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.
 |
| 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.
 |
| 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?
===============================================================
Also FYI – Texas wind power induced blackouts happened in 2008, see this story.
See Mike Smith’s book on “how science tamed the weather”.
===============================================================
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
Richard,
You wrote that the UK target for electricity from renewables is 20% by 2020. I believe the actual target is 30% and the 20% applies to reduction in carbon emissions from all sources.
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.
April E. Coggins says:
February 2, 2011 at 8:40 pm
“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?”
It takes the same amount of energy to heat or cool.
The difference in more northerly locations we use natural gas or oil for heat.
In more southerly locations they use heat pumps for heating and cooling.
How much energy it takes is the difference between comfort zone and outside temperature. At 0 degrees F outside thats about 70 degrees worth of heating where as 105 degrees is just 35 degrees of cooling.
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!
Re.ThomasJ says:
February 3, 2011 at 7:08 am
Good links. Green jobs cost jobs. Anyone who does not read your links and my earlier links about Denmark, the proclaimed ideal example of wind power, is talking from prejudice. The green thing is not as green as nature’s green, CO2. In fact it is a disaster happening now, yet the predicted disaster of CAGW fails to materialize.
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
I guess I’ll add to my previous post that from this experience I thought that i was prepared for this as I have plenty of food, propane fuel and even filled up water containers as soon as the power went off first time. What I have learned from this cold spell is that you can never be too prepared. I’ll be purchasing a small power generator and adding additional supplies to my emergency items very soon. For me, I’m glad this happened at this time because I’ll be better prepared for the next maybe even worse “weather event” soon to occur!
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….
Dave Springer says:
February 3, 2011 at 1:33 am
Texas average electricity rates are 10% below the national average.
________________________________________________________
Could be a true statement, but probably only for ‘all sectors’. See http://www.eia.doe.gov/electricity/epm/table5_6_b.html
In 2010, the Texas residential power price was still higher ($.01/kWh) than the national average.
Texas power prices surged well above the national average when it became the leading wind power state from 2005-2007. See http://knxu.com/~pix/100111_cost_per_kwh.jpg (EIA data).
There are many factors influencing power prices. However, O&M for wind power is significant and the costs are increasing. See http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/partner/first-conferences/news/article/2010/06/true-cost-of-wind-turbine-operations-maintenance.
Here is a comparison of possible future energy prices and costs (EIA). See http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/pdf/2016levelized_costs_aeo2010.pdf
Keep in mind that it is easy to play with levelized costs to make anything look good. EIA is making nuclear power look worse (by using the MIT/U Chicago study that assumes 40 year plant lifetime when 80 years is a better estimate), and they are making wind power look better. Advanced nuclear is shown high by a factor of 2, and I wouldn’t be surprised if wind is shown low by a factor of 2.
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.
I wonder how many of those Texans laughed at Californians for their rolling blackouts while Texas companies were charging them 400% of normal for a KWH…
I still hoping someone will find a link to tell us just how much electricity the Texas wind farms produced leading up to and during the blackouts.
Hoser says:
February 3, 2011 at 6:47 am
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.
Thank,you, Hoser, exactly right, Chernobyl was a FUBAR from the time it
went critical. The lack of Containment is the big thing here. no relationship to commercial reactors….
In wind energy-intensive Iowa we had no such problem, though we had a bit more cold. I have not noticed our wind turbines turning less in the cold. In this recent storm I shoveled my driveway to one side, so I wouldn’t have to face that intense cold wind.
More coal energy plants may not have helped the situation or increased reliability if they were built with the equipment subject to the same freezing conditions but with no more resistance to the cold. I have worked as an engineer in California and Arizona and now Iowa. I have also worked with southern engineering companies on industrial plants in Iowa. The engineers from the south were incredulous at how deep we bury pipes to prevent freezing. “Six feet! Are you sure?” I doubt those new coal power plants would have been any better equipped than the existing ones to withstand cold. They would have been subject to the same cold and seasonal variation and just as likely to be down for maintenance or frozen equipment as the existing ones that failed.
At least with wind, if one turbine is down for maintenance it’s one of many and no big deal, and it can be brought on line quickly once repaired. If one Coal unit is down for maintenance it’s a major part of your capacity, and it takes most of a day to bring it online once its fixed.
More natural gas plants would have been subject to the same existing natural gas distribution system, and likely made it worse.
Wind is not a magic elixir, but it is part of the mix. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear are also not magic elixirs, but they are all also part of the mix.
To Mike Smith, who said:
February 2, 2011 at 9:21 pm
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
—————
Mike, this is an assertion which goes beyond the facts currently at hand. It was the conventional plants that went down, no? Why is it that if there were more conventional plants, they would be operating, when the conventional plants currently built were shut down by a combination of excess cold and excess demand?
You can make a generalization that is accurate: wind power is intermittent and might not blow when needed, and that there has been at least one large blackout in TX as a result of so much wind. You can say that if there is more such power, there might be more such outages, caused by a sudden, widespread reduction in winds. That would be accurate, but it wouldn’t describe what happened in this case.
This particular blackout, caused by conventional generation being knocked off line, was not the fault of TX wind generators. Nor can you demonstrate that if there were more conventional generation, they same thing wouldn’t have happened to them.
There is a bottom line: conventional generators failed in this case.
There are good arguments to be made against too much wind power. Make them. Don’t make them up.
The Wind Energy Association is actually trying to take credit for “solving” the problem:
American Wind Energy Association – Background on Texas Blackouts
February 03, 2011
Wind power played a major role in keeping the blackouts from becoming more severe. Between 5 and 7 A.M. this morning (the peak of the electricity shortage) wind turbines was providing between 3,500 and 4,000 MW,
Many parts of the Texas experienced rolling blackouts, coinciding with unusually cold temperatures across many parts of the state. Millions of customers statewide appear to have been affected. Here are the facts as they are currently understood:
Wind energy played a major role in keeping the blackouts from becoming more severe. Between 5 and 7 A.M. this morning (the peak of the electricity shortage) wind farm power was providing between 3,500 and 4,000 MW, roughly the amount it had been forecast and scheduled to provide. That is about 7% of the state’s total electricity demand at that time, or enough for about 3 million average homes.
Cold and icy conditions caused unexpected equipment failures at power plants, taking up to 50 fossil-fired power plants totaling 7,000 MW of capacity offline.
The cold temperatures caused electric heating demand to exceed the demand expected for this time of year. Many fossil and nuclear power plants take planned outages during non-summer months for maintenance, since electric demand is usually lower during these periods than in the summer.
The cold temperatures led to very high demand for natural gas for heating purposes, which may have strained the ability of the natural gas pipeline and distribution system to meet both these heating needs and the need to supply natural gas power plants (Texas obtains about half of its electricity by burning natural gas, and gas power plants account for about 70% of the state’s generating capacity).
“While we are still learning about what happened today, this weather event clearly demonstrates the importance of developing and maintaining a diverse energy portfolio that is not overly dependent on any one energy source,” said Michael Goggin, Manager of Transmission Policy, American Wind Energy Association. “This experience shows just how valuable a clean, affordable and homegrown energy source like wind can be in contributing to a reliable electric system.”
But I note with interest that the areas of TX that have wind turbines are more than 400 miles from the areas suffering blackouts (and electric power – not just voltage! – is used up in useless power line resistance losses when transmitted long distances) and have very low wind speeds. Wind speeds under 15 mph don’t generate usable power.
So I seriously doubt the Wind Energy claims.
3000 Megawatts generated? Maybe that many was theoretically available at the top of windmills already built, if every windmill built could have been producing at its maximum theoretical rate. But how much energy was getting produced that early in the morning? The UK windmills are 8% effective in winter.
Kum Dollison says:
February 2, 2011 at 11:48 pm
China was the No 1 installer of Wind last year.
—————————————————-
China was the number one installer of electrical generation capacity in the world last year in general, and I’m going out on a limb by guessing that they were not the No. #1 installer of wind “power” as a percentage of newly installed power when China is adding coal plants at a rate of 2 per week.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6769743.stm
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.
Vince Causey:
At February 3, 2011 at 7:47 am you say to me:
“You wrote that the UK target for electricity from renewables is 20% by 2020. I believe the actual target is 30% and the 20% applies to reduction in carbon emissions from all sources.”
Sorry, but I have to disagree.
The Energy White Paper published by UK Government in May 2003 set out four objectives;
o Cutting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions
o Securing the reliability of energy supplies
o Promoting competitive markets to help raise the rate of economic growth and
improve productivity
o Ensuring every home is adequately and affordably heated
The White Paper established that a major contribution to the reduction of CO2 emissions was to be expansion of so-called ‘renewable’ sources of power to provide 20% of UK electricity supply. At present, ‘renewables’ provide 4% and windfarms (i.e. local assemblies of wind turbines) provide 0.5% of the total UK electricity supply.
Hydroelectricity schemes provide most existing ‘renewable’ power sources in the UK (mostly in Scotland), and there are limited opportunities for more hydroelectricity schemes in the UK.
The expansion would be nearly 30 GWe of power from use of ‘renewables’ and would mostly be provided by construction and use of windfarms.
The objectives set out in the White Paper were endorsed by the Energy Review published by UK Government in July 2006. The present government inherited that policy when it came to power last year and has not altered it.
The Energy Review also advocated ‘distributed power systems’, combined heat and
power (CHP) schemes, increased energy efficiency especially in dwellings,
investment in research on alternative ‘renewables’ (e.g. wave power and geothermal
power), and continued use of nuclear power for electricity generation.
The White Paper and Review did not say that their proposal for increased use of windfarms would require 15000 x 2 MW wind turbine units to be constructed at the rate of 3 per day for the next 15 years. This ambitious project is being supported by large subsidies.
The renewables objective is being addressed by promotion of windfarms because both the White Paper and Review – wrongly – assert that windfarms reduce emissions from power generation and that windfarms and hydroelectricity are the only technically feasible ‘renewables’ at present. However, the Review advocated investment in research on alternative ‘renewables’ notably wave power and geothermal power.
Richard
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
SORRY I meant SURFACE MAP not METAR
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.
To the best of our knowledge, wind generation actually kept the blackouts from being worse than they were. See http://www.awea.org/rn_release_02-02-11.cfm . Oops.–Tom Gray, consultant to American Wind Energy Association
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 :).
racookpe1978, thank you for your information. I believe your post was the first to supply information about what the wind was actually doing during the stress on the electric grid.
First, the original article was unfortunately written more on presumptions rather than facts. The themes might be valid, but wisdom was lacking in the decision to assign blame before gathering evidence.
Second, I did not buy the idea that a rolling blackout occurred because of frozen coal piles and frozen pipes at two coal plants. Two alternate explanations came to my mind: (1) Maybe spokespeople are not mentioning wind because it would be politically incorrect to do so. I am very aware of the pressure not to speak evil of wind in the electric industry (at least in public). But a more likely explanation: (2) The industry was blaming the these two coal plants to deflect blame from system operators – because they certainly should have been able to handle the failure of two coal plants (via spinning reserves). But, now it is reported that 50 fossil-fuel plants had problems. That degree of widespread problems probably exceeded the old electric standard of 15% excess capacity and preparations for triple contingency.
Third, the reliability issue of wind is still a valid discussion point. I do not know if we can accept the Wind lobby’s pronouncement that wind was contributing 3500 to 4000 MW; however, even that figure means that wind was operating at 50% of its rated capacity. If you have a crisis, you would like an operating generating source to generate more than at 50%. The construction wind plants required huge investment dollars that were not available for construction of plants that would have been available at closer to 100%. As system engineers know, for every 10 MW of wind generation installed, you need 5 to 10 MW of back-up capacity. We are not talking about an inconsequential amount of dollars.