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.
I’ve got the solution — new technology that was developed by Al Gore.
I am an early investor in his company. It’s called Al Gore’s Company.
First of all, there has to be an official report about the 2021 incident.
It will say to winterize the entire Texas energy infrastructure.
That’s what the 2011 report said after rolling blackouts affected 3.2 million.
Texans should Ignore the 2021 report, just like the 2011 report was ignored.
Texans don’t need no stinkin’ reports. Texan’s need action.
The right answer is Al Gore’s nuclear powered blowers to keep windmills spinning when there is no wind. You may recall that Al Gore previously invented the internet. The solution is NOT building more windmills. If there is no wind, one bazillion windmills will produce the same electrical power as one windmill = none. The solution is to create wind, when nature does not. Al’s new product is called the “Zero Carbon Windmill Accelerator”.
I bought a one percent share of Al’s company. I was a little disappointed, however, to find out Al has sold 1,746 one percent shares. But that doesn’t matter. I expect to get rich anyway, and Al will win a Nobel Prize. This is the truth, NOT satire.
A quote from UK Uncensored:
“Because while the image is being shared as a tool to convey that wind turbines are frozen over, so are useless in a cold snap when you really need power, and need fossil fuels to bail them out…. It’s actually not true.
The image is from a test in Sweden in 2014.
Imagine my joy when looking into this and finding this out. It’s fake news!
The original image, from Luke Legate, a publicist for the fossil fuel industry, was retweeted tens of thousands of times. Including by Lauren Boebert, a gun-wielding member of Congress from Colorado, who urged her 537,000 followers to “keep that in mind when thinking how “green” windmills are.”” Kit Winder, Editor, UK Uncensored Southbank Investment Research (southbankresearch.com)http://www.southbankresearch.com.
The image is a “meme.”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meme
The wind turbines in Texas were largely frozen over. By February 14, before it got really cold, about half had already iced up.
The image is clearly a meme, intended to ridicule the notion of deicing wind turbines.
Only total fracking retards fact-check memes
“The image is clearly a meme, intended to ridicule the notion of deicing wind turbines.
Only total fracking retards fact-check memes”
The “fact-checkers” for this meme are all over the internet.
They apparently think if they can show that the picture was taken in Sweden in 2014, instead of Texas in 2021, it negates the fact that windmills freeze up and need de-icing on occasion.
They are just trying to defend the Green New Deal which depends heavily on windmills being the power generation of the future.
Texas shows windmills are not up to the job of powering the future, so the alarmists want to distract from that by pointing at the “shiny object” helicopter picture, and saying “fake news, fake news”.
The helicopter picture controversy does not change the fact that the windmills failed Texas at the worst possible time and cannot be depended on to keep the electrical grid up and running in the future.
So right Tom. One wonders why their reaction was ‘fake news’ rather than why if Sweden was doing this in 2014 was Texas not doing it in 2021?
Good point, Dave.
And that well-known truism about the definition of insanity is…. what?
Texas Snow Storm Event
California imports about 30% of its annual electricity to cover any electricity short-falls; it has major connections to nearby grids. This mode of operation sufficed, until the US Southwest had a major, multi-day, heat wave; during heat waves winds are minimal. As a result, electricity supplies, from mostly coal-fired plants, to California were curtailed by the exporting states. The result was rolling black-outs for several days, with 115F temperatures, because California had closed 15 of its 19 Pacific Coast, highly efficient, low-CO2, minimal-polluting gas plants.
None of this had anything to do with the California grid.
Texas does not import electricity, because it has minor connections to nearby grids.
New England imports about 19% of its electricity, because it has major connections to nearby grids.
The New York Times, February 20, 2021, displayed a graph, based on EIA data, of Texas electricity production by source, a few days before, and a few days after, the major winter snow storm, which started early evening, February 14, 2021.
Gas plant output was about 43,000 MW. The output became about 29,000 MW about one day later, a 33% reduction (largely due to piping freeze-ups), then output went up and down, at an average of about 29,000 MW, to counteract changes of other sources.
Coal plant output was about 11,000 MW. The output became about 8,000 MW about one day later, a 27% reduction (largely due to piping freeze-ups), then the output was about 7,000 to 8,000 MW
Wind plant output was about 9,000 MW, from an installed capacity of 30,904 MW, about 15,000 wind turbines; the capacity factor was 9000/30904 = 0.29. The output became 1,000 MW about one day later, an 89% reduction (largely due to freeze ups of 12,000 MW of capacity, about 12000/30904 x 15000 = 5,825 wind turbines), then the output increased to 4,000 MW for about a day, then decreased to about 1,000 MW, etc., due to wind-velocity variations. The relatively few wind turbines on the Texas Gulf Coast were unaffected by the snow storm.
https://windexchange.energy.gov/states/tx#capacity
Nuclear plant output was about 4,000 MW. The output became about 3,000 MW about one day later (largely due to piping freeze-ups),
a 25% reduction
Solar plant output was near zero. The output increased to 3,000 MW, from and installed capacity of about 13,000 MW, on the following midday, then to near-zero again, etc.
None of this had anything to do with the Texas grid.
“Grid” refers to the entire system.
It includes the generating stations, which is where most of the problems were.
David, a few questions about the ERCO graph:
1.) Is the narrowing of the green wind band from about the 10th to the 18th due to lower wind or wind turbines not functioning? I keep hearing from the greenies that the wind turbines performed better than expected.
2.) Any idea how wide a band for gas heating would look?
3.) It looks like wind is now up and gas has narrowed. Is all the gas generation restored?
1) I don’t know. As of Feb 14, it was reported that half of the wind turbines had frozen up. The wind turbines that didn’t freeze up do appear to have performed better than expected. They weren’t expected to perform at all.
2) No. It would have to be in Btu… I don’t know if those data are available yet.
3) Pretty well everything is back online. When wind is working, gas power plants are cut back and/or shut down.
“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?”
OK I will be blunt. David knows jack about making and distributing power. Does not appear to be very good about handling weather related emergencies either. I expect more from Texans compared to idiots in California.
To be fair, very few people do. So you get idiots with agendas debating idiots with agendas. Very entertaining.
It is a pet peeve of mine. I have some theories about this. First the power industry does a good job of keeping the power on (except in California). As a result, people are not prepared. Second large power plants are not located in big cities (aka cesspools) so people do not learn from a neighbor but a clueless press.
My first nuke out of the navy is in a rural area. My neighbors heated with wood because the oil truck was not able to get in for weeks at time. My neighbor down the road was anti-nuke and like to discuss safety. My response was ‘had any chimney fires lately’.
So it was my job to operate the nuke plant safely. Not my job to address every concern that someone might have.
It is not my job to assess what folks should do in an emergency. Just saying each person should give it some thought.
Deaths because of a power outage are generally preventable. Chimney fires and carbon monoxide poisoning happen to people who are not prepared.
For the record I am rich. I have all the money I need. I am not Bill Gates rich. Poverty is a state of mind. Some are unhappy because Bill Gates has more money. The same people are unhappy because we do not have enough wind and solar.
We only need a finite supply of electricity.
Most worrying to climate elites, people are angry. In Texas, reporters found the man in the street incredulous that in the number one energy producing state, he was not only without electricity and heat but without safe drinking water. The media, so heavily invested in global warming, recognizes it is essential that the average citizen “seeking answers” find a target for his wrath. Heaven forfend that he should blame the media, politicians, even the scientific community, for foisting man-made global warming on him, with its insistence that man must change the climate by substituting unreliable renewables for tried and true fossil fuels.
Got an email from a cousin living north of Houston, everyone he knows is pissed off and all blaming ERCOT, not the weather or climate.
First, good news for you all. Tomorrow, my guys/gals at the SPE (Society of Petroleum Engineers) will be hosting a broadcast on the Texas energy Gong Show.
The bad news for you all is from the advance vids they provided. It appears that, even though my SPE, as a rule, veers rabid right, they will agree that:
* Gas deliverability could have and should have been improved, post 2013 realization. I.e., it would have been good to do both economically and to help with ERCOT mission statement compliance
Listen in. You’ll certainly get your fill of AGW denialism. But engineers, as a rule, hate poor planning, seeded by myopic politics.
Search here: SPE Live: The Texas Power Failure — What Went Wrong and Why? I honestly don’t know if civilians can listen in, but hope so…
SPE is one of the biggest proponents of CCS/CCUS… Not exactly denialism-ville.
On my calendar…
https://www.spe.org/en/events/live-events/
SPE membership is not required for live broadcasts like this and past events are available on YouTube.
Not a “blame game” at all. Except for the misguided, poorly considered, initial WUWT posts on this. Oh, and the whiny, deflective boners by Abbott and Perry
The name of the “game” is to make changes to better respond next time. No matter their politics, the SPE and API can help, if you let them this time…
Really?
New York Times, February 17…
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/climate/texas-blackouts-disinformation.html?auth=login-facebook
Watts Up With That?, February 17…
What did Greg Abbot say that was wrong? Nothing.
What did Dionne Searcey write that was wrong?
In February 2020, wind accounted for 26% of ERCOT’s generation.
From February 1-8, 2021, wind accounted for 30% of ERCOT’s generation.
From From February 9-18, 2021, wind dropped off to 8% of ERCOT’s generation.
Natural gas accounted for 63% of the generation during Winter Storm Younger Dryas. When demand peaked to a record level on February 14, natural gas and coal were delivering 80-90% of capacity at a time when nationwide natural gas demand was also hitting an all-time record.
We won’t know exactly what went wrong in the natural gas sector for quite a while. Tomorrow’s SPE broadcast probably won’t even have all of the questions, much less firm answers as to what went wrong.
We do know that it was inadequate to back-up a total loss of wind power during a prolonged period of record cold weather and record high electricity and natural gas demand. We do know that wind & solar totally failed to perform… despite apologia about “performed better than expected.” We also know that if natural gas performed as well as wind last week, thousands of Texans would likely be dead.
“Gas deliverability could have and should have been improved,” Not going to get an argument from any American on that. One of the first steps on that road is to ascertain exactly who was responsible for blocking that action and holding them personally and financially responsible, then house them at the Texas State prison closest to the wind farm that started all this crap so they can watch as they are torn out. Perhaps chain gang them so they can help tear them out. Have to punish people so they stop doing stupid crap like blocking gas pipelines and nuke plants.
“Have to punish people so they stop doing stupid crap like blocking gas pipelines and nuke plants.”
IMO, economically justifiable gas pipelines in Texas are hardly “blocked”. As are not almost all of the gas infrastructure improvements that could have been completed and maintained years ago.
That being said, I have only a couple of years of Texas gas field experience. My work was mostly California and international, and much of my info is second hand from co-workers who spent more of their careers there (Yanqui petroleum engineers can’t escape Houston HQ visits no matter where they work and how hard they try). The pre vids for this broadcast seem to bear out the gas deliverability infrastructure short falls, but I’m going to both keep an open mind tomorrow AM, and investigate more myself.
Really? Envirotards block everything, filing frivolous law suites, vandalizing property, doxing employees and using contacts with EPA employees and other agencies to roadblock anything beneficial to America. The problems you are speaking of are there BECAUSE their implementation was blocked by fellow travelers of these climatetologist scumbags. Where do you think the idea of having transfer pump heating systems be powered off the electric grid instead of leaving them independently fueled as they used to be? Been a long time since I worked directly in drilling, I have and had family and friends who work across the industry. Not that many years ago the electric grid shutting down did not effect gas and oil pipeline operations and refineries had sufficient backup power that they shutdown causing damage to systems. Who changed that? They are the root of the problems we have today.
Just not based in fact. Field facilities have more backup and service reliability than ever before. Solar, batteries, remote oversight of even the smallest field oil and gas processing facilities. 40 years ago many wells/consolidated tank batteries were served by hardly able single phase service. Almost all upgraded now (at least outside of Texas).
Tune into the SPE broadcast this AM to find out more….
“more backup and service reliability than ever before” You say that after saying same failed and more is needed. Which is it? Tying those backup systems to the electric grid and expecting them to work when the electric grid fails is just idiotic. Having them INDEPENDENT of the electric grid so they work when it fails is not idiotic. Which are you advocating be done? Seem to be trying to be on all sides of issue at same time. Standing in the middle of the road is how the deer got run over, too. Have to pick one side or the other.
One take away from todays SPE broadcast. Gas and electricity are tightly tied in Texas winters. But your BS try at indirectly blaming wind is – at least yet – fact free.
Yes, any gas down from e failure should be (and probably can easily be), remedied. But chicken and egging now is premature. We need to hear chapter and verse from District level gas E&P supervisors on what they did/didn’t do to prep, what were their modes of failure, what they needed to maintain deliverability
Again, really? ERCOT is the ones saying wind generation failure was the start of the problem. Calling them liars is fine by me, does not change the fact electric grid dropping was the what brought it all about. Good try, though.
Who thought that wind generation wouldn’t wane in the face of this pptt frequency (so far) weather? Even with cold weather mods to their innards. everyone who should have knew that some blades would ice over. Any entity who counted on wind – even given the overperformance of the coastal turbines – hadn’t thought thru what was KNOWN about how the system would perform in such conditions.
The “plan” was obviously to get the gas and electric power from other sources, even during these extremes. Now, the name of the game is to actually work it…
Making the backups dependent on the grid was a decision that can be easily tracked down and the people responsible held to account and those issues fixed, now. Not 5 years from now, not after a bunch of handwringing in front of the press or after allowing the guilty parties to skate away to cause the same problem elsewhere. People are dead because of this, massive property damage has been done. Those responsible have to be held to account. Now.
David M wrote, “We do know that it was inadequate to back-up a total loss of wind power during a prolonged period of record cold weather and record high electricity and natural gas demand.”
Who I s ‘we’?
Engineers design to design criteria. For example nuclear power plants, are designed to withstand the worst case seismic event in the last 200 years. Emergency plans are in place to keep people from dying if the unexpected happen.
Every commercial nuke plant that I worked at and to my knowledge every US plant are designed to automatically shut down when the grid went away because there was no place to send the power.
New US reactors are designed to rapidly run back to house load and avoid cascading failures. I wrote the technical guide for my company. Lesson learned over 40 years was that power to the grid could be restored faster if thermal plants kept running at low power.
My point is that criteria often change with time and more knowledge.
Another approach is looking at how other places manage to avoid such problems. I was at a meeting with my manager where the need for new power plants was being discussed in Washington State. The state employee responsible for ensuring the lights stay on had just asked his minions if there was enough pipeline capacity for the new plants.
I looked at my boss. We knew the answer and it was ‘no’. There was enough pipeline capacity for one new plant. The plant my company was building with gas from the pipeline we owned.
The plant was never finished. Washington State solved the problem by sending the energy intensive jobs to China.
I suspect the problem in Texas will be found growth of demand because jobs and therefore people are moving to Texas.
The Texas state legislature, Public Utilities Commission and ERCOT aren’t run by engineers. They’re run by politicians and lawyers.
Dingdingding!!! We have a winner. Climastrologists have infiltrated every level of our energy production industry and local to federal government agencies. Rooting them and their damage out should be the priority.
ERCOT and power plants are not run by politicians.
Politicians set policy.
I have only had the misfortune of having a lawyer come to my desk onne time. My root cause investigation was very critical of management. It was a judgement call and I could have said the right choices were made.
The NRC did not see my report and were told the plant was not legally obligated to conform. Subsequently, millions were spent fixing the ‘not’ a problem.
So it does not matter if during the root cause process if a lot of root blame is being done by those who do not get the job done.