this post has generated before it spreads further.
Thanks,
Michael Goggin
American Wind Energy Association

The OP was spot on. Wind farms are a boondoggle waste of Federal monies. Who cares if TX paid for them. It’s 19th century feel-good gaia-love-fest crap. Five Nuke plants would give us steady and cheap, say 5cent/kw power. Oh… but that’s not politically correct!!! So we pay more.
Only the stadium in Arlington was exempt from the rolling blackouts, not the hotels and crap the other poster from TX mentioned. Obviously, if they’d blacked out the stadium during MEDIA-DAY at the staduim, it would have had profound implications in the sports media. I can accept they were exempted but so should the hospital districts. This whole thing should be looked into and we Texans deserve a better response next time… and more nuke plants. I hope that comes from this.
Also, the Federal Government needs to allow for reprocessing of nuke fuel like the rest of the world does… that would buy us many years of power without a waste disposal issue. Thank you Jimmy Carter.

A few questions for Michael Goggin,
1) What is the capacity of Texas Wind?
2) How much was actually produced during the time in question?
3) How much did those turbines cost?
4) How many coal plants and what MW could have been available if the answer to #3 was spent on coal power plants?

Michael Goggin: ” Great Britain and Minnesota have never experienced blackouts due to wind energy, contrary to your statement in the second to the last paragraph.”
But that won’t be true for long.
“Figures released in early January showed that as temperatures plunged to well below freezing and electric power demand soared, electricity production at Britain’s 3,100+ wind turbines fell from an average of 8.6 percent of Britain’s electricity mix to just 1.8 percent. Instead of serving up to 3 million homes, wind farms were serving just 30,000 homes, a mere one-hundredth of normal capacity. On the evening of December 20 Britain’s average temperature fell to minus 5.6 celsius. At 6.30 that evening, the nation’s wind farms, which claim a generating capacity of 5.2 GW of electricity, were actually generating a piffling 40 MW, the equivalent of 20 turbines working at full capacity.
When British wind farms were reportedly producing “practically no electricity” over a similar period in 2010 the British Government was forced to ask 95 major industrial consumers to turn off their gas pipelines.”
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm/6310/Britains-Wind-Farms-are-No-Spin-Zones-When-Cold-Hits

Several morons have gotten on here and tried to portray this as being anything but caused by wind. It is entirely caused by wind. Windspeeds were low and baseload power plant construction has been lagging because morons in government have been pushing wind forgetting that for every new megawatt of wind, there has to also be a new megawatt of coal, gas, or nuclear built.

@Kristoffer Haldrup
The US most certainly does have an interconnected modern electricity distribution system, just not in TX, which insists on being on its own with minimal interconnection. I would say there are no countries in Europe, zero, with a more modern or more interconnected system than the US.

How would you like to be a conventional power plant that has to ramp up and down to tolerate the lack of production by wind energy. Think it might cause that plant problems? When will people get sick of windgate and the huge taxscam that it is? Wind power has 0 capacity value. It is worthless junk. Can we move on to REAL power that is American made? WAKE UP PEOPLE!

Kristoffer Haldrup says:
February 2, 2011 at 10:36 pm
I suggest you find out where all your electricity comes from when the wind isn’t blowing (ie clear cold winter days – we get a lot of those in your neck of the woods)
Hint – it comes from a country next door who do NUCLEAR power. Please ask your local representative and wind farm managers exactly how many new windmills are planned – and why
The laugh is wind powered countries being totally reliant on those nasty nukes next door. (Bit like Holland which won;t do nukes – but buys a lot of electricity form France – 80% nuke…)
Wind Power can not do base load.
Wind power can not be relied on to supply peak load top up – because the wind doesn’t always blow (or blows to strongly).
Wind power looks pretty (or not) and is pretty useless at providing a DEPENDABLE SOURCE OF ELECTRICITY. I presume you do like the light to come on when you turn it on ?

@Ken S
And Ken, after you’ve purchased that generator, you’ll be set for when the wind power nonsense pushes utility power as high as Obama plans for it to “necessarily” be pushed. Then you’ll be better off running your generator with $6 a gallon gas than buying wind energy from the grid.

Sorry Anthony. I think I was right the first time and whole OP is by Mike Smith. It can get confusing when your name is still at the top and it doesn’t say “guest post by Mike Smith”
In any case someone should make a retraction. According to ERCOT Texas’ wind farms continued to deliver 3.5 to 4 gigawatts of 9.4 gigawatts faceplate capacity. I’ve been reading claims, here and elsewhere, that wind farms only deliver 8% to 30% of faceplate due to wind speed variability. For Texas wind farms to have delivered around 40% of faceplate capacity during this power crisis is nothing short of outstanding performance.
For someone who asked about cost of wind vs. nuclear:
According to US DoE wind generation is $149/kwh and advanced nuclear is $119 but Texas’ nuke plants are conventional not advanced so it’s probably a bit closer to parity than that. In any case the nuke plants are baseline generators while wind power is called in when baseline demand is exceeded. In the case today they performed exceedingly well while several recently built coal plants going offline due to cold weather problems is the root cause.

What ratepayers in Texas should really be cheesed off about is all that mis-allocated capitol in idle wind turbines. That capitol could have been used to build additional peaking plants to prevent the rolling blackouts.

“Also FYI – Texas wind power induced blackouts happened in 2008, see this story.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/02/28/us-utilities-ercot-wind-idUSN2749522920080228
The incident in 2008 was not just “wind power induced”. If one reads the article, we find that the situation had multiple causes and interruptible customers were restored in 1.5 hours. Only interruptible customers were affected, those industrial customers that pay less if the utility can shut down certain feeders if required.
“In addition, ERCOT said multiple power suppliers fell below the amount of power they were scheduled to produce on Tuesday. That, coupled with the loss of wind generated in West Texas, created problems moving power to the west from North Texas.”
The timeline from official reports on the incident indicate a 150 MW conventional unit tripped as well, contributing to the reserves shortage. The wind facility’s output reduced to its minimum at a rate of 3.5 hours, rather than trip offline at a moment in time.
Check out the investigations into the incident. It was a learning experience, but certainly nothing catastrophic or indicative of a major reliability problem with a utility grid containing wind power.
http://www.nrel.gov/wind/systemsintegration/pdfs/2008/ela_ercot_event.pdf
Dave Springer and Michael Goggin, great comments backed with actual expertise and insight into the recent incident.
Biomass, wind, solar, enhanced geothermal, hydro, tidal, wave, and algal biodiesel. Large scale electricity storage if necessary via pumped water, underground compressed air or electric vehicles. These are the collection of technologies that will be able to power our world for many generations to come (nuclear too, for the shorter term). It is a responsible thing to do for future generations by developing these technologies now, for many reasons: human health, environment, global warming and peak resources. With proper R&D engineering support, we can have a modern society well into the future likely at low cost and high reliability.

racookpe1978 , excellent questions and clarity.
I’ve lived in Texas 22 years. The whole time I’ve lived here, the libtards ecowarriors have thwarted any attempts to build generation. They’ve been actively anti-coal and won support from dems and repulicans. Lots of hooey and bad science and not enough real-world thought. So we’ve spent a butt-load of money on feel-good systems and we suffer third-world brownouts when demands exceeds some bean-counters expectation. It’s not like we didn’t know this cold front was coming… they talked about it for a freaking week down here… This was a cluster and deserves a thorough investigation.
And here’s the main problem I have with wind. Everyone wins, the farmer, the electric company, the State, but we, the people lose. They are a blight on the landscape, they have to be heavily subsidized with State and Federal money and we end users not only pay that money in taxes and debt, but we endure the failures of the precious earth-friendly systems . Build modern nuke plants… 50 of them and cheap electricity for everyone and it’s always available.

Bill Totten, an only quasi-recovered liberal, has posted this (excerpt):

In a rare interview, Dr Pierpont, a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told The Independent on Sunday: “There is no doubt that my clinical research shows that the infrasonic to ultrasonic noise and vibrations emitted by wind turbines cause the symptoms which I am calling wind turbine syndrome. There are about twelve different health problems associated with WTS and these range from tachycardia, sleep disturbance, headaches, tinnitus, nausea, visual blurring, panic attacks with sensations of internal quivering to more general irritability.
“The wind industry will try to discredit me and disparage me, but I can cope with that. This is not unlike the tobacco industry dismissing health issues from smoking. The wind industry, however, is not composed of clinicians, nor is it made up of people suffering from wind turbines.” The IoS has a copy of the confidential manuscript which is exhaustive in its research protocol and detailed case series, drawing on the work of leading otolaryngologists and neurotologists – ear, nose and throat clinical specialists.

There is an excellent blow-by-blow of the Texas rolling blackouts over at MasterResource.
As for the useless Texas wind power and the causes of the outages here is an excerpt from the article:
Texas Power Outages: A Preliminary Analysis (Cold snap brings failure–isolated ERCOT an issue) — MasterResource
“In brief, extreme cold weather pushed power demand to very high winter levels. At the same time, fifty of the state’s power plants were offline due to the effects of the cold, and several others were undergoing planned maintenance. The combination of very high demand and reduced supply left the ERCOT grid perilously short of reserves. Rolling consumer outages were employed to protect the system from failing completely.
[…]
Some wondered whether wind power was at fault, but wind contributed about seven percent of ERCOT’s power during the emergency – about the same as this time last year.
No power system is immune to hazards. But policy decisions that increase the likelihood of hazards or multiply the resulting damages ought to be given careful reconsideration. In this case, the choice by Texas policymakers to keep ERCOT isolated from surrounding power systems prevented power companies within ERCOT from accessing excess power capacity elsewhere in the state and in neighboring states. Other policy issues also are raised by the emergency, but few are likely to be as cost-effective and technically simple to implement as linking ERCOT to its neighbors.”
http://www.masterresource.org/2011/02/texas-winter-power-outages-ercot/

“FYI – Texas wind power induced blackouts happened in 2008, see this story.”
That’s a lie. It was not a blackout. The story explicitely states that only industrial users who had purchased interruptable electricity had delivery curtailed for 90 minutes.
An interruptable supply means just that. These industries enjoy a lower price for electricity in return for being the first ones to have power cut when demand exceeds supply. It works the same way for water during droughts – certain customers have interruptable water so that in a drought situation they are the first to have their water supply reduced and in return they purchase water at a reduced price the rest of the time. Once more Mike Smith demonstrates he doesn’t have the first clue of what he is talking about.

In 2006, the only study I could find, which I already linked in a previous comment, Texas spent a total of less than 2 million dollars in “subsidies” for wind turbines which is predominantly in the form of school tax abatements. That’s chicken feed in a state with 20 million people.
The number is so low because most of the wind farms are on land that is already tax abated via agricultural exemptions.
The big subsidies are federal tax incentives. Companies like Shell and Exon are the typical owners of these windfarms and are the beneficiaries of federal tax incentives. Federal tax benefits in 2006 for Texas wind farms were five hundred million dollars.
Farmers are also big winners. They typically receive a lease payment of $5000/yr per wind turbine erected on their land. That’s about twice as much as they get for a cell phone tower. The wind turbine does not significantly effect their farming activity so this is gravy for them. Farms are struggling as it is with variations in weather causing alternating years of feast and famine. Having a wind turbine or cell phone tower on their land provides them with a steady income stream uneffected by good or bad growing seasons.
If one wants to find the facts on subsidies (actually learning the truth seems to be a low priority for most commenters in this thread) you can find it here:
http://www.window.state.tx.us/specialrpt/energy/subsidies/
FYI, for those who can’t be bothered to put in some due diligence in learning the facts, or for those who don’t want the facts get in the way of their hatred of alternative energy production, ethanol subsidies dwarf everything else. If you want to harp on wasteful, harmful subsidies then at least go after the worst one by far – ethanol distilled from corn.

Brian H says:
February 3, 2011 at 10:05 pm

springer: According to US DoE wind generation is $149/kwh and advanced nuclear is $119 but Texas’ nuke plants are conventional not advanced so it’s probably a bit closer to parity than that.

“More shell games. When you roll away the subsidies and add in the backup conventional plant required, the costs are much more than double that. ”
Actually those numbers are explicitely absent subsidies. Cost including subsidies are (note how I provide links to data sources – it would nice if you did the same):
Advanced Nuclear: $114/mwh
Wind (on shore): $97/mwh
source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/electricity_generation.html
This is from the December 2010 report. The figures I quotes previously were from the January 2010 report. The latter explicitely excluded subsidies. In this report I can’t find an exclusion for subsidies so I’m assuming the disparity between $149/mwh and $97/mwh for wind power is the subsidized cost for the lower number. These are total levelized cost estimates for new capacity that would go online in the year 2016. Investors in electrical generation would look to these numbers to decide which types of power sources are the most attractive. As a general rule the lowest cost sources sell into the grid first and as demand rises the more expensive sources get a chance to sell what they can produce.
I don’t make these things up. If you have more reliable/credible data than U.S. Department of Energy go ahead and provide a reference but I won’t be holding my breath waiting for it – most of the comments and the OP itself are mostly emotional hand waving with little objective analysis or facts to support it. Wind energy is supposedly “green”, environmentalists and liberals like it, and for most of the people here that alone is enough to condemn it. I don’t think that way. These things should be evaluated on a case by case basis and when they make sense they make sense. For example I’ve never had much of a bone to pick with wind farms but on the other hand I knew from the word go that ethanol distilled from corn and sugar, made profitable by obscenely high subsidies, was the worst thing the DoE ever got behind and George W. Bush can be blamed as much if not more than anyone for it as the program really got rolling under his watch.

It appears that the Texas problem was not the same as the problems in England last month. Here in south central Texas we had plenty of wind during this unusual cold spell (Which I thought was unusual. We usually have windy conditions for a few hours after a cold front, But the wind didn’t die down until late Thursday afternoon.) The wind field plots on the local TV weather showed a good wind field thoughtout the state.
I am not a big fan of wind power, but we can’t blame the rolling blackouts on wind power. The San Antonio, Tx, newspapers website had this to say:
“Statewide, about 50 generating units, representing about 7,000 megawatts that ERCOT had been counting on either tripped offline or were unable to come online, Doggett said. That’s almost 10 percent of the grid’s available capacity.
He blamed those downed units, not excess demand, as the reason behind the power shortage that forced it to call for rolling outages.
ERCOT lifted the emergency status for utilities across the state late Thursday morning, although Doggett said South Texas remained vulnerable.
“We continue to have plant outages in the Valley that concern us,” he said.
The downed plants reported a variety of weather-related problems, like frozen pipes and valves and frozen control equipment. He said grid operators saw no particular pattern, either in location or reason for failure.”

Dave, sorry, but you are wrong. See this Reuters post:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/02/28/us-utilities-ercot-wind-idUSN2749522920080228
And Reuters is not known as a “skeptics heaven”.
Piotr

pjotrk:
The article you posted was from 2008. I was talking about this post. From Feb. 2, 2011. The one that we’re currently commenting on.

Here’s an article from a pro-coal publication. Written by a journalist. Who apparently asks questions and has the wherewithal to vet his sources and not rely on pointed conjecture.
http://www.powergenworldwide.com/index/display/articledisplay/2372081052/articles/powergenworldwide/t-and-d/t-and-d-infrastructure/2011/02/ERCOT-outage.html
Wind was not the cause. Not even a contributor. Time to give it up. Retract and move on.

I am sorry. There is one more noteworthy point to add about wind subsidies not captured by the study mention by Mr. Springer. When power generation is added, transmission lines must be built to move the electricity to the distribution systems, and costs are assigned to generation sources for this transmission. Recently — at least in the Midwest Operating System — wind generators objected to being assigned any costs for transmission, even though transmission lines were being built for their electricity.

A few questions for Michael Goggin (yet to answer) ,
1) What is the capacity of Texas Wind?
2) How much was actually produced during the time in question?
3) How much did those turbines cost?
4) How many coal plants and what MW could have been available if the answer to #3 was spent on coal power plants?