Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
There’s a typically hyper, deceptive, and Pollyanna article in the Houston Chronicle with the headline “Texas has enough sun and wind to quit coal, Rice researchers say“. You gotta watch out for these folks, it’s the old bait and switch.
Because sure enough, as they say, there’s more sun and wind in Texas than would be required to quit coal. But then, there’s enough sun alone to quit everything. Texas uses about 450 terawatt-hours (million megawatt-hours) of electricity per year. And there are about a million terawatt-hours of sunshine falling on Texas every year. In short, every year the sun pours down on Texas about two thousand times the amount of energy that Texas uses in the form of electricity.
So there’s more than enough sun and wind, just as they say … but is it economical to harvest it? That’s the real question.
Let’s start by looking at the evolution of the fuel mix in Texas over time. Figure 1 shows the situation from 1990 to 2016.
Figure 1. Evolution of Texas electricity sources by fuel, 1990 – 2016. Other biomass includes agricultural byproducts, landfill gas, biogenic municipal solid waste, other biomass (solid, liquid and gas) and sludge waste. Other gases include blast furnace gas, and other manufactured and waste gases derived from fossil fuels. Other includes non-biogenic municipal solid waste, batteries, chemicals, hydrogen, pitch, purchased steam, sulfur, tire-derived fuels, waste heat, and miscellaneous technologies. Note: Totals may not equal sum of components because of independent rounding. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-923, “Power Plant Operations Report” and predecessor forms.
Recall that we set out to see if Texas wind energy is economical. I note that the US Congress is up in arms about whether to spend five billion dollars or less on a border wall … and meanwhile, we’ve already wasted over seven billion dollars in US taxpayer subsidies to prop up the Texas wind producers.
Note that this sum was paid, not just by the Texans who will presumably benefit from it, but by every taxpayer—including taxpayers who live in states where there is no wind energy generated.
In addition, Texas has had to spend an additional seven billion dollars to upgrade and extend their grid out to the remote locations where the wind is blowing. So we’ve blown fourteen billion on this nonsense.
The other deception in the Houston Chronicle article involves solar energy. Over the years we’ve spent billions of dollars propping up the solar industry … and at the end of all of that, solar is a measly two-tenths of one percent of the Texas electricity generated. Two-tenths of one lousy percent! On the graph above, it’s too small to even see.
Conclusions?
It has cost us fourteen billion taxpayer dollars to provide 13% of Texas electricity … and all that we’ve gotten from that is some unreliable wind power that requires gas-powered backup generation for when the wind doesn’t blow.
So yes, as the headline said, Texas has enough sun and wind to quit coal … but at a billion dollars in taxpayer subsidies per 1% of the total generation, it is totally and completely uneconomical to use it.
This is my shocked face … the only good news is that the US Federal windpower subsidies are supposed to end in the next couple of years. Well, that is, unless the Trump Administration caves in to the predictable pressure from the wind parasites and extends the subsidy …
It’s enough to make a man say bad words … not that I would do such a thing, you understand … in public, at least …
Best wishes to all,
w.
PS—Misunderstandings are the curse of the intarwebs. When you comment, please quote the exact words that you are referring to, so we can all know who and what you are discussing.
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“So there’s more than enough sun and wind, just as they say … but is it economical to harvest it? That’s the real question.” How about how many square miles of land will it take to provide all this energy. Does the state really want to encumber itself with all that infrastructure? Will it guarantee enough energy to meet the demand 24 hr/day all year? Not hardly. Still need fossil fuel or nuclear to fill the gaps. Fools errand using these two renewalables.
We Texans don’t mind taking all the other Americans money. As long as you continue to be foolish with it! My average electric bill per month for my home is $47.38.
Trouble is, we are paying for California and other states, not just Texas (no offense to my Texas and California relatives).
This isn’t all Federal Money…
As for building new power transmission lines in Texas: “The project cost $7 billion, a price that will be paid for by tacking on a fee to Texans’ utility bills. On average, your power bill could go up several dollars a month.” (Source: https://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2014/06/26/how-new-transmission-lines-are-bringing-more-wind-power-to-texas-cities/ )
Texans have paid more than $7 billion in building new power transmission lines that only benefit wind production companies. They could have never gone into business in the first place without tax payers paying the bills to move the power generated from the fields to the cities. So calling wind power cheap is nothing but either ignorance or deception.
You can build a nuclear power plant fairly close to the city that needs the power. You can build the gas generator inside the city (if you can find room). But wind is where you find it, so you have to build massively long power lines that have no other purpose then to get the wind electricity to the consumer.
Besides trashing out landscape, and kill birds and bats, these monstrosities suck out household budgets dry whether we “want” the power or not.
And yes, there are also Federal subsidies going to these same wind power producers, so they are making a LOT of money and causing the other producers harm…all paid out of YOUR wallets.
End the subsidies – either wind can or cannot compete fairly.
Start counting and reporting on the number of dead birds and bats (including protected species) found under the wind turbines. Mayne people will suddenly wake up to the fact that wind is not so harmless.
R of T,
“wind is where you find it, so you have to build massively long power lines that have no other purpose then to get the wind electricity to the consumer.”
In addition, those power lines have to be sized for full load when the average load is a small fraction of that. Same goes for solar. This is very inefficient use of resources, especially if you oppose mining for copper, etc.
This is the problem with such federal programs. Say for simplicity population among states is uniform, Texas (and other states same) gets $50 in federal subsidies for every $1 extra in federal taxes paid by Texas residents, looks like mostly free cash for individual states to grab and waste. Rational to take, but inefficient. In economics, opposite of public goods problem, and sometimes called the ‘tragedy of the commons’ or ‘split-the-check’ problem. Say 10 people go to lunch at a restaurant and split the check, the lobster and champagne is on the menu for $100 which you would not purchase alone, say you value the meal at $20, but on the margin your share of the bill split with 9 others rises by only $10, thus you order, everyone else does same and over-orders too. Problem gets worse with number of people. Wasteful spending results. Texas’s benefits are less than national costs. It would be better for Texas taxpayers or utilities or electricity consumers to weigh and bear the costs and benefits for a more efficient allocation of resources.
It also gets worse with bureaucrat approval processes and rent-seeking. Senator Byrd sitting on a key appropriations committee in Congress was able for years steer federal money wasted on massive unneeded federal highway projects in West Virginia, they are huge and empty. The nationally funded ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ in Ketchikan Alaska (replacing the ferry) would have served 50 residents and was earmarked to cost cost $400 million, doubt those 50 in AK would be willing to put up or value it at $8 million a person. And for solar and wind or EVs, we also also have the armies of lobbyists making campaign contributions and private companies pushing to make a buck on what is completely inefficient where benefit is less than cost. Environmental concerns are just propaganda marketing to sell, e.g. EV subsidies to rich EV consumers and Tesla Corp for downstream coal powered cars.
The myopic green jobs argument is there too for marketing, but for every dollar more in public spending, you have one less dollar in private sector spending, more public sector jobs and fewer private sector jobs, net is zero, real incomes fall due to inefficiency. People with blinders on always conveniently forget the fact that income and property tax payers fleeced will spend equivalently less destroying jobs. Collective socialism to allocate resources by decree replaces more efficient private sector decisions. True overall costs and benefits become disjoint by a political process. Plus we have watermelon idiots elected like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) who cannot do simple 3rd grade math with cool sounding green idea “solutions” for 100s of $ billions from taxpayers and the economy to “fix” things out of fairy tail fiction books she and millennials are delusioned to believe.
You have yellow-vests in France or electricity consumers in OZ unhappy with the bill, but it is usually too late as the waste has already been done like a lost and unrecoverable sunk cost.
Agree. Misallocation of resources resulting from federal money that disportionately benefits individual states. Ethanol mandates and subsidies for Iowa, wind for Texas. The general voting public now understands, as do the greenies that originally supported it, that ethanol fuel was and continues to be a financial and environmental mistake (on the face of it, converting a carbohydrate to a hydrocarbon replacement should have raised questions. My analogy, like converting electricity to coal). In a few years that same understanding will develop about wind “power”. In the meantime, $ trillion or so “misallocated”, and practically impossible to get rid of because of all the (make believe) jobs.
We already know that solar and wind isn’t a viable alternative to base load requirements, and adding too high a component of such on the grid introduces grid instability if duplicating base load isn’t idiling on standby to back up. There is enough examples globally to back that statement up. Plus it has been massively subsidized for a technology that only has a operating life span that is half to a 1/3 of a clean coal or NG facility. I think this point is the demise of wind and and solar, in that when it comes time in 15-20 years to replace all that solar/wind hardware, there will be no subsidy available and it will die a natural death. In all the calculations by the proponents of green tech wid and solar,I have yet to see the deprecition and replacement schedules. Which would prove that they are uneconomic now even with subsidies.
The only place that solar/wind might have some utility, is in area’s that are currently supplied by a diesel ICE tech. Surprisingly, the 3rd world has a lot of such and also reasonable solar insolation. Plus it is predictable time wise. If supplemented with high efficiency solar hot water heating, a lot of diesel can be conserved for maybe a 1/3 to half of the day. There is a place for some of this tech, but I don’t think on a large scale grid, plus it doesn’t work without subsidies. The only long term solution is advanced Nuclear Power of some type. In the shorter term, we are better off with clean tech fossil fuels and exporting that technology to China, India and the Third World.
From above:
So the 13% looks like 6.5 GW . Since this is from GWh/yr I presume this is measured energy / yr , not boiler plate numbers.
So about $2bn / GW of production capacity. Your main point is that this is unaffordable. How do other fuels compare?
Note: Isn’t it about time we stop trying to compare reliable, cost-effective, dispatchable power to “public enemy nuisance” non-dispatchable, interruptible, undependable, off-spec, unsustainable without subsidies and mandates junk “power”? Everything about wind “power” is bad somethings worse than others. The whole thing was an expensive foolish mistake. The discussion needs to be, how do we stop this madness? If CO2 really is poison instead of plant food then put all this”free” $ into nuclear subsidies and mandates, or, better still just burn more NG and be happy.
Usually I am very suspicious of graphs as they rarely provide the logic of the calculations behind them. However figure1 showing the escalating costs due to an increase in the intermittent power percentage looks very much like (I suspect) a graph of cost against the intermittent/reliable ratio. However it needs to have the actual figures included and the cost calculations very transparent.
It would be a frightening image for the Greenblob and would probably be banned from the MSM.
You get 77 comments posted here on Wattsupwiththat.
In the two newspapers cited
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Texas-has-enough-sun-and-wind-to-quit-coal-Rice-13501700.php has 24 comments, e.g. “and it will create jobs” “…and save the planet!” [Err for me as it does neither.]
http://www.texastribune.org/2011/08/24/cost-texas-wind-transmission-lines-nears-7-billion/ has 4 comments.
A bit unbalanced. Instead of just preaching to choir here, maybe some also should be posting at source or writing letters to editor.
There is a lot of mainstream MSM AGW religion out there which needs debunking, e.g. about 99% of watermelons I talk to to their shock have no idea that it has been getting colder almost 3 years now (and say fairly it is post el nino), and think CO2 is causing imminent collapse, never thought EVs were really coal powered, even smart people hoodwinked, such driving things like support of wasteful public policies, solar and wind and EV subsidies.
https://moyhu.blogspot.com/p/latest-ice-and-temperature-data.html#Drag
Whoever cares. The Pappas history –
https://www.google.com/search?q=Salzburg+Mercedes+represents&oq=Salzburg+Mercedes+represents&aqs=chrome.
As in Texas, as in nowhere land:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Salzburg+Mercedes+represents&oq=Salzburg+Mercedes+represents&aqs=chrome.
Some years ago I wrote a guest post for Judith calculating “the true cost of wind” by correcting egregious EIA errors. We used the Texas ERCOT grid for backup and transmission figures. Result (ifnoring subsidies) wind $146/MWh, CCGT $56/MWh. End of story, and fully supports WE.
And here is the link to it Rud.
https://judithcurry.com/2015/05/12/true-costs-of-wind-electricity/
Thanks, Rud. As I said in the head post, the $7 billion is not the cost of the wind systems, it’s just the subsidies. You’ve put real numbers to the rest.
w.
Yes. Its a really simple point. You cannot lower the cost of running a grid by replacing reliable cheap generation plant with unreliable, intermittent and expensive generation plant.
This is why the wind lobby is forced into all their intellectual contortions to try to argue that wind is competitive or cheaper than coal or gas. The usual way being to leave out half the costs, or pretend that intermittent generation is worth the same and functions the same as continuous and reliable.
Its really weird. Even if you think emissions are taking us to catastrophe, wind and solar are not going to help and are not fit for purpose. Not to mention that reducing emissions from generation are only addressing a tiny proportion of the supposed problem.
One feels these guys are emulating the early Church father who practised believing at least two impossible things before breakfast….
This is not the only problem, there is also the “cascade effect”.
Anybody wanting to build new generation of any kind in such a skewed market will require the same, or even more expensive subsidies to make it worthwhile investing.
That means that even the traditionally cheaper Base Load generation will have to become more expensive.
This has already happened in the UK with the Hinkley C Nuclear Power Station and even on the backup baseload generation to keep them in operation, which by the way has just been banned by the EU.
This is the exact opposite of a free Capitalist Market and precisley what the UN Agendas are all about.
Can’t see a scale bar for the subsidy line on Fig. 1. There’s room on the R of the graph.
Thanks, Coldish. Subsidy is to the same scale on the left.
w.