Guest “fact checking the fact checkers” by David Middleton
Note to fact checking trolls: The featured image is a meme. Look up the word meme before you prattle on about the frozen wind turbine not being in Texas. Also, I have been referring to the freakishly cold weather, snow and ice of the past couple of weeks as Winter Storm Younger Dryas. It is my unofficial pet name for the the Texas weather from February 9-18, 2021. Fact checkers who say this storm name doesn’t exist will very likely be ridiculed.
Ever hear someone say, “Everything’s bigger in Texas“?
Well… The lamestream media lies about the recent Texas energy disaster have been Texas-sized.
This is just a small sample…
Fact check: Renewable energy is not to blame for the Texas energy crisis
Natural gas, the state’s dominant energy source, has provided drastically less energy than expected, according to experts and industry data.[…]
“Wind was operating almost as well as expected,” said Sam Newell, head of the electricity group at the Brattle Group, an energy consulting company that has advised Texas on its power grid.
“It’s an order of magnitude smaller” than problems with natural gas, coal and nuclear energy, he said.
[…]
NBC News
WINTER STORM 2021
No, frozen wind turbines aren’t the main culprit for Texas’ power outages
Lost wind power was expected to be a fraction of winter generation. All sources — from natural gas, to nuclear, to coal, to solar — have struggled to generate power during the storm that has left millions of Texans in the dark.[,,,]
Frozen wind turbines in Texas caused some conservative state politicians to declare Tuesday that the state was relying too much on renewable energy. But in reality, the wind power was expected to make up only a fraction of what the state had planned for during the winter.
[…]
Texas Tribune
No, Wind Farms Aren’t the Main Cause of the Texas Blackouts
The state’s widespread electricity failure was largely caused by freezing natural gas pipelines. That didn’t stop advocates for fossil fuels from trying to shift blame.[…]
However, wind power was not chiefly to blame for the Texas blackouts. The main problem was frigid temperatures that stalled natural gas production, which is responsible for the majority of Texas’ power supply. Wind makes up just a fraction — 7 percent or so, by some estimates — of the state’s overall mix of power generation this time of year.
[…]
New York Times
- “Wind was operating almost as well as expected”
- [W]ind power was expected to make up only a fraction of what the state had planned for during the winter.
- Wind makes up just a fraction — 7 percent or so, by some estimates — of the state’s overall mix of power generation this time of year.
The “fraction” link in the New York Times article leads to the Texas Tribune article I quoted. The “fraction” link in that article leads to another Texas Tribune article that says this:
Only 7% of ERCOT’s forecasted winter capacity, or 6 gigawatts, was expected to come from various wind power sources across the state.
Texas Tribune
That’s just a bald-face lie… Or a very confused journalist.
ERCOT’s (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) wind output is actually fairly reliable in winter, particularly in February.
In February 2020, wind accounted for 26% of ERCOT electricity generation…
Wind has accounted for at least 20% of ERCOT’s February generation from 2016 to 2020.
| ERCOT % Feb Generation From Wind | |
| 2011 | 10% |
| 2012 | 11% |
| 2013 | 13% |
| 2014 | 10% |
| 2015 | 12% |
| 2016 | 20% |
| 2017 | 23% |
| 2018 | 25% |
| 2019 | 24% |
| 2020 | 26% |
| 2021 (Feb 1-8) | 30% |
| 2021 (Feb 9-18) | 8% |
In February 2021, prior to Winter Storm Younger Dryas, wind accounted for 30% of ERCOT’s electricity generation…
During Winter Storm Younger Dryas, wind dropped off to 8% of ERCOT electricity generation, while natural gas more than doubled as a percentage of ERCOT electricity generation…
While there were severe problems with thermal generating sources from February 15-18, wind was basically a no-show from February 9-18.
And this puts the lie to these fact checker claims:
- Fact check: Renewable energy is not to blame for the Texas energy crisis
- No, frozen wind turbines aren’t the main culprit for Texas’ power outages
- No, Wind Farms Aren’t the Main Cause of the Texas Blackouts
The truth…
- Renewable energy is why Texas has less natural gas and coal capacity than it would have had otherwise.
- Frozen wind turbines are why coal-fired power plants were operating at >90% of capacity from February 9-14 and natural gas power plants were operating at 70% to more than 80% of capacity from February 11-14.
- Wind farms aren’t the main cause of the Texas blackouts because most of them had already been knocked offline by freezing temperatures and ice… Nearly a week before the blackouts! Where’s my Sam Kinison video?
The desperation on the part of the lamestream media to proactively defend wind power during this fiasco would be funny, if not for the fact that this lie quickly gained so much traction, that I have even repeated it. Wind power did not perform better than expected in any rational sense of the phrase.
That said, wind power has generally been very successful in Texas… The problem is that ERCOT’s plan for a total failure of wind power seems to have been hoping that natural gas, coal and nuclear power plants could successfully operate at about 90% of capacity until the wind power came back online.
“Hope ain’t a tactic.”
Mark Wahlberg as Mike Williams in Deepwater Horizon
Even with all of the system-wide failures, natural gas is the only reason that this energy disaster didn’t claim hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. Winter Storm Younger Dryas will probably surpass Hurricane Harvey as the most expensive natural disaster in Texas history and ERCOT was possibly within five minutes of it being possibly the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history when they began load-shedding.
Former Texas Public Utilities Commissioner Rebecca Klein laid out some questions that need to be asked and answered in this very thoughtful article:
1. Are we prepared to pay more for electricity and water to ensure higher levels of reliability? And if so, how much more? Greater reliability may mean a number of things, such as required weatherization of infrastructure assets; higher mandated margins of reserve generation than we have today; real incentives for customer conservation and/or smart appliances; better coordination among gas, electric and water utilities; making sure our gas supply is safe, adequate and accessible; or tweaking our wholesale power price caps, among many other things. Some of these activities come at a higher price than others. We need to evaluate the tradeoffs in a systematic way.
2. How can we be better prepared for “outlier” events, regardless of their probability? Would it make sense to require state-wide scenario planning that includes coordinated drills that test both our operational and communication capabilities across multiple entities?
3. How can all stakeholders, particularly ERCOT, the Public Utility Commission of Texas, the Office of Public Utility Council (but also utilities, etc.) provide more timely, transparent, and relevant information to consumers about how to prepare; what is happening and why; what to expect; and whom to call?
C3
Or we could go with AOC’s solution.
The infrastructure failures in Texas are quite literally what happens when you *don’t* pursue a Green New Deal.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 17, 2021
The breakdown for 16 February 2021:
| MWh | % | |
| Wind Generation | 73,395 | 6% |
| Solar Generation | 20,134 | 2% |
| Hydro Generation | 3,833 | 0% |
| Other Generation | 682 | 0% |
| Natural gas Generation | 759,708 | 65% |
| Coal Generation | 204,655 | 18% |
| Nuclear Generation | 98,394 | 8% |
| Total | 1,160,801 | 100% |
Fossil fuels accounted for 83% of our electricity generation on February 16. Fossil fuels + nuclear accounted for 92%. But AOC says more wind & solar would have saved the day…
“Almost as well as expected” because ERCOT is smart enough to not expect much from wind during peak load events.
They give wind an Electric Load Capacity Credit of about 7% when planning.
When operating, they use time windows. A week out, they probably saw wind would be below 5%. Day ahead, they probably anticipated wind at zero.
The entertaining part is that even zero is wrong. They only count the positive contributions from wind in these calculations. When wind isn’t blowing, wind plants are a small load. Every generator consumes a bit of “house power.” In the case of wind, this load is about 1% of nameplate. A 500 MW wind plant is about a 5 MW load when the wind isn’t blowing.
ERCOT has 24,000 MW of wind plants. During the worst parts of the event, you can see in the chart that wind plants touched 0 output a few times. At these times, the fleet of wind plants was likely consuming more than 200 MW – enough to run 100,000 space heaters.
Now we have storms without wind. I just can’t keep up.
Storms with wind are bad for turnines too. Blades on a windmill have to be feathered or locked down to reduce the spin. Blades spin too fast and you destroy the generator. It’s a “goldilocks” kind of power. They only produce when conditions are within a narrow margin of acceptability. Used to be that the turbines would feather their blades starting at when the wind moved into the 30 mph range but couldn’t generate anything useful at less than 15 mph. I’m not sure about the newer model generators.
This shows the performance for a fairly typical modern 3MW onshore wind turbine
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/GqyyC/1/
To convert to mph, multiply m/sec by about 2.237, or to be exact, multiply by 125 and divide by 55.88. Cut in speed is about 7mph, and cut out speed is 50mph. Beyond that they pinwheel, and should survive at least Cat 1 hurricane winds. Very little power is generated at lower wind speeds. Efficiency drops as they feather the blades once full generator output is reached. It’s also fairly low until the sweet spot – for this design about 5 or 6 -10 m/sec.
Note that this is a true efficiency curve relative to wind energy at given wind speeds, so it looks somewhat different to a traditional power output curve, which you could plot from the data, and would show a small jump at cut in speed, then a slightly faster than cubic growth as the inefficiency of low speed reduces, and then a more or less cubic growth until full output is reached, followed by a flat 3MW of output until cutout speed.
did they ever figure out why the frequency fell to 59.3?
collapse in wind just before it seems like the obvious culprit, but haven’t heard confirmation
Collapse in wind is not the culprit, as we know that wind output was steady during the event. It was caused by a cascade of trips because ERCOT had no spare capacity to call on to restore frequency after a large power station ran into trouble, and because they didn’t institute any blackouts until that happened automatically when 59.3Hz was hit – cutting the demand resulted in remaining supply being big enough to restore the frequency.
The gradual erosion in wind output over several hours meant that there was no spare capacity left. The underlying problem was that there wasn’t enough capacity available to cope with close to zero wind output.
CORRECTION: Wind output FELL SHARPLY (AGAIN) just PRIOR to the grid frequency drop, and it trended downwards after the drop. Coal & nuke power output drops mostly or entirely FOLLOWED the grid frequency drop. ERCOT data show this timing..
No it did not. Here’s the ERCOT dashboard print showing that wind was generating 5,148MW right in the middle of the trip, when the frequency reading was 59.334Hz
http://web.archive.org/web/20210215075245/http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_conditions.html
And here are the hourly reports of wind generation recorded at the EIA
2/15/2021 1 a.m. CST 5350
2/15/2021 2 a.m. CST 5205
2/15/2021 3 a.m. CST 5154
2/15/2021 4 a.m. CST 5214
At that point wind was stable with very little fluctuation. There was nothing like the report I cited elsewhere in the thread, dating back to 2008, when wind dropped very suddenly from 1700 to 300MW, which did cause some blackouts.
reuter report
This from a facebook post:
From James Epley:
My career is the electric utility business for over 40 years (22 years in Texas) so I know a thing or two about what’s going on. First off, Green Energy Policies are at the root of the situation in Texas this week. It just is. Maybe not in the way that you think but it is. There are a number of interrelated events that resulted in cascading failures across the grid. Let’s start with base load capacity. Texas is a summer peak demand region where winter is typically a low demand period. Maintenance on both fossil fuel and nuclear plants are typically performed over the winter and may take 6-12 or more weeks to perform. I spent a particularly cold winter up on the side of a unit. It was miserable work. Texas has 4 individual nuclear units across 2 plants, South Texas NP and Comanche Peak NP. One of those units is offline in a maintenance cycle and not available to the grid. 25% of nuclear capacity is not available. Another significant portion of the fossil fuel plants are also offline in maintenance cycles and thus are also not available to support the demand. Plans include a grid reserve for colder than normal weather but do not include the extreme demand caused by the record breaking sustained cold being experienced. OK, we have established that base load capacity is reduced.
Second, traditional fossil fuel power plants have been decommissioned over the past few decades with no replacements. This was done while the green energy projects, most notably wind, have been coming online. This is the first major category where green energy policies have impacted the situation. Base load capacity of traditional fossil fuel plants has been diminished. Coupled with the maintenance cycles mentioned above, overall readily available base load capacity is WAY down. If these plants had been kept in serviceable condition while the green energy market technologies would have matured, the crisis may have been averted. Think of throwing away typewriters in the decades before personal computers became viable.
Well, the natural gas lines froze, you say. Natural gas freezes at -297 degrees so this point is a joke and a bad one. What really happened is that the pumps necessary to extract and transport the gas went offline due to power outages. Where is most of the natural gas supply from? West Texas. What is the major power source in West Texas? Wind turbines. When the wind turbines went offline due to freezing (and yes, they did in fact freeze in place), the power was cut to the pumps necessary to extract and transport the natural gas. This is where some of the cascading effects took place. The wind turbines couldn’t supply the power to the grid taking the gas pumps offline so they couldn’t deliver gas to the gas power plants so they went offline taking more capacity off the grid, etc., etc.
Well, the wind turbines on the coast were over producing to make up for the frozen turbines in west Texas. Nah, it doesn’t work that way folks. On a good day turbines may produce up to 100% of normal rated capacity. When one turbine shuts down (0%), another isn’t spun faster to produce 200% of normal rated capacity. It just doesn’t. It would likely self-destruct under that assumption. That argument doesn’t hold water.
Another nugget, natural gas powerplants traditionally were fitted to run on both natural gas and heavy fuel oil (the type used on ships). With the abundance of natural gas supply and the squawking of the green energy people, that capability of natural gas plants has been removed either physically or by simply not filling the storage tanks located at the plant. When the gas supply was cut off, the plants had no means to switch over to their fuel oil supply. Capacity gone.
So, we have 1) diminished base load capacity due to immature green energy policies, 2) normal maintenance schedules during a once in a generation event, 3) immature green energy supply technologies impacting traditional energy supply facilities, and 4) no failover capacity due to green energy policies.
So, when the first power units started going offline, the demand on the grid outstripped the load capacity of the remaining plants. Like a breaker in your house when too many hair dryers are plugged into the same circuit, the breaker trips. Powerplants have huge breakers at their sites to protect the units from overloading. So the second unit goes offline. And then the next and it gets faster as the remaining capacity is not able to meet the demand.
That about covers it. The root cause is green energy policies that emphasize an immature renewable energy source technology and the reduction in traditional base load capacity before it is viable to do so.
Thank you for your attention.
Wind and solar are as mature as they are ever going to get.
Keeping coal plants in a state where they can be started up with just a few days notice costs a lot of money. Will these costs be borne by the operators of wind and solar, or will they also be pushed off on consumers?
IMO, wind and solar do not belong in the energy mix at all, at least not at grid scale. Solar may be useful in some niche applications, but I think wind is a complete waste of money – plus, there is a lot more of an environmental impact from both wind and solar than their advocates will admit. Coal, gas, and nuclear are the only viable energy sources.
I think the comment “Wind was operating almost as well as expected,” said Sam Newell, head of the electricity group at the Brattle Group, an energy consulting company that has advised Texas on its power grid.” is correct. When you need wind or solar do not expect them to be there.
What is the cost to upgrade the Wind system to prevent problems with icing and how much do you need to increase the subsidy to do do this. What is the cost to increase the reliability of the natural gas delivery system? What is the cost to increase the supply of coal to the coal fired plants? What is the cost of replacing solar and wind with more reliable nuclear power generation with the same zero emissions.
“Wind was operating … as expected” So, watermelons KNEW wind WOULD leave children, the aged, the feeble and others freezing, hungry, thirsty … in the dark. And, that was acceptable to watermelons;-(
Scotty, beam my loved ones out of reach of watermelons
watermelons are all about “reducing the population”, so any deaths from this are a feature not a bug
Another problem is that compressor stations are no longer allowed to run on natural gas. They have to run on electricity. So when wind craters, it can trip off the compressors creating a cascade effect.
I live in Austin, Texas and was without power for 4.5 days. However, I have a gas stove and a gas hot water heater and fared pretty well using a stovetop for heat and I had hot water. I have multiple carbon monoxide and CO2 detectors and was not concerned about using my stovetop for heat. Having grown up in Houston and ‘weathering’ several significant hurricanes, I have become a bit of a prepper from the standpoint of keeping stores of non-perishable food, etc.
The City of Austin paid $460 million for a biomass plant (allegedly) capable of generating 100MW, but was useless during the outage and this is explained in more detail in the links associated below.
I would add, for those of you quoting the Texas Tribune from Austin, this organization is simply another collectivist disinformation spreader posing as objective journalism. Sometimes, they are forced into repeating facts, but not without attempting to spin them.
https://www.kxan.com/investigations/austins-biomass-power-plant-sat-idle-during-texas-winter-energy-crisis/
Biomass is likely another imaginary fix by the alarmists.
‘“Because the combustion and processing efficiencies for wood are less than coal, the immediate impact of substituting wood for coal is an increase in atmospheric CO2 relative to coal,” Sterman explains. “This means that every megawatt-hour of electricity generated from wood produces more CO2 than if the power station had remained coal-fired.”
https://physicsworld.com/a/biomass-energy-green-or-dirty/
We were going great guns in the late 70’s building steam equipment for nuclear plants in the US and around the world. I thought I had a good career until that stupid movie China Syndrome and 3 Mile happened and then Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden started their BS and we had letters of intent for more US plants that then got cancelled. We let the greenies win back then and have paid the price ever since.
YOU NEED TO GET ALL THE POLITICANS AND THEIR FINGERS OUT OF THE PIE, AND LET FREE MARKET CAPITALISM HANDLE IT, LIKE IT ALWAYS DOES, WELL.
Strip mining prevents forest fires. And Frosty would be blind if not for a coal miner.
Thanks for digging out the figures. I’d heard various claims of between 10% and 25%. I guess when they want to say how wind taking over as a major source they look where they can find 25%, when they want to minimise they average year round or do some other selection bias techniques to get 10%.
The history of power produced for the last ten years in the month of February is what we need to look at. Thanks.
As for “as well as expected”, that does not say anything about anything. Who expect what, under what circumstances. They knew wind would be taken out by freezing conditions so what happened was no different from what was “expected”. Wind performed as well as expected: it failed.
David, you really ought to be less snarky when writing about subjects of which you are demonstrably very ignorant.
It’s fairly easy to do an Internet search to find out what generation ERCOT thinks will be available from wind during a winter capacity challenge:
http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/197378/SARA-FinalWinter2020-2021.pdf
If one goes to that document and looks at what wind ERCOT expects to be available for a winter peak, one sees:
Coastal wind: 1480 MW
Panhandle wind: 1411 MW
Other wind: 3251 MW
Therefore, the total wind ERCOT estimates to be available for a winter peak equals…wait for it…6.142 gigawatts.
Surprise! The journalist knows what he’s talking about on this matter, and the petroleum geologist doesn’t. Possibly, that’s because the journalist actually performed some research before he wrote what he did. (That’s as opposed to the research you seem to do, which is only research that is sufficient to confirm your existing opinions.)
A classy way to handle this situation would be to place a postscript to your original post, with an admission of your error, and an apology to the journalist for any offense given if he happens to come upon your post.