By Andy May
I live in Texas and write about climate science and energy, so I get a lot of questions about the recent problems. My wife and I are OK, we have a natural gas powered generator and did not lose power like most people did earlier this week. We also had a broken pipe, but it was outside the house, and I was eventually able to cap it, with the help of a neighbor, after the normal (for me) three trips to the hardware store and two failed attempts.
As usual these days, discussions of natural events quickly devolve into useless political arguments about who or what is to blame. Little thought is put into the technical or scientific issues, instead everything is viewed through the prism of Democrat or Republican political agendas. Ideology trumps common sense. Thus, we have Democrats blaming natural gas shortages and coal downtime and Republicans blaming the wind power collapse. What really happened?
The Chronology
Texas is a big place; it is 862 miles (1,387 km) wide and 23% larger in area than France. The weather varies a lot from Northwest Texas where the wind turbines are to Austin, San Antonio, and Houston where some of the worse problems were. So, let’s look at the data, in Figure 1 we see electricity generation from February 7 through Thursday February 18.
Monday night, February 8, West Texas was right at freezing, with spotty freezing rain and sleet and 100% humidity. See Figure 2.
Figure 2 shows some of the critical weather statistics for Midland, Texas, near the West Texas wind turbine country. What isn’t shown is the humidity. The sudden drop in temperature began Tuesday, Feb 8, and humidity quickly rose to 100%. No measurable precipitation occurred between February 8 and February 13, but condensation froze onto the wind turbine blades. The condensation generally concentrated on the leading edge of the blades, which direct the wind around the blade and produce the spin and the power. The ice on the blades, especially the ice on the leading edge, caused the blades to stop spinning.
As Elliot Hough, an engineer, put it:
“the turbine blades and more importantly, the leading edge that directs airflow around the blade to create lift, will cover with ice and eventually lose all lift. In the case of a turbine blade, that means the turbine stops turning. In the case of an airplane, the airplane falls to the ground. If air is well below freezing point, there is little to no moisture in the air and blades won’t freeze over. Such are the conditions much further north in North Dakota where temps can be sub-zero F and turbines don’t ice over.” Elliot Hough on Linkedin
When these conditions occur on airplanes about to take off, the wings are de-iced with a chemical that melts the ice and stays on the wings long enough for the plane to reach an altitude where the humidity is low enough that no ice will form. But wind turbines are on the ground and if the humidity stays very high, as it did in West Texas for three days, and the temperatures continue to drop, they fail.
As the wind turbines froze, natural gas combined cycle backup generators kicked in. These were all over the state. Natural gas generation is normally a very good backup. It is flexible and can increase or decrease its generation on demand, nearly instantly, unlike coal or nuclear. These latter two sources have lots of fuel on site and are normally safe from disruption, but they are slow to change their output. Thus, they are considered “base load” sources of power. Natural gas is very flexible, but since its fuel is delivered by pipeline, on demand, it is vulnerable to supply disruptions. The Texas weather was bad enough that even some nuclear and coal generation was affected on February 15th, the coldest day.
As Figure 1 shows, natural gas ramped up to make up the loss of wind, in fact it increased 450%, as shown in Figure 3 from the Wall Street Journal on Feb. 17.
So, the sequence of events was, wind turbines iced up from February 8 to 10 and their power output dropped 93%. Natural gas ramped up quickly to cover the shortfall, increasing an incredible 450%, but the pipelines feeding them fuel iced up, especially the valves on the pipelines and put the natural gas generators out of commission. [Update: As Marc notes in the comments, this is an oversimplification of what happened. Also see this article in the San Angelo Live for more details.]
If the Texas grid generation mix had more coal and nuclear this problem with cold weather would have been much less. But coal and nuclear plants have been decommissioned to make room for more wind power. To make matters worse, some coal and nuclear plants had cold weather problems themselves.
Conclusions
The proximate cause for the Texas grid collapse was the very cold weather from February 9 to 17. The initial problem was that wind was producing over 25% of Texas’ power and it is intermittent. Knowing it was intermittent, ERCOT ramped up natural gas generation as an instantaneous backup for the wind, but they forgot that natural gas is supply-on-demand, and the pipelines are vulnerable to disasters, especially cold weather. Disaster power sources are coal and nuclear, they have fuel on site for days or weeks and do not require a pipeline or a backup.
Policy implications
Texas has encouraged the building of wind turbines. They do this, in concert with the U.S. government, through direct subsidies and by paying for wind generation, rather than paying for electricity purchased. This guarantee of revenue means generating companies do not have to consider market demand, they can build wind turbines endlessly with no risk. They can even pay others to take their power and then be reimbursed by the government with our tax dollars! Since 2006, federal and Texas subsidies to wind power, have totaled $80 billion, this foolishness is explained well on the stopthesethings website.
The wind power excess capacity has distorted the generation mix in Texas to a dangerous and unbalanced level. Natural gas, coal and nuclear generating companies have too little revenue to increase or fortify their plants, since wind can generate as much as it wants and is guaranteed revenue for the electricity it generates.
The subsidies and mandates must be stopped and our baseload (aka emergency) capacity increased and fortified. Coal and nuclear power generation must increase. It should be clear to everyone now that, while natural gas is a perfect minute-by-minute grid stabilizer, since it is an on-demand electricity generator, it is vulnerable to weather disruptions. Texas’ current emergency baseload capacity is too small and too vulnerable.
Politics has thoroughly corrupted climate science as I explain in my new book: Politics and Climate Science: A History. The thoroughly corrupt field of climate science politics is now corrupting the fields of engineering involved in power generation. This is dangerous, engineers must make engineering decisions, not politicians. Reliable electricity is essential to our prosperity and well-being, our various governments should not be purposely destabilizing our electrical grid with dumb renewable policies, they should be strengthening the grid to make Texas more resilient.
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From the article: “and I was eventually able to cap it [broken water pipe], with the help of a neighbor, after the normal (for me) three trips to the hardware store and two failed attempts.”
That sounds like me! Plumbing is the worst! 🙂
Nope, plumbing is only wet and maybe smelly. Amateur electrical stuff is literally shocking. Been there, done that. Both.
I can do electrical better than plumbing. My plumbing jobs always end up leaking. I had to replace my copper pipes that fed my shower and after a whole lot of trouble I won’t get into here, I finally got the thing hooked back up, and then the very next week one of my supply lines under the house broke and that was right before the big freeze so I’m waiting for it to thaw out a little before tackling that.
I just do minor electrical repairs. Anything more complicated, I call the professionals. I had a friend who was an electrician and he was working on my outside meter while I watched, and all of sudden he jumped back, and he got a shock which he said he felt all the way across his chest. So even professionals have to be careful. I’m sure glad I wasn’t a witness to his demise that day.
Thanks, Andy.
Not sure why the subsidies given to renewables don’t require a fail safe backup.
Because the subsidies were never intended to create usable power sources.
In a word, rent seekers. They ‘lobbied’ the government because if they had to provide reliable power, it would have cost money.
They could. ERCOT in TX has the power to do so as part of their rules to play in the marketplace. But the Board of Directors of the ERCOT simply don’t care. They are politicians, not engineers.
I’m late to this discussion as I spent the day at Disney World with my granddaughters. Flew to Orlando from far south Texas last Saturday before things came apart! Talk about luck. (Also have a funny story about why I had over a years worth of toilet paper before the pandemic hit, but maybe later.) Anyway, if you are still monitoring comments Andy I’m curious what happened with all the wind turbines in South Texas? We have what appears to be hundreds if not thousands not far from the coast. What percentage of Texas’ capacity does this group of bird killers represent?
Good thing you aren’t a politician.
Yeah, really! ORG would be on CNN right now.
I’m not sure of the percentage, but attached is a map of wind farms in Texas. Brownsville only got down to 28 on Monday, the 15th, so I suspect most of the wind generation in that area was working when the wind was blowing, but wind speeds were 0 from 6AM on the 15th until Noon on the 16th.
I think some anemometers froze up and power outages affected reporting at some weather stations…
At Lubbock wind speeds dropped to cut in levels or below for much of the 15th:
https://weatherspark.com/h/d/145759/2021/2/15/Historical-Weather-on-Monday-February-15-2021-at-Lubbock-International-Airport-Texas-United-States#Figures-WindSpeed
Abilene did a little better until nightfall, but not really enough to produce a lot of power
https://weatherspark.com/h/d/145819/2021/2/15/Historical-Weather-on-Monday-February-15-2021-at-Abilene-Regional-Airport-Texas-United-States#Figures-WindSpeed
Cut-in is around 10-15kph, depending on turbine model.
Closest to Brownsville with a complete record for the 15th
https://weatherspark.com/h/d/145842/2021/2/15/Historical-Weather-on-Monday-February-15-2021-at-Edinburg-Rio-Grande-Valley-Regional-Freight-Terminal-Airport-Texas-United-States#Figures-WindSpeed
Again, dies at dusk
Wind output got clobbered – but then again, it’s not infrequent that it falls below 1GW for the whole of ERCOT
Texas (ERCOT) has to do three things to increase reliability.
.
1) Interconnect to the Western Interconnect, the Eastern Interconnect and the SPP grids.
.
2) Winterize the natural gas production/delivery systems
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3) Install de-icing systems on it’s wind turbines.
1) Get rid of the mental affliction that is ACDS
2) Get back to solid RELIABLE electricity supplies, well maintained
3) Get rid of any feed-in priority or mandate on UNRELIABLE sources.
4) STOP WASTING MONEY on intermittent unreliables.
You have been shown that interconnects would have made no difference
You have been shown that GAS carried the day for most of the time.
DENIAL of facts is one of the symptoms of manic ACDS. (Anti-CO2 Derangement Syndrome)
You have ALL the symptoms, and are showing yourself to be a raving nutter. !
Insulate the raw natural gas collection/gathering systems so the MOISTURE in the raw unprocessed gas doesn’t freeze.
And stop wasting money by building UNRELIABILITY into the supply network.
I said that already in 2)
Wake up and engage your brain, for once in your petty little life.
———————-
GREAT that you agree with all my points though. 🙂
Maybe you are not as dumb as you make out, and your ACDS is not totally infecting your tiny mind .
How long would the insulation delay the freeze-up?
Wrong.
It needs to increase the availability of dispatchable generation in winter time. They under-estimated demand, and had insufficient capacity. There was no spare capacity available in neighbouring grids which would mean that increasing connection to them would achieve very little. Most likely, it would result in higher prices in Texas, as other grids would look to rely on dispatchable power when their own wind and solar fails them.
There is no point in installing deicing systems if wind can fall in cold weather to very low levels of generation whether or not icing causes a problem. You need dispatchable backup to cover for low wind days whether they occur in winter or summer.
Probably the best insurance of gas supply would be to restore gas fuelled compressors to pipelines. No reliance on the grid to keep going. There might be some point in having some salt cavern storage. As it was, gas was redirected away from LNG liquefaction plants to maintain supply levels elsewhere. The market works: LNG plants had every incentive to sell the gas they would otherwise have liquefied, and pay demurrage on the tankers awaiting loading. It’s unclear how much more might be justified.
De-icing systems are expensive, if they are installed on the blades, they cut into blade efficiency, both take a system that is already too expensive and make it much more.
The icing conditions in West Texas lasted for days, that is 100% humidity and temperatures just below freezing. Tons of deicing chemicals would have been needed at every wind turbine, right when the chemicals would be needed on the roads. Further applying the chemicals to the blades for days would have scattered them all over the landscape and the chemicals kill plants, very stupid idea.
The loss of wind generation seems to have been as much about lack of wind as icing. Generation was as high as 9.1GW on Sunday afternoon, and still 8GW during the evening peak. It then fell away, reaching a low of just 649MW on the hourly data. There’s no point in deicing if there isn’t the wind to turn the blades. Much better to spend on additional dispatchable capacity
I was thinking more on the lines of de-icing boots and heated leading edges, such as what they use for airplane wings during flight. That’s why I specified “installed on the blades”.
It’s already agreed that using helicopters to de-ice the blades is a brain dead solution.
Ummm…. How do you put heated leading edges on a propeller? Are the propellers on conventional aircraft heated or only the fixed wings? It would be difficult to commutate electricity onto a windmill propeller from an engineering viewpoint. And putting batteries into a propeller doesn’t sound like the best idea either.
The interconnect and de-icing just reduce the degree of unreliability. They do not get you to a reliable system. Only adequate winterized fossil fuel system provide reliability. Can we really blame the people of Texas for not planning for this cold weather. After all the greens have been saying for years that snow is a thing of the past.
No matter what you need fossil fuel backups so you never get to zero carbon.
Of the three items only winterizing the fossil fuel systems and adding enough backup to deal with really cold temperatures provides reliability. The interconnect and de-icing wind turbines are just exercises in reducijng degrees of unreliability.
No.
1) increase baseload power, such as nuclear, coal and gas.
2) require both wind and solar to provide a dispatch-able supply, ie guarantee power when required (probably by using backup generators for when the wind doesn’t blow).
3) tell the toxic greens to shut up.
De-icing systems would not have protected the wind turbines during the Feb 8-9 problems. The critical conditions lasted too long, they could not have had enough of the chemicals on site. Plus there is a pollution problem.
Wind turbines with deicing systems have to be shutdown for deicing… Not much use when it’s well below freezing for 10 days.
There’s also the problem of keeping the helicopter blades de-iced.
Or are the centripetal forces sufficient for that?
How do you install de-icing systems on existing wind turbines?
Stop listening to idiocy issuing from the likes of bethan and ilk.
You forgot to include 4):
Make sure you have 100 percent backup for all windmills for times when they do not function, such as in very cold, icy weather, or very high winds, or no winds at all.
450% ramp up?
EIA is not trustworthy. Especially, when it portrays private energy producing installations.
A 450% increase without offsetting the electricity shortfall suggests that much of that 450% increase is due to homeowner and business installed backup generators.
Looks like EIA playing their usual games of attributing power generation equivalent to each unit’s nameplate operating output, not what the unit actually produces.
After all, EIA only has access to nameplate electricity power capabilities for zoning applications filed at installation. Not what how much electricity is actually produced for each installation.
That is, EIA’s claim for 450% increase includes totals for independently installed backup generators at nameplate capacity, just as they label wind power generation at nameplate capacity.
All of those independent operators would cause problems with natural gas supplies.
Best way of building RELIABILITY into the grid is GAS, COAL and/or NUCLEAR, with a mandated 90 day fuel stockpile
(90 day fuel stockpile is difficult with gas)
Hydro, Geothermal can be used if you are lucky enough to have it.
Build enough of that to cover the base load + say 20%
Then use GAS to carry any peak loads.
Maybe some BIOMASS, from waste.
Wind and solar have ABSOLUTELY NO PLACE on a RELIABLE electricity grid.
ATheoK, The EIA got its information from ERCOT. The 450% ramp up was real generation. The gas generators were reserve “peaking” supply. Most of Texas’ peakers are natural gas. Wind was very high (~40%) early on Feb 8, so almost all the natural gas peakers were off grid and idling. The 450% increase was because they started at a very low number (about 5 GW) on Feb 8. After the wind failed the natural gas ramped up to ~40GW (see figure 1). That is actually 800%, but who’s counting.
Excellent explanation, Andy.
The windmills were carrying the load at the time of the freeze-up, and the natural gas powerplants were idling.
It took a while for the natural gas generators to get up to full speed, and then some of the generators were plagued with inadequate gas supplies, because of the cold weather, and were not able to produce power at their maximum rates, so they could not make up for the entire shortfall caused by the loss of the windmills. And this made rolling blackout necessary.
Had all the natural gas generators been able to come up to full power, they might have been able to prevent the blackouts, although I don’t know that for sure, but I suspect that is the case.
The natural gas generators and others, with the exception of windmills and solar, did keep the Texas electric grid from failing completely and that is a blessing in itself.
Had the Texas grid failed entirely, the estimate is it would have taken a month to get things back up and running. As it is, it is estimated that the blackouts will cost Texas $50 billion and that’s for a State that is only partially without electricity. Losing it all for a month would be catastrophic in money and human lives.
The people of the United States have been witness to a real good test of unreliable windmills and solar with the Texas disaster. If other States don’t want to end up like Texas, then don’t place your future in the hands of unreliable power generation like windmills and solar.
In the end, it all boils down to one thing: Warmer is better.
Particularly when your grid is geared for warmer.
I have a lot of questions about this statement made in the article:
but the pipelines feeding them fuel iced up, especially the valves on the pipelines and put the natural gas generators out of commission.
Pipelines are buried several feet underground. Therefore, they do not “ice up”. Valves are above ground and operated remotely so changing flow by operating the valves might have become more difficult- but that should not have stopped the flow of gas in the underlying lines.
So what put the gas generators “out of commission”. There were numerous problems.
1. At 1:55 AM on February 15 the grid sustained an unexpected drop in frequency from 60 Hertz to 59.3 Hertz. That knocked several non renewable generators off line almost immediately. They still had gas supply but were tripped off line and all generation stopped. ERCOT says they don’t know what caused the frequency drop. But it coincided with the sudden loss of wind energy.
2. Power was lost to numerous pipeline compressor stations. Without electricity they don’t operate. That dramatically slowed the rate of gas flow through the pipelines.
3. I suspect some gas plants were running on interruptible power. Its cheaper and its rarely interrupted. Those plants had their power cut in order to route gas to home heating use.
I think its highly oversimplified to just say that the gas plants quit operating because the gas pipelines “iced up”.
Thanks Marc, I stand corrected. I put a note in the post that references your comment and also an article in San Angelo Live that provides more details. Good stuff, thanks!
Actually the incident just before 2 a.m. seems to have started with a loss of gas generation, likely cascading to others because of the underfrequency. Wind was fairly stable at just over 5GW. See the timeline I posted upthread.
But I think you are right that the gas supply picture was much more complicated, and the loss of supply greatly aggravated by cutting power to pipeline compressors. We know that Texan LNG plants released probably up to 4bcf/day back to the inland market. I wonder how much production got shut in on the basis that a pipeline had shut down.
2. Power was lost to numerous pipeline compressor stations. Without electricity they don’t operate. That dramatically slowed the rate of gas flow through the pipelines.
It is my understanding that the compressor stations were originally fueled by natural gas and were subsequently converted to electric. Is that the case?
If so, isn’t that one of the major reasons for the loss of power?
I read a review of a WSJ article (behind paywall), which indicated that the switch from methane power to electric power for the compressors that failed when power was cut off was mandated by a federal greenie law.
Obviously Texas needs to ditch the “free market” approach to it’s electric power supply, and institute government regulation. Easiest way to do this is to vote out the GOP and go blue.
Besides the bills that Texans are getting from the “free market” pricing for their electricity and natural gas, they are going to have a fit when their insurance bills come due. The insurance industry in Texas is going to take a big hit from this, and will have to recoup their losses by raising rates. Ya gotta love the free market.
It really is amazing how every problem in something that isn’t fully government control is proof that the free market can’t work.
On the other hand, no matter how many time government screws up, it’s always proof that the free market doesn’t work.
Other than frozen pipes, how exactly is the insurance industry going to take a “big hit” from this?
It really is amazing how progressives actually beleive that the answer to every problem is more socialism.
It’s easier than thinking for yourself, or actually working for a living.
ERCOT Board of Directors HAS THE POWER TO DO THIS. The problem is that they are all certified blue Democrat Greenies!
If the customer has no choice as to who their supplier is, then it isn’t a free market.
bethan sounds like one of those people who believes that there is pure communism, and everything else is some form of free market.
“Many gas turbine power plants can be fueled with natural gas, fuel oil, and/or diesel, allowing greater flexibility in choice of operation- for example, while most gas turbine plants primarily burn natural gas, a supply of fuel oil and/or diesel is sometimes kept on hand in case the gas supply is interrupted. ”
.
.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant
..
..
Let me guess, Texans didn’t think ahead?
“Texans didn’t think ahead?”
.
Nope, they sure didn’t, They let themselves get sucking by the ACDS agenda.
There has been WAY TOO MUCH money wasted on building UNRELIABILITY into their electricity supply system by implementing ridiculously erratic wind and solar
If that money was spent on upgrading COAL and NUCLEAR to carry the base load, with GAS carrying the peaks, this would never have happened.
The anti-CO2 agenda/ ILLNESS is totally to blame for the problems in Texas.
Would violate their emissions permits. Fuel oil? LOL, would love to see you get an EPA permit for that.
To keep natural gas from forming hydrates and freezing you inject methanol. They should be set up to do this.
Whilst methanol can solve the freezing problem in pipelines it is clear that providing the capability may not make economic sense for many gas producers in Texas. There was a comment here the other day from a small scale producer confirming her had shut in wells because of ice problems in his wastewater handling system. He was quite clear it would have been uneconomic to install cold weather measures.
Texas, Feburary 2021: proof that unreliable fossil fuels need backup.
Do you ever think or do any type of research before posting ?
bethan is one of those people who will believe a reporter quoting an un-named source, long before she will believe actual data. But only if the reporter is saying what she wants to hear.
WIND FAILED COMPLETELY
GAS carried the day, ramping up by 450%… until it couldn’t
COAL and Nuclear were maxed out. Much more was needed.
There has been way too much money UTTERLY WASTED on building UNRELIABILITY into their electricity supply system by implementing ridiculously erratic wind and solar.
If that money was spent on upgrading COAL and NUCLEAR to carry the base load, with 90 days fuel in reserve, ..
…. and with GAS carrying the peaks, this would never have happened.
The anti-CO2 agenda/ ILLNESS is totally to blame for the problems in Texas.
The only problem with your mythmaking, is that there was no drop in the amount of electricity being made by fossil fuel power stations.
Only wind and solar saw drops, and they saw huge drops.
Yeahbut that doesn’t remove the requirement to add spinning reserve every time you add a windmill, for those times when the wind doesn’t blow.
…or the sun doesn’t shine.
Interesting article, but allow me to offer a few other thoughts:
Nuclear Power – The State of Texas has no authority to control the design of nuclear power plants. That authority lies with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Nuclear power plants elsewhere operate uninterrupted through conditions far worse than Texas experienced. If nuclear plants in Texas fall offline because of inadequate weatherization it’s not a failure of design, it’s a failure of design criteria. We should expect the NRC to review this event and likely require upgrades for nuclear plants in “warm” locations from California to Florida.
Federal Control – It has been suggested that federal regulation would have required greater weatherization of pipelines and power plants. If the NRC design criteria for nuclear plants failed to accommodate this event, what suggests that other federal regulators would have imposed more stringent design criteria?
Weather – Much blame has been placed on one power source or another when all failed to some degree. ERCOT’s response seems to have been slow. However, a cold event of this depth, extent and duration was a huge statistical outlier. Unprecedented means unprecedented.
It was not unprecedented. In December of 89
Texas experienced temperatures lower statewide than were experienced in Texas last week.
They had a similar event in 2011, it just didn’t last as long.
Australia now has a sophisticated market in Frequency Control and Ancillary Services. At this stage there are 8 variables that are priced through bidding and for each half hour pricing period. This chart shows how the prices for these services have increased with increase in weather dependent generators.
?itok=K4s_b-hV
The high price in Q1 2020 was the result of an interconnector outage between Victoria and South Australia for just 2 weeks. SA has very high penetration of WDGs; about 70% of energy from wind and solar.
The Battery at Hornsdale made significant income during the line outage. The costs were born roughly half between the WDGs and the retailers. South Australia has enough rooftop solar to send the State demand negative so rooftops have become a major user of FCAS services but can only be charged through the retailers.
The levying of FCAS charges to the WDGs and payment for the services to the thermal plant is gradually sheeting home some of the costs of reliability to the unreliables while giving financial benefit to the reliables.
At this stage there is no direct benefit for inertia. A payment has been thought about but right now inertia is being provided outside the market mechanism with governments paying up front as part of the network infrastructure but eventually recovered from consumers.
It is getting harder to make money out of WDGs in Australia apart from rooftop solar. The government subsidies will completely dry up by 2030 unless targets are changed. Value of subsidies are currently in rapid decline as targets are achieved ahead of time.
Texas penetration of WDGs has reached the 20% point where there needs to be a FCAS market if one does not already exist. That will likely make many proposed WDG projects uneconomic.
It is delusional to incorporate high levels of intermittent generation without some means of charging for the intermittency to benefit the on-demand generators. If every WDG project required a guaranteed output then that would do as well.
For the failed link – see attached.
a half-hour video interview by Thought Leaders with Jason Isaac – with a nifty play-by-play explaining how inattentive management failed to respond quickly enuf – and how unreliable energy sources (guess which ones those are) provided hardly any energy at all
There was a choice between more safety and more “renewables” (intermittents).
Texas chose poorly.
https://youtu.be/0H3rdfI28s0
A good comment by Ulrich Lyons over at JC
https://judithcurry.com/2021/02/18/assigning-blame-for-the-blackouts-in-texas/#comment-943900
Wind turbine output drops and gas takes over all the time: that’s a perfectly normal event and has nothing to do with the Texas grid failing.
the fail was in the gas generation – an avoidable incident, one Texas was warned about after 2011. Texas has seen multiple severe weather evens in the last 40 years.
(Though wind turbines don’t fail in other parts of the world in these conditions).
Griff, are you aware that under Boris’ and Carrie’s plans gas generation of electricity will soon be a thing of the past? Currently the UK has less than 10 days storage of gas so even if that is converted to Hydrogen storage things are going to get a bit sticky most winters in the UK. I know you don’t live in London so using public transport for day to day needs is as tricky for you as it is for me. But i assume you’ll be quite happy to give up your car for 30 pieces of silver, (£3000 is the current offer)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9281039/Drivers-offered-3-000-credit-cars-shift-greener-transport.html
Wind turbines always fail during icing conditions.
When there is enough excess capacity, then gas taking over from failing wind is possible.
The problem is that as the percentage of wind goes up, it gets harder and harder to have sufficient gas reserve to take over when the wind stops blowing.
Green idiocy will rob us of the resources that underpin our standard of living. The age of energy disruption is here. Next the disruption of the food supply will follow. Anybody for vegan?
I can envision repurposed windmills in 50 years time. Used as lampposts were in the 1940s.
I presume you are referring to lampposts improvised use as gallows for naz is/collaborators in post-war Europe. I suspect many of the younger/international readers will not recognise the significance. Even as British, I would say we have not retained awareness of those events.
Lamp posts are perfectly suitable though. It’s not as though there would be any risk of electrocution after the lights go out.
Having spent a winter in OKC in my youth and frequently having to return there on business trips I was always surprised at how snowstorms blow through OK and took it straight to Texas. A news Year everywhere freezing rain covered the car and the roads. I had never seen the effect of freezing weather on humidity. I left OKC to report to my assignment in Alaska where any humidity in the air soon flocked the trees and electrical lines as rime ice. How did the wind turbines keep up with the wind speed. It can easily reach over 50 mph in the flatness of OK and Texas.
What also did not help is that the gas distribution network is powered by electricity for pumps and valves. The cascading power cuts disabled the gas network. Poor planning. And the coal stores at the coal-fuelled plant also froze into blocks of ice. Poor planning.
“the gas distribution network is powered by electricity” is not really correct. Gas pipelines have changed from gas powered pumps to electrical pumps to meet EPA demands at the cost of reliability. I don’t know about the valves, but any fail-safe operation in the event of electrical/control interruption would be a problem.
Two points with issues:
“When these conditions occur on airplanes about to take off, the wings are de-iced with a chemical that melts the ice and stays on the wings long enough for the plane to reach an altitude where the humidity is low enough that no ice will form.”
Yes, planes with ice or snow on the wings, fuselage and tail surfaces must be de-iced prior to takeoff. However “icing” of the critical airfoils can and does occur at altitude also! Whenever the outside air temperature is between -5 and +3 C and the plane traverses cloud/precipitation – icing can occur, and can occur incredibly rapidly. Planes that fly through these conditions have anti ice capabilities onboard – including heating the wing’s leading edges and engine inlet cowlings, and various other de-icing mechanisms such as inflatable rubber boots on wing leading edges and heated propeller blades, or rubber boots on them, etc.
Next issue:
“Natural gas generation is normally a very good backup. It is flexible and can increase or decrease its generation on demand, nearly instantly, unlike coal or nuclear. These latter two sources have lots of fuel on site and are normally safe from disruption, but they are slow to change their output.”
There must be a distinction between gas turbine and steam turbine as prime mover of the generator shafts. Coal and Nuclear plants use boilers to make steam for steam turbines. Natural gas can be either gas turbine, or more conventional boiler/steam turbine variety.
ONLY the gas turbine flavor of generating plant is rapidly throttlable. If a steam plant is fired by natural gas, it is not rapidly throttleable and is akin to the slower response of Coal and Nuke plants.
Incidentally, there were/are oil fired generating plants too, which are not subject to disruptions of gas pipelines as they have humongous storage tanks. And typically oil fired boilers are more thermally efficient than natural gas fired.
As we move into the late 2020’s, we should expect to see gas turbine powered grid stabilization plants being deployed in places where these can be easily serviced by rail transport LNG tank cars.
All those jet engines we can’t install on airliners because the GND put an end to air travel in the United States might end up being installed in these grid stabilization plants instead.
Non-aviation people may have a hard time understanding how much a little ice disrupts airflow over a airfoil. I have a small aircraft. When I pick up even a thin layer of frost, the aircraft will immediately lose several knots of airspeed. The strategy is to leave icing conditions immediately. But a windmill can’t climb or descend, or turn around, and I hate to the of the cost and maintenance involved with de-icing systems. So even a thin layer of frost reduces efficiency a lot. And any appreciable build up (which can happen incredibly fast) will turn those blades into large baseball bats.
An airplane certified for flight into known icing is called FIKI. What does it cost to build a windmill that is GIKI?
Best detailed description I found on Twitter Gomes@GomesBolt. Judith Curry retweeted. Worth a read.
The major flaw in the ERCOT grid was insufficient backup for wind.
The only way ERCOT could have made it through this unscathed, was if coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants been able to run at >95% capacity for a full week, with temperatures 20-40 °F below normal, with infrastructure more geared to coping with above normal temperatures. They actually anticipated that wind output would shut down under these conditions.