Guest “Of course they did” by David Middleton
ERCOT = Electric Reliability Council of Texas
H/T to David Youatt for this suggested topic.
June 14 ERCOT News Release
News Release
June 14, 2021Tight grid conditions expected due to high number of forced generation outages
Grid operator requests energy conservationAUSTIN, TX, June 14, 2021 – The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is asking Texans to reduce electric use as much as possible today through Friday, June 18. A significant number of forced generation outages combined with potential record electric use for the month of June has resulted in tight grid conditions.
Generator owners have reported approximately 11,000 MW of generation is on forced outage for repairs; of that, approximately 8,000 MW is thermal and the rest is intermittent resources. According to the summer Seasonal Assessment of Resource Adequacy, a typical range of thermal generation outages on hot summer days is around 3,600 MW. One MW typically powers around 200 homes on a summer day.
“We will be conducting a thorough analysis with generation owners to determine why so many units are out of service,” said ERCOT Vice President of Grid Planning and Operations Woody Rickerson. “This is unusual for this early in the summer season.”
According to generation owners, the number of outages should decrease throughout the week.
Wind output for today is expected to be 3,500 to 6,000 MW between 3 and 9 p.m. This is roughly 1,500 MW lower than what is typically available for peak conditions. Wind output is expected to increase as the week goes on.
Today’s peak load forecast may exceed 73,000 MW. The peak demand record for June is 69,123 MW set on June 27, 2018 between 4 and 5 p.m.
[…]
ERCOT
June 14 Texas Tribune Article
Texas grid operator urges electricity conservation as many power generators are unexpectedly offline and temperatures rise
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas says a large number of power plants are offline, but it could not provide details as to what may be causing the “very concerning” number of outages. At the same time, the state is experiencing near-record demand for electricity in June.BY ERIN DOUGLAS JUNE 14, 2021
[…]
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas said in a statement Monday that a significant number of unexpected power plant outages, combined with expected record use of electricity due to hot weather, has resulted in tight grid conditions. Approximately 12,000 megawatts of generation were offline Monday, or enough to power 2.4 million homes on a hot summer day.
ERCOT officials said the power plant outages were unexpected — and could not provide details as to what could be causing them.
[…]
Of the plants offline, about 9,600 megawatts of power, or nearly 80% of the outages, are from thermal power sources, which in Texas are largely natural-gas-fired power plants. That’s several times what ERCOT usually sees offline for thermal generation maintenance during a summer day. Typically, only about 3,600 megawatts of thermal generation are offline this time of year.
[…]
Texas Tribune
- Monday is today, June 15.
- The ERCOT statement had 11,000 MW offline, not 12,000.
- The ERCOT statement had the thermal sources at 8,000 MW offline, not 9,600.
Reality: Summer is wind’s bad season
Wind has been ramping down since May, while natural gas has been ramping up.
Wind has sucked so bad lately, that solar has outperformed it.
Let’s compare peak demand on June 14, 2021 at 4:00 PM to ERCOT’s expected peak summer 2021 capacity:
| 1600 June 14, 2021 | |||
| MW | MW | % Expected | |
| Expected Summer Peak Capacity | 86,000 | 69,119 | 80.4% |
| Natural Gas | 43,860 | 45,589 | 103.9% |
| Coal | 11,524 | 10,886 | 94.5% |
| Nuclear | 4,214 | 3,826 | 90.8% |
| Wind | 21,328 | 3,681 | 17.3% |
| Solar | 3,268 | 4,954 | 151.6% |
| Other | 1,634 | 183 | 11.2% |
| Storage | 172 | 0.0% |
I calculated expected capacity by multiplying the expected total peak summer capacity (86,000 MW) by each sources share of ERCOT’s total capacity as listed in their June 2021 Fact Sheet.
ERCOT clearly didn’t expect wind to deliver 21,328 MW. They only expected wind to deliver 3,000 to 6,000 MW. At peak demand yesterday, wind delivered 3,681 MW. So, I suppose they could have semi-honestly stated that: “Wind was operating almost as well as expected”.
Wind not only sucks in summer, it sucks worst at midday during summer.
Natural gas kicks @$$
Unless ERCOT was expecting natural gas to deliver significantly more than 51% of 86,000 MW (June 2021 fact sheet), it delivered 104% of what was expected. Texas has two nuclear power generating stations: Comanche Peak and South Texas. Each station has two reactors. As of June 14, Comanche Peak 2 was offline. A June 15 E&E news article indicated that the 1,150 MW Comanche Peak 2 is offline due to a transformer fire. Comanche Peak 2 went offline on June 7. The E&E article also indicates >9,000 MW of thermal sources being offline. Since Comanche Peak 2 has been offline for a week, it’s not the difference between ERCOT’s 8,000 MW and the media’s >9,000 MW.
I don’t doubt that some thermal generation units are offline right now. It could even be the 8,000 MW cited by ERCOT. However, based on actual output, it’s hard to see anything under-performing except for wind power.
When the EIA Hourly Electric Grid Monitor gets updated for today’s output, I’ll post a sequel to see how things have changed since yesterday. The ERCOT website shows demand currently peaking at 69,597 MW, with about 3,100 MW of reserve capacity online.
Wind doesn’t just suck in Texas right now
Wind works pretty well in Texas… When it works, mostly spring and fall.
Last winter the SJW morons wailed that Texas wind power failed because we were too cheap to winterize our wind turbines. Being SJW morons, they never checked to see that the grids to the north of ERCOT (SWPP & MISO) experienced similar wind power failures. Well guess what? The winds in SWPP and MISO are also sucking right now.
Featured Image
The featured image is a “meme.” I have little doubt that SJW morons are already hard at work fact-checking it. I’ll be very disappointed if they don’t provide some comic relief in the comments section… Something along the lines of: “That wind turbine is not in Texas…”
The original image is from this article: The true cost of wind turbine fires and protection.
Another trillion dollars of windmills will fix it .
Oh , except on windless days .
Well a trillion dollar set of batteries will fix it .
Whos gonna pay for it , you
In the year 2000, the International Energy Agency made a prediction that would come back to haunt it: by 2020, the world would have installed a grand total of 18 gigawatts of photovoltaic solar capacity. Seven years later, the forecast would be proven spectacularly wrong when roughly 18 gigawatts of solar capacity were installed in a single year alone.
Go here:
https://techxplore.com/news/2020-07-offshore-power-cheap-money-consumers.html
Offshore wind power now so cheap it could pay money back to consumersby Imperial College London
Try this:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-28/solar-and-wind-cheapest-sources-of-power-in-most-of-the-world
Seen this?
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/apr/25/insanely-cheap-energy-how-solar-power-continues-to-shock-the-world
Being a former engineer for a large power company and having earned a Master of Science in Energy and the Environment, I had PV panels installed five years ago, with my estimated payback of 15-17 years, . . the right thing for an eco-freak to do. Before they could be installed, we acquired a VW e-Golf electric car. The savings in gasoline alone took the solar system payback down to 3 1/2 years. So, we added a used Tesla Model S, P85, and that took the payback down to less than three years, which means we now get free power for household and transportation.
But that is not all: We do not need to go to gas stations, we fuel up at home at night with cheap baseload power. During the daytime, the PV system turns our meter backwards powering the neighborhood with clean local power, which we trade for the stuff to be used that night. If we paid for transportation fuel, the VW would cost us 4 cents/mile to drive, and the Tesla would cost 5 cents/mile at California off-peak power prices.
No oil changes are a real treat along with no leaks. And since it has an electric motor, it needs NO ENGINE MAINTENANCE at all. We do not go “gas up”, or get tune-ups or emissions checks, have no transmission about which to worry, no complicated machined parts needing care.
Do you park that Tesla in your garage?
Is a used Tesla more of a fire hazard than a new one?
“The latest round of offshore wind farms to be built in the UK could reduce household energy bills by producing electricity very cheaply.
Renewable energy projects, including onshore and offshore wind and solar farms, have so far been subsidized by government support schemes. This has led to some to complain that clean energy is pushing up bills.
However, the most recently approved offshore wind projects will most likely operate with ‘negative subsidies’ – paying money back to the government. The money will go towards reducing household energy bills as the offshore wind farms start producing power in the mid-2020s”.
The main thing that they always miss is that the market was designed to ignore risk specifically so that they can incorporate wind and solar without raising costs. This dis-incentivizes maintaining adequate flexible reliable capacity for gas.