By Mike Smith, Meteorological Musings
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas said 7,000 megawatts of generating capacity tripped [“tripped” means failed]Tuesday night, leaving the state without enough juice. That’s enough capacity to power about 1.4 million homes. By rotating outages, ERCOT said it prevented total blackouts.
“We have the double whammy of extremely high demand, given the lowest temperatures in 15 years, combined with generation that’s been compromised and is producing less than expected or needed,” said Oncor spokeswoman Catherine Cuellar. Oncor operates power lines in North Texas and facilitated the blackouts for ERCOT.
— above from the “Dallas Morning News”
The article didn’t give a clue as to what generating capability failed, but I can make a pretty good guess: Wind energy.
When the wind is light, the turbine blades do not turn. And, the coldest nights usually occur with snow cover and light winds. The 9pm weather map for the region is below. The red number at upper right is the current temperature and they are well below zero deep into New Mexico and parts of Kansas and Colorado, so regional power use is high. Springfield, CO was already -15°F. Temperatures are in the single digits and teens over most Texas with very light winds in the areas where the turbines are located.
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| Map courtesy National Center for Atmospheric Research |
For a time, Texas was bragging about being the #1 state for “wind power” (it still is) and we were bombarded with TV commercials and newspaper editorial touting the “Pickens Plan” for massive spending on wind energy. Pickens himself was building a huge wind farm in northwest Texas. He has now ceased construction.
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| Wind power capacity in 2008. Texas has more than twice as
much as any other state. |
Now, because of relying so much on wind power, the state is suffering blackouts. My book’s publisher, Greenleaf Book Group in Austin, was without power all day and Austin wasn’t even affected by the recent winter storm. Mexico is trying to help by shipping power to Texas, but it is not enough.
Of course, Great Britain has experienced wind power failures (and rolling blackouts) during cold weather due to light winds. So has Minnesota, just last winter. I think we should learn from them.
If Texas had made the same dollar investment in new coal and/or nuclear power plants they would probably be snug and warm tonight. Do we we really want to sacrifice our families’ safety and security along with business productivity during extreme cold for the sake of political correctness?
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Also FYI – Texas wind power induced blackouts happened in 2008, see this story.
See Mike Smith’s book on “how science tamed the weather”.
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UPDATE: 2/3
THE PLOT THICKENS. Please read the addition to this story (at the bottom): http://meteorologicalmusings.blogspot.com/2011/02/equal-time-american-wind-energy.html
Certain visitors in Anthony Watt’s living room are loudly insisting that Anthony retract what another guest has said to the room with Anthony’s permission.
…
Yeah, that says it all.
Thanks someoneintheknow .
I wouldn’t trust wind after reading that report. 1600MW lost in 3.5 hours.
Is this a reasonable and credible explanation?
http://theenergycollective.com/michaelgiberson/51062/cold-snap-brings-rolling-power-outages-texas-ercot-policy-isolation-fault
[…]
ERCOT reported that severe weather led to the loss of 50 generation units amounting to 7,000 MW of capacity on Wednesday morning. From news accounts it looks like a few large coal plants failed after water pipes burst. Some natural gas generators found insufficient fuel supplies due to heavy demand for natural gas. Other natural gas generators found their access to fuel curtailed by state rules that give priorities to other customer classes when supplies run short. In addition, a larger than usual amount of generation was off-line for scheduled maintenance – one estimate put this quantity at about 12,000 MW.
[…]
Texas has pursued a policy of isolation for the ERCOT power grid so as to keep the state’s largest utilities subject primarily to state, rather than federal, regulation. Two minor links connect ERCOT and utilities in Oklahoma, but they are of little commercial significance.
[…]
The system needed all of the power it could get. Had more thermal plants been built, at least some of them would have been in service and helpful. Outages would have been moderated a little. Wind generated power was used and useful, but couldn’t be dialed up to produce more during a time of need. Wind power was neither the cause of the problem, nor of any special value in reaching a solution.
[…]
It is entirely likely that, had power companies in ERCOT been linked more substantially to other utilities in the state and utilities in neighboring states, Wednesday’s rolling blackouts could have been completely averted. This conclusion is obviously not enough of an argument by itself to justify reforming the state’s policy of isolating ERCOT. But it may be sufficient to rekindle discussions about the costs and benefits of ERCOT’s electrical isolation.
[…]
Wadayamean coal? Texas sits right on top of extremely rich natural gas sources. Gas fired electric plants(or dual-fuel types) would be a better idea.
More opinion; let’s wait until a few of the missing facts are found (e.g. what actually failed at the plants that went down, what did planning call for that night in the way of scheduled reserve/spinning reserve in the system, what was wind power actually contributing, were there any transmission constraints, line trips, was the asserted lack of natural gas per some info sources a relevant issue, etc.) …
.
Jim, I just told you exactly what the wind was contributing and more importantly how much it dropped off in 15 hrs.
Well, the UK isn’t Texas and Texas isn’t the UK.
But here in the UK, if you aggregate all the published results, half hour by half hour, over the whole of 2010, BigWind provided less than 1% of total for around 60% of the time. And less than 0.1% for around 28 days (aggregated together.)
That’s for around 3,100 turbines.
We didn’t have major brownouts in December because clapped out coal power stations, run flat out (and due to close soon because of EU rules) managed to produce around 40% of the power required.
These things (and this and the previous Government’s cAGW dogma and complete incompetence) have already led to huge increases in fuel bills, fuel poverty and (no doubt) hypothermia deaths.
Meanwhile this week’s copy of “New Civil Engineer” brings an interesting (?) interview with Alastair Dutton, Crown Estates about the £150 Billion Round Three offshore wind power programme to build 10,000 offshore wind turbines by 2020.
http://www.nce.co.uk/features/energy-and-waste/offshore-wizard/8610838.article
OK, let’s just accept that this is Prince Chuckles’ guy making a case for the bizarre investment of £150 Billion, in the middle of an economic train crash, on technology which patently just doesn’t work.
I’m sure Dave Springer (BigWind’s answer to Bob Ward?) would think that’s a great idea.
So we absolutely have to pump (at least) £150 Billion into “solutions” that we know don’t work (and which are anyway unachievable) and which would have an immeasurable effect (even if they were achieveable and did work) on a “problem” that likely doesn’t even exist?
Great!
Michael says @ur momisugly February 4, 2011 at 12:22 pm: “Mike, you may want to listen to the CEO of ERCOT”
Michael, ERCOT exists in a heavily regulated environment. The quickest way to cause get your organization in deep trouble in such an environment is to say something that would suggest questioning of the regulators and government. There is tremendous pressure in the electric industry not to speak evil of wind. You would pay dearly for such comments.
@Mike Smith
“If your car (which is about the physical size of the turbine itself) failed 43% of the time, I do not believe you would tout that fact as a “success.”
You don’t seem to understand that this kind of variability was known before the first wind turbine was installed. It’s a known constraint not a suprise. Do you think nobody bothered to put up an anemometer and get a record of wind speeds at the potential windfarm locations in advance of erecting scores of expensive windmills? Don’t be naive. Predicting the potential generating capacity days or hours ahead of time is as good (or as poor) as the weather forecast. In this case forecasted winds were actually an hour different from the forecasted winds which contributed to the load management errors. Load balancing on the grid is all about predicting demand ahead of time and allocating generation from different sources to handle the forecast changes in demand.
“My contention is that if we had simply build more nuclear (or coal) plants with the money spent on wind, the crisis (which interrupted power to hospitals!) could have been avoided.”
You also don’t seem to understand who “we” is. We (the public) doesn’t build wind farms. Privateers such as Shell, Exxon, and T. Boones Pickens build wind farms. They are risking their own capital in building generating plants. They look at the numbers and choose what they think is the best profit opportunity. The federal government offers tax incentives to make some kinds of generation more attractive than others just like the federal government offers home mortgage interest tax deductions and sometimes tax credits to encourage home buyers, or tax credits for college tuition to encourage college enrollments, etc. You should be aware that Texas offers virtually nothing in the way of tax incentives or other subsidies for building wind farms. A wind farm can get a school tax abatement for the land where a turbine sits but almost all the land used to site these things already has an agricultural exemption so there’s no subsidy coming from Texas. In 2006, the only year I could find data for, total subsidies for wind farms in Texas amounted to less than 2 million dollars. That’s chickenfeed in a state with 20 million people.
So when you talk about “we” building wind farms unless you’re talking about Shell stockholders then the “we” is really “they” not you or I.
Crustacean says:
February 4, 2011 at 12:35 pm
“1) Is it correct to believe we wouldn’t ever have installed enough wind capacity for any of this to matter in the slightest, were it not for the political potency of global warming campaigners? Yes.”
I’m sure that’s a contributing factor but I think the primary reason is that for every megawatt of wind power that can be generated it’s a megawatt less taken out of national coal and gas reserves. That means our national reserves of these fossil fuels will last longer. Most people realize that coal and natural gas supplies will not last forever and they also realize that the wind will never stop blowing.
“2) Is it correct to believe the volume of greenhouse emissions to be avoided by installing wind capacity ranges somewhere between greatly oversold and nonexistent, owing to the need for equivalent fossil-fueled backup in spinning reserve? Yes.”
Survey after survey has shown that Americans don’t place greenhouse gas emissions as a high priority problem. They are far more concerned with unemployment, rising health care costs, rising college tuitions, and so forth. Global warming is a very low priority item for the majority. So while the environmentalist whackos might believe it’s a very good thing, and believe it’s better than it really is, I believes it’s a non-concern for everyone else.
In regard to spinning backup that does indeed lower the GHG reduction of wind power but maybe not as much as you might think. To keep a generator spinning with no load requires a minimal amount of energy input. It’s exactly like the difference between how much fuel you car consumes when idling and how much it consumes out on the highway moving at 70 miles per hour. The difference is drastic. When idling only enough fuel is needed to compensate for friction and heat loss in the motor which is minimal and in the latter case you need enough fuel to overcome rolling resistance of the tires and wind resistance of the body. Keeping a generating plant on spinning backup means you supply enough fuel to maintain the boiler with a head of steam but you’re only drawing off enough steam to compensate for frictional losses in the turbine and generator shafts plus a little waste heat left in the steam after it runs through turbine. Waste heat loss in modern steam turbines is minimal as the techology to extract every last bit of usable heat is quite good these days.
“3) Assume I’ve answered #2 incorrectly. If so, would it not remain true that meeting only a small percentage of electricity demand with wind generation would result in a correspondingly small (and therefore inconsequential) reduction of greenhouse emissions? Yes.”
Greenhouse gas reductions realized from wind generation is so small as to be neglible. In fact any practical means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions won’t have any measurable effect on global climate. The whole greenhouse gas brouhaha is a load of bullsht. For one thing no can demontrate that anthropogenic GHGs are doing anything significant to the climate, no one can demonstrate that if they are indeed warming the globe that the warming is not a good thing, and no one can demonstrate that any practical reduction in emissions will have any significant effect whatsoever.
“4) Given the grid instability that is anticipated to become a serious threat at a (likely fanciful) wind penetration of approximately 20 percent, may we assume meeting a small percentage of electricity demand with wind is as much as we can safely do? Evidently yes.”
We can safely do as much as we want so long as there is backup generation sufficient to meet uncertainties in wind power generation. Predicting wind power available at any point in time is only as good as the meteorologists are at forecasting the winds and demand for power is only as good as temperature forecasts. Usually they’re pretty good at it but they aren’t infallible. Load balancing on the grid is a complicated affair. Wind power is a relatively new source. With anything new there is a learning curve. We’ll get better at it as time goes on. In the meantime there will be mistakes and occasionally times when power goes out. Power failures have been happening since the first electrical wires were strung. Generators fail unexpectedly, extreme winds and ice storms take out transmission lines, transformers fail, extremes of heat and cold cause rare spikes in demand, and so forth.
There’s an economic balancing act that goes on between having enough power plants to meet demand during the most extreme and most rare conditions and having plants that sell enough power to operate at a profit. You see, if you have enough plants around to meet large demand spikes that only happen for a few days once every ten years it means those extra plants sit idle the rest of the time and turn profits into losses. Having too few plants means more times where there isn’t enough power available to meet rare demand spikes.
Since power plants and built and operated by private corporations operating for a profit the tendency is to build fewer plants that operate closer to maximum capacity all the time. This generates the most profit. Competition is what works to limit the profit incentive. Just as WalMart is willing to trim profit to a mininum in order to offer the lowest prices and make up for the low profit margin with high volume power producers are also tempted by the same thing. Federal, state, and local government steps in by offering tax incentives and building transmission lines to encourage what it feels is in the public’s best interest to keep the generation capacity both reasonably priced, available when and where it is needed, and reliable under all but the most extreme conditions.
“5) Then why on Earth do we fool with wind at all?”
Because it reduces the rate at which national coal and natural gas reserves are being drawn down, it is non-polluting, the wind is free for the taking and will keep blowing practically forever, and last but not least there is profit in it for the owners.
Those who feel a need to respond to rhetorical questions are invited to supply their own answers to #5.
Martin Brumby says:
February 5, 2011 at 6:44 am
“Well, the UK isn’t Texas and Texas isn’t the UK.”
Very true. I don’t know and don’t really care how wind farms are financed and operated in the UK. I live in Texas and buy my electricity off the ERCOT grid. What I know is that I pay $0.11/kwh from my local electrical power co-op, which is a penny less than the average rate in Texas, 10% lower than the U.S. average price, and far better than comparably populus states California (avg. $0.14) and New York ($0.19). Power getting cut to my home has not increased in frequency since the wind turbines have been installed. By far the most frequent reason my power goes out is transmission lines getting severed by falling trees in windstorms and ice storms. Power outages happen far more often in my rural home than they do in my city home due to having more miles of electrical lines vulnerable along winding two lane roads with trees crowding the wires and repair crews taking longer to find the problems and having to travel farther to get to them. Power outages due to insufficient power generation available is rare enough so it it is, so far anyhow, of no practical concern to me.
Dave Springer: “Most people realize that coal and natural gas supplies will not last forever”
100 years of supply in the USA thanks to Shale Gas.
1000 or more years once Methane Hydrates come online.
Why kill people now by ruining the grid with unreliable wind?
Why buy Wind Turbines from China when the USA has huge stockpiles of cheap natural gas?
Dave Springer: “We (the public) doesn’t build wind farms.”
The “public” (taxpayers) pay for 30% of the construction costs.
“The grant program that Congress has extended was created in the 2008 stimulus bill. It forces taxpayers to pay 30% of a renewable energy project’s costs. Big Wind insisted on these grants because wind energy producers don’t make enough net income to take advantage of the generous renewable energy tax credit.
The industry also wants a federal renewable energy standard, which would require utilities to buy power from green energy projects regardless of price. Without that additional subsidy, AWEA concedes that wind power will “stall out.””
http://energizevermont.org/2011/01/wsj-the-wind-subsidy-bubble/
“Texas Comptroller Susan Combs has determined the state is paying too much in tax subsidies to wind farms. A new study by her office found that tax breaks offered by school districts as economic development lures are “increasingly used to over-incentivize projects that create few or no jobs.”
About two-thirds of the projects are wind farms, and the cost per job is 40 times what the state spends on projects financed through the Texas Enterprise Fund.”
http://blogs.chron.com/lorensteffy/2010/12/the_hot_air_beh_1.html
Charles Barton had a definitive post on the issue.
Energy demand was high for winter, but nothing in comparison to summer.
The blackouts were primarily caused by dangerous dirty methane gas plants – not coal plants – shutting down.
Wind power did a great job at 5am when it wasn’t needed, but failed miserably (as it often does) when demand was high.
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2011/02/tesas-power-blackouts-and-green-energy.html
Thanks Duncan. From your link to this one:
“Wind generators apparently do not work as well when it is cold. There were enough areas in Texas on Tuesday where the night was clear and cold and the wind dropped, shutting down generating capacity apparently quite rapidly. There was also a relatively high demand for electricity due to the very cold temperatures throughout Texas.
This is one of several instances where wind generation failure in Texas has resulting in blackouts and problems with the electrical grid. Blackouts present problems especially when electrical power is needed during very cold or very hot weather. Keith Johnson of reported in The Wall Street Journal that wind power has not been nearly as efficient and productive in Texas as has been claimed,
The Lone Star state famously leads the U.S., itself the world leader, in wind power. But how much wind power—really—does Texas have?
Less than one-tenth of its official tally of more than 8,000 megawatts, says Robert Bryce in the Energy Tribune. That’s because wind power is a lot more fickle than other power sources, such as natural gas, coal, or nuclear power.
The Texas electricity authority, ERCOT, figures the state’s wind power capacity is only 8.7%. That means for every 100 megawatts installed in a wind farm, power authorities can only count on seeing 8.7 megawatts of electricity produced. That’s a lot less than the standard line that wind power in the U.S. produces at about 30% or 35% of its nominal capacity.”
OUCH: http://lubbockonline.com/interact/blog-post/may/2011-02-04/power-went-down-texas
BillyBob says:
February 5, 2011 at 10:42 am
“Dave Springer: “Most people realize that coal and natural gas supplies will not last forever”
100 years of supply in the USA thanks to Shale Gas.
1000 or more years once Methane Hydrates come online.”
No one has figured out how to economically mine methane hydrates from the ocean floor. Not for lack of trying either. Ten or more years ago I thought methane hydrates would be a nifty new fuel source but not anymore. It’s become something like nuclear fusion power – perpetually 20 years away from becoming commercially viable. Adding to the problem of mining methane ice is getting it from the offshore mining operation to the power plants that use it. Liquification and moving by tanker ships and tanker trucks is expensive. Typically natural gas is used close to the source and piped to the consumer as a gas. It’s ubiquitous in oil fields and considered a nuisance if there isn’t a nearby consumer for it. As a byproduct of oil wells it’s either burned off at the well-head or compressed and driven back down underground to maintain pressure in the oil formation so that more oil is forced out of it. There is notihng on the horizon that I know of to change any of these constraints on methane ice mining so unless you know something I don’t about it we can’t bank on being able to economically substitute methane from ocean floor hydrates for methane from continental production fields.
“The “public” (taxpayers) pay for 30% of the construction costs.”
It’s true enough since 2008. As part of the emergency stimulus bill $43B was allocated for renewable energy projects and wind farms were big players. It was supposed to expire in 2010 but I believe it’s been extended to 2012.
The author of the OP is in Austin, TX (same as me) and the rolling blackout that cut power for 45 minute intervals over the course of a few hours happened in Texas. As well Texas is by far the largest producer of energy from wind and Texas also has its own independent electrical grid (unlike the rest of the nation where there are two national grids that each span many states). So when he claims “we” spent billions I assumed he meant we Texans spent billions. That’s patently untrue. Texas hardly spends a dime on it. The wind farms are privately owned & operated and virtually all the financial incentives are federal. Up until 2008 the incentives were tax credits meaning that to claim them you had to owe the federal government at least as much as the credit you were claiming. That’s not exactly like a handout of free money. It’s a matter of the federal government confiscating less of your income.
On first blush this might appear to result in a reduction of federal tax revenues but that’s still a matter of dispute because the goverment still taxes the salaries of every individual working in the industry from the guy who is working on the assembly line making the parts to the truckers moving the parts from plant to site to the people who assemble the turbines and the people who operate, maintain, and repair them. The argument is made that this creates “good” jobs (“good” being well above minimum wage) whereas absent the investment stimulus these people would be on the unemployment rolls collecting federal unemployment benefits instead of being gainfully employed and paying payroll taxes. I’m not prepared to say whether that revenue neutrality hypothesis is true or not although I think it probably is at least to some extent.
@the moderators
I’m being moderated via the blacklist (or the spam bucket if you wish to call it that)for about the past week. Is this typical for people who don’t rubber stamp their approval on every article that appears here?
It’s annoying not to see my comments appear immediately tagged with “awaiting moderation” and since not a single one of my comments has failed to eventually appear I don’t see what good it does except for causing more work for the moderators digging comments out of the spam queue and possibly making me repeat things I’ve already written because I can’t review it. Not a single one of my comments that I know of has failed to be approved.
How about either banning me outright so I can go complain elsewhere that WUWT doesn’t allow equal time for contrary views or take my email address out of the blacklist and treat me like everyone else. The current discrimination against me is starting to piss me off.
[Reply: No one is banning you. WordPress automatically puts some comments into the spam folder based on words, phrases and links. WP does not disclose their algorithms. They use the Akismet spam filter. Your comments are all posted, although there may be a delay until a mod rescues them from the spam bucket. Have patience. ~dbs, mod.]
BillyBob says:
February 5, 2011 at 2:28 pm
“Texas Comptroller Susan Combs has determined the state is paying too much in tax subsidies to wind farms. A new study by her office found that tax breaks offered by school districts as economic development lures are “increasingly used to over-incentivize projects that create few or no jobs.”
I’m calling bullsht on this. If Susan Combs has determined any such thing she hasn’t published it. The official report is here:
http://www.window.state.tx.us/specialrpt/energy/subsidies/index.php#wind
and shows tax abatements to wind farms in the latest year with data available amounted to $1,508,400 (see exhibit 28-21).
I challenge you to find any official report by Combs that confirms the rumored report mentioned by the Austin-American Statesman. The following search should turn up everything in the state records on this and it just isn’t there:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS382US382&q=wind+farm+subsidy+combs+site%3a*.tx.us
Duncan & Billybob:
The fact of the matter is that prediction of wind power generation is only as good (or as poor) as the weather forecasts of wind speeds. Prediction of power demand is also only as good (or as poor) as weather forecasts of temperatures.
Since the blog owner is a meteorologist I think it would be great if Anthony could write an article on this aspect of wind power generation given it’s his profession and professional colleagues who play a very large part in how well electricity from wind farms and power demand can be forecast and planned in advance.
Regardless of how well production and demand can be balanced to avoid interruptions in supply it still remains a fact that every megawatt hour produced by wind power is megawatt less taken out of national coal and gas reserves which aren’t bottomless pits. There’s currently a crisis in natural gas supply effecting all the southwestern states and California. Right now there isn’t enough natural gas available to meet the demand. It isn’t that there aren’t enough power plants it’s there isn’t enough gas to run them. That has nothing to do with wind power, nothing to do with how many natural gas fired plants there are, and everything to do with the natural gas supply chain that fuels those NG power plants. There just isn’t enough production and distribution of gas to meet the spike in demand from the record cold arctic air mass covering most of the nation. Essentially what is being complained about is that wind farms didn’t come to the rescue when the natural gas supply broke down under the strain. Wind is fickle. Wind turbines are helping the situation but they aren’t miracle workers.
BillyBob says:
February 5, 2011 at 6:20 pm
“The Lone Star state famously leads the U.S., itself the world leader, in wind power. But how much wind power—really—does Texas have?”
“OUCH: http://lubbockonline.com/interact/blog-post/may/2011-02-04/power-went-down-texas”
This is another case of misunderstanding or misreporting by the press.
10% of faceplate capacity is how much ERCOT purchases from windfarms not how much the windfarms are offering for sale. The windfarms can produce, on average, over 30% of faceplate capacity. What actually gets purchased and consumed is, on average, 10% of faceplate capacity.
The basis of this misunderstanding is that ERCOT purchases the lowest priced electricity first and turns to more expensive sources when the lowest price source is not enough to meet demand. The lowest price electricity comes from combined-cycle natural gas turbines. Advanced coal fired turbines are the next cheapest, conventional coal the next cheapest, hydro-electric and nuclear are next up, then comes wind farms. Hydro-electric is just as fickle as wind as it is in short supply during droughts and in abudance during floods. Rain in Texas is generally excessive during El Nino and minimal during La Nina. This in turn determines whether impounded bodies of water with hydro-electric generation at the base of the dam are close to full or close to empty. Funny you never hear anyone bitching about the unreliability of hydro-electric like they do about wind energy. I have a home on the shore of a major water impoundment that supplies water for the city of Austin and a number of nearby cities, water for industry, water for agriculture 100+ miles downstream (primarily rice farms) and also produces electricity as the water is released. When the reservoir level gets low releases are curtailed to “interruptable” consumers so that more critical needs (such as Austin residents having water flowing from their taps) continue to be met for as long as possible. As the water level in the reservior declines the water pressure at the base of the dam declines and with the reduced pressure comes reduced power to spin the electrical generators. The water supply situation and hydro-power is of course not as unpredictable on a day to day basis as wind power but on a year-to-year basis it is far more unpredictable than wind generation. The reason no one complains about the unpredictability of hydro-electric power is everyone understands and accepts the constraints while wind farms are new and few people seem to understand the constraints associated with it.
I forgot to include a link to the ERCOT report on wind generation from which I drew the numbers (30% of faceplate offered for sale, 10% actually purchased):
http://www.ercot.com/content/meetings/board/keydocs/2010/0420/Item_13_-_Review_of_Wind_Generation_Impact_on_Ancillary_Serv.pdf
Don’t believe everything you read in the press. You’re relying on what may be a dimwitted or biased reporter’s interpretation of the data instead of actually confirming it for yourself. If the original source is available go to that to confirm what’s reported in the press. Quite often the press doesn’t accurately represent the original source.
@ur momisugly moderators
Thanks for the reply. I’m very familiar with both WordPress and Akismet as I was the administrator of high traffic blog for several years. I used Akismet for my spam filter too and for “problem users” I’d put their email address into the blacklist (usually used for naughty words not naughty users) but the end result is the same for blacklisted words and comments that Akismet determines is spam.
Every single one of my comments is landing in the spam bucket. It’s not happening because of blacklisted words or phrases as those don’t show up in every comment. Unless you or another moderator put my email address in the blacklist then Akismet somehow has my email address tagged as spam.
I’ve had that happen to commenters on the blog I used to manage – Akismet dumping every one of their comments into the spam bucket for no apparent reason. It was difficult explaining to those users what was happening and why. I couldn’t get Akismet to explain it to me either so I and a few of my subscribers just had to live with it.
I apologize for thinking you’d put my email address in the blacklist. Getting all my comments dumped to spam happened simultaneously with Anthony telling me to get my head out of my ass and me responding in a similar tone. Naturally I assumed it was an intentional addition to the blacklist instead of an unexplained Akismet determination.
Thank you for the time it takes to go through spam queue pulling out Akismet’s mistakes. I have personal experience with how time consuming it is performing that particular moderation chore.
@Dave Springer
Granted, wind turbines are lowering greenhouse gas emissions, ever so slightly. I don’t think their benefits are any where near worth the cost of their subsidies. Then, there’s the absolute fact that nearly every megawatt of wind will always have to be backed up with a megawatt from something that will be available when the wind doesn’t blow.
If wind isn’t having to pay 5 or 6 cents for each kilowatt hour it generates to a fossil generator that is idled by that generation (but must exist to back up the wind), then wind is getting that much more of a free ride, after all the subsidies it’s already getting.
@Dave Springer
Your most recent post, where you point out that natural gas production and distribution bottlenecks mean it can’t be relied on in a demand spike, is an excellent argument for building four or five hundred large coal fired power plants around the country on a congressionally-mandated fast track.
I’ll point this urgent need out to my congress lady.
Not only would this help secure our energy future, an all-out build out of modern, highly efficient, coal units would actually lower CO2 emissions by replacing old obsolete units with more efficient units.
mike g
I’d rather see advanced nuclear put on the fast track than I would coal power plants even though coal is cheaper. Nuclear fuel, especially thorium breeders, is virtually unlimited. The problem is that there’s a lot of engineering and validation to get from Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s liquid florine thorium reactor (LFTR) 7.5mw research unit that operated from 1964-1969 transformed into a safe, economical 1000mw commercial design. Department of Energy estimates that will take 20 years to get the first plant online. A fast-track effort would probably not reduce that by more than 5 or 10 years. Coal plants on the other hand can go from drawing board to operation in matter of a couple of years.
The problem with coal plants is uncertainty. Since these are privately financed and operated for profit energy producers have to know with reasonable confidence that egregious CO2 emissions mandates from the EPA or congress aren’t going to come crashing down upon them and turn a profitable power plant into a money losing power plant.
Adding to the incertainty are promising new technologies which can, in the time required for a new nuclear or coal plant to pay for itself and start turning a profit, come along to produce electricity at a lower price point than coal or nuclear. If that happened then the investment in the coal or nuclear power plant turns it from a profitable enterprise into one that will never pay for the cost of building it.
Biofuel produced directly from sunlight, CO2, and waste water by genetically engineered microorganisms are already here with pilot plants under construction expected to come out of the starting gate with any hydrocarbon-based fuel from diesel to ethanol to methane at a price point competitive with $30/bbl crude oil. There’s a huge technogical leap happening as we speak in biofuel production. It isn’t happening through distillation of corn or even conversion of “waste” biomass such as cornstalks but rather through direct conversion (one step process) of sunlight, CO2, and municipal waste water (or sea water + nutrients) into ready-to-use diesel, ethanol, av-gas, and natural gas (methane). Synthetic biology is so close to large scale commercial application that it represents a clear and present danger to anyone tempted to invest in traditional energy sources where that investment needs 10 years or more before it becomes profitable.
Also keep in mind that the electrical grid is running closer to capacity during periods of high demand than the plants which produce the electricity to feed onto the grid. All the big brownouts that have hit the northeast were grid failures not power plant failures. Upsizing the power grid is very expensive and time consuming because it generally entails condemning private property for rights-of-way. You can’t go vertical on existing rights-of-way to add capacity because the transmission lines need more separation than you can get by stacking them higher. So you have to go horizontal adding more towers in a parallel track and that means acquiring more real-estate to do it. People don’t like being forced to sell their property for the public good and fight it tooth & nail through every means at their disposal. Conversely the government doesn’t care to pay premium prices that unwilling landowners would voluntarily sell for so condemnation is often how it is resolved. I don’t like condemnation of private property for the public good one tiny bit. The only way to avoid that is by decentralized production of electricity. I hold out a great hope that solar photo-voltaic and net metering will decline in cost enough so that it becomes common for people to have PV on their roofs almost as easy and cheap as putting up new shingles and that these will largely meet their daytime electricity needs and when it is cloudy or at night they draw power from the grid in the usual manner. Right now it costs about 3 times as much to produce your own PV electricity as it does to buy it off the grid but there is vast room for improvement. The cost of net metering grid ties are ridiculously expensive – almost as much as the cost of the photovoltaic panels themselves. Standardization, economy of scale in mass production, and further improvements in manufacturing of solar panels I hope will bring the price for the consumer down to parity with grid prices within the next 10 years.
Steam turbines don’t get efficient until they are very large units so I doubt the hoopla about small, semi-portable nuclear power plants is ever going to amount to anything so the only promising way to decentralize electrical production and thus make do with the existing power grid is photo-voltaics. I think the electric car is a huge boondoggle too with primary reason being there isn’t enough electricity for more than a tiny fraction of the ground transportation fleet to recharge from the grid – plus there is a looming shortage of niobium required for manufacture electrical wheel-drive motors and there’s just nothing on the horizon in battery storage technology and a big leap is needed there to make anything but short-commute vehicles a viable consumer product.
It’s a mess but I’m confident that new technologies will come to the rescue. I think those technologies are not the ones most people would agree are the most promising. Wind power is a niche player. It’s useful and there’s a role for it primarily as a band-aid until some truely inexpensive practical alternatives come online.