There’s a saying in the lone star state “Don’t Mess with Texas” which actually started out as an anti-littering campaign but has become sort of a slogan for the rugged, no-nonsense way of life that people have there. Now with dead wind turbines littering the state, the focus on deploying unreliable renewable energy in the name of “saving the planet” has literally “messed with Texas” in a huge way.
Ice storms knocked out nearly half the wind-power generating capacity of Texas on Sunday as a massive deep freeze across the state locked up wind turbine generators, creating an electricity generation crisis.
Wind generation ranks as the second-largest source of energy in Texas, accounting for 23% of state power supplies last year, behind natural gas, which represented 45%, according to Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) figures.
ERCOT reports today the spot price for electricity in Texas is currently a stunning $9000 per MegaWatt-hour. Even in the high demand summer months, $100 per MW-hr would be high.
At the same time the freezing temperatures were driving electricity demand to record levels, ERCOT reported while calling on consumers and businesses to reduce their electricity use as much as possible Sunday, Feb. 14 through Tuesday, Feb. 16.
“We are experiencing record-breaking electric demand due to the extreme cold temperatures that have gripped Texas,” said ERCOT President and CEO Bill Magness. “At the same time, we are dealing with higher-than-normal generation outages due to frozen wind turbines and limited natural gas supplies available to generating units. We are asking Texans to take some simple, safe steps to lower their energy use during this time.”
Source: http://www.ercot.com/news/releases/show/225151
A graphic provided by ERCOT shows the huge gap between electricity supply and demand today:
Capacity is expected to fall short of demand by as much as 20,000 megawatts today, while the National Weather Service in Dallas predicts record low temperatures between -6° F to 3° F for Monday night.
A map from poweroutage.us is showing the scope of power outages in Texas shows that about 75% of the state is experiencing power outages in varying percentages with a significant portion having no power at all:
At the moment, ERCOT is placing rolling power outages in effect to prevent a complete collapse of the power grid saying:
“ERCOT has issued an EEA level 3 because electric demand is very high right now, and supplies can’t keep up. Reserves have dropped below 1,000 MW and are not expected to recover within 30 minutes; as a result, ERCOT has ordered transmission companies to reduce demand on the system.
This is typically done through rotating outages, which are controlled, temporary interruptions of electric service. This type of demand reduction is only used as a last resort to preserve the reliability of the electric system as a whole.”
Source: http://www.ercot.com/eea_info/show/26464
It is sad and ironic that in a state known for its huge petroleum and natural gas resources, the lack of reliability of wind power has brought the state to its knees in a time of crisis, not unlike that which California experienced in 2020 during record heat where wind and solar power could not keep up with demand and was near collapse.
The folly of chasing renewable energy as a means of mitigating “climate change” is making itself abundantly clear today in Texas. When will politicians wake up and realize that renewable energy almost always equates to unreliable energy?
How many virtue signalers are in Hawaii right now? Get a head count of private jets.
We lost power for less than a day, and water intermittently. Many people in Texas are still without power. ERCOT is not telling the whole story. Demand was NOT unprecedented, but significantly less than what we use during the hottest part of summer. The problem is that all the wind shut down, and many of the gas or coal-fired plants were shut down due to the cold or a lack of fuel. Texas has about 82 GW ready for summer peak loads, which would have been plenty for this storm, but mechanical reliability appears to be the real issue. Wind and solar continue to contribute zip-nada-nothing to help. Unreliables as usual, better called fair-weather friends. The advantage of a coal-fired facility is that two or more months of fuel can be easily stored onsite. Nuclear power plants can store years of fuel in a relatively small room. Gas-fired units need a depleted gas reservoir like the one under my area. Katy Hub can store 23.5 billion cubic feet and deliver 700 million cubic feet per day to consumers. Solar and wind cannot be economically stored. These require expensive batteries which are not feasible at grid scale, not to mention the ecological impact of mining the metals needed to make those batteries.
The policy Titanic has struck ice sir. Captain, what shall we do now?
Lower away all the EVs of the rich that will float and have the poor passengers cling to them.
Update and numbers….
Texas Power Crisis Is Getting Worse With Millions Left in Dark (yahoo.com)
I must admit when I predicted cyclical cold coming from the confluence of AMO turning down, ,multi cycle solar minimum, and Pacific cycles I was not thinking of Texas. I was thinking of Europe and the NH in general. Maybe that broad-based cooling follows this weather.
And electric motors, now without power, to keep the gas flowing. A petroleum pipeline, canceled. Nuclear plants regulated to deny the ability to reprocess used fuels. A perfectly forward-looking parody.
Bring in the New Orleans Levee Boards to fix it with giant pumps that don’t work when the power goes out.
Texas has no excuse. They had California and Germany as warnings, and they ignored them. Texas, a State synonymous with Oil, can’t keep its lights on. Why? They were gullible enough to cave to the insane liberals.
The very first station I chose in Texas shows No warming, and in fact cooling, since 1900.
Burnet (30.7586N, 98.2339W) ID:USC00411250
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/stdata_show_v4.cgi?id=USC00411250&dt=1&ds=14
I really wanted the “Frozen turbine story ” to true. Sadly, it is a hoax. Blast.
Why would you say it is a hoax? Of course its true, but of course they didn’t all freeze, just as all the gas didn’t freeze.
But no wind is no wind
What good were the approximately 30+ billion dollars worth of wind turbines? How many 24/7 coal or gas systems could have been built for 30+ billion dollars.
I am in college station tx, and never lost power once. Many homes in same subdivision did lose power multiple times and continue to lose power. Turns out our house might be in same circuit as a fire station and apparently they don’t shut the power to those circuits. I guess sometimes you get luck in life, I’ll take luck over brains any day.
Never seen so much hand waving all over the internet in my life.
Yes, gas let texas down, but its because they failed to plan for cold. Seems to be lots of plans for heat but none for cold.
Why would that be, do you suppose?
Has there been some stuff in the media about runaway heating of the planet?
Clearly texas allows too much water in the gas and so here they are.
But that can be fixed if you plan for it.
You can’t fix “no wind”.
Currently texas wind assets are generating at roughly 11% of nameplate, to power the grid only from wind you would need 600gw installed
That is 166,000 3.6mw wind turbines.
Texas is big but do you have room for that?
Moratorium on new wind farms until the gas situation is sorted
or build more nukes
or recommission the coal plants.
Pointless to install a single new wind turbine until the reliable power issue is fixed.
Where’s the applauding voice of Greta Thunberg? She must be rejoicing at the carbon dioxide emissions saved when electric heaters can’t work.
Has she been frozen stiff without a heated home, or silenced by leaking car exhaust?
Or perhaps she’s learning a low profile can be useful when Mother Nature leaves you looking naive and foolish.
She has been shut in due to the cold and as we know the C02 concentration in a closed up room or abode builds up. Since she can see C02 , she is being blinded by a fog.
The MSM narrative on this is that it isn’t the fault of windpower:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-56085733
The problem with this is that the correct counterfactual is to ask whether there would be blackouts if renewables had not been installed. If renewables are 20% of capacity and everything else is 80%, the proportionate loss of capacity due to the weather is 2.1x times higher for renewables. So if renewables were not part of the mix, Texas would have an extra 8GW of capacity. (This assumes that the ratio of capacity down remains constant, which might not be true).
So wind really is mainly to blame.
There are an estimated 10,700 installed wind turbines in Texas. Google states that they cost 3 to 4 million each installed. So there is the real problem which is that they wasted 30+ billion dollars for intermittent power. That same money could have meant extra 24/7 energy sources, and they could have hardened the overall grid at the same time.
So checking on this, it seems the problem lies with failing fossil fuel power plants…
‘ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, did not conduct any on-site inspections of the state’s power plants to see if they were ready for this winter season.’
‘it’s becoming very clear that many power plants, including the natural gas system that supplies those plants with fuel, were simply not insulated well enough to protect against the cold and that ERCOT was way off in its assumptions about the state’s ability to weather a major winter storm.
Instead of sufficient capacity dozens of power plants crumbled when the cold hit, plunging the state into massive power outages and putting lives in danger.’
‘Ercot turned off power for millions of customers after several power plants shut down due to the below-freezing temperatures the state is experiencing. Officials at Ercot said the equipment at the plants could not handle the extreme, low temperatures. The choice was either shutting down power for customers or risking a collapse of the grid altogether.’
‘While Republicans have been blaming frozen wind turbines for the state’s blackouts, officials and experts say that malfunctions in natural gas operations played the largest role in the power crisis.
Ercot said all of its sources of power, including those from renewable sources, were affected by the freezing temperatures. The state largely relies on natural gas for its power supply, though some comes from wind turbines and less from coal and nuclear sources.
Natural gas can handle the state’s high temperatures in the summer, but extreme cold weather makes it difficult for the gas to flow to power plants and heat homes. Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas Austin, told the Texas Tribune that “gas is failing in the most spectacular fashion right now”.’
The WSJ has a good summary of the multi-day period. It is not kind to wind.
They could store the gas near gas fired stations if they wanted. In the old days, ‘town gas’ used to be generated then stored in gasometers. Here is a link/image of a small one.
Not sure how long a plant would last on the gas stored.
Regarding the use of gas-engine driven vs electrically driven pipeline compressors (and please, they are compressors, NOT pumps);
In the early 1980’s I worked briefly for Conoco’s natural gas division in Louisiana. We had both types of compressors in service.
At that time, Conoco was leaning heavily toward using only electrically driven compressors, primarily as an operating cost saving measure (no green or environmental agenda).
The IC-engine driven, natural gas fueled compressors worked well, but the engines themselves were quite maintenance intensive as compared to electric motors, which required virtually zero maintenance.
Another issue was that the operating costs for the gas-driven units was high, since at that time natural gas was quite a valuable commodity (remember the Carter years?).
There was plenty of relatively inexpensive coal-fired power available, so in many applications the electricity to run a motor driven compressor was less expensive than using the high-value natural gas.
I don’t recall what preparations they made for power outages resulting in the shutdown of electrically-driven compressors.
It would seem that putting in a gas-fired backup generator to back up a large electric compressor would be 100% duplication of infrastructure.
For example a 2,000 HP electric motor driven compressor would require a roughly equal sized gas-fired motor/generator set, so capital cost would be at least doubled.
It is a confluence of factors, or a “perfect storm” of them if you will, which caused this. But the bottom line is that this is a perfect example of what happens when you spend a decade (or more) undermining and weakening the grid via a host of anti-“carbon” and pro “green” energy policies. Coming soon to a state near you (if not already there).
If you have access to the WSJ, this is a good summary of the ERCOT situation.
Texas Spins Into the Wind – WSJ
There is a rising number of reports that natural gas fired electrical generation is the bigger failure. ERCOT included. That is not the full story though. I’m guessing these plants aren’t really designed to be reliable back up. Per ERCOT, they had a number of them down for scheduled maintenance and unavailable. Others were not designed for cold weather although west Texas isn’t exactly a stranger to snow – making them unavailable as backup or baseload, but used as peak supply.
Almost certainly, what natural gas they have is subject to being unable to sell power at many times due to favorable treatment of wind. Someone needs to do a detailed analysis when the snow settles.
Some are claiming that it is the gas generation that is causing this problem. The Problem with this argument is that if it were not for favorable wind subsidies the gas plants would have been up and running and the cold would not have taken them down as they would already have been warm.
Fake news, from a fake website…
As is typical of media weathercasters, Watts (a college dropout) has no academic training in the physics of climate or related disciplines. Unencumbered by scientific expertise he works by intuition, and intuitively he could not bring himself to accept the documented increase in the U.S. surface temperature record. There had to be a problem with the instrumentation or book keeping — somewhere. Watts explained his story to Glenn Beck. At first he speculated that the composition of new weather shelter paint had interfered with the measuring system:[4]
“Well, Glenn, I kind of stumbled into this. This was a project started on serendipity. I started out looking at paint. You may call seeing some of the early weather shelters that are housing the thermometers. They look like chicken coops on stilts that are white with slots and so forth. Anyway, to make a long story short, the weather bureau designed them back in the 1800s and they lasted until now, some of them still in use. They changed the paint in ’79. A long time ago I had a conversation with the state climatologist of California about them and we wondered if the change in paint—the original spec was the old Tom Sawyer whitewash because they were designed in the 1890s and they changed the paint check in 1979 to latex—so I wanted to do an experiment about finding out whether that paint made a difference … And then I went to another station in Marysville, California at the fire station and it was a new design and I discovered that the fire chief parked his vehicle, radiator end, right next to the sensor within about two feet of the sensor … So my project changed from looking at paint to looking at stations all around the country.”
In his early days Watts tried to position himself as a genuine “skeptic” concerned about the quality of data, but eventually he couldn’t keep a straight face.