Guest “debunking the debunkers” by David Middleton
Setting the Stage
Why was Texas, ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) in particular, so unprepared for the onslaught of frigid weather? This was NOAA’s February temperature outlook map, released on January 31, 2021:
20 days later, this was NOAA’s map of the number of hours below freezing for the week of Feb. 12-19, 2021:
In less than a week, we went from an outlook for about normal February temperatures to the forecast of an ice storm and then “the worst winter weather conditions seen locally in decades (if not on record)”… Radical would be an understatement.
The first hint I had of the approach of Winter Storm Younger Dryas was on Monday, February 8. Not being hurricane season, I wasn’t paying too close attention to the weather. The forecast on Monday was for possible freezing rain overnight on Wednesday… But the scary bit was a forecast of single digit low temperatures early in the week. It simply doesn’t get that cold in the DFW area. And as the days went by, the forecast kept getting worse.
The ice storm hit Wednesday night and caused this on Thurday…
And it just kept getting colder. By Sunday, February 14, it was snowing and temperatures were 41 °F below normal…
This Arctic blast was essentially unprecedented…
Oklahoma City set a record for its longest straight period of temperatures at or below 20 degrees: 210 hours between Feb. 9 and 17 beat its previous record in 1983. The temperature dipped to minus-14 degrees on Feb. 16, the city’s lowest since 1899.
Dallas experienced its second-longest streak of temperatures at or below freezing and at or below 20 degrees, and reached its third-coldest temperature on record: minus-2 degrees.
Houston, which was placed under its first wind chill warning, observed a wind chill of 1 degree, its lowest since at least 1990, according to meteorologist Alex Lamers. Its high temperature of 25 degrees was its fourth coldest on record.
Kansas City set a record for the longest stretch with temperatures at or below 15 degrees, at 10 days.
Washington Post
February 16 was actually tied for the second lowest DFW temperature on record.
Coldest temp in over 70 years and the 2nd coldest temp ever recorded in the D-FW area
On Feb. 16 the temperature dropped to -2°.This ties the 2nd coldest temp ever recorded.
On Jan. 31, 1949 the temperature also dropped to -2°.
The only time it has been colder was -8° back on February 12, 1899.
3 days in a row of record lows
Feb. 14, 15, and 16 all observed record low temps.Feb. 14 the low was 9°, which shattered the old record of 15° set in 1936.
Feb. 15 the low was 4°, which shattered the old record of 15° set in 1909.
Feb. 16 the low was -2°, which shattered the old record of 12° set in 1903.
3 days of record cold high temperatures
From Feb. 14 to 16, all three days observed record cold high temperatures.This means the afternoon was the coldest on that date that is ever been observed.
Feb. 14 the high was 22°. This breaks the old record of 27° set in 1951.
Feb. 15 the high was 14°, which shattered the old record of 31° set in 1909.
Feb. 16 the high was 18°, which breaks the old record of 21° set in 1903.
WFAA
It also pretty well knocked out most of Texas wind power production… because Texas doesn’t winterize their wind turbines… Right?
Debunking the debunkers
Fact Check: Do Wind Turbines Really Fail in Cold Weather?
It’s time to debunk the rumors.By Brad Bergan
Feb 17, 2021
Crisis breeds confusion and the recent string of record-low temperatures amid this week’s cold and frosty weather conditions in Texas are no exception. But when the state’s power grid fell short of energy demands, misinformation spread like wildfire — arguing that frozen wind turbines are to blame for the blackout.
However, wind turbine installations don’t go up without substantial investment — which means planning for the kind of volatile weather much of the world is already seeing for the first time. The question is raised, then: Can wind turbines really fail in cold weather?
Wind turbines in cold environments typically ‘winterized’
Misinformation sparked when an image showing an Alpine helicopter de-icing wind turbines covered in frost or ice surfaced on social media. The implication was that frozen wind turbines were the cause of Texas’ series of power outages.[…]
Interesting Engineering
The interesting engineer went on to state that helicopter-assisted wind turbines are better for the climate than coal-fired power plants.
In fact, carbon emissions generated from de-icing a turbine — like in the Alpine Helicopter video and image — saves two days’ worth of emissions, relative to coal power.
Interesting Engineering
This may be true… But it’s not likely to be of much comfort to the 4.5 million Texans who lost power during the record-shattering cold stretch.
While I have no doubt that wind turbines are winterized in very cold places where fossil fuels and nuclear power have been effectively outlawed, Texas isn’t one of those sort of places. So… If Texas (ERCOT) wind turbines failed because they weren’t properly winterized, then the other grids hammered by Winter Storm Younger Dryas must have fared better… Right?
The Southwest Power Pool (SWPP) and Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) extend from Texas to the Canadian border.
Their wind power output did what ERCOT’s did… It failed.
Here’s a funny, maybe coincidental, correlation:
Note that the correlation is just as good when temperatures are above freezing. Why use DFW temperatures?
- I live in Dallas and I remember 1983 and 2011.
- The Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) area was the first major metropolitan area in the ERCOT grid to be hammered.
- The North Central Texas region had the highest electricity demand in the ERCOT grid.
Why were ERCOT and Texas hit so hard?
Why weren’t power outages nearly as bad in the SWPP and MISO grids? It might just have something to do with coal.
On the other hand, the fuel source receiving most of the blame from the lamestream media, outperformed the neighboring grids by a wide margin.
The “failure” was the drop-off from 900,000 MWh/d on February 14 to 700,000 MWh/d on February 16. At this time, the explanations for this are anecdotal. Hopefully, the multitude of investigations will produce at least one dispassionate explanation for what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again.
Let’s Make Orwell Fiction Again!
[W]hile frozen wind turbines have contributed to the state’s energy crisis, that type of energy has only slightly underperformed against published expectations for winter output.
NBC News
Wind typically accounts for 20-25% of ERCOT’s winter generation. Winter, particularly February, is actually a good wind season. According to the EIA, in February 2019 wind achieved a 41% capacity factor in Texas. ERCOT data indicate a 31% capacity factor in February 2019. Up until February 8, wind was exceeding expectations… Then the bottom dropped out for 10 days.
Wind’s failure occurred a full week before the power outages… When 25% of your team doesn’t show up for the game, the phrase “only slightly underperformed” is, at the very least, Orwellian.
Natural gas, the state’s dominant energy source, has provided drastically less energy than expected, according to experts and industry data.
NBC News
This is akin to saying that the Avengers performed drastically less well than expectations against Thanos in Infinity War.
About 60% of Texas natural gas generation consists of combined cycle (CC) power plants, which can exceed 80% capacity factors. Gas turbines and other combustion generators can ramp up and down quickly, but have low capacity factors. From Feb. 7-12, natural gas ramped up 10-20% to >60% and was operating like it normally does in August.
| Technology | Time adjusted capacity (MW) | % | Ann | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
| Capacity Factors | |||||||||||||||
| Natural Gas – CC | 41,095.7 | 60% | 56.4 | 52.7 | 46.8 | 44.6 | 41.4 | 54.2 | 65.4 | 71.6 | 75.9 | 69.3 | 51.1 | 49.2 | 53.4 |
| Natural Gas – GT | 9,689.5 | 14% | 33.8 | 31.9 | 29.2 | 28.6 | 28.0 | 32.7 | 35.9 | 40.5 | 42.9 | 38.7 | 32.8 | 31.3 | 33.0 |
| Natural Gas – IC | 908.5 | 1% | 19.7 | 15.5 | 16.1 | 17.2 | 16.3 | 19.6 | 20.3 | 25.1 | 29.0 | 26.5 | 18.7 | 18.5 | 13.9 |
| Natural Gas – ST | 17,096.7 | 25% | 14.8 | 6.8 | 6.0 | 8.8 | 8.4 | 13.2 | 18.3 | 24.6 | 34.8 | 24.4 | 15.4 | 8.5 | 7.8 |
While natural gas generation should have been able to hold at a 60% capacity factor from Feb. 14-18, it clearly outperformed what is normally expected for this time of year.
Every part of the ERCOT system failed to some degree from Feb. 15-17.
The narrative has been that conservatives have unfairly blamed the power failure on wind power in order to prop up fossil fuels. The narrative is a straw man.
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.By Dionne Searcey
Feb. 17, 2021
As his state was racked by an electricity crisis that left millions of people without heat in frigid temperatures, the governor of Texas took to television to start placing blame.His main target was renewable energy, suggesting that the systemwide collapse was caused by the failure of wind and solar power.
“It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas as well as other states to make sure we will be able to heat our homes in the winter times and cool our homes in the summer times,” said Gov. Greg Abbott, speaking on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News. Other conservative talk-show hosts had already picked up the theme.
[…]
New York Times
Nothing in Gov. Abbott’s statement is false or misleading. While there were failures across the system, wind and solar failed almost totally a week before natural gas, coal and nuclear experienced their problems. On the coldest day since 1899, fossil fuels accounted for 83% of ERCOT’s electricity generation. Fossil fuels + nuclear accounted for 92%.
Orwellian efforts to exonerate wind & solar and place the blame on natural gas, coal and nuclear power are simply… Orwellian. Claiming that this is a “wake up call” for the United States to further degrade our energy infrastructure, because climate change is Orwellian on LSD and steroids…
White House climate czar to AP: Texas storm ‘a wake-up call’
The Associated PressWASHINGTON (AP) — The deadly winter storm that caused widespread power outages in Texas and other states is a “wake-up call” for the United States to build energy systems and other infrastructure that are more reliable and resilient in the face of extreme-weather events linked to climate change, President Joe Biden’s national climate adviser says.
[…]
“We’re going to push the clean energy, we’re going to push for better cars, but it’s also going to be about capturing the will of the public to actually face the challenges we’re facing today and meet them in a way that’s going to be beneficial to them,″ she said.
For example, Biden’s plans to provide 500,000 charging stations for electric cars and invest in battery technology are intended to make it easier for the public to participate in a clean-energy economy. “If we can lower that cost, and everybody knows they can get where they need to go when they need to get there” in an electric car, “we’ll get the kind of demand on the auto-sector side that we need,″ she said.
Similarly, if utilities are given the right incentives, they can meet Biden’s goal to have net-zero carbon emissions by 2035, McCarthy said. The head of a lobbying group for electric utilities said earlier this month that the 2035 date would be “an incredibly difficult situation to handle” for most U.S. providers.
[…]
Associated Press
Clearly, if the grid was devoid of natural gas & coal generation, more wind & solar generation, ERCOT was connected to SWPP & MISO (it already is connected to SWPP and Mexico) and we had 500,000 more EV charging stations… What? Winter Storm Younger Dryas wouldn’t have happened? The power failures wouldn’t have been so bad?
It’s time to make Orwell fiction again… MOFA!
Who, what, when, where and why?
Whatever happened to the 5 W’s? At this point we only know what, when and where. Yet, virtually all of the lamestream media are distorting the what and reporting conclusions about who and why based on anecdotal information and “expert” opinions.
We won’t know the “why” until we know exactly what failed:
- Wind
- Ice on blades?
- Frozen turbines?
- Poor wind conditions?
- Poor cold weather performance in general?
- Natural gas
- Frozen wellheads and damaged separators?
- Shut in production to avoid frozen wellheads and damaged separators?
- Frozen pipeline control valves and/or hydrate plugging?
- Low line pressure due to excess demand for heating and electricity?
- Compressors knocked offline by power outages?
- Frozen pipes in power plant cooling systems?
- Power plants offline for maintenance in low demand season?
- Coal
- Frozen pipes in power plant cooling systems?
- Frozen boilers?
- Ice covered coal stacks?
- Emissions restrictions?
- Power plants offline for maintenance in low demand season?
We won’t know the “who” until we know the “why”.
Even worse, the politicians have already claimed to know what the solutions are. And in almost every case, the media and politicians are focusing on what they think should have been done differently over the past 20-50 years, rather than on what could have been done differently over the past 20-30 days, particularly what could have been done differently from February 5-14, 2021.
On fact checking the helicopter deicing meme.
Most of the uses I’ve seen for that haven’t bothered to mention the image is years old, is from Sweden, and apparently used warm water, not typical glycol-based deicing fluid used on airplanes.
It’s still a “meme”…
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meme
I fully agree it’s a meme. I hate it when people post memes and don’t include the full story.
Then it wouldn’t be a meme.
Following this meme up with an explanation that Kim-Jong Un didn’t actually say this, would defeat the entire purpose of posting it.
I don’t know where you got that, David Middleton, but I love it.
I just Googled “meme”… 🙂
we don’t need Grumpy Cat’s life story
LOL!
Does anyone really need to know the”full story” behind why Keyboard cat is playing the keyboard? Or the “full story” of why Captain Picard is really putting his face in his palm? Or the “full story” behind the otherwise unrelated link that you click on that starts playing “Never Gonna Give You Up,”? No. Anyone that does clearly doesn’t understand memes.
The first time I saw the image was at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/01/23/saturday-silliness-wind-turbine-photo-of-the-year/ :
That’s likely a bit unfair. Note that this turbine didn’t “freeze up” but iced up due to rime ice in freezing fog. After deicing it could run normally (i.e. unreliably) for quite a while. Blades can be designed with heaters to melt frozen rain and rime, they may not have been in common use five years ago.
And other stupidities too!
Or you could just view it as a funny picture in dire need of a witty caption… 🙂
http://www.urbanhi.net/uhi-cities/houston-area.html
12,910 of the 16,293 Texas wind turbines (79%) were located in areas that had temperatures below freezing for more than 144 hours.
Interesting… The most productive wind turbines are on the Llano Estacado and Edwards Plateau.
Those were pretty well all in the frozen zone.
The Panhandle, where a lot of those turbines are, is actually in SWPP, not ERCOT.
Hello David,
Thank you for bringing to my attention the issue of Texas wind turbine locations in relationship to the boundary of the ERCOT region. I looked into the ERCOT boundary issue and discovered that in 2008 Texas began to establish Competitive Renewable Energy Zones (CREZ), which expanded the ERCOT boundary. The Panhandle is where a CREZ development was established, which includes 17 of the 26 counties you highlighted in red. The remaining 9 counties in the northern portion of the Panhandle which are not in the CREZ, hence not in ERCOT, contain 433 wind turbines.
I have completed additional analysis on the freezing temperatures in Texas in relationship to the location of wind turbines inside the ERCOT boundary and outside the ERCOT boundary. Of the 16,293 wind turbines in Texas, 15,727 (96.5%) are inside the ERCOT boundary. Of the 15,727 wind turbines inside the ERCOT boundary, 73% of the turbines were exposed to freezing temperatures for 8 to 11 days (192 to 264 hours), from Feb 7th to 21st.
I have created an interactive web map that allows for anyone to examine the details of my analysis. I have also provided links to the data sources that I used, which allows anyone to download the data and do further analysis. This can be found on my Urban Heat Island web site.
http://www.urbanhi.net/uhi-cities/houston-area.html
I don’t buy that it was merely warm water. Warm water freezes very fast due to low gas saturation, all they would be doing is making the problem worse. Maybe there was some salt in it, but it was probably deicing fluid.
See:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-it-true-that-hot-water/
Don’t need to see sciencymerican, I know from real world experience where our father told me not to water the animals in the winter with hot water because it would only freeze faster – I didn’t believe him so he showed me, and then later explained to us why in chem 101. Funny thing, that chem 101 prof also told us on the first day of class, just because someone has a PhD doesn’t mean they are smart.
As one who spent the whole time in the affected area, I appreciate the information and data in the article. It explains a lot. However, it misses one of the 5 Ws about natural gas that I believe was a significant factor. There have been several reports that natural gas pumping plants were shut down as part of the rolling blackouts that dominated our area. These shut downs prevented the stations from fully supplying gas to backup electric generators, delaying as much gas generator electricity production as possible. This was said to have significantly exacerbated the electricity shortage.
I should also point out that I have lived here for 14 winters, and have never had to use either of my two backup generators, one for the heat pump, the other for the lights and refrigerator. They are intentionally stored without fuel since gasoline deteriorates quickly in the hot summer temperatures. It turns out that they were essentially useless. The lack of snow removal equipment left the roads covered with icy ruts, and it was impossible for delivery trucks to resupply fuel to the gas stations in the area. All the ones I visited were closed.
Use avgas. You can store a jerrycan and It doesn’t deteriorate
I buy non-ethanol gas for storage. And always remember StaBil is your friend.
just for clarification, you don’t pump natural gas. you compress it. also, I think you mean natural gas PROCESSING plants.
What went down were compressor stations. They used to run on natural gas, but due to the “cost of carbon” regulations, new ones have been built with electric motors. These were shutdown due to load shedding. The gas going to power plants has a dew point at -20F max, and if they are from a cryo, -130F. The gas going to plants did not freeze up. Also, Texas export a lot of gas to Mexico and can get spec gas from storage or from the Gulf of Mexico. The problem was the loss of the compressor stations. WHY that happened needs to be investigated.
Don’t know your power equip usage for lawn and whatnot so suggestions about storing gas are a bit open. I recommend keeping 3 5 gallon cans of gas for backup generator and limit running it till you have an idea how long you will need it. Limited run to keep refrigeration and freezer and limited lighting, etc. Storing gas long term is a hassle, I rotate stored gas by using in mowers/weedeaters/leaf blowers during summer. Being up north our emergency needs are more likely in winter than summer. You in Texas need to worry more about hurricane season, this last outage not being really typical.
You should have a problem with the strange belief of the “interesting engineer” that helicopters are somehow justified tools in power generation
Well, the power-gen pin-wheels are just helicopter-blades placed vertically. 🙂
**In fact, carbon emissions generated from de-icing a turbine — like in the Alpine Helicopter video and image — saves two days’ worth of emissions, relative to coal power. **
So what?
Emissions numbers are only for bean counters. Emissions effect on temperatures is very small.
Like maybe even nonexistent. Nobody knows, nor are they able to find out.
don’t worry we’ll charge the electric de-icing helicopters with the wind turbines
then we’ll turn the helicopters sideways to make the turbines spin
I think that with the wide range of problems for just about all sources of electricity the cause is clear, the “energy market”. Clearly, energy producers had no incentive to prepare for such events as the polar vortex.
I do think that is where the conclusions will be.
ERCOT is an “energy only” market. They don’t pay for capacity. The “plan” was to allow spot prices to spike to astronomical levels as an incentive to maintain excess capacity for bellwether events.
These sorts of problems are expected in summer and normally only last a few hours a day, for a few days.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-13/texas-power-prices-briefly-surpass-9-000-amid-searing-heat
However, it wasn’t going to be possible to restructure ERCOT in the week leading up to the deep freeze.
re: “They don’t pay for capacity.”
Do check your facts, in particular, look up “non-spin reserve” which was (of course) dispatched that day …
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=“non-spin+reserve”+settlement&t=palemoon&ia=web
ERCOT doesn’t pay for the generators to deploy or maintain capacity.
The generators bid for opportunities to participate in the day ahead market. ERCOT accepts bid for energy and ancillary services, which includes non-spinning reserve.
Generators get paid if ERCOT accepts their bids.
Wind was, but turbines were not. Some you win some you loose, this time you lost.
“Some you win some you loose, this time you lost.”
Shouldn’t that be “this time you loost?” 🙂
TEXAS SNOW THAT DOESN’T MELT – WEATHER MODIFICATION TECHNOLOGY
videos – 1 min 8 secs + 44 secs + 2 mins 4 secs + 1 min 39 secs + 3 mins 16 secs
Have You Ever Seen Snow That Doesn’t Melt? Take a look at this…
https://mypatriotsnetwork.com/patriot/texas-snow-that-doesnt-melt-weather-modification-technology/
+
CHINA IS MASSIVELY EXPANDING ITS WEATHER-MODIFICATION PROGRAM – SAYING IT WILL BE ABLE TO COVER HALF THE COUNTRY IN ARTIFICIAL RAIN AND SNOW BY 2025
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-expanding-weather-modification-program-artificial-rain-snow-2025-2020-12
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GREG HUNTER/DANE WIGINGTON: WEATHER WARFARE IN TEXAS – SNOW THAT DOESN’T MELT
includes video – 36 mins 45 secs
The bottom line in regard to the flash freeze that Texas was just hit with, we can debate the agenda behind these operations, but the fact that this was not an act of nature is beyond scientific question. . .
https://usawatchdog.com/weather-warfare-in-texas-snow-that-doesnt-melt-dane-wigington/
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THE DIMMING – FILM PREVIEW – 4 mins 25 secs
What has happened to our once brilliant blue skies? How many have noticed the change? Why are skies now so often filled with the lingering, expanding, and sky covering remnants of jet aircraft dispersions?
It was inevitable, the “Chem Trail” crowd has shown up.
What caused polar vortex’s prior to the Chinese doing it?
really evil unicorns. possibly pegasus himself.
Cherith – K. O. O. K. (Keeper of odd Knowledge)
Thanks for the laugh
Hey, where can I get some of the ‘non-melting snow?’ I could use it for my eBay packing.
You left out nuclear. Apparently one plant was forced offline when return water from the cooling tower froze or control valves iced up.
I don’t know how northern cooling towers deal with that. Insulation? Partial blocking the air inlets at the base of the tower?
We know the “why” with nuclear power.
Texas (ERCOT) only has two nuclear power plants. Each power plant has two reactors. Comanche Peak Nuclear Generating Station is about 60 miles southwest of Dallas. The South Texas Project Nuclear Generating Station is between Houston and Corpus Christi. One of the STPNGS units went offline for couple of days due to low steam generator levels when two feedwater pumps shut down due to freezing water.
I meant to discuss nuclear in the post. The two nuclear power plants were operating at 102% of capacity before STPNGS Unit 1 shut down. Even with the loss of one reactor, nuclear power was still delivering 75% of capacity, far better than anything else in the grid.
Shouldn’t that be 102% of nominal or recommended capacity?
The EIA capacity factors are relative to summer capacity, which is lower than nameplate.
In Dec 2020, STPNGS had a 105% capacity factor relative to summer capacity. It was only 99% of nameplate capacity.
They have reactors that go to 11
Is that binary or decimal?
Don’t jump to conclusions. The incident was due to “loss of feedwater pumps.”. Were they also load shed? It might have been freezing, but the reasons have been vague. “Due to freezing weather”.
That never occurred to me… And it would almost be funny if 1/4 of the state’s nuclear power generation was taken offline due to load shedding.
Mr. Layman here.
I fairly recently learned what “load shedding” means when, in testing our new backup generators capable of supplying power to our plant that averages about 75 MGD, we shut down for about 4 hours.
Our SCADA system plus a few other things then had to run off our battery UPS. As it’s batteries run down, it’s programmed to shut down various terminals.
We learned the hard way that the priorities in what goes down first needs to be adjusted.
Our mainly used SCADA terminal went down before a PC next to it on our city network went down. We could surf the internet but we didn’t know what was happening in the plant from that room!
(Our SCADA is not connected to the city network or anything outside. No WiFi ect. If we need our vender to get in to fix something, via a phone call we need to switch on the modem for them to connect.)
It would be really weird (and dumb) if “load shedding” programming included shutting down something a power plant needed to stay online at that time in Texas.
“(Our SCADA is not connected to the city network or anything outside. No WiFi ect. If we need our vender to get in to fix something, via a phone call we need to switch on the modem for them to connect.)”
That sounds like a good idea. All public utilities should get disconnected from the internet. That way hackers can’t do you harm.
It wasn’t. See my previous comment. The reactor tripped due to a feedwater pump pressure signal error due to water freezing in pressure sensing lines.
It’s called “sarcasm.’
About 40 years ago I was the designer of the electrical system in a nuclear plant (not in Texas). I’m 99.9999+% sure that the pumps in question are powered by steam turbines. Any burp in feedwater flow triggers a shutdown. (Nuclear paranoia) There is an electric pump used during startup. It can’t be started fast enough to beat the trip + it’s probably only about 1/3rd capacity of the main pumps.
I spent some time as an electrical operator on Truxtun. I’m pretty sure the feedwater pumps were electric. Granted, a D2G is not a grid-scale reactor like the Westinghouse units used at the South Texas Project.
One thing I learned as an engineer was to listen to what the operators had to say. They were at the front lines so to speak and it was their profession to be observant.
The unit I worked on is a 1200MW BWR. The feed pumps are driven by 18MW steam turbines (about 24,000HP) and the startup pump is 5000HP (IIRC). It’s hard to imagine electric feed pumps for anything larger than about 250MW.
This was a time before there was a surface nuclear navy and many of the operators were former submariners. It took a while to convince them that the connections to the plant weren’t shore power 😉 They weren’t used to being the biggest unit on the power system. We landlubbers sometimes prefixed the plant name with ‘USS’.
Much respect and thanks to you for your service to our country.
About 40 years ago I was working on the EFIC (Emergency Feedwater Initiation and Control) system for the Crystal River 3 plant in Florida. (A Babcock & Wilcox plant…just like Three Mile Island.) (Oops!)
There was no “burp” in feedwater flow. The feedwater pumps tripped due to a bad pressure signal caused by ice forming in pressure sensing lines. The trip of the feedwater pumps tripped the reactor.
https://atomicinsights.com/south-texas-project-unit-1-tripped-at-0537-on-feb-15-2021/
I suspected as much.
My ‘burp’ was alluding to the fact that the controls don’t wait to see if the system recovers from a disturbance or if the disturbance is even real.
Losing feedwater is very high on the list of bad things for the reactor (or boiler in a fossil plant). Without feedwater, the reactor would have to ‘store’ the energy. That’s simply not in the cards. (Apparently this is a PWR which can blow off safety valves to dump energy from the secondary loop. That doesn’t work for long as you quickly run out of water to boil in the Hx.)
Thanks for the link. I assume the feed pumps are on the turbine deck beside the main turbine.
No, once the generators from a reactor plant (or any generating plant) are paralleled to the grid, load shedding elsewhere is not an issue. The generators at this point are powering all their own equipment. As to the loss of the feedwater (pump), this was due to a problem sensor on a sensor tube. This may have been due to the water in the sensor tube freezing up, or possibly just to the failure of the sensor itself. In either case, the feedwater pump(s) tripped off due to either a faulty input from the sensor, or the recognition that the sensor had failed.
Yes, the feedwater pumps shut down due to freezing water. Per this site, it was frozen water in pressure sensing lines that signal the feedwater pumps:
https://atomicinsights.com/south-texas-project-unit-1-tripped-at-0537-on-feb-15-2021/
Apparently in cold climates, some of the warm water is diverted to a circuit which uses the waste heat to prevent freezing/ice build up. Also applicable to the cooling circuit in coal and gas plants. Unlike winterising wind turbines, there is no loss of efficiency, but it has capital and maintenance costs which could only be recouped a few days each decade in Texas.
As I remember working for a utility, one of the coal plants on the system had a major de-rating or maybe a shutdown during a cold-wave because of condensate water freezing on the bottom air-inlet on a natural-draft cooling tower, pretty much blocking out the needed upward air-flow. As an engineer, I would think there’d be some method of bypassing some of the un-cooled (warm) condensate to “wash” the lower inlet-area to keep it from freezing up…
Happy to agree to wait on the answers to the questions posed in your (fairly) complete outline below your “Who, what, when, where and why? before doing the opining, accompanied by the cherry picked, incomplete graphs and editorializing that precedes it.
“Even worse, the politicians have already claimed to know what the solutions are.”
Which pol has proposed any? None in your post, but I’m open to refuting any I missed. Even the Abbott quote is not a “solution”. It is just a true, initial, statement of fact, that could be taken many different ways.
Cherry picked? What was left out?
Regarding the pols, try reading this part of the post and the linked AP article:
Orwellian efforts to exonerate wind & solar and place the blame on natural gas, coal and nuclear power are simply… Orwellian. Claiming that this is a “wake up call” for the United States to further degrade our energy infrastructure, because climate change is Orwellian on LSD and steroids…
Unless Czarina McCarthy is referring to coal and nuclear power with the phrase “energy systems and other infrastructure that are more reliable and resilient,” she is proposing a solution that will make the problem worse. The fact that the “reliable and resilient” was followed up with “in the face of extreme-weather events linked to climate change” is a pretty good indication that her (the Democrat Party) solution is to build less reliable, less resilient energy infrastructure… Particularly since the only specifics she mentioned were net-zero carbon emissions by 2035 and 500,000 more EV charging stations.
Now… It is possible to have resilient and reliable energy infrastructure and drastically reduce carbon emissions, possibly even getting to net-zero at some point in the not to distant future… But that would involve more coal and more natural gas with carbon capture (CCS/CCUS) and more nuclear power. Unless I missed it, none of those items were on the Czarina’s list.
Regarding pols proposing inane solutions, I did include this in my previous post on this subject:
Her reply was anodyne. Nothing about specific solutions to your problem. As for AOC, let’s make a deal. You don’t strawman AOC and I won’t strawman those who claim that it was the fault of wind tech for which you can find NO ONE who has ever claimed that it was fit for purpose to add the extra power required at the time.
Any ERCOT officials who didn’t plan for the low (but increasing) probability, ultra high impact, weather extreme you all went thru last month, should be run off. Doh! Too late! And part of that plan woulda/shoulda been understanding that you will have a few days to a week to have a forecast firm enough to wake up all of your contingent resources. Resources that should have already been pre-hardened.
We need the answers to these questions, per your directionally correct outline. You don’t have them, nor do I. I have general operational knowledge in this area, and you have your ideology, but we need to wait for the facts…
Larry the Cable Guy would say…
Ya know, I get the feeling that when bOb worked around tool pushers and drillers and roustabouts and pipefitters he got picked on a lot.
Another Seritan posting from afar. Been doing it since I was 14, with 2 Seabees hitches – one “E” and one “O” – in the mix. So, not so much. Would more likely apply to those posters who never served – especially not in the ‘bees..
Seritan? I must thank you for giving my vocabulary a workout. Not what I would expect from a roustabout!
Maybe he meant Serutan?
Roustabout? Got to be a pencil-neck.
Hats off to the Seabees! They accomplish miracles! Quickly!
I have seen plenty of big boys get thumped around on worksites, even college educated ones. Oh, and 12 years US Army, Artilleryman, FO and Air Assault. Worked offshore, drilling and production, onshore both plus pipeline. Rest of time spent in construction/remodeling/farming and residential maintenance.
Your prattling on about how great wind and solar are and how gas/oil/coal and nuclear are all going away is quite funny. Please do keep it up.
Folks, I do regret getting into this pig fight with 2hotel9. The only interesting part of his comment was his career back and forths. Oilfield work is great – if you save your boom $. 2hotel9 did not, hence his “…time spent in construction/remodeling/farming and residential maintenance.”
Mr. big: You say you regret it, then launch right back to it. I will remember that you don’t actually mean what you say.
And now you move on to dumping on anyone in the building trades, real classy. You going to crap on farmers, too? Clearly they are beneath you.
He was probably the Union Rep
It’s a little old but this had me in stitches at the time. Noit the 9 O’clock News UK satire programme.
https://youtu.be/FU-tuY0Z7nQ
The essential oneness of being Bob. I have worked several jobs with multiple Bobs, always fun.
STUPID comment, Bigbob. Just ask the simple question: “would a greater proportion of investment in wind and solar and a lesser proportion of investment in fossil fuels and nuclear have prevented this tragedy?”. If you think the answer is yes, there is something really wrong with you.
Here’s a clue for you – people who make an argument and back it up with real, unfudged data nearly always have more insight into the issue than people who don’t.
“ “would a greater proportion of investment in wind and solar and a lesser proportion of investment in fossil fuels and nuclear have prevented this tragedy?”.”
Well, no, and that’s why I never said it would. But I would not be surprised if a complete investigation found that investment in short term natural gas surge capacity would have been the best way by far to greatly reduce the losses.
Texas oil and gas runs on a low bid, just in time basis. And even given buddy buddy regulation is STILL is losing it’s ass. So, since wind is now generating returns greater than Texas natural gas now – the industry is eating it’s seed corn in terms of decaying oilfield service capacity, and is losing $ quarter after quarter while borrowing from loan sharks to pay dividends – I don’t the wind sector should have to subsidize it. Rather, if Texas rate payers want reliability, they will have to pay for it as do the rest of us…
There was plenty of short term natural gas surge capacity. Check out the map here:
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/66IkX/1/
Total daily sendout available from storage is 17.5bcf/day within Texas – provided you don’t cut the power to the compressors.
Even though you have provided no documentation of this, let’s assume (1) that electricity WAS curtailed to NG storage facilities, and that (2) they underperformed as a result. To solve, a PLAN would have included electricity PRIORITIZATION that could have easily take care of that. It would have then resulted in a big increase in e deliverability. That’s why we need an investigation.
FYI, Texas authorities have KNOWN they were short of natural gas storage capacity for years. The should buy a clue from California, which is quickly updating its system.
I can only refer to published sources. I have shown that storage provided some 156bcf in the South Central District (which also includes some neighbouring states) in the week of 12th-19th February according to the EIA. That’s over 22 bcf/day, or nearly as much as normal Texas gas production. You are the one making assumptions that the compressors being cut were at storage facilities. All we know is that supply was cut into some power stations. We do not know where in the system the compressors were blacked out. There is plenty to suggest that blackouts were instituted with little though about how they might affect the gas supply system, and in particular supply to power stations. We do have the Texas Railroad Commission’s declaration that power stations were #2 on the priority list after homes and hospitals for gas supply. I already posted that.
Wind is of course generating a $24/MWh production tax credit which is otherwise known as sucking on the subsidy teat.
“Wind is of course generating a $24/MWh production tax credit which is otherwise known as sucking on the subsidy teat.”
You seem to have lost a decimal point there somewhere, pard.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Subsidies-for-renewables-under-attack-in-Texas-13795289.php#:~:text=Wind%20generators%20are%20able%20to,kilowatt%20hour%20over%2010%20years.
Tiny, compared to the communized external costs of hydrocarbons..
You seem not to know the difference between MWh and kWh.
I think you lost a few braincells. $1c/kWh equates to $10/MWh. Didn’t you ever learn about units?
I do, and the miscount on the decimal point is mine. The bad news for you guys is that, since the average Texas e rate was $0.1186/kwH +/- 0.06 kwH, $0.023/kwH is still well within one standard deviation of overall Texas rates. I.e., STILL tiny compared to hydrocarbon extraction external cost communizations over the last many decades.
I’d be more than happy to lose these relatively tiny green start up helps if you all were willing to lose those. Deal?
What is a communized external cost of hydrocarbons?
“What is a communized external cost of hydrocarbons?”
Just one?
As I said, lose these, and I’m cool with a statistically insignificant, phasing out, boost for wind.
Deal?
No deal.
How much per downed eagle and raptor? Per bat?
What royalties is wind paying in Texas?
What privisions does it make for its clean up costs, including removing concrete foundations?
What about all the exotic materials mined with slave labour used in making wind turbines?
Bribery…don’t even start on that one.
:”How much per downed eagle and raptor? Per bat?”
Hydrocarbon based electricity gen ends up killing many more/GwH produced than wind. FYI, even that has been reduced by the simple expedience of painting patterns on the blades.
“What royalties is wind paying in Texas?”
Royalties are based on extraction from property owned. So, none.
“What privisions does it make for its clean up costs, including removing concrete foundations?”
The “privisions” will be that they are removed/buried. They are inert, unlike most hydrocarbon waste. MANY orders of magnitude smaller of a problem. FYI, blades are also inert. Mostly silica and metal. What’s natural silica? Sand. They will be landfilled – BFD.
“What about all the exotic materials mined with slave labour used in making wind turbines?”
Finally, an actual issue. This needs to be dealt with immediately, including any toxic working conditions involved. We’ll do the same for conflict hydrocarbon production/transportation, ok?
“Bribery…don’t even start on that one.”
Same here. So, I’ll just show you the iceberg tip.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/788056/us-oil-and-gas-lobbying-spend-by-party/#:~:text=Between%201990%20and%202020%2C%20the,on%20lobbying%20for%20political%20parties.&text=In%202020%2C%20oil%20majors%20such,went%20to%20the%20Democratic%20Party.
Just look at the subsidies and tax breaks
https://www.irglobal.com/article/tax-incentives-for-renewable-energy/
COMPLETE FANTASY BS !! Unsupported by any evidence
AGW cost = ZERO
1… Do you have any empirical scientific evidence for warming by atmospheric CO2?
2… In what ways has the global climate changed in the last 50 years , that can be scientifically proven to be of human released CO2 causation?
Again, the big oily blob refuses to look at the MASSIVE BENEFITS of the use of FOSSIL FUELS
EVERY LARGE SOCIETY in the world has been TOTALLY DEPENDENT on fossil fuels for their development and continued existence.
Even the big greasy blob is TOTALLY RELIANT OF FOSSIL FUELS for its very existence.
The BENEFIT is SEVERAL MAGNITUDE MORE than any of his petty perceived and imaginary issues.
Well, let me start with my ad hominem response: What a stoopid statement! Oil and gas (and especially nuclear) have become uncompetitive against subsidized wind and solar. And where do subsidies come from? Well, ultimately your tax dollars, but they’re doled out by government(s). So oil, gas and nuclear are no longer competing against “alternative” energy, they’re competing against the government, and government is always an unfair competitor. So then trying to throw in buddy-buddy regulation, well you win the irony award for the day, because the regulation(s) nowadays are all favoring wind and solar, even when they have to cheat to do it (such as employing a Levelized Cost Of Electricity, but that’s a different story, or exempting both wind and solar from the Endangered Species Act, or… oh, hell, do your own damn research for a change, you clearly haven’t done any in concocting this idiotic statement).
Clearly, your screen name was picked from, what, under Orwell’s rules from 1984, so that anything from the government is always given a name the exact opposite of its alleged purpose?
I don’t think saying it was a stupid statement is an ad hom. saying he was stupid for making that statement would be.
Even really bright people can say some silly or stupid things.
“So oil, gas and nuclear are no longer competing against “alternative” energy, they’re competing against the government, and government is always an unfair competitor.”
Well said.
They are also competing against a CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming) ideology with no basis in fact.
I think it would have been, and remains, the most cost effective action is: insulate things that must remain fluid in cold weather.
All the failures relate to things that can be mitigated except one: the wind turbines cannot be protected from freezing. Too many, too expensive, too late. Everything else that froze can easily be upgraded. Immediately. Probably in the next month. Then it won’t happen again.
“All the failures relate to things that can be mitigated except one: the wind turbines cannot be protected from freezing.”
They can be protected from subfreezing temps, but much less so, from icing. This is common knowledge, and counting on them in subfreezing icing weather is a run offable boner.
“Everything else that froze can easily be upgraded. Immediately. Probably in the next month. Then it won’t happen again.”
IMO, you’re mostly right. The exception is natural gas storage, should the investigation find it is lacking. It can also be increased, but will take longer.
Texas needs a good, fast, investigation, with no malingering if Paxton starts finding things that don’t comport with Abbott’s prejudgments. And then the will to execute the recommends.
Texas needs to STOP RELYING on UNRELIABLES.
GREATLY INCREASE the percentage of RELIABLE COAL-FIRE ELECTRICITY. (they have plenty of coal)
Weather harden the gas supplies so that cold doesn’t cause supply issues.
And certainly don’t rely on wind and solar for pumping that gas.
The blame for the WHOLE DEBACLE can be place totally at the feet of the scientifically unsupportable ANTI-CARBON agenda.
Easy money with subsidies and not being required to supply reliable power 😉
Clown show indeed Bob
“Well, no, and that’s why I never said it would. But I would not be surprised if a complete investigation found that investment in short term natural gas surge capacity would have been the best way by far to greatly reduce the losses.”
No doubt about that.
I wonder: Had the reliable generators, the coal, natural gas and nuclear been at 100 percent production, would this have made up for the windmills dropping out of the system? Or would the system still be stressed?
Does Texas have enough spare reserve to take over when all the windmills go down?
If they don’t, then they need to get to that position.
Ken Paxton and the state legislators .need you badly for their investigations. No sarc – they do. Now, it doesn’t presently appear that it is that likely that “all” of the windmills would go down from a likely enough weather extreme, but you are asking critical questions.
Bigger pic, the look into needs to be non pol. Experts in the multiple industries involved.
Ken Paxton and the state legislators need the experts at WUWT. 🙂
Texas needs to STOP RELYING on UNRELIABLES.
At the moment they have UNRELIABILITY BUILT INTO THE GRID via wind and solar.
They need to GREATLY INCREASE the percentage of RELIABLE COAL-FIRE ELECTRICITY. (they have plenty of coal)
Weather harden the gas supplies so that cold doesn’t cause supply issues.
And certainly don’t rely on wind and solar for pumping that gas.
The blame for the WHOLE DEBACLE can be place totally at the feet of the scientifically unsupportable ANTI-CARBON agenda.
Strawman AOC?? Seriously?? She IS a strawman!
At least the brain part.
Part of her GND was a guaranteed income for those “not willing to work”.
She’d have paid people to NOT shovel snow?
Anodyne: like a placebo or sop. Something of no real intrinsic value except to change focus from the con mans hands. Thank you AOC for nothing. Thank you bob for standing up for ‘nothing.’
“Anodyne: like a placebo or sop. Something of no real intrinsic value except to change focus from the con mans hands.”
Sorry Clyde, not the def. Try this.
“not likely to provoke dissent or offense; inoffensive, often deliberately so.”
Go for “something”, Clyde….
So, utterly pointless..
meaningless “blah…”
Just like your posts. !
Just look at the crazy variability of wind power before the event. How do you prepare?
“Just look at the crazy variability of wind power before the event. How do you prepare?”
Not at the scale under discussion. Not the kind of variability under discussion. Any authority that assumed such a nominal loss of wind power in the face of conditions THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN PLANNED FOR deserves to have their spurs hung up for them.
Just hope that Ken Paxton’s investigation won’t go full Kris Kobach and fade away when it becomes obvious that the results won’t validate prejudgments of the Texas ruling class.
You can read Paxton’s CIDs here
https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/ag-paxton-issues-cids-ercot-and-other-companies-following-dangerous-winter-storm-power-failures
The flavour is consumer protection rather than trying to work out how the grid might be run better. He is looking at compliance with the 2011 recommendations on winterisation, and on communications between the parties.
He has not required ERCOT to produce a technical report based on control room SCADA data – which I would have looked for. That would allow a timeline of events to be established and provide a way of calling companies out if they lie about what happened or what they did. He does not seem to have looked at the gas sector, where I suspect there is a lot of information to unravel. Some gas utility bills are also going to be astronomic, and clearly there are operational issues for pipelines etc.
Still, it is a start.
Thoughtful, thanks. I agree that the investigation should be much more catholic. Expanding on my comment of 2 minutes ago, the look into should:
Texas needs to STOP RELYING on UNRELIABLES.
GREATLY INCREASE the percentage of RELIABLE COAL-FIRE ELECTRICITY. (they have plenty of coal)
Weather harden the gas supplies so that cold doesn’t cause supply issues.
And certainly don’t rely on wind and solar for pumping that gas.
The blame for the WHOLE DEBACLE can be place totally at the feet of the scientifically unsupportable ANTI-CARBON agenda.
No, her reply was that of a mentally stunted child. !
Her comment was the absolute OPPOSITE of any sane or rational comment
What happened in Texas is what happens when you DO listen to the idiotic anti-science, anti-engineering,anti-LIEF, anti REALITY greenie ACDS agenda.
Without bending and grovelling to that farcical agenda, they would still have has a large proportion of COAL fired power, and the situation of gas needing to massively ramp-up to cover for missing wind energy, would not have been anywhere near as bad.
Hi,
I’m interested in conversing with people who “…have general operational knowledge in this area,…”
My email is my last name and first name (all one word) at Gmail.
Best wishes,
Mark Bahner
Flattered Mark, but wouldn’t be prudent in this day and age. I’ll be happy to back and forth here. It’s my favorite subject, and WUWT puts the jack in thread jacking, so why not? But I don’t need to risk clicking my way into buying google $250 gift cards for any distressed relatives.
Also, a few search terms should help you meet up with some experienced, credentialed oil field folks.
I have done some work on resiliency, and sustainability. For resiliency, renewables don’t count, neither wind nor solar. Why? They’re not dispatchable. i.e., neither wind nor solar can be turned on when you need them, they both work only when they wanna. So imagine you have a job to do, and you get your schedule for the week, and you decide that schedule just doesn’t work for you, and you’re going to work only when you wanna, not according to the schedule. How long do you think you would still have a job?
That’s what I thought.
The benefits of them more than make up for their variability. But this subject is not about that. We KNOW what wind can and can not do. Any organization that aksed it to do more than that should be reorganized. The foci of Paxton’s investigation should be on:
I predict either Paxtonian/Abbottian investigatory “guidance” as the findings move away from their Texas PC’isms, or maybe trying to make the findings disappear, per Kris Kobach. Either way, they will try and sell Texas out, and Texans searching for the truth need to fight back..,
“What needs to be done now”
Texas needs to STOP RELYING on UNRELIABLES.
GREATLY INCREASE the percentage of RELIABLE COAL-FIRE ELECTRICITY. (they have plenty of coal)
Weather harden the gas supplies so that cold doesn’t cause supply issues.
And certainly don’t rely on wind and solar for pumping that gas.
The blame for the WHOLE DEBACLE can be place totally at the feet of the scientifically unsupportable ANTI-CARBON agenda.
“benefits of them more than make up for their variability” Which benefits? The not producing electricity benefit?: The killing wild birds benefit? The dead people from massive power outage benefit? Which one makes you so happy?
big oily blod has just successfully pointed out that ,,,
…. “expectations” for RELIABLE energy from wind…
ARE EXTREMELY LOW.
Well done, blob !!
Great to see you are now advocating RELIABLE supplies like COAL and well maintained GAS infrastructure.
Not advocating for coal, Fred. It’s dying a natural death, and our job will be to spend cubic $ cleaning up after it.
As with every other extraction in the US, those costs were shifted from the sourcers who voluntarily assumed them, to the rest of us. The less bad news is that coal clean up, as bad as it is, will end up an order of magnitude cheaper than gas and oil clean up.
Mr. big: AOC’s “anodyne” response was still an answer to your question, calling it “anodyne” is non-responsive. Just admit you were wrong.
Oh, then you mock someone for a decimal error that was in fact YOUR error. Why didn’t you refer to yourself as “pard”? Can’t take it?
We know you don’t mean what you say, but your comments are worth LESS than zero. Your talk of the costs of “clean up” from gas, oil and coal demonstrates you are not a serious commenter. You are making the CB’s look bad.
WELL YOU SHOULD BE !
“What needs to be done now”
Texas needs to STOP RELYING on UNRELIABLES.
GREATLY INCREASE the percentage of RELIABLE COAL-FIRE ELECTRICITY. (they have plenty of coal)
Weather harden the gas supplies so that cold doesn’t cause supply issues.
And certainly don’t rely on wind and solar for pumping that gas.
The blame for the WHOLE DEBACLE can be place totally at the feet of the scientifically unsupportable ANTI-CARBON agenda.
I can assure you that many in the SWPP lost power for over a day too. It wasn’t as bad because we’re prepared for frigid temperatures with water lines buried 3′ down and wrapped when they enter into the home above ground.
And you might be able to add to the possible list of ‘why’
I meant to include that one.
Wind turbines froze in the SWPP and MISO grids as well, but they rely more on coal than gas, so suffered fewer blackouts. However, SWPP wasn’t able to help out ERCOT due to its own outages.
In 2019, turbines were shut down in ND when the ambient temperature reached -20 C, as they’re programmed to do. US turbines don’t have the cold weather packages fitted on Canadian wind power generators.
Utilities may have to charge higher rates to winterize wind turbines and other energy infrastructure, and to stockpile coal and gas.
Good posting of actual data, David. I like the attitude that “it didn’t happen because we planned for cold weather and no problem”, when it did happen, and it could happen again. By the way, when does this Global Warming deal kick in? I see Cerro La Plata from my office window and it is loaded with snow, which is strange because the southern hemisphere Feb. is like August up north. The grape growers report a 15 % loss due to early freeze, now then say the cold rain and dark skies slowed down maturing of the crop.
And I see the first of the many lawsuits was filed in Houston this morning to absolve one of the entities from $1.8B in “peak pricing” charges. As usual, the attorneys will be making money through all this.
Aside from the cold temperature effects on wind power outputs, what were the wind inputs during the storm.
Weather driven intermittent wind turbines can fail if the wind speed is too low or too high.
I have seen little data on the actual wind speeds and reliability during the crisis?
Was the wind blowing? Was it blowing too hard?
Or was the problem with icing?
That helicopter spraying de-icer was a couple years ago in Sweden I think, not Texas.
“I have seen little data on the actual wind speeds and reliability during the crisis?Was the wind blowing?”
I haven’t heard much about the wind speeds, although I did see one report that referred to windmills not having any wind in Texas at certain points during this disaster.
Underneath a huge, high-pressure weather system like the one that made up the arctic cold front, the winds will fall off to almost nothing for days at a time, and, although I don’t have the numbers, I think it was a big problem for windmills.
It would be instructive if someone could get the figures for windmill production for each State during this arctic cold blast and figures for how the winds were blowing at the time. The cold temperatures were not the only problem.
I think those figures would go a long way towards explaining what we have just experienced.
I have not heard of any reports of freezing being a problem for coal and natural gas plants located north of Texas. The SPP’s problems may be mainly with their windmill production.
Most of the natural gas infrastructure did not fail. If it were the cold that froze up pipes and such, wouldn’t most of them have been expected to fail, as did wind?
More likely power management was more to blame. Shut down flow and the flow will freeze”.
“In fact, carbon emissions generated from de-icing a turbine — like in the Alpine Helicopter video and image — saves two days’ worth of emissions, relative to coal power.”
The theory here is that if a particular turbine happens to be running and providing an unpredictable amount of power instead of frozen at zero, a coal-powered electricity plant will use exactly that much less coal?
Been around a while but still funny:
Edited to add H/T Peter Grant
How is that States can shut down churches, restaurants, stores, and schools because of an emergency – but they couldn’t overrule the EPA on emission permits during one?
“How is that States can shut down churches”
States can’t legallly shut down churches, according to the First Amendment.
Legally doesn’t seem to matter anymore.
States certainly CAN shut down churches, especially when said churches quietly comply.
“Legally doesn’t seem to matter anymore.”
That’s true. We have a lot of petty dictators running around lording it over people.
OT a bit but related to carbon; Illawarra coke production in Oz. Interesting! (I’m a mechanical engineer)
Very cool video.
The Bulli Seam of the Illawarra coal group is a spectacular creation of nature. It challenges the mind to comprehend how such a thing has come to be but there it is a ~ 260 million year-old artifact of the great southern super continent of Gondwana which split apart into Antarctica, South America, Africa, Arabia, and India. India moved rapidly north and collided with Asia to form the Himalaya in more recent geologic deep time.
The earth is dynamic, the climate is dynamic. Oh what stories the rocks do tell.
And then the natural gas plant failed, because it wasn’t winterised, just as Texas was warned in 2011.
(and I say again: nobody else’s wind turbines freeze, so you didn’t winterise those either, when you could have and should have).
Still waiting for proof an all fossil fuel grid would have handled this…
You leave out the reduction of “fossil fuels” power production…., care to be honest about it?
Sunsettommy,
You need to be more careful; you almost used honesty and griff in the same sentence!
Yes, and it is all ERCOT’s fault. Oh, and your proof is all over America, moron. It is handled every winter.
Prior to so many wind mills and solar panels, the fossil fuel grid handled this kind of stuff every year.
Everyone’s wind turbines in the path of Winter Storm Younger Dryas failed…
?w=1110
?w=1110
?w=1110
Wind & solar (52% of the winter capacity) generated 11% of the electricity from Feb. 8-18. Natural gas, coal & nuclear (48% of the winter capacity) generated 89% of the electricity from Feb. 8-18.
% of Winter Capacity % of Generation Feb 8-18 Natural Gas 20% 60% Coal 20% 19% Nuclear 7% 48% 9% 89% FF & Nuke Wind 45% 10% Solar 7% 52% 1% 11% Wind & Solar ERCOT 100% 100%
David, I still figured out how to post a video clip but you might want to add this to your repertoire.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/test-2/#comment-3148776
Hmmm … somehow a tree on a powerline showed up.
Try this?
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-Oo6oihTrE&w=1109&h=484%5D
Winter, particularly February, is actually a good wind season. According to the EIA, in February 2019 wind achieved a 41% capacity factor in Texas. ERCOT data indicate a 31% capacity factor in February 2019. Up until February 8, wind was exceeding expectations…
Good wind season—–41% Say What?
Griff
Why do you even bother with David, he crushes you every single time.
BTW have you check out the artic ice? your death spiral is finally here!!!!
You could pretty much replace “David” in your post with the name of any other post Griff has gone up against. David Just does it with style (and memes).
Even when shown the door, you don’t have the integrity to say, “Thanks for the party!”
You don’t acknowledge when you are wrong, or apologize for inappropriately insulting others. As an example, you have never apologized for saying the Susan Crockford is not a scientist.
You have all the answers, except when you don’t, which is most of the time! Mark Twain observed that “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.” Yet, you apparently never show embarrassment at being so wrong that most laugh at you. What does that say about you?
“As an example, you have never apologized for saying the Susan Crockford is not a scientist.”
Worth pointing out. An apology is in order.
I have pointed it out several times and he/she/it has not acknowledged. That is why I say he knows no shame.
by not winterized you mean used grid power for compressors instead of gas for fuel.
All across the north grids work perfectly fine. You really are getting dumber with each post.
Texas needs to STOP RELYING on UNRELIABLES.
GREATLY INCREASE the percentage of RELIABLE COAL-FIRE ELECTRICITY. (they have plenty of coal)
Weather harden the gas supplies so that cold doesn’t cause supply issues.
And certainly don’t rely on wind and solar for pumping that gas.
The blame for the WHOLE DEBACLE can be place totally at the feet of the scientifically unsupportable ANTI-CARBON agenda.
As per above, even if all gas/coal/nuclear was operating at full capacity, the excess demand would still have caused blackouts. And for also reasons listed above, there wasn’t more fossil fuels built because they cannot compete against subsidized solar.
The proof is axiomatic my friend.
Isn’t the real point of all this what would have happened if wind and solar were the only source of electricity? How many people would have died? Battery backup that would have been required is beyond comprehension.
That’s the real issue right here folks.
Based on real -time experience in Texas, how the faark is 100% “renewables” EVER going to support civilization anywhere, anytime?
All of them.
Not all of them, some would have flown off to Cancun 😉
So, basically, ERCOT set the system up to fail and then just waited for it to happen. Took awhile, that said they got the result they were after, now they will screech for more money. Well, those who have not already resigned will. The resignees will be setting up gofundme pages to pay their legal expenses.
NBC strikes again!!
Texas power suppliers are going under.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/texas-electricity-firm-files-bankruptcy-064724456.html
Wow, ERCOT created the situation which caused the crisis and is billing everyone else billions of dollars for what they created. What a sweet grift!
It’s not quite that simple…
ERCOT has the power to escalate spot wholesale prices up to $9.000/MWh when demand is exceptionally high and/or generation capacity is exceptionally low. In the past, the price has occasionally spiked that high for a few hours a day, for a few days, during summer heatwaves. In this case, wholesale prices were pegged at the statutory maximum for the better part of a week.
ERCOT bills the retailers for the wholesale price offered to generators. ERCOT then pays the generators. It’s been a very good year for generators…
Revenues due to generators YTD are larger than the full years of 2018-2020 combined.
Retailers have 7 days to pay their invoices or get suspended from the system. Some of the off-brand retailers offered plans where consumers paid a flat fee and the wholesale price. Griddy was one of these companies. They were the one sending out bills to consumers for up to $17,000. Griddy’s customers didn’t pay their bills. Griddy didn’t pay ERCOT. Griddy was suspended and all of their customers were switched to other retailers.
re: “Texas power suppliers are going under.”
NOT a supplier, a middle-man, a ‘transporter’ who acts as a retailer to the public. Capiche?
I think we may see financial stress in several quarters, not just REPs (Retail Electricity Providers). If ERCOT can’t pay generators who have large bills for gas then those generators may go bankrupt too. Whether distribution companies escape unscathed will depend on how well they were set up to manage the risks. Whilst many gas producers and traders will have done well, there will be those who got exposed to price volatility and will be wiped out.
I said “supplier”, not “generator”. Huge difference. I get multiple calls every month from suppliers that offer cheaper rates than PSEG or JCP&L, who are the generators. The companies are also required to mention the “compare” number, to compare against the “suppliers” should I want to switch, which I don’t. None of those companies are called “middle men” or “transporters”. Yes, I think I understand it. Where did you get those terms from?
As I mentioned in a different post, I only hope that the frozen turbines, requiring grid-supplied power for multiple reasons when not spinning, are also stuck paying those huge bills.
Regarding the 5Ws, I would add:
Nuclear –
Frozen elements in power plant cooling systems?
Lack of redundancy in critical sensors?
Inadequate cold-weather design criteria?
re: “Frozen elements in power plant cooling systems?
Lack of redundancy in critical sensors?
Inadequate cold-weather design criteria?”
Read the report from 2011, that report covers it all …
In Mn they have 2 nuclear power plants from the 70s…safe reliable power in all temps.
For nuclear power plants, all of these items are the responsibility of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Why were they not addressed at a national level?
No where has it been established that there was any “freezing” involved. Just vague statements. Likely the pumps were load shed when the wind turbines froze up.
As I wrote previously – Load shedding can not possibly be an issue in a power generation plant running paralleled to the grid. Once the power plant generators are online and paralleled, for all practical purposes, that plant is supplying all of its own electrical power. A load shed event somewhere else will have no impact.
As for the sensor in question at STP Unit 1 – the loss of the feedwater pump(s) was due to a problem sensor on a sensor tube. This may have been due to the water in the sensor tube freezing up, or possibly just to the failure of the sensor itself. In either case, the feedwater pump(s) tripped off due to either a faulty input from the sensor, or the recognition that the sensor had failed.
HDDTTWA?
“However, wind turbine installations don’t go up without substantial investment — which means planning for the kind of volatile weather much of the world is already seeing for the first time.”
First off, a lot of money does not correlate with getting something that will actually work.
Second, how do they plan for weather they already have that they are seeing for the first time? This is illogical. In no place equivalent to Texas has they had this effect in winter because the N American continent is a special geographical situation.
Limited wind generation was mostly about limited wind speeds. Unfreezing those turbines that froze, or whose blades were coated in a dangerous layer of ice would not have helped. Check out the windspeeds in Wind Turbine Central, a.k.a. Abilene, TX:
https://weatherspark.com/h/d/145819/2021/2/8/Historical-Weather-on-Monday-February-8-2021-at-Abilene-Regional-Airport-Texas-United-States#Figures-WindSpeed
Use the right arrow on the chart to view subsequent days. Bear in mind that wind turbines produce nothing at all in winds below their cut-in speed (10-15kph, 7-10mph, 2.5-3.5m/sec, and not a whole lot more until speeds get somewhat higher: maximum output requires typically over 10m/sec, 36kph, 22mph.
Check out other wind sites: Lubbock, Amarillo, along the coast from Corpus Christi to Brownsville. It’s much the same story.
The real killer is that total ERCOT wind generation was just 649MW in the hour to 8 p.m. on the 15th – right when demand would have been at around 75GW according to ERCOT’s forecast. Even if half the output was lost to freezing, it really would not have been much use, and a very poor return on >30GW of nominal capacity – or on spending money on weatherising it. Wind is simply not worth the candle, and in planning you must allow that it will fail completely just when it is most needed – no probability based calculation that says on average you could expect 6 GW even in a cold snap. That theory and model has been disproved.
Just an FYI, add frozen instruments / instrument lines to your list for gas and coal power. It’s amazing what happens when the wrong critical transmitter freezes.
A couple of points about gas supply: a very large chunk of gas supply actually came from storage drawdown. In the US South Central region, withdrawals were 55bcf in the week to 5th February, 89bcf in the week to 12th February, and 156bcf in the week to 19th February. 156bcf has an energy content of about 45TWh.
When used for electricity generation, efficiency of conversion will vary between 60% for a modern CCGT operating in stable fashion at design capacity and about 40% for an open cycle peaker unit. Perhaps 5-6% of energy sent out will be used in pumping it to users with furnaces and stoves – maybe less to well located power stations. What is quite clear is that natgas storage puts any talk of batteries, pumped storage and other green boondoggles completely in the shade.
It should be noted that the gas in storage is dry gas, only subject to liquefaction at -160C, and not subject to hydrate formation. This map show gas in storage by county in Texas as at Nov 30th (the latest data from Texas Railroad Commission), which gives a fairly good idea of storage capacities:
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/66IkX/1/
We should note that gas supply was adequate to fire some 44GW of generation at peake demand at 8 p.m. on 14th February. It was only subsequently that supply became a problem. So although production was down due to freeze-offs and voluntary precautionary shut-ins at wellheads, supply was being made good from storage and from re-routing about 4bcf/day from LNG liquefaction to the market. It was ony when power was cut to pipelines that supply really became a problem.
…Orwell on LSD and steroids!
Is that how the DemoKKKrats came up with the Equality Act, or is that bigoilbob’s go to choice for breakfast?
Thanks for trying spread some light on a self-induced tragedy, and lightening the tragedy with some humor! That the lame stream urinalists and libtard pols are so loudly blaming fossil fuels for the near disaster of Winter Storm Younger Dryas indicates that even they have no faith in their Green Weenie solutions! They just parrot the party line so they can continue with the slush funds and bribery schemes that predominate in DC now! To be honest, some of them seem to be too stupid to know any better, but let’s not talk about AOC, let’s look at solutions!
Do you think ERCOT can be fixed or even be improved enough to avoid further mishaps like what just occurred? How many more “events” will have to take place before the public wakes up to the horrendously expensive scam that is Unreliable Energy!
re: “Do you think ERCOT can be fixed”
WRONG question; this was a PUCT and QSE (generator) failure. Read the 2011 report again.
SEARCH for this title: Report on Outages and Curtailments During the Southwest Cold Weather Event of February 1-5, 2011
_Jim,
Don’t you think that ERCOT exacerbated the problem? Whether or not the problems with Unreliable generators can be solved will depend on government and public policies that are still in flux and seem to be fighting the last war still!
What if there isn’t another extreme cold event for 15 years or more? Just about anything could seem to be solving the problem until the problem surfaces again. Nobody now in charge is likely to have to worry about it again.
“What if there isn’t another extreme cold event for 15 years or more?”
I would bet money that a large high-pressure system will settle over Texas within the next 15 years. It might happen this summer.
When the high-pressure system settles in, the winds don’t blow, and the windmills dont work.
Persistent high-pressure systems occur all the time and are involved in the most severe weather extremes such as cold waves and heat waves.
Persistent high-pressure systems make windmills incapable of successfully supplying base load electricity 100 percent of the time for any grid they are on.
Windmills have to have reliable backup power generation like natural gas for 100 percent of their output, otherwise windmills put the whole electrical grid in danger of failing.
Using helicopters to spray de-icing fluid on windmills is extremely inefficient. The helicopter burns more energy simply staying airborne than the windmill could produce in a day once it starts rotating in the wind. The better solution is to ramp up power production by natural gas during the cold snap, then let solar power melt the ice during the next warm front in Texas, and the windmills will start up naturally.
Another false meme from the ignorant media is that the gas-fired power plants couldn’t start their electric compressors. Huh? Natural-gas turbines have an inlet air compressor, which is connected to the same drive shaft as the power generation turbine, so that some of the output power is used to drive the inlet air compressor. As long as the flow of natural gas to a turbine continues, colder inlet air will not prevent the compressor from operating, and why would anyone shut the turbine down during a period of peak demand?
By the way, since cold air is denser than warm air at the same pressure, the volume flow rate through the compressor would be lower for the same mass flow rate in cold conditions than in warm, making the compressor more efficient!
re: “Another false meme from the ignorant media is that the gas-fired power plants couldn’t start their electric compressors.”
You seem to be conflating some things too, like the compressor stations situated at various points in the nat gas system that are now electric powered vs used to be nat gas-engine powered compressors.
One has only to understand that Wind is intermittent, meaning is CANNOT be counted on, to know that it is not any part of a solution to make a more stable grid. Solar is worse, it cannot be counted on in the day and can be counted on not to be available at night.
Peak power demand requires power that is there when you need it…not when the weather is cooperating. It must come from fossil fuels or nuclear – end of story. For fossil fuels, there needs to be enough fuel stockpiled to survive on for several days.
Texas should get behind an effort to start dismantling Wind Turbines as they have already proven to be a costly failure. No more should be built. The same with any centralized solar generation, get rid of it. The easiest way to start down this path is to remove the subsidies that intermittent power generation counts on to make fat profits.
re: “Texas should get behind an effort to start dismantling Wind Turbines as they have already proven to be”
You have NO grasp of the reality of the situation and ‘market’ (EVERYBODY has their hand out for ‘graft’) in Texas that enables this nonsense, IOW, that horse left the barn a LONG time ago.
Exactly, unreliable forms of energy like wind and solar get the subsidies
re: “Why was Texas, ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) in particular, so unprepared for the onslaught of frigid weather?”
I read the above and have to think, what was Dave Muddle-minded’s thinking? It is up to each generator (QSE) on the Texas grid to prepare their equipment for cold weather …
Reading the report after the LAST event in 2011 we know the answer … but does Dave know?
It’s not a matter of ERCOT preparing equipment for cold weather. It was a matter of ERCOT not taking the storm seriously enough and not shedding load early or quickly enough…
https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/or-abbott-gives-2-reasons-why-ercot-is-responsible-not-a-scapegoat-for-storm-outages/
On February 14, it was too late to winterize anything. But there was still time to initiate rotating outages.
ERCOT doesn’t have regulatory power. That resides with the PUC and state legislature. All of them basically ignored recommendations made after similar, but smaller scale, problems in 1989 and 2011.
https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/investigates/30-years-of-warnings-to-winterize-texas-power-plants-yet-they-still-froze-will-austin-finally-require-it/287-20540908-dbce-4e17-90a3-19aa4f4f4690
Bingo
Texas needs to STOP RELYING on UNRELIABLES.
GREATLY INCREASE the percentage of RELIABLE COAL-FIRE ELECTRICITY. (they have plenty of coal)
Weather harden the gas supplies so that cold doesn’t cause supply issues.
And certainly don’t rely on wind and solar for pumping that gas.
The blame for the WHOLE DEBACLE can be place totally at the feet of the scientifically unsupportable ANTI-CARBON agenda.
“…Wind was operating as well as expected” Really? Ask the people on the ground who played Texas blackout Baseball: The facts: # players on payroll: Wind-28755, Nuclear-5153. # players in uniform: Wind-7070, Nuclear-5153. World Series batting average: Wind-0.110, Nuclear-0.800. Who do you want on your team?
If you were to hire workers for a job would you hire unreliable workers like solar and wind?
From the article: “Why weren’t power outages nearly as bad in the SWPP and MISO grids? It might just have something to do with coal.”
I live in Oklahoma and my electricity never did go out, although other large metropolitan areas in Oklahoma, like Tulsa and Oklahoma City, had temporary blackouts. I attribute my good fortune to the fact that there is a coal-fired powerplant located about 20 miles from my house. It was chugging right along.
I heard today on the local news that the Oklahoma Gas and Electric Company, which supplies a good portion of Oklahoma with electricity, paid about $600 million last year for electricity, and during the two week period of the arctic blast, they ended up paying over $1 billion for electricy during that period! Of course, the OG&E customers will have to pay this extra cost, but the Oklahoma legislature is proposing that these costs be spread out over a decade or more. We’ll see what happens.
We need to add some dependable power supplies to our grids. We clearly run short in extreme weather. And extreme weather doesn’t have to be just cold weather.
The real problem with windmills is sometimes the wind doesn’t blow, and many times when the wind doesn’t blow, it is because there is a serious weather situation going on such as an extreme cold front like we just experienced, or an extreme warm front, both of which can incorportate a period of days when the wind is becalmed because a huge area of the country is sitting underneath a high-pressure system where the winds fall off to zero.
When the winds fall off to zero, the windmills don’t produce power. For days! That is unacceptable, and inevitable if we increase windmill encroachment into the electrical grid.
We have reached the limits of windmill intrusion in Texas and it looks like in the SPP, too.
You can’t do anything about the wind not blowing. Windmills are useless then. We have better alternatives, even for the alarmists. Let’s wise up and start heading in the right direction.
Both the Right and the Left can probably agree on building more nuclear reactors. Let’s start from there. All we really need is nuclear reactors, but being one who doesn’t believe in evil CO2, I can’t see wasting all those fossil fuels for a science fiction scare story. But I’ll compromise on nuclear. 🙂
But the Left doesn’t agree with building nuclear reactors. They agree with destroying western civilization at that’s about it all they agree with.
I was appealing to the alarmists who don’t seek the destruction of western civilization. I assume there are some. If not, then never mind.
Today there is very little wind in the whole of the UK. Wind is performing almost as well as expect 5.45% of demand. Outperforming coal which is at 5.38% fortunately gas is also performing as well as expected 53.39%
As expected:)
At this very moment if the wind is steady at 5 and the next second drops to zero…where does the power come from ?
Weather doesn’t cause pileups. People not driving for conditions does.
A question for MSM apologists for wind turbines and solar energy:
Inasmuch as approximately half the country was experiencing similar or colder temperatures at the same time that Texas suffered massive supply failures, why didn’t the rest of the country experience the same fate? What is different about the Texas energy grid that sets it apart from the rest of the country, other than an unusually high reliance on so-called ‘free energy’?
There were blackouts elsewhere not just Texas
None as widespread or as long as Texas. Nearly everyone north of Texas did better in colder weather. Why?
I haven’t taken a hard look at overall net interchanges or excess capacity in SWPP and MISO. So, I can’t say whether or not a connection to MISO would have made much difference. This might be the subject of a future post.
As stated numerous times in the post, the primary subject was “what” happened, not “why” it happened.
A small correction. Neighbouring grids were supplying about 1.2GW at the time of the big trip. Later that fell as low as 123MW. At $9,000/MWh there was a huge incentive to maximise exports to ERCOT. That was all they could manage. There is some data at the EIA dashboard I will try to find again later.
This doesn’t show up on the Hourly Grid Monitor, assuming I’m reading it correctly.
You found the numbers. Negative numbers are imports by ERCOT. Note that in the first plot “ERCO Demand” is higher than “ERCO net generation” by exactly the negative of “ERCO total interchange”, reflecting the imports helping overall supply. From the (i) Notes for the chart:
NotesHourly (or daily) electricity demand, day-ahead demand forecast, net generation, and total net interchange for the selected balancing authority. Negative interchange values indicate net inflows from neighboring balancing authorities, and positive values indicate net outflows to neighboring balancing authorities.
There are details tie by tie on the ERCOT dashboard prints available from Wayback. e.g. this from the big trip:
http://web.archive.org/web/20210215075245/http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_conditions.html
“blackouts elsewhere” does not equal “massive supply failures.”
Just my view, but it would do some people living in Texas, who are “in charge” of important stuff, a world of good if they spent a winter up here in the Great Frozen Northern Midwest. Lake Michi Gamu will test your mettle (and your metal, too), and if you can’t deal with the reality that Queen Winter has her own agenda, then you’re on the wrong planet.
We’re used to this stuff, no matter how much “anxiety attack” nonsense the local newsies try to put into it. We deal with it, shovel it, and move on. If the forecast is for snow, we’uns up here in the Great Frozen North just assume it means enough white stuff to build a full-sized fort and prepare accordingly.
Now, how hard is that to understand? That, and the ridiculous arguments about climate vs. weather are getting old.
This winter storm in Texas and the Great Plains (why aren’t we hearing about THEM?) isn’t something new, any more than another dry spell/drought.
It’s weather, for Pete’s sake. Deal with it!!!
irony is been pretty warm here in mid maine. by that I mean I have not seen any -20+F nights this year, bunch of -6-10F nights.
David,
Any chance of digging into why the Nuke went down? Loss of cooling pumps due to “weather related issues” sounds like a cover up. Were the cooling pumps load shed?
No. A pressure gauge feed pipe froze, so the pressure gauge gave a false reading (reported that the pipe feeding the gauge was narrow gauge: suspect that lack of flow helped the freezing). That triggered an alarm that shut down the water pumps, and in turn the reactor, because you must use the energy it generates which you can’t do it there is no water for steam. Had the gauge not given a false reading there would have been no problem at all. Info based on an account given by an STP executive.
Thank you. I tried to point this out in comments on a couple of previous posts. You said it better than I did.
Well, I’m going to address the problem in a logical fashion. I’ll be shopping for a whole house generator. And as more grids become unreliable because of reliance on green energies, I suspect this will be a growing market – until the environmentalists decide you need a special license to install one.
I think the proper way to look at the situation is to compare how energy systems perform if you have coal and gas only providing the energy compared to a system with a mix including renewables. The real problem is that renewables weaken the whole system so it enhances the likelihood of failure. Trying to pinpoint whether that failure is due to coal, gas or renewables is irrelevant. Would the system have failed to the extent that it did if there was no renewables? The answer is most certainly no. Would the system have failed if there was only renewables? The answer is most certainly yes.
So the clear answer is not what is the best mix but rather why do we need renewables at all?
And that is where governments have to argue that dangerous man made global warming does not exist and even if it did exist that renewables are not the way to fix it. This would be the most logical solution. Let’s check the data and the predictions to see if we have a problem and if there is a problem let’s think of solutions that will help. Ie If you are concerned about 2 degrees of warming buy an air conditioner for everyone. If you are concerned about rising sea levels build walls ( like in Holland).
At the moment all the world is doing is creating non solutions to a non problem. It’s time to start the re-education process.
The video of that big I-35 pileup was quite something. My wife and I were spent the first third of our respective lives in the Midwest, so were no strangers to driving conditions such as those. She remarked that there’s not much you can do about such accidents. There is so rarely ice in most of Texas that people don’t have a chance to learn.
I disagree, and see a business opportunity for some enterprising driving school. There are a number of skating rinks in the Dallas area, and they are certainly not 100% utilized. Hire some instructors from Minnesota, rent out some rinks, and teach people how to drive on that stuff.
I would propose a similar thing here in the Washington DC area, where a little snow on the beltway results in carnage, except for two things: 1) Because no one around here can drive on a little snow, the Federal Government shuts down if there’s even snow in the forecast. That’s such a good thing, I wouldn’t want to chance it going away. However, 2) there’s really only a small chance of shutdowns going away, because drivers in this area (especially Maryland) don’t know how to drive on dry pavement, and thus are probably unteachable.
As I was young, around 19, we used to exercise with our VW beetles do drive and slide on snowy streets around corners and bends, late in the evening when there was no other circulation around – hat was very helpfull, off course with mounted snow tyres.
Nowerdays, the German Carclub ADAC offers winter- and snowtraining on special places as they do for driving caravan and other trailer.
PS
As I never drove an automatic car, I have no idea how to start driving with on ice or snow. But it’s always amazing to see people or also truckdriver with stick shift, change in first gear and try to start driving, same in sand or mud and, off course mostly full throttle 😀
Third or even forth gear and nearly no throttle, just not stalling the engine, they never heard off 😀
ERCOT is a bunch of lawyers. Lawyers are smart people; they’re just no good at electrical engineering. Consider: Would you put lawyers running NASA? Would you want lawyers in charge of building your next aircraft, bridge, or life-saving medical device? Who thought it was a good idea to put lawyers in charge of the grid? What did they freaken’ expect?
MSM is conflating kWh over time with kW. At the critical time when load shedding started winds contribution fell to 500 kW of capacity. Which is nothing.
The kWh over time is completely irrelevant to holding the system together by meeting kW capacity vs load. If wind generated a lot of kWh before or later so what, it wasn’t there when it was needed.
Can you provide evidence for that claim? I think it’s bunkum. According to the ERCOT dashboard, wind was producing 5,148MW right in the middle of the trip down to 59.3Hz.
http://web.archive.org/web/20210215075245/http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_conditions.html
Even at the low point which was 8 p.m. on the 15th, wind managed 649MW.
By all means let’s look at how wind failed, but exaggerated claims that aren’t true do not help the case – they undermine it.
David-
As a fellow Texan, I want to thank you for the time and effort you have put into your recent posts on the failure of our electrical system during the recent cold spell.
I hope you will contact your State Representative and State Senator to testify at the legislative hearings that are sure to come. Every State Legislator needs to see and hear this information.
My state representative is a Democrat… Texas 100 is a weridly shaped district.
My state senator, Bob Hall, has been calling for grid resilience for years.
https://blueribbonnews.com/2021/02/state-senator-bob-hall-doubles-down-on-power-grid-resilience-and-security-legislation/
Less plant food is the better outcome, you see …
Biden’s Net Zero by 2035 would require an impossibly large Nuclear Power build up… Or… Live with killing hundreds of thousands during wind and solar total bkackouts that are 100% certain to occur.
The Liars are sitting on the Throne.
I live in Austin and was without power for 4.5 days. Good thing I had gas stove and hot water heater that were still functioning, as well as battery-powered carbon monoxide and CO2 detectors. Natural gas fossil fuel made it possible for me to survive. It’s that simple.
Global Warming causes everything!
by
Meteorologist Mike
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/65704/#65905
In your section on natural gas, one of the bullet points is:
“Compressors knocked offline by power outages?”
I suggest a corollary:
“Compressors knocked offline by “Green” requirement that they be powered by the same grid which they used to be a backup supply for”
In other words, if you make a simple flowchart showing CC natural gas generation stations as a backup electricity suppy, you’ll see the folly of using that same electricity to pump gas down the pipelines to provide that backup power.
The compressor stations used to be powered by natural gas fired pumps in many cases, or as gas fired pumping backup to electric compressors.
But the “Greens” know best, forcing the move to electric gas pipeline compressors to supposedly reduce CO2.
I wish they could read a flowchart, there’s a big problem with their analysis, as millions of freezing Texans could attest.
As has been suggested, did the windmills stop producing because of ‘Lack of Wind’, rather than ‘Surplus of Ice’
Me being me, took off to check some Personal Weather Stations(PWS) at Wunderground
What I found was/is quite amazing.
Here’s my screenshot and a gorgeous example of what a large number of Texas PWSs show..
From this PWS.
See how the wind speed (2nd from top squiggly line) drops to zero at about 11:00 on that day, Thurs 11 Feb while the rest of the PWS carries on as normal?
Loads of other PWS show the exact same.
Immediately followed by some ‘precipitation’. This had to have been melting ice/snow because, as you see, the sun came out as the ‘precipitation’ occurred
Could we take those little anemometers as (all the rage these days) proxies for the bigger wind turbines?
Rub a warmist nose in that if you wish……
whats been entirely Omitted?
how the livestock and wild critters fared in this?
my guess is very very poorly;-((
I know weather isn’t climate, but it must be a subset. We can’t predict weather with any certainty out past 72 hours but we know the global temperature rise to a decimal point over the next 20 years.
The first two words of that sentence are a bit redundant (just saying).