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
Doesn’t ERCOT have a website that gives the daily wind generation?
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.
A lot of people seem to be in quick submit mode. An FYI from Wikipedia:
* The spinning reserve is the extra generating capacity that is available by increasing the power output of generators that are already connected to the power system. For most generators, this increase in power output is achieved by increasing the torque applied to the turbine’s rotor.[3]
* The non-spinning or supplemental reserve is the extra generating capacity that is not currently connected to the system but can be brought online after a short delay. In isolated power systems, this typically equates to the power available from fast-start generators.[3] However in interconnected power systems, this may include the power available on short notice by importing power from other systems or retracting power that is currently being exported to other systems.
As has been pointed out, there was no reserve, or it was inadequate. If wind power plays a significant part of your production capacity, and it’s unavailable, you either get rolling blackouts or a full on black-out.
Coupled with record use for this time of year. Spurred on by record cold – and wind.
Everybody has also been home the last couple of days; all schools closed, little traffic on the roads and preparations underway in North Central Texas for the SuperBowl in Arlington, Texas.
.
The birds on my birdfeeder have put up a windmill. It’s one of those toys which we remember from our childhood, a stick with a plastic fan which can be put out of a car window or put in front of a fan so it turns. They did not put it up for power generation. Thay have discovered that it scares away the squirrels which rob the birdseed. Unlike a “wind farm” [wind farm is an oxymoran], let’s try wind industrial site, it does not kill birds. However it has a drawback: It only scares the squirrel when the wind is blowing.
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?
Anthony, are you reading my mind? ☺
I just commented this in an older article but this one fits it so much better,
so I repeat:
Now we really get to see how well the politicians have spent our billions and billions of tax dollars in preparation of such inevitable weather events, lulled asleep by AGW “scientists” harping that such events were only of the past. Now they lie and say they knew it all along.
It don’t look pretty. Vote the guilty out of office and ask your new representatives to defund them all. Now!
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…
The ironic thing is that I read just the other day that one of the utilities in Texas had stopped any forward motion on a nuclear plant there because they could not find a customer for the power.
Published just yesterday:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/business/energy-environment/01nuke.html?src=busln
Um … I’m thinking: No.
The plan was to go-ahead with the plants they had scheduled (it was standard base-load plants and normally available nat. gas-powered peakers); maybe they need to review their N-1 contingency plans during cold wx?
I do STRONGLY suggest the geniuses on-board here tonight second guessing those whose job it is day-in and day-out making these generation and load schedules hear-out the PUC member whose interview may be found at a link above …
.
Any jurisdiction that counts on wind power as part of its base load capacity deserves every blackout black eye it gets.
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/
Well, Bubba, I’m sorry, but This Myth is “Busted.”
From Jim’s excellent link:
http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/20110202_actual_loads_of_weather_zones
That wind was blowing Strong, All Night, and All Day.
Not such a hot post for the web’s Top Science Blog.
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.
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, such as setting off buried charges near your trees to loosen up the soil and improve aeration. As with most bad things in life, this power outage could’ve been prevented by the proper application of high explosives.
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.
Anthony
Here is an associated article from the UK about how their turbines failed in the cold.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1345439/Customers-face-huge-wind-farms-dont-work-cold.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
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.
crosspatch says:
February 2, 2011 at 9:44 pm
“The ironic thing is that I read just the other day that one of the utilities in Texas had stopped any forward motion on a nuclear plant there because they could not find a customer for the power.”
Maybe reality will set in after this. As far as I know, nuclear power plants are not effected by weather conditions.
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.
Who cares if wind turbines were working? A 30% capacity factor AT BEST. Texans now pay 50% more for power since 2006 (sharp price rise with wind generation capacity growth). It comes with a requirement for smart grid – far worse than a TSA groping. Yes, I like having my stuff turned off by someone or something else, and the government knowing what I do in my home. I like having identity thieves hacking my computer through the wires in my home (they will be able to do that soon if you aren’t careful), and bureaucrats sniffing my email. It makes me warm and fuzzy to think how my vital services can be so easily manipulated by the People’s Liberation Army (China). Security? Soggy tissue paper.
if($mood =~ m/sarcasm/){$mood =~ s/sarcasm/anger/;}
…because the situation is too dangerous to be witty.
The proper path forward is being taken by China as already posted on WUWT: Thorium-based nuclear power using liquid sodium or fluoride IFRs. A small fraction of the money we are flushing down the social program rathole (to create more dependency) could be better spent to build reliable inexpensive domestic energy and to grow the space program. These investments would return many times the dollars spent. They would help us leap forward to create new industries and jobs, which would mean the vast social programs would not be needed. But no, this administration has the goal of knocking us all down several notches to gain even more control over what’s left of the free market and our privacy.
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.
China was the No 1 installer of Wind last year.
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.
“When the wind is light, the turbine blades do not turn.”
What part of this don’t you understand, Al?