Guest “I really couldn’t make this sort of schist up if I was trying” by David Middleton
Reporting from Ice Mud Station Dallas… The pool is now ice-free for the first time on record (the record started very recently… ;).
Texas to Add 35 Gigawatts of Wind & Solar in Next 3 Years — Boosting Grid Resilience
By Zachary Shahan
Published 16 hours agoClearly, the news story of the week — well beyond CleanTechnica — has been Texas and some neighboring regions freezing over and losing electricity. The vast majority of the power plants that went offline were thermal power plants (mostly natural gas). They were not equipped enough for the cold. A number of wind turbines were also down because no one had bought the “cold-weather package.”
[…]
CleanTechnica
To the extent Texas is adding wind & solar to the grid, these plans were made long before Winter Storm Younger Dryas. The notion that this is for the purpose of “boosting grid resilience,” is totally fracking retarded.
Solar is flat-out not a factor in Texas’ electrical grid. While wind is a key component of our grid, generating 20-24% of our electricity over recent years. It totally failed over the past 10 days. As temperatures dropped below normal in the DFW area on February 7, wind output dropped from 35-65% of capacity to 10-30% from February 9-18. Over the same time period coal and natural gas power plants ramped up to nearly full capacity very quickly. As of Sunday February 14, the system was functioning normally. As temperatures plunged from 20 to 40 °F below normal in the DFW area, some thermal power plants went offline for a variety of weather and demand surge related issues and by Monday morning ERCOT was in full emergency mode.
The graph above is preliminary, a “work in progress.” I’m still working on gathering more detailed data on capacity by fuel type. However, it clearly demonstrates that more wind generation capacity would have been as useless as mammary glands on a bull.
ERCOT’s single biggest failure was the lack of reliable backup capacity for wind power… ERCOT expected the wind power to fail under these conditions. It appears to me that the only way ERCOT could have made it through this unscathed, would have been for natural gas, coal and nuclear power to have delivered 80-90% of capacity for 7-10 days during record-cold weather (20-40 °F below normal in the DFW area) with a system geared toward hotter than normal weather. This was not a realistic expectation. ERCOT also failed to be sufficiently proactive in implementing rotating outages and when they did, they were unable to adequately rotate the outages.
Regarding the “cold-weather package” horst schist…
Why wind turbines in New York keep working in bitter cold weather unlike the ones in Texas
Updated Feb 19, 2021Syracuse, N.Y. — Texas Republicans were quick to blame the state’s wind turbines for the massive power outages that millions of Texans experienced this week during an unusual blast of cold weather.
Texas leads the nation in wind power, with nearly 15,000 wind turbines producing 23% of the Lone Star State’s electricity last year. Many of the turbines shut down when the cold descended on Texas.
[…]
But we couldn’t help but wonder why wind turbines in cold-weather states like New York can operate in the winter with seemingly little trouble when their counterparts in Texas can’t.
[…]
“There are a variety of cold weather and anti-icing technologies that are used on wind turbines in the coldest regions,” she said. “These technologies help prevent the buildup of ice on turbine blades, detect ice when it cannot be prevented, and remove ice safely when it is detected.”
[…]
The sensors can even tell which blades have ice on them and which ones don’t. When ice is detected, heating elements inside the blades turn on to melt the ice.
For safety reasons, the turbines are shut down while the heating elements melt off the ice, Kurt said. That way, there’s no chance of ice flying off spinning blades, potentially damaging the turbines or, worse, striking someone on the ground, she said.
“We’d rather the ice drop below the turbine,” she said.
Once the ice is removed, the turbines are turned back on and the blades can safely spin in the wind again.
In Texas, wind turbines are not equipped with such de-icing packages because operators there never expected to need them, Kurt said.
“Turbines in Texas are built for the type of temperatures they usually get in Texas, where it’s 110 degrees, not 10 degrees,” she said. “It’s a cost thing.”
Rick Moriarty covers business news and consumer issues. Syracuse.com
So… Heating elements (which require electricity) melt the ice and the wind turbines have to be shut down to deice them? Maybe that’s why New York’s wind turbines generate almost no electricity all winter long.
Unlike New York, Texas doesn’t have a nice, steady, winter electricity load. Our load varies quite widely and our wind turbines can generate over 40% of our electricity on favorable days. Even at the peak of our recent deep freeze, Texas wind turbines generated more electricity than New York’s. There are days when Texas wind turbines generate more electricity and then all of NYISO.
Texas needs to winterize at least some portion of its most reliable generation capacity: natural gas, coal and/or nuclear. Texas doesn’t need to emulate what doesn’t work in New York.
Oh, come on now!!! You actually expect these people to use Common Sense??? Really, David Middleton, they chase common sense right out the window.
Sara, I agree. Common sense is a much-missed attribute in politicians. Thankfully, I find its absence very entertaining.
Regards,
Bob
Is the Clean Technica run by politicians? That explains everything.
I believe it’s run by climate scientists. Who in most circumstances are indistinguishable from politicians.
And, in many cases, Klimate Aktivists
Common sense seems to be a job handicap for politicians. Just like having a conscience.
If they had common sense, they would have never built the wind turbines.
Trying to confirm the story that Texas asked the EPA to increase production, and were refused.
https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/shocker-biden-doe-forced-texas-power-grid-to-below-60-capacity-to-meet-arbitrary-green-emissions-targets-demanded-multi-million-dollar-residential-power-bills-to-overrule/
Also wind on the morning of the 16th dropped to far below 10 percent. It was not even visible on the charts I saw, and there was no wind to speak of.
Texas claims there NG and Coal had plenty of reserve capacity.
Must see graphic
Nuclear was the most stable. That should be the way forward.
Even then, one of the two reactors at the South Texas Project went offline due to freezing up of some of the cooling plumbing. ERCOT lost ~25% of its nuclear generating capacity for about 3 days.
It amazes me that so many people still believe those towers at nuke plants are putting smoke in the air.
They are the same people who believe in “Glow Bull Warming”
Jeff
Coal comes in a close second for stability.
NG was very stable, please look at the graphic. It varied up and down according to the variance of wind. The main post shows a graphic for the same period, yet it does not vary as much as this chart??
Natural gas initially performed extremely well, but did experience some failures. That said, natural gas kept the entire state from freezing in the dark.
Exactly correct David. My point was the variability with natural gas was, unlike the fickleness of wind and solar, a feature of NG generation to be able to vary its output to not only load follow, but also to wind follow. Solar appears to be an afterthought.
Wind output in Texas is highly variable. From Feb. 1-7, it ranges from 25-70% of capacity. Natural gas generation ramped up and down to level out overall generation, with gas operating as low as 16% on windy days. As temperatures dropped below normal, wind generation dropped off to next to nothing, while gas and coal ramped up to 80-90% of capacity. When temperatures dropped to 40 °F below normal, a combination of demand surge and freezing weather effects knocked some gas, coal and nuclear generation offline… At this point wind had already been knocked out of the game by the weather.
David M, thanks, an informative chart, yet I think the resolution needs to be finer for the un-reliables in particular. ( Hourly at a minimum, as the variation on wind can easily have considerable flux in one hour. ) I am in affect asserting that wind, reduced to producing 10 percent of it’s capacity in the graphic, is likely way to high.
I would also add that 82 percent of NG capacity is A, reachable at will, whereas wind likely never reaches its capacity. ( Curious if the 82 percent was limited by the federal restrictions) and B, about double the wind output at 70 percent of it’s capacity.
Federal restrictions did not hamper natural gas electricity generation.
So you confirmed this as not relevant?
https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/shocker-biden-doe-forced-texas-power-grid-to-below-60-capacity-to-meet-arbitrary-green-emissions-targets-demanded-multi-million-dollar-residential-power-bills-to-overrule/
This is a fraudulent report.
I wish they would learn how to graph data.
?? What do you mean?
David wrote:
“If they had common sense, they would have never built the wind turbines.”
I published this highly technical grid-balancing solution in 2018:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/16/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly-efficient-way-to-store-energy/#comment-2520849
Here’s an even better solution:
1. Build your wind power system.
2. Build your back-up system consisting of 100% equivalent capacity in gas turbine generators.
3. Using high explosives, blow your wind power system all to hell.
4. Run your back-up gas turbine generators 24/7.
5. To save even more money, skip steps 1 and 3.
The ‘green’ state of South Australia realised your point 3 only that they laid the explosive around their last coal fired power station. We know how that ended up!
David A: look up DOE Order #202-21-1 which addressed the Texas request to waive emission limits so NG and Coal could increase generation to max capacity. The Biden Administration basically told Texas they could do this as long as they sold excess capacity at $1500/MWh, which is kinda like requiring a gas station to sell gasoline for $1500/gallon. You won’t get many takers.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2021/02/f82/DOE%20202%28c%29%20Emergency%20Order%20-%20ERCOT%2002.14.2021.pdf
Interesting.
That was exactly what ERCOT had requested. Since power prices were pretty much locked at $9,000/MWh it was more of a rate capping exercise.
The ERCOT request:
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2021/02/f82/ERCOT%20202%28c%29%20Emergency%20Order%20Request%20-%2002.14.2021.pdf
Yep. If this led to a drop off in output, it’s a very serious problem.
Yet there was no rate cap. It was a “minimum of $1,500.00 per MWH.”
Not yet certain I understand this at all. Why in any sane world are generators limited from reaching maximum output?? Is it not insane enough that wind and solar get precedence, and sale 100 percent of their production, yet there us some cap on what coal NG, and nuclear are allowed to generate??? WUWT.
As Scottie used to say “She cannae take any more, Captain. It’s the dilithium crystals!”
Running at absolute maximum increases risks of breakdown when done over protracted periods. But also, it can overwhelm pollution mitigation measures such as stack scrubbers which are sized to deal with an occasional maximum power run, not a continuous one. You may want to argue about the legally mandated maxima, but they are voted into law.
Sara said: ” there was no wind to speak of”
So what?
That happens lots of times with wind power. Probably almost every week, at some point. Texas went ten years without blackouts (since rolling blackouts affected 3.2 million Texans in early 2011). They didn’t have blackouts every week since 2011, every time wind power was really low.
The entire energy infrastructure of Texas was not prepared for extremely cold weather, including the windmills, and even a nuclear plant. The official 2011 report recommended winterizing the entire Texas energy infrastructure. But no one read the 2011 report because it was 357 pages long. So the cause of the 2021 incident was an excessively long 2011 rolling blackout analysis report published in August 2011. Who’s got time to read a 357 page report? Not Texans.
Are we not still looking for a quantifying breakdown of exactly what caused how much power loss?
My initial guess ( and a true WAG) in order of power lost, most to least, is…
1. Wind, ultimately a complete fail, and possibly a negative.
2. NG diverted to heating only as wind failed and demand soared. ( Only a drop in their increase)
3. Compressors for NG failed due to being caught in the rolling blackouts.
3. Coal and nuclear drop off due to ???
4. NG drop off due to some winterization issues.
5. Federal rules regarding not allowing fossil fuels to reach full output. ( An ongoing mystery as to policy and affect.)
( Would love to see this quantified)
Common Sense has been irretrievably poisoned.
Use Good Sense instead.
Jonathan Swift, the famous satirist who wrote Gulliver’s Travels, couldn’t have written a satire showing idiocy on display as what the climate obsessed are coming up with in reality today.
They are devoid of reason, common sense, or even a sense of reality.
Time was, not long ago, that everyone knew ‘global warming” or “climate change” did not mean “weather”.
Gradually the media made sure that distinction was erased from the public consciousness, and at this point, “climate change” is synonymous with “weather’.
Each and every weather event is called “climate change” with no qualification, and every time a severe weather events makes the news, hundreds of headlines blare about how bad this latest bout of climate change was.
The net effect is to erase the distinction from peoples’ minds.
And the follow on is, when the media and the politicians bloviate about the “climate crisis”, no one bats an eyelash or wonders WTF they are talking about.
To listen to these jackasses talk, one would be well justified in supposing that they believe that human beings have the ability to control the weather.
And that the warmistas are being prevented from effectively controlling that weather by people who resist their mind-numbingly idiotic and rapacious policies.
See here:
Texas and California built different power grids, but neither stood up to climate change (yahoo.com)
Texas storm blackouts shows power grid vulnerable to climate change (cnbc.com)
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2021-02-16/texas-blackouts-california-climate-change
Nicholas
You said, “Each and every weather event is called “climate change” with no qualification, …”
That isn’t quite true. If it advances the alarmist meme, then it is called “climate change.” It is doesn’t, it is called “weather.”
Exactly. Myself, I’m thoroughly enjoying my bit of “climate change” today at just about 2:30 PM – 77F, absolutely clear blue skies (except for a very tiny bit of cirrus way down in the southwest), and a breeze that is gusting up to maybe 3 MPH.
Now, if they really COULD lock that in for all time, I’d send them some money.
I stand corrected.
I am thinking of a monologue from George Carlin on the idiocy and fake-ishness of today. Talk about a material rich environment!!
Ha! Ha! Ha! As you correctly said, David, you really couldn’t make this kind of stuff up. But sadly, the propaganda machine has conned so many people into believing the stuff they read every day in the MSM.
Given the epic failures of the political class and the commercial and financial interests now stacked up to harvest vast amounts of public and private money, things are going to get worse before they have any chance of getting better, unfortunately.
The US already has the technology to bring extra generators online quickly in the event that the normal electrical supply is insufficient, or interrupted by bad weather. A number of GE90-115B based gas turbine generators, each with a 65 Megawatt capacity, strategically sited throughout the state of Texas would solve the problem. After all, Texas is not exactly short of oil to provide fuel for gas turbines. Even the “CO2 is evil” brigade would have to concede that any additional CO2 emitted by running these generators during short periods of emergency would be miniscule.
With the current downturn in aviation orders due to the pandemic I expect General Electric would welcome the business. All that seems to be lacking is the necessary willpower to make things happen.
I may be mistaken, but my understanding of the magnitude of the power deficit is that it would have taken many hundreds of such generators standing by, AND with all the fuel they needed to run.
And that inability to supply gas at the rate it was needed was one of the big issues at the critical pint in time that things went to hell.
That “number” you speak of is at least 100 to cover the sorts of shortfall at times last week. And, I admit to nitpicking here, gas turbines do not run on “oil” although some turbines can run on liquid fuels of various types.
Where I’m from, some(not all) gas turbines and combined cycle units run on
#2 oil stored on site as a back-up to natural gas. And when the cold hit here in the east and gas prices spiked, some units were running on oil because it was cheaper.
Indeed, a look at GE’s website confirms that CCGTs can be configured to run on liquid fuel. In earlier times, before distortion of the energy market, it was normal practice for gas-fired plants to have on-site tank farms of petroleum distillate as emergency backup fuel. But that costs money, and warped energy policy here in Texas (due to unreliable “renewables”) militates against generating companies building in such emergency reserves. That alone would easily have prevented the near-collapse that Texas experienced last week. Skewed markets subsidizing wind energy and controlling energy pricing to favor wind are the principle cause.
When wind can provide reliable baseload power on its own, at competitive cost and without price and tax support, then it will simply be an environmental disaster rather than both an environmental and economic disaster.
Robert
You said, “All that seems to be lacking is the necessary willpower to make things happen.”
And the ideological mind set to actually want to protect the population. The current POTUS (with a cloud over his legitimacy) does not appear to have the necessary willpower.
There is no engineering reason that what you are advocating couldn’t be done. The problem is cost .Remember the recent post here, that pointed out that. in Texas, you only get paid for electricity you generate. So how do you pay for, let alone make a profit, if these units must sit idle until there is no wind. The answer in Texas, is you allow these generators to charge up to $9000 a Mwhr. Which if I did the math correctly, is $9.00 a kwhr. (And that’s a wholesale price).
No doubt that amount was paid during some of time period from 2/9 to 2/18. To get an idea of how much this is going to cost a homeowner consider my situation. I use about 20 kwhr a day for my 2100 sq. ft. house. Suppose at least 5 of the days during this period the maximum rate was allowed. So my bill for this month would include 100 kwhr (5 x20 =100 kwhr) at $9 a kwhr or $900 (and that just the wholesale cost).
No wonder the Texas governor has told the electric companies not to invoice their customers until the State has time to figure out what to do.
What ever that price is, it is not free enterprise. Curious as to exactly how the price is set.
Interestingly, we’re not that stupid about the renewable role, we’re too emotional.
The WHY in this equation is = getting off fossil fuels reduces emissions. Emotions takes it from there, and any data or facts are categorized as deniers.
Elected and appointed and special interest groups feed off the WHY for votes and money
The Press will not report on DATA or FACTS that counter the emotions as they are deemed as deniers of that emotion driving the public.
If they want affordable, reliable electricity and if reducing carbon emissions is important, almost all of the effort should be going into nuclear power and carbon capture, utilization & storage (CCUS).
If they want to feel good about saving polar bears, they should just go ahead and freeze in the dark.
Thanks, David. Once again, I thoroughly enjoyed your post.
Sure am glad I moved from Texas decades ago so that I avoided this event…though I do miss Texas and and my friends there occasionally.
Regards,
Bob
We’re running out of still-decent places to go…..
Come to “friendly” Manitoba where 95% of our power is hydro, still costs less than 9 cents a kWh, sure it’s cold here in the winter especially last week but summers are great!
Oh, and forgot to mention that we very rarely ever lose power.
Yes, except the mosquitos the size of crows.
The Polar vortex avoids Manitoba, to cold for it in winter
🙂
I remember being in Fairbanks on April 2nd, with snow still covering the ground, although the streams were running. The mosquitoes (State Bird) were already flying around!
“The sensors can even tell which blades have ice on them and which ones don’t. When ice is detected, heating elements inside the blades turn on to melt the ice.”
Can we assume the power necessary comes from the grid and not other turbines? And whenever ANY maintenance is performed, that power comes from the grid and not other turbines? Is that net-metered, or do they separate “production”, to obtain subsidies, from “used” power and therefore cheat the system even more?
They might have diesel generators to be used for this type of situation.
Apparently it didn’t work.
Electricity is fungible. That said, the electricity used for de-icing the blades reduces the amount of electricity available for other purposes.
Since a windmill isn’t generating electricity when it’s de-icing, that’s the big deal. The extra electricity it sucks from the grid just adds a bit of insult to the injury.
Careful with the assumptions. Airplanes don’t have to land before turning on deicing equipment. Net positive production probably only takes a bit more wind speed. Start-up production would be negative, but only for a short period. But the thought of a back-up generator for a wind-mill is funny.
Whether to include deicing equipment in the original build was dependent on the spec. The spec was likely based on 20, 50,100, 500 year weather events and weighed against the costs and alternatives. I expect the cost was not justified and that existing power sources would be used as back-up. Over time in the Texas case, as the wind power capacity was built out and half the politicians deferred their judgement to science-politicians, ERCO got wobbly and lowered the priority or forgot about the back-up plan. Splat!
According to the article, they stop the blades so the ice that comes off goes straight down instead of flying off in all directions.
Or worse, ice flies off only one blade first, then unbalances the whole thing. Then the blades start flying off.
At the speed the tips of the blades are travelling, a chunk of ice coming off a tip could fly for miles.
In addition to the damage such a chunk of ice could do to houses, cars and people, just imagine how much damage such a chunk could do to another windmill blade.
IT’S THE BATTLE OF THE TEXAS TITANS!
Watch in amazement as huge windmills hurl giant chunks of ice at each other!
Tonight on Sports Net. 10:30 local
I wonder how long it takes to de-ice a windmill?
I imagine it would be a losing battle in a heavy ice storm, at least for a while.
Airplane deicing systems are designed to prevent build-up while in flight. Preflight is hot glycol. If the wait is too long before take off, another treatment is required which strangely seems to disappoint some passengers. It doesn’t get much better than a winter Chicago O’Hare connection. I expect windmills would not start up with ice and need continuous deicing similar to planes. Given the size and remoteness of mills, an electrical system could provide both functions. Some small plane use air bladders to deform the wing skins. Seems barbaric though.
My assumption in any such questions is that they are ripping us off and lining their pockets coming and going.
For one thing, in Texas at least, it seems this last couple of weeks would have been the first time such heaters would have seen much usage, and so whatever money needed to be shelled out for the heating package far exceeds the cost of the power they would have used.
So, if these things are subsidized, which we know they are, the question becomes, do subsidies cover the cost of such add-ons?
Common sense would seem to argue they they apparently do not, or else they would have been bought and hence increased the size of the graft.
Personally, to me the best outcome would have been for the ice to have caused them all to collapse into a heap of worthless scrap.
However, concern for the people who have suffered and the economic damage done, almost makes me wish that if they are gonna do these turbines, they should have at least done them right.
But they are too harmful to think that way…the sooner they are discredited, dismantled, worn out, caught on fire, fallen over, and by any means just plain gone, the better.
“Personally, to me the best outcome would have been for the ice to have caused them all to collapse into a heap of worthless scrap.”
Yes, it would have been very interesting to see how they would recycle the tower and blades and to have a current evaluation of the cost of doing this.
From what I recall, the weight of adding heating elements to the blades slightly reduces efficiency, and hence the subsidy that the whirlygigs can generate. Over the course of a decade (or however long the subsidy collectors last), it is the reduced total generating capacity that is decisive in not adding the heating elements. They’re inefficient enough already, and that odd icy day might not be windy anyway.
Greed and avarice explain much of what we see in the world of men.
Consider what appears to be a vast metropolis in North Dakota, when viewed at night by satellite; the get- rich- quick operators are flaring natural gas at the wells, rather than spend money to build the pipelines to transport it.
If it cost more to build a pipeline then they could ever sell the gas for, then only an idiot would build the pipeline.
If they could sell the gas for more then the pipeline cost, they would do it.
Think before you assume that people who aren’t doing what you think they should are either stupid or greedy.
And as Biden demonstrated, it isn’t the oil men who make the final decision.
Are you quite sure that is the case, that flaring occurs only because of the conditions you stated?
It’s a complex situation, but there are alternatives to the flaring and more have been coming online.
It would be knee- jerk and naive to claim that greed and avarice aren’t part of the complexities.
Did you know that by ND law, that operators must pay royalties on flared gas after 1 year from first production at a well (with some exceptions.)
The flaring problem was so widespread, that laws/goals were set to capture 91% of flared gas, by 2020.
Flaring was not doing the royalty owners any favors. Consider that Nat gas constitutes generally about 10% of the value of oil/gas production in Bakken Field, (with gas:oil ratio increasing over time,) then longer term outlooks call for build out of gas gathering infrastructure, wouldn’t you agree?
I don’t think that you would also argue that greed and avarice don’t play a part in the wind energy sector, as well.
I’d go so far as to say that greed and avarice are the main drivers of the entire wind generator industry… along with blatant ignorance and stupidity.
I work on wind turbines in the north and gotta say I have NEVER heard of heaters in the blades to melt ice from them….Dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of in theory or use.
Wind turbines have blades freeze up in the north just as they did in Texas. It doesn’t happen as much in the north because we get more snow than ice due to temps being colder. Also, wind turbines will run with ice on the blades but they will reach a point that the ice creates a balance issue and they have to shut down.
Yes, wind turbines pull power from the grid when not producing. In order to get the true output MW from wind turbines you have to find the difference between output and the MW consumed. I haven’t seen that info and prob won’t.
Alo, do you have a WAG on how much power, how often? Wind Turbines are very often not turning.
I just looked at a 1.5 MW GE wind turbine that is paused (meaning sitting idle). It is consuming 4kw per hour. Wind turbines vary by design on how much power they consume while in idle, so you would have to look at real time consumption for the different manufacturers. The consumption may also vary due to some systems running intermittently at idle.
If you had all of that info and did the math for how much power the turbines in Texas consumed while sitting idle due to icing, it would be eye opening.
“If you had all of that info and did the math for how much power the turbines in Texas consumed while sitting idle due to icing, it would be eye opening.”
Interesting, as a negative useless draw at such a critical junction is a bad situation worse.
15,000 windmills in Texas was what I read recently, possibly in the article above. I also read that approximately half of the windmills were offline during this storm. Based on your figure, estimating this to be roughly equivalent across the board for all of the wind turbines installed in Texas, that’s 7,500 X 4KWH/Hr = 30MWH/Hr.
My electrically-heated home in North Houston consumed right at 4KWH per hour for the three coldest days of this storm … so (based on the above calculation, 7500 of my homes’ consumption went to serve idle wind turbines.
Let’s not forget that this severe storm (the worst in at least 30 years if not 50 years) was an unprecedented power demand.
Half of the wind turbines were already frozen by Sunday, February 14. By February 16-17, I would guess that about 75-80% were offline.
I’ve lived in Dallas since 1981. I can only recall two comparable weather events. In December 1983, we had a longer stretch of continuous sub-freezing weather, only because it got above freezing for about 1 hour on February 13. My recollection is that there were a lot more water mains ruptures, but less power failures back then (more coal, no wind). In February 2011, we had a very similar freezing weather/power outage situation. It was less severe, because it wasn’t quite as cold, didn’t last as long, we had more coal and less wind power, and ERCOT successfully implemented rotating power outages.
Actually, wind turbines are always turning. When they aren’t being driven by the wind, they are being driven by an electric motor. If the blades stop for long, they will create a flat spot on the bearings that will quickly make the turbine unusable. A stopped turbine also runs the risk of bending the shaft on which the blades are attached.
This is flat out false, wind turbines are NOT driven by an electric motor when the wind is not blowing (at least the 7 different manufacturers of wind turbines that I worked on – 1.5 MW and greater). They pinwheel. The lowest of wind will spin the rotor back and forth slightly. If they do reach a standstill it won’t be there for very long and will not affect the main shaft or bearings. I’m not sure where you got this information but it’s not true.
Substation outages are required from time to time to address issues with either the transmission company or the renewables company substations. These can and have lasted weeks. The wind turbines are not powered during this time and are required to have the high speed brakes released in order for them to pinwheel to avoid damage.
Who should I believe. You, or industry documentation?
I have 8 years of experience working on wind turbines. I would know if the rotor was spun by an electric motor in low winds. What industry documentation are you reading? They spin the drive train with an electric motor when it is in storage (meaning, not installed and waiting to be sold). No where in a functional wind turbine is there an electric motor to spin the rotor/drive train when the wind is low, they just pinwheel or free spin.
Please provide the industry documentation where you learned this. Make no mistake, I don’t think wind or solar is the answer for anything nor will it ever be. I am just trying to stop you from providing false information. False information doesn’t advance anything.
Don’t ask MarkW for documentation, or even a link to it…..he has none
I see BJ is still suffering from the butt hurt he got over on the Willis thread.
What’s the matter BJ, found that Willis was more than you can handle so you scuttled off to another thread to lick your wounds.
BTW, I’ve never seen you present any documentation either. Just bad analogies that even a 5 year could rebut.
I don’t think so
I see lots of turbines here in AB on calm days, not turning at all.
Maybe they turn them a 1/4 turn every few hours?
Regardless, just another inefficiency whatever the truth is
Mark
I have driven by a lot of wind farms where only about half are clearly turning. Maybe they are moving too slowly to assess from a moving car. However, they weren’t in production mode.
They move pretty slow. Less than one revolution per minute.
Can you show us the documentation you spoke of? Should be easy.
No documentation Mark?
Wind turbines are great at standing still
I thought that was a design feature to make it easier for the suicidal bats and raptors to fly into the blades.
One can only hope that whatever power they used from the grid last week cost them $9,000/MW.
“I work on wind turbines in the north and gotta say I have NEVER heard of heaters in the blades to melt ice from them…”
Probably true. But we need more info on the actual modes of failure. For any Texas turbines that stopped for control or mechanical issues in their innards, the operators need to consider Iowa equipment additions.
https://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/iowa-wind-turbines-equipped-to-handle-extreme-cold-ice-is-another-matter-20210219#:~:text=Unlike%20Texas%20wind%20turbines%20that,winter%20storm%2C%20Iowa's%20kept%20turning.&text=And%20because%20Iowa's%20turbines%20are,up%20to%2020%20below%20zero.
Oh, BTW, Mr. Middleton’s apologia that the gas sector performed well, but just couldn’t ramp up fast enough is quite FOS. Texas gas fields, from the lack of chemical injection downhole to the lack of glycol pumps on the wellhead, to the lack of heated well site heated gas production units and dehydration, to the lack of buried lines, undrained drip pots, to the non pigging of gathering systems, to the lack of anything like adequate gas storage capacity, and on and on, weren’t equipped or manned for deliverability requirements that MUST have been forecast.
The nat gas supply chain not only needs to take the responsibility, but the blame. Channels Nixon during Watergate accepting the responsibility, but not the blame. When aksed for the difference, he said “If you take the blame you go to jail”.
The next episode of this Gong Show will be months of whiny finger pointing to avoid paying for the exploded utility rates that were in the contracts all along. Followed by nada….
The post isn’t about the natural gas sector. Read the fracking title: Texas to boost grid resilience with more wind & solar, according to Clean Technica
Natural gas did ramp up fast enough. The problems happened after it had ramped up.
This is from the middle of the post…
ERCOT’s single biggest failure was the lack of reliable backup capacity for wind power… ERCOT expected the wind power to fail under these conditions. It appears to me that the only way ERCOT could have made it through this unscathed, would have been for natural gas, coal and nuclear power to have delivered 80-90% of capacity for 7-10 days during record-cold weather (20-40 °F below normal in the DFW area) with a system geared toward hotter than normal weather. This was not a realistic expectation. ERCOT also failed to be sufficiently proactive in implementing rotating outages and when they did, they were unable to adequately rotate the outages.
I closed the post with this:
Texas needs to winterize at least some portion of its most reliable generation capacity: natural gas, coal and/or nuclear. Texas doesn’t need to emulate what doesn’t work in New York.
I also mentioned issues with gas here…
The record-shattering cold temperatures and winter storm were accurately forecasted well-ahead of time. No one should have been surprised by the weather. The only real surprise was that almost all of the wind turbines froze, depriving the grid of about 25% of its usual electricity generation.
While I have no doubt that Winter Storm Younger Dryas has temporarily impacted crude oil and natural gas production. Assertions that it’s down 18% or 27% are meaningless. We won’t know how much it’s down or for how long for days, if not weeks. The disruptions will be well behind us by the time they can actually be quantified. The storm and record cold weather has clearly shut down refineries and made it nearly impossible for tanker trucks to deliver gasoline in many places.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/02/18/arctic-air-freezes-permian-shale-fields-fake-news/
And here…
Many on the right have been somewhat unfairly placing all of the blame on frozen wind turbines, many on the left have been idiotically placing the blame on natural gas & coal, and retardedly on nuclear power plants. The failures to deal with freezing weather were system-wide.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/02/17/the-day-after-tomorrow-ercot-fail-edition/
And here…
The Day After Tomorrow – Dallas Edition is prima facie evidence that coal and nuclear power are essential components of grid resiliency.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/02/15/the-day-after-tomorrow-dallas-edition/
When detailed data are available about the failures in the natural gas sector, I’ll write a post on it. However, suggestions that the entire system be reconfigured for optimal operation when temperatures are 20-40 °F for a week, are dumber than OCD’ing over a humorous meme.
“The post isn’t about the natural gas sector. Read the fracking title:”
I did. Read my fracking comment. It was an FYI. In case you haven’t noticed, folks go off topic quite regularly here. Some even to fact free comments about Biden’s election.
“Natural gas did ramp up fast enough. The problems happened after it had ramped up.”
Your loosey goosey use of terms like “ramped up” makes your comments hard to follow. But the fact is, implicitly and explicitly, natural gas was the expected source to carry you all thru this emergency, and it failed. The failure was fully avoidable. I.e., there is NO reason that Texas could not have taken reasonable precautions to avoid this NATURAL GAS calamity.
“ERCOT’s single biggest failure was the lack of reliable backup capacity for wind power… ERCOT expected the wind power to fail under these conditions”
I hope so? The BS expectations about wind power in these conditions are breathtaking. No one should have expected good wind performance in the trans zero, icy conditions that prevailed last week. Wind can handle cold, snow, but not relentless icing.
“It appears to me that the only way ERCOT could have made it through this unscathed, would have been for natural gas, coal and nuclear power to have delivered 80-90% of capacity for 7-10 days during record-cold weather (20-40 °F below normal in the DFW area) with a system geared toward hotter than normal weather. This was not a realistic expectation.”
More apologia. This not only didn’t have to happen, it wouldn’t have in most of the rest of the CONUS. Either ERCOT knew about this and decide not to make sure that the “Alamo” fuel – natural gas – was ready, or did and chose not to manage.
Either way folks, ERCOT – and the eff you underlying philosophy guiding it – will get some sunshine in the coming months….
As opposed to the apologia for wind? You mean the “Not our fault! You trusted us!”
Either way, sport, wind siphoned off precious capital for unreliable energy and away from reliable thermal baseload. But that won’t get the required sunshine in the coming months because the narrative must be maintained at all costs.
“As opposed to the apologia for wind?”
Please point out my “apologia for wind”. I said that ERCOT was correct in not counting on it for events that occurred a few parts/ten thousand’th of the time. Other states protect the innartds of wind turbines against bitter cold and would have done better. But ERCOT apparently counted (theoretically correctly) on gas, without doing their homework.
“Either way, sport, wind siphoned off precious capital for unreliable energy and away from reliable thermal baseload.”
Total BS. “Thermal baseload” has not only been capitalized wherever and whenever it stands a chance of profiting, but has had a free ride for decades. There are low to mid 11 figures worth of shirked asset retirement obligations (well plugging, site restoration, platform abandonments) against it – some over a century old – just in Texas. As with other extractive endeavors in US history, those proud Texans will whine and wheadle those costs onto the rest of us…
You definitely didn’t offer up an apologia for wind in your ill-informed rant.
Did you miss this?
ERCOT’s single biggest failure was the lack of reliable backup capacity for wind power… ERCOT expected the wind power to fail under these conditions. It appears to me that the only way ERCOT could have made it through this unscathed, would have been for natural gas, coal and nuclear power to have delivered 80-90% of capacity for 7-10 days during record-cold weather (20-40 °F below normal in the DFW area) with a system geared toward hotter than normal weather. This was not a realistic expectation. ERCOT also failed to be sufficiently proactive in implementing rotating outages and when they did, they were unable to adequately rotate the outages.
Natural gas and coal did ramp up to ~80-90% of capacity very quickly…
Coal was operating at ~90% from Feb 7-14. Gas was over 80% from Feb 12-14.
We still don’t know all of the reasons why they dropped to 60-66% overnight. The reasons appear to include:
We won’t know the answers, much less the solutions for a while.
Regarding the asinine use of the word apologia, I wrote this in a February 17 WUWT post…
The breakdown for 16 February 2021:
Fossil fuels accounted for 83% of our electricity generation yesterday. Fossil fuels + nuclear accounted for 92%.
While there is plenty of blame to go around, ERCOT had a “dress rehearsal” for this in 2011. At least back then, they successfully employed rotating outages. We haven’t lost power, while many of our friends have been without power since early Monday morning.
Texas has more wind power capacity and natural gas production than many, if not most, nations. This cluster frack is inexcusable and an embarrassment to the Great State of Texas. We now know that President Donald Trump and Energy Secretary Rick Perry were 100% correct when they asked FERC to ensure that our coal-fired and nuclear power plant fleets be kept in service.
Oh almost forgot, David. Gotta love that clean Texas coal.
https://earthjustice.org/sites/default/files/files/Texas_Ash_Fact_Sheet-2015-05.pdf
But I’m sure there’s lots of $ put back by the operators to cleanup these poison pools. Right? I mean they MUST be doing better than the oil and gas operators who are bonded for only a tiny fraction of their actual, expected asset retirement costs. Right?
Even further off the topic of this post. But anything from Earth Justices is worth reading… might even justify a post ridiculing it.
Coal is far cleaner than the manufacture of wind turbines
And coal ash has MANY uses, its all around you.
Wind turbine refuse has none, just massive non-biodegradable landfill.
Add that to the huge benefits of coal in bringing buried carbon back into the carbon cycle where it can actually be used by all life on Earth.
Salute!
The other thing that helps us down here along the “sunny” coast (Galveston to Panama City, more or less) is what we do when a storm is coming – prepare! You can’t wait to leave if the water is already creeping up the driveway.
We also get freeze warnings because we normally remain warm enuf to keep from freezing pipes and such. So covering faucets and shutting off lawn/garden irrigation is another thing we have to do. The power companies advise us to run a little cooler if on heat pumps. Sometimes we even get warned about implementing the dreaded rolling blackouts if the overall load is close to a grid collapse.
I was surprised at the conventional plants in north Texas having problems, as I recall many very cold spells when stationed just north of Dallas and we would run to Colorado for Christmas. That Panhandle, as in Amarillo, can get as cold as North Dakota.
Glad to see the wakeup call without “pandemic” scale fatalities. And pray we can get the general populace educated about the benefits of nuclear power.
Gums opines…
Many of the thermal power plant boilers are actually outside. 110 F in summer is a much bigger problem here than -1 F in winter. So, it wasn’t surprising that some power plants experienced freezing problems. This happened on a much smaller scale back in 2011.
The oddest failure to me is the shutdown of one of the reactors at the South Texas Project Nuclear Generating Station. It was apparently due to freezing up some of the cooling system plumbing. STPNGS is between Houston and Corpus Christi, in Matagorda County near the Gulf Coast… This is a place people would go to get ways from freezing weather… 😉
Worked for a power utility, and saw something very strange in one of the trade magazines — turbine-generator sets OUTDOORS without shelter, IIRC maybe in Saudi Arabia or somewhere similar,
It’s not uncommon in the US, even for nuclear plants. South Texas , St. Lucie in Florida and Shearon Harris nuke plants all have open turbine decks, along with a number of fossil plants.
Warm is life, people spend big money going to places to bask in the sun and heat. Cold is death. We are in an ice age right now. Both poles of our planet is frozen over and nothing can live there. And we are more likely to have ice ages than anything approaching dangerous warming. Where we live, the temperature can switch tens of degrees in a day. From freeze to thaw.
Our pipes run six feet below ground. Even so, occasionally a house will lose its water. The drill is to run a hose from that house’s outside faucet to the neighbor’s outside faucet. Then you leave one of the inside faucets open. As long as water is flowing in the garden hose, it doesn’t freeze. The water company doesn’t charge for the extra water used that way.
So, keeping the water flowing also works. If we have pipes that will be subjected to freezing temperatures, we drain them. Frozen pipes do burst.
I had a couple of friends that made good money one winter in Denver when many of the water lines from the street, all buried at least 6ft deep, froze. They used a portable welder to thawing them out. They connected it to the meter at the street and the main line where it entered the building.
What can also happen is septic tank freezing due to low snow cover.
Ugli.
Dripping outside faucets is SOP in Texas for the occasional deep freeze such as this. I had to check and adjust mine at midnight and again at 2:30AM to make sure it was dripping just enough to keep them from freezing. I flushed the toilets and ran inside faucets every couple hours overnight. Even so, my hot water line to the bath at the opposite end of the house from the water supply entrance riser froze up over the garage by 2:30AM, and I was immediately in the attic with a heat gun to avoid a pipe burst. I ended up dripping both hot and cold bathtub and vanity faucets to keep that from happening, then took a long hot shower before I got to bed at 4AM.
Two of my neighbors weren’t so lucky. I helped one with a broken sprinkler system supply line that burst outside so he could turn his water back on, and the other rigged up a temporary patch on a burst pipe in the garage attic until the plumber could come out today.
That chart of what New York wind turbines actually produce is invaluable, “winter packages” and all.
That chart shows megawatthours. Why not megawatts?
Because it is reporting the daily total energy in MWh. You can on short timescales have the charts show hourly data for MWh, which gives the same as the average power in MW. I guess the EIA find it easier just to add up the hourly data into daily totals. But you should ask them. It’s their charting system.
The site gives the option of hourly or daily plots. I chose daily because they are smoother and I wanted to display 21 days of generation. Both plots have the y-axis in MWh. The daily plot is MWh/day. The hourly plot is MWh/hour… AKA MW.
Yet this chart shows how much NG has to mirror Wind Powers failure, daily! I don’t think that information should be lost by averaging.
Texas dodged a bullet: Would you like explosions with your blackouts?
Texas toyed with cascading crisesThe Green Experiment could have gone so much worse. Here’s a man who was a gas industry executive involved in a near miss in New England in 1989. The four day blackout sounds bad, but it was a lottery win compared to the worst case scenarios. Not only was a full state-wide blackout possible, which may take months to correct, but the gas system is a bomb waiting to go off too.
ERCOT officials admit they only just averted a blackstart:
Texas was “seconds and minutes” away Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.
Yep… Another indication that ERCOT waited too long to start load shedding.
Fear mongering BS from ” The Texas Tribune ”
“The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down. ”
Really ? ?
They are so poorly designed and constructed that they will catch fire , blow up , and the lines will go down ?
Really ? ?
Has ERCOT never heard of circuit breakers?
There are figures for this stuff … It’s an outside chance 4% that an overload will lead to a transformer failure. So given the number of transformers involved statistically you would have to expect a couple to go up.
As long as the same idiots are allowed to do the same idiotic crap everything is going to get worse.
How much did late T. Boone Pickens pocket on wind development?
Not as much as his widow.
She’s the one, BTW, that sold her Del Mar beach house to Bill Gates, for almost $50 million. If I recall correctly, she had paid $7 million for it. That was quite a good investment right there.
I got this all wrong. First, he didn’t marry a window. He did marry a handful or more than a handful of women. It wasn’t his most recent wife that sold the Del Mar house to Gates and it was listed for $48 million and sold for $43 million.
The purchase price in 2007 was apparently $35 million. She probably netted several million though.
A lot more than he would have if he’d ordered the Winterization Package” for his turbines. 😄
We are fortunate that Ol’ Boone left the scene….he wanted huge windmill farms….and also wanted to change the diesel powered trucks to natural gas powered trucks…..why?….to put more money in his accounts – that’s why.
That about sums it up accurately.
Personally, talking about percentages does not give me the sense of knowing exactly how much power each source was producing.
For me at least, the best graph to use to understand how each power source was performing over time as the situation changed, if the one that tracks megawatts of power being added into the grid.
A percentage increase or decrease could mean demand was changing, with no change in the amount of power being produced.
This is illustrative.
I am not sure I understand the chart that shows energy rather than power, and does so on this style of graph.
I could understand it if this one was a bar graph.
That will work out well. Winter kill is here.
That will work out well. Winter kill….
Did this go into moderation? It seems that Word Press doesn’t like the last word you used.
We are now finding out that the Feds didn’t let TX run its nat gas and other generators full out because it would violate emission standards.
Can the government get any more idiotic?
You mean the same government that won’t let states enforce federal rules on immigration, or their own state rules regarding elections, gets upset when states don’t follow rules regarding anything else?
That sounds like a “hold my beer” type of question.
Yes Tim, posted above, trying to confirm. If true then the Governor should have defied the order.
Meanwhile, the true and original global warming has hit Sicily again in a spectacular way, fourth time in the four days
https://videos.dailymail.co.uk/video/mol/2021/02/22/9133087132692559429/640x360_MP4_9133087132692559429.mp4
Bet that is more than 0.1c of warmining.
A bit of warming is always welcomed on a cold late winter day, but even more so it is one of the essential ‘goldilocks Earth’ events, recycling CO2 and other base minerals required so that life on the planet could flourish, as my ‘personal geologist’ tells me and Mr. Middleton might affirm.
Does not matter if it is a bad idea when there is money to be made as long as the ones making the money don’t have to put up with the consequences. For instance liberal democrats don’t want the turbines in their back yard but it’s OK to impose on rural folks.
Wind and solar are parasites on the grid. With all of the subsidies, they do not have to contribute to load balancing. When they are producing little power the fossil generators have to pump power into the grid to balance the load. When renewable production is up, the fossil fuel companies have to cut back on what they add to the grid. Less power means less revenue. They can only charge so much. With less revenue, they have no incentive or money to increase their capacity. Why not make renewables provide their own backup. Only then will people understand the true cost of renewables. Texas will only be more screwed with more renewables coming on line.
Clean Technica is Griff Central, need I say more.
The Clean Techo Chamber.
De-icing would not have solved the wind shortage. That was mainly due to low wind speeds, in many places dropping below minimum cut in speeds. If the iced turbines had been available they would have added little. Doubling wind would not have solved it either. Twice zero is zero.
There was simply insufficient dispatchable capacity available to meet demand. That became aggravated as with no spare margin, any plant that suffered problems had no backup. When power got cut to gas pipelines there was a fuel shortage for power stations feeding off them. A bit like chopping you own legs off, they fell over. Prior to outages there had been enough gas to run 44GW to help meet the 69GW peak demand. When one large plant tripped out, frequency fell rapidly, tripping out several others. There was no spinning reserve. I’m sure that the 59.3Hz load shed trips were triggered.
What doubling the renewables will achieve is regular periods of surplus generation and extensive curtailment, when prices will fall close to or below zero, crippling the economics of running anything, including wind farms, and reliable, inertia providing generation. It will crowd out inertia on the grid, making it much less stable and prone to blackouts. Yet when the wind doesn’t blow backup for the full demand will be needed. Prices will become highly volatile, because absent any other form of remuneration underutilised plant will be trying to recover costs, and there is likely to be a capacity shortfall anyway. There will need to be a reset in how the grid is managed. Costs for consumers overall will rise sharply. Reliability will become Californian.
This is like after a doctor’s advice to eat healthy after a heart attack and the patient decides to limit their diet to bacon and butter.
Bacon flavored butter!
I am really and truly beginning to believe that I have been sentenced to live in the midst of Mencken’s “Commonwealth of morons.”
Confederacy of Dunces?
At the time, I thought “Idiocracy” was a movie, not actual future history.
For what do you prepare with such a forecast (left) ?
More real energy production, less wind/solar stupidity, then you are prepared.
By mid January some of us knew otherwise
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/01/18/the-stratosphere-has-warmed-profoundly-this-month-what-are-the-implications/#comment-3164797
Who of the weathermen look at SSW ? At least not these being part of the AGW lobby.
And the forecast was published a month earlier.
Nevertheless it’s necessary to follow day by day what may happen.
The Arctic blast in the DFW area was in the outlook about 10 days before it hit.
iirc, and I may be wrong, the lubricants used in the colder climates would not work in TX due to summertime heat. can’t remember where I read that though so take with grain of salt.
Hydro-carbons thicken as they get colder.
With motor oil (10W40 for example) the first number is how well the oil flows when cold, the second number is how well the oil protects when it gets hot. I forget what temperatures are used to measure the two numbers.
I would assume that the heavy duty greases used in big motors like these have the same issues.
Back when I changed my own oil, I would buy different grades depending on what time of year it was.
I live in ackbasswards Arkansas only about 7 miles from the Texas state line. Were I live, we didn’t have a one second glitch in electricity.
For some reason, people who live in big cities (aka cesspools) think they have common sense and are worldly.
Where you live in Arkansas you also have the fairly new USC coal Turk plant on the Swepco grid.
“So… Heating elements (which require electricity) melt the ice and the wind turbines have to be shut down to deice them? Maybe that’s why New York’s wind turbines generate almost no electricity all winter long.”
Ummm… no. Wind turbines in New York generate about the same small amount of electricity during the winter as they do all year, as about 5 minutes of google searching will show. But you knew that didn’t you? You just wanted to spread the usual disingenuous WUWT BS.
“The texas grid collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union or today’s oil sector in Venezuela. It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances.”
Cue incompetent, whiny republicans blaming someone/something else for their own follies as usual instead of taking responsibility. Completely pathetic.
Whinging, incompetent, ACDS-plagued Stevie-IQ-45 makes whining sounds while producing zero-evidence to back up in chihuahua-brained comments.
His usual empty, disingenuous, dumb BS. !
Doesn’t even reach as high as “pathetic”
WASTING ELECTRICITY, when its in low supply, to heat up wind turbine blades..
Don’t you realise just how STUPID that sounds. !
I gave $200 as part of AOC’s fundraising effort to help out the folks in Texas. It’s about 5 million in total now.
What did you do Fred?
SFA I bet- just bitched and moaned about the greens/democrats while jacking off in your momma’s basement.
What a creepy little pathetic man you are.
So much hatred, so little intelligence.
No wonder he likes AOC.
AOC was raising money to help out Texans while Cruz was vacationing in Cancun.
That’s precious. Now can she get started on repealing the wind PTC and other nonsense that caused the problem in the first place instead of doubling down?
It really does look like BJ is stupid enough to believe anything, so long as it agrees with his picayune brain wants to believe.
She feels guilty
Best way to help Texans would have been get rid of the BUILT-IN UNRELIABLITY of the grid
AOC, and those with similar hatred of carbon based life, have SIGNIFICANT BLAME for the problems that occurred in Texas.
If it weren’t for morons like AOC going on and on and on about a non-existent climate crisis, Texas wouldn’t have been in this position in the first place. So yes, people like you should pony up.
Sure you did, sure. I want to see the financial statement on Accusatory Occasional-Cortex’s “charity” fund raising. Oh, yeah, that will never be released.
So much self-hatred.
poor little IQ-45
You are a wasted piece of humanity.
Sorry if it hurts your tiny barely functional mind to realise that using electricity to de-ice useless wind turbines means it can’t be used elesewhere
Wind turbine de-icing is a PARASITIC LOAD on the grid..
just as people like you are a PARASITIC LOAD on society.
It is also noted that as always, you go on a little 5yr year old tantrum to deflect from you total lack of evidence.
Off you go, “feel” yourself with great virtue-seeking.
Poor IQ-45
That would be wrong. AS in Texas, wind power is seasonal in New York…
Although, it does appear that this winter’s NY wind generation is much lower than last year’s.
You are correct that wind does generate almost no electricity all year long in New York.
This bit is just flat-out moronic…
I clearly put the blame on ERCOT and, by extension the Texas state government…
[…]
Gee that electricity generation by wind looks a bit larger over the winter months doesn’t it? thanks for making my point David- it’s much appreciated.
Republicans/libertarians just can’t take responsibility for their own mess can they?
Texas is the only state not connected to the national grid because succession, and yet go crying to the federal government when their incompetence comes back to bite them.
It’s no wonder Republicans are bleeding support nationally.
Except when it doesn’t. Wind power doesn’t get built to the scale it has in Texas without government interference. Democrats/totalitarians just can’t take responsibility for their own mess, can they?
And interconnects are magic. They don’t create power out of nothing and they run the risk of cascade failures not to mention the complexities of managing phase over continent-scale distances.
We’ve already seen this story before : https://www.netl.doe.gov/energy-analysis/details?id=2594
Texas built wind because it was cheaper than coal. In Texas they always take the cheapest option.
It was only cheaper than coal because of government distortions. And as we just saw it really wasn’t cheaper at all. Take the market distortions out and we’ll talk.
The Texas legislature approved CREZ and the build out of wind power and transmission lines from West Texas back when natural gas was expensive and in short supply. Wind thrived because Texas has a world class wind resource and our state government streamlined its development. Wind works very well in spring and fall, not so well in summer and winter.
The failure wasn’t in failing to winterize sporadic wind power. The failure was in not winterizing enough reliable thermal generation to cope with the longest stretch of subfreezing weather since 1983. We didn’t experience a 2011/2021 power crunch in 1983, because the vast majority of our generation came from coal back then.
…
Both can’t be true unless you want to argue that winterization was better in 1983. Was it?
And if they approved the wind build out when gas was expensive isn’t that even more irresponsible given that gas is the only real option for backing up wind.
Coal was the dominant source in 1983. It was far less vulnerable to supply disruptions than natural gas.
When the decision was made to build out wind power in the early 2000’s, coal power plants had become excessively costly due to environmental regulations and natural gas was expensive. By 2011, natural gas was the dominant source and wind was a significant factor.
In 2021, we experienced a 1983-scale deep freeze with a grid even more dependent on wind & natural gas, with less coal than 2011.
Incomplete answer. Are you saying that coal does not require winterization? I think that’s generally true but we still need an explanation for the dip in coal generation last week.
And if gas was expensive during the wind build out then isn’t it irresponsible to build more wind when gas is the only backup? Or was that hidden by playing games with CF assumptions? Certainly the cost of backup is never considered in the LCOE projections which makes them fraudulent IMO.
It seems highly likely that some coal tripped out on grid frequency issues. Some also on loss of water supply caused by blackouts to pumping.
I find that plausible, but that takes some of the air out of the “winterization” calls.
WInd has never been cheaper than coal. But then you prefer propaganda to reality every time.
These guys come here for trolling only; they always have an idiot at hand to suck people’s time with their green rubbish
That’s a joke, right?
Now just plain out LYING ..
… or is it just gross ignorance like you showed in that Willis thread
The electricity generation by wind looks a bit larger over the winter months… Where? Compared to what? You didn’t have a point to make.
What part of placing the blame on ERCOT and the Texas state government did you miss?
How would connecting to the national grid have made any difference? There is no national grid. Even if ERCOT was connected to SWPP and MISO, there was no spare electrical generation capacity in the surrounding states, which also experienced power outages.
It also wouldn’t have helped with supply disruptions to natural gas power plants.
Regarding this retarded troll, “go crying to the federal government,” Texans pay Federal taxes just like the rest of the country… FEMA and other Federal disaster assistance is funded by taxes that we pay.
If Texas connected to the neighboring grid(s), they would have been subject to Federal regulations requiring proper weatherization. Since Texans don’t like regulations, and take the cheapest route available, they repeat the past (2011).
Source?
He’s presently sitting on it. Once it’s no longer in use you’ll have your answer.
$193 Billion more federal Taxes yearly paid by Texans than is received in federal funds returned to Texas.
In addition to his many other mental shortcomings, Steve can’t read charts.
What I find fascinating is he seems to believe that more government is always the best answer.
I’m guessing that Steve is another progressive who has utterly failed to make it in the free market, and blames everyone else for his own shortcomings.
Texas choosing isolating their grid to avoid federal regulation is the prime reason their grid failed.
No. Texas choosing to overbuild unreliable wind power because of federal regulation and subsidies is the reason their grid failed.
BJ doesn’t need facts. His handlers have told him what to believe and that’s all he needs.
Based on what? Do you have anything other than mindless parroted blather?
Are you really as stupid as your posts make you seem?
David has presented the evidence that puts the lie to your beliefs.
The isolation had nothing to do with the problems faced in Texas. (The grid never failed, is even possible for you to tell the truth? Or has your hatred totally precluded that possibility?)
The surrounding grids had no power to sell, so even if there had been an inter connection every 10 miles, it would have made no difference.
Complete BS, as always..
Prime reason is because of the green agenda and CO2 hatred.
Build UNRELIABILITY into any system, it become unreliable.
That is what wind turbine do, by their very nature.
You mean that INSIGNIFICANT little green line, hey mindless moron.
Maybe you over-estimated your IQ when you put it down as 45 !!
Ercot managers are DUMBOCRATS. Why keep trying to DENY that, IQ-45 ?
Yes, we all agree the Republican should never have bowed to the marxist ACDS illness.
The green agenda is TOTALLY TO BLAME for the problems that occurred in Texas..
Why is it that low-IQ marxists like you can never accept responsibility for any of their idiocies ?
If there is little to no wind, and grid electricity is used to “de-ice” wind-turbines..
.. the those turbines become a PARASITIC LOAD on the supply system
You like, like marxists like stevie are on modern society.
If you have ten turbines, and de-ice one, it starts producing power that can be used to de-ice the remaining nine.
Because that magically makes the wind come back?
How do you de-ice in the middle of the storm?
Do you think that helicopters can fly in icing conditions?
Why not de-ice all of them at the same time?
That’s all the backup diesel generator can support?
roflmao.. you really are TOTALLY CLUELESS, aren’t you brianles. !!
Apparently even when not driving, a wind turbine not operating is yet drawing power, about 4 KWH.
David provided a chart that demonstrated his point.
Where’s your data.
Do you have any evidence that there was under investment in the Texas power grid, or are you as usual, just making it up as you go.
Speaking of pathetic, have you read any of your own posts lately?
Actually, David provided data in the form of a graph which makes my point nicely. Thanks David.
Imagine spending all day, every day reading posts on a website created by a failed weather girl, that’s full of imaginary BS and nobody important cares about.
And that is the totality of your life.
Speaking of pathetic.
So you got nothing.
Has he ever had anything? Other than a streak of hatred towards those who have done better in life than he has?
Actually, David’s graph proves the exact opposite of what your tiny little mind wants to believe.
I see that Steve suffers from the standard progressive mental disorders.
He actually believes that he can read minds and knows everything about someone from one or two web posts.
Then again, progressives in general suffer from delusions of godhood.
It comes from all those participation trophies they kept getting as kids.
Progressives just SUFFER
Its their way of life.. its who they are.
I’d be OK with this, if the whiney limp-wristed putos didn’t insist on inflicting their suffering on people with real jobs.
Yep see that little green wind line in NY (with a microscope)
Now THAT IS PATHETIC !!
Poor IQ-45, and dropping fast!
Not one bit of real science, just mindless blathering
So sadly PATHETIC. !
I prefer David’s graphs to your unsubstantiated (and wrong) claims. By extension, I think that we can put as much stock in your partisan screeds.
Well, if you add enough Wind Turbines, expect that 50% will be covered in ice and another 10% out of commission (as usual), and just count on the wind to be blowing on the days you have a peak demand so that you are generating at least 20% of Name Plate Capacity for those wind turbines still working, you can lower the risk of not being able to meet demand.
So 35GW would equate to ( (35 x 0.9)/2 x 0.2) = 3.15 GW of additional power (assuming the wind is actually blowing). Therefore, using this logic, you only need to build somewhere on the order of 130 GW of new wind turbines and you can meet the needs of out last peak demand (assuming the wind is blowing). Sounds *COMPLETELY REASONABLE* to me… (NOT!)
Can we PLEASE just build some more base load power generation stations and actually fix this problem?
Let me be Griff:
Not true. Blah-blah.
Germany. Blah-blah-blah.
Grauniad Link.
You beat him by 3 minutes, and got the nonsense down perfectly.
since it was mainly the natural gas which failed, seems fair enough.
And as the rest of the world apparently has turbines which don’t freeze, perhaps the new ones will be of those models…
still need some grid scale batteries, demand response and above all a connection to other grids though.
Experts say, you are wrong, ergo, you aren’t an expert, what doesn’t make we wonder. following all your comments 😀
Ask the expert Mr. Middleton what happens to the moisture coming out of the natural gas well that is fed into collection’/gathering pipelines that lack insulation during this event.
Grid batteries:
20GW x 24 hours x $500,000,000/GWh for a day’s outage cover. $240bn every 10 years. when they have to be replaced. Or spend $20bn on 20GW of gas generation that will last 40 years.
Economics is not your strong point, is it?
Like most progressives, griff believes money is printed by government thus costs don’t matter.
Griff has strong points?
He’s a good batting practice pitcher… 😉
He could moon light as a spear catcher.
Keep telling that lie, it is all you ever have.
David m, did not see your post to Griff before I responded. Great to see the T added!
And Data, well that good fun. It looks like wind dropped to zero at one point.
Griff is one of my favorite BP pitchers… And a fellow Star Trek can… 🖖
Griff, natural gas was able to ramp up production 450% during the storm. How much did your vaunted wind and solar power sources contribute?
Natural gas saved the Texas grid. Without natural gas the whole thing would have gone down. And Windmills were of no help. They couldn’t do anything to help the situation.
Had the whole Texas grid gone down, the estimate is it could take a month to get it back up and running, and the costs would be in the tens of billions of dollars.
Natural gas saved Texas’ hindquarters.
Windmills put Texas’ hindquarters in jeopardy.
.
STILL LYING through your teeth, as always, hey griff-tard.
Even the data that showed GAS ramping up by HUGE AMOUNTS to cover for AWOL wind isn’t FACT enough to sway your ACDS diseased little mind, is it !
Natural gas was diverted from power plants to residential users for home heat.
Production from natural gas power plants went up by 450%. It could have gone up by more had the EPA permitted it.
And wind powered electricity disappeared completely
Do you have yet another empty meaningless point to make ?
Griff, did you even read the post?
Yes, there is de-icing technology. The wind turbine has to use electricity and it has to shut down to de-ice.
I looked the other day when one of your collective was going on about de-icing, the best i could find on Vesta was that it “might use 2% of the turbines generated power over the course of a year for de-icing”.
A 3.6mw turbine that makes 35% availability generates 11000mwhr a year, 2% is 220MW.
But assuming de-icing is a small portion of time, that is an awful lot of power that has to come from elsewhere.
Weasel words, 2% of annual production.
Why not state how much it actually takes?
But these are meaningless arguments. Most of the wind production failed because there wasn’t much wind, i was checking various texas locations last monday with my weather channel APP, no wind anywhere.
Same thing we had here in AB for 9 days in the exact same system except it was -30C here.
No wind
So it doesn’t matter if texas spends $5 trillion more on cold hardened wind turbines going forward, when this sort of system hits again, and it will, there will be no wind power
And people will Freeze and die.
If the $80 billion spent on crap renewables in the last 15 years had been spent hardening the real power supplies all we would be arguing about is the polar vortex and what it means
because there would have been no blackouts.
griff is famous for providing links to articles that actually refute the point he’s trying to make.
So it’s probable that griff did not bother to read the article.
“weather channel APP”
I wouldn’t trust TWC to tell me if the sun was up.
Another one of your little hallucinogenic FANTASIES. !
Your congnitive non-functionality on just how much battery would be needed to become “grid-scale” is hilarious.
Its as though you haven’t got a single functioning brain cell inside that empty abyss between you ears.
griff still seems to believe that “grid scale” batteries are capable of powering the entire grid for hours, if not days.
As i showed here in AB during the recent polar vortex, we had functionally zero wind power for almost 9 days, at -30C
Because there is little to no wind in the middle of one of these winter siberian highs.
So our little AB grid for 4.4 mil people, 11GW, would require at least 7 days of grid battery back up, would require 1,850GWHr of battery back up
To ensure everyone doesn’t die.
I think that battery would bankrupt Canada and make a big Dent in USA GDP if you tried to do that.
And if constructed as one piece it would likely bend gravity and create a black hole based on its mass.
All bad
I’m willing to bet that had you had solar power, it wouldn’t have been providing any power either.
“As i showed here in AB during the recent polar vortex, we had functionally zero wind power for almost 9 days, at -30C”
What electrical grid could survive nine days without electricity?
That’s what AOC wants us to gamble on. She wants us to get off fossil fuels and power the world with windmills.
AOC doesn’t seem to understand that sometimes windmills just do not work. Windmills are not ready for prime time.
If you want to live in something other than the Stone Age, then you have to have generating facilities that will work regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. Windmills do not meet those requirements.
Windmills are a disaster waiting to happen.
Alarmists need to give up on windmills and solar which are weather-dependent, and put their efforts towards building more nuclear power plants. That’s the future for them.
That battery idea seems problematic: https://naptownnumbers.substack.com/p/battery-grid-backup
Something that rarely gets mentioned is the effect that ambient temperatures have on the efficiency of batteries. In the Texas scenario, cold weather is the situation when back-up batteries would be most valuable. However, they are least efficient under those conditions!
Sodium sulfur grid batteries do not have that problem https://www.energy-storage.news/blogs/sponsored-ngks-nas-grid-scale-batteries-in-depth
How many batteries would you have used?
The article you linked to says nothing about insensitivity to low temperatures. I doubt your claim because chemical reactions in general proceed more rapidly at elevated temperatures. Thus, it seems unlikely that your NaS batteries are immune to reduced performance at low temperatures.
You really are a low-education, non-thinking gullible twerp, aren’t you Brianless.
190 of them in Japan, with an overall capacity of just 530MW on micro grids .. a tiny niche market.
And of course totally unnecessary if you don’t have the idiotic imposition of the UNRELIABILTY of wind farts on your grid.
Looks like griff’s got himself a new lie that he will repeat ad infinitum, no matter how many times he is refuted.
Actual data, shows that natural gas did not fail.
Actual data, shows that wind and solar did fail.
Looks like poor griff still doesn’t have any idea what grid level batteries are and how expensive they are. (I’d love to hear how griff would use 5 minutes of power (what the best grid level batteries provide) was going to solve the problems in Texas)
Griff, NG failed…
Can you see? Can you see and think at the same time? ( Not sarcasm)
Heated turbine blades solves the problem does it? I know I’m not the only pilot that checks this site, but is that really feasible? How fast does ice build up on a turbine blade; will you spend more time and energy de-icing than generating?
(Moderate icing is 1-3″/hr, light icing is less than 1.) If a winter wind turbine in icing conditions is going to work–‘consider immediate exit from the conditions’.
Here is some insight from a Finnish company that offer turbine ice control systems:
https://wicetec.com/technology/
Note they do not recommend the system unless there is reasonably signficant regular icing problem.
David is an armchair quarterback living in a big city.
What I liked about working at power plants is being able to love in the country and have a few acres of land. In cold climates I heated with wood. When I lived in mild climates, I kept a two weeks supply of
wood. My house was never cold.
Although I worked in the power industry, I never owned backup generator. They are dangerous and not very reliable.
Since retiring, I travel in a motorhome and spend lots of time dry camping especially in Texas. For example Crystal beach east of Galveston is 22 miles of beach where you can park for free.
I have three generators. A large propane genny to run two air conditioners. A small gasoline genny to charge batteries. An intermediate size that I can sti
still lift that can run one air conditioner.
It is simple, redundancy and dual fuel source provides reliability.
I do not have solar on the roof of my RV. If it was a good idea I would.
The best I can tell the purpose of wind and solar is to talk about it.
It is like David mentioning ice in his pool. Subtle ways people let you know they are rich.
Nothing wreong with being rich and clueless about making electricity.
I ready your rambles twice, trying to figure out what you are trying to say?
Dave is saying the real power supplies need to be hardened.
What part of that are you disagreeing with?
I think the word “pool” triggered him.
Maybe he’s not in the same gene pool that you are and is suffering from ‘pool envy.’ When I lived in Phoenix, it seemed that there must have been a law requiring everyone to have a pool. Even rental homes had pools.
If I had 2007-2008 to do over again, we wouldn’t have included a pool when our house was built… Although walking across the shallow end without getting my feet wet was kind of fun.
Can you also turn water into wine? 🙂
Still, it beats being POOR, DUMB and CLUELESS. !!