Guest “Just a bit outside!” by David Middleton
Plunging Natural Gas Supply Shows Texas Still Not Ready for Cold
By Gerson Freitas Jr, Francesca Maglione, and Sergio Chapa
January 3, 2022, 12:06 PM CST Corrected January 6, 2022, 1:18 PM CSTTexas’s natural gas industry had almost a year to prepare for last weekend’s cold blast and avoid another loss of production. But yet again, instruments froze, output plunged and companies spewed a miasma of pollutants into the atmosphere in a bid to keep operations stable.
Though Saturday’s cold front wasn’t as severe as the February storm that killed hundreds and knocked out power to much of the state, nearly 1 million cubic feet of gas was burned or wasted due to weather-related shutdowns, according to filings with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. At the same time, production plunged to the lowest level since the last freeze, BloombergNEF data shows.
[…]
Bloomberg Green
The article includes this eye-popping graphic:
The Bloomberg article is…
The freezing weather over New Year’s weekend did lead some operators to shut in production. However, the media intentionally exaggerated the production drop and willfully ignored the actual failure.
EIA Data Suggests 5% Decline in Texas Natural Gas Production – Not 25% As Some Outlets Reported
January 7, 2022
Bloomberg Corrects Gross Exaggeration of Emissions Related to Cold Weather (Corrects 1 Billion cubic feet to 1 Million cubic feet)
AUSTIN – Being quick to blame and slow to listen might get headlines, but it doesn’t deliver facts that are needed to make thoughtful decisions to protect the lives of Texans.
Recent media reports and industry hacks have been exaggerating data about the natural gas system related to the recent cold weather. There are no official daily reports of actual flows of natural gas – they are delivered monthly. However, analysts can offer estimates based on market activity, the same type of activity sellers and buyers of natural gas use to make their daily decisions.
Recent estimates of natural gas production vary, as should be expected because of the assumptions that go into every estimate. They also vary because not every analyst is analyzing the exact same data, areas or timeframes.
Based on just-released data from the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA), IHS Markit estimates weekly average natural gas production in the Permian Basin in West Texas and Southeast New Mexico fell by 0.8 Bcf/d (5%) week-over-week. The week-over-week time period analyzed is December 22-29 and December 29-January 5.
RBN Energy issued comments on the storm this past Monday. RBN looked at Permian data that includes both Texas and New Mexico and stated the previous week production levels were near 14 Bcf/d and over the weekend declined to 10.89 Bcf/d, a decline of 3.11 Bcf, representing a reduction of 22%. RBN data attributed the decline to both cold conditions and high winds, which are often a factor of declined production in the Permian, not just during cold days.
Whatever the actual number is for all of Texas when all producing basins are included, the drop in natural gas production is not unique to Texas nor was the Texas production decline anywhere near a major issue for overall gas availability for those who plan ahead and utilize the vast amount of natural gas storage (544 Bcf of working capacity). Otherwise, the market would have reflected a shortage in the spot-pricing, the real test of availability. Important to this conversation and the system is something we have consistently stated since the Uri discussions: some variation in production occurs with sudden temperature changes – these are field operations, not controlled factory settings.
Texas usually produces about 25 Bcf/d of natural gas. Natural gas used for electricity generation is typically only about 4 Bcf/d, meaning 75% of the natural gas produced in Texas goes toward purposes other than electricity generation. This other 75% can be called on by generators if they want to purchase it. For speculation purposes, let’s assume Texas experienced a total reduction during the 3-day cold weather of 20% (much higher than EIA estimates of 5%), that leaves 20 Bcf/d, five times as much gas as is used for electricity generation, plus hundreds of billions of cubic feet of natural gas in storage for those who choose to contract for it and purchase it.
To further confuse what happened during the recent cold weather event, Bloomberg initially reported 1 billion cubic feet (Bcf) of natural gas was emitted during this period, which created even more media hyperbole about the impact of the cold weather. Bloomberg rightly issued a correction that the 1 billion cubic feet was actually 1 million cubic feet – this is a significant error. TCEQ can and will investigate this fully but initial reports confirm this should be within normal operating expectations and the impact is minimal.
Even Bloomberg, with all of its catastrophizing, shows a similar amount of natural gas available as was available a year ago. Thus, no crisis.
[…]
TXOGA
Despite all the caterwauling about Texas and ERCOT being unprepared for winter, natural gas fired electricity generation responded to the freeze as it was designed to do.
Can you guess which energy source failed as temperatures dropped?
As long as government is involved in energy production of any type it will continue to get worse. That is what they want.
I don’t think BigOil agrees. Bob blames global warming…I mean climate change…climate extinction
Climate breakdown.
Wasn’t that a Tom Petty song?!?!?
As long as government is involved in anything it will continue to get worse. That is what they want.
It doesn’t seem to matter which party.
Texas Republicans were windmill “groupies”
from 2011 to 2021.
Seeking political gain knows no party affiliation boundaries and focuses concentration on the short-term advantage. The certainty of down-range market failure was denied by all the CliSciFi profiteers. The CliSciFi profiteers are now attempting (mightily) to blame anything other than their unfounded, politicized policies.
It is all ’bout da Benjamins!!!!
Bush/Perry/Abbott Republicans love investments that the government forces the citizens to purchase from at an unseen price.
“Texas Republicans were windmill “groupies”
from 2011 to 2021.”
Yes, there are too many Climate Change True Believers in the Republican Party. The only difference between these True Believer Republicans and the Democrats is the Republicans want to introduced free market principles into fixing the problem.
It doesn’t occur to them that there is no real Climate Change problem that needs fixing. These Republicans have partaken of the Koolaid, too.
We will need to disabuse them of these Climate Change ideas or we will need to replace them with clear-thinking Republicans.
It just seems the damn wind is always blowing because we don’t notice very mild weather.Power companies know better.
Good presentation of data and comments, as usual, David. Hey, wait a minute, is that helicopter de-icing the wind turbine blades powered by unicorn farts? Because, you know, it would de duplicitous to utilize the evil carbon fuel for such a pure green wienie deal as wind power.
Fact Check: True
And spraying deicing fluid made from oil, too.
It was very hot water heated with fuel oil
Not relevant for Texas
Alpine Helicopter displayed the helicopter image in its 2015 presentation for the Winterwind International Wind Energy Conference. According to a presentation, Alpine began testing the helicopter-hot water method in 2013. Alpine stressed that the procedure does not use chemicals. Helicopter operators use a joystick to spray hot water on turbines to defrost ice or snow that’s collected on them to prevent dangerous fallout and impediments to wind turbine function. In preparation, water is heated in a tank with a 260kV oil burner the night before. The procedure then takes about 90 minutes to de-ice a wind turbine.
When i worked in product development,
engineers called band, aids like a helicopter
spraying hot water on windmill blades,
“A Rube Goldberg fix”, done to avoid admitting
the original design was no good.
Besides that, ice wasn’t the main problem in Texas, it was lack of wind after the arctic high-pressure system settled over Texas.
You can’t see the extension cord?
Why would gas producers bother investing in improved resilience when the Prez wants to kill them?
To paraphrase a meme from the 70’s: Let the bureaucrats freeze in the dark.
It will be you, not the bureaucrats, that will be freezing.
Well, some of them got rather cold in Virginia a few days ago.
Of course, as clearly laid out in the Demobureaucrat Book of Rules, they promptly blamed it on the Republican who was not in charge of anything at the time.
It is up to the Republicans to protect the dims from themselves, like good adults do for their children.
Exactly: Irrational uncertainties in laws and regulations from all levels of government wreck individual and businesses’ ability to plan for the future, the basis of free market capitalism. Without fairly consistent policy, commerce is wrecked. Wind and solar subsidies and forced taking of outputs, no matter the economics of their productions’ impact on markets, hurts consumers and the society as a whole.
An interesting recent related example is China’s demand for immediate CO2 reductions (supposedly related to COP26) which resulted in vast unanticipated reductions of FF supplies to individuals and distortions and shortages of energy supplies to electric and industrial production, with resultant privation to individual citizens and export markets. Western governments’ policies are providing for a slow-motion example of that train wreck.
The amount of subsidized wind on the Texas grid distorts the market. As the subsidy miners do not pay for conventional backup, there are shortages of conventional generation capacity.
There will always be a need for conventional generation capacity since wind/solar cannot be relied upon when energy is needed. Texas is one of several states that “deregulated” and broke the vertical energy market where a regulated monopoly owned the grid and the energy generation. Through a set of regulations which included stiff penalties for outages, the vertical system became a system of over production yet made for a reliable grid.
Today, no one is responsible for a reliable grid. The Walmarts, Amazons, Google, Facebook, Chinese, et al are subsidy mining in Texas and have zero responsibility for any reliability. The grid owners are paid through a convoluted scheme of “taxing” producers; because of yet another complex and fluid schemes, backroom deals and other forms of soft collusion, reliable energy is being financially pushed out (read: ESG consequences). Texas lawmakers are primarily responsible for setting energy policy especially since the Texas grid is entirely within the State and Texas doesn’t need to work with anyone. For over a generation, politicians, through misguided and corrupt machinations have condemned Texas to an unreliable and expensive grid that is beholden to the capricious whims of the billionaires.
For example, if Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft wanted to “teach Texas a lesson”, they would just go on strike in terms of participating in the energy auction. That could have the potential of crashing the grid and throwing Texas into chaos of months if not years because Texas relies so heavily on wind and is shutting down thermals.
Given how the Great Reset architects have a penchant for destroying lives and businesses, I don’t put it past them.
If we can’t rely on wind then why the hell put it on the grid?
There is much money to be harvested, that’s why.
Virtue signalliing.
It’s exactly the same in the UK.
Don’t think you really want to compare TOTAL, cradle to grave fossil fuel v renewable subsidies. But I certainly hope you do…
Bigoilyboob, The US does not subsidize oil. Like all other industries it gives petroleum producers tax breaks. The only major tax break that’s unique to oil production is drilling costs. That amounts to about $4.00 per car per year. Cars actually pay almost 100x that much in gas taxes.
Don’t go on with your ridiculous claim about uncompensated externalities, the only reason we have the society we do is because of oil. The benefits of oil FAR, FAR outweigh the negatives. Thinking people reject your complete nonsense insinuating that they don’t.
Every company in the country is permitted to deduct business costs against their taxes.
Just because different companies have different types of business costs is not evidence that any of them are being subsidized.
Clearly, Boob, you don’t know what subsidies are.
Taxes are monies that Businesses (You) pay the Government
Tax Breaks are monies Businesses (You) don’t have to pay the Government
Subsidies are monies that the Government pays Businesses (You)
Right to the point! Thanks.
While I agree with your comment’s sentiments, Brian, money is fungible and subsidies are the same as tax breaks.
“…money is fungible and subsidies are the same as tax breaks.”
As are Ben Dover ES&H reg enforcement, AGW costs, and being allowed to shirk most asset retirement obligations. Lost on this crowd.
Incorrect, Bryan
Subsidies are tax breaks that the government gives to “bad” businesses like oil companies. Try to keep up 🙂
This lie has been dealt with so many times that only the willfully ignorant still spout it.
There are no subsidies for fossil fuels.
Being allowed to deduct expenses against your taxes is not a subsidy.
Name one subsidy fossil fuels get.
He can’t do it, but he believes it because the MSM says it is the case. Remember the MSM are made up of journalists, which have no expertise in anything except (arguably) writing stories. I’ve never read one who understood science of any kind. I hate to say it, but I usually believe that except for writing skills, they are the most ignorant class of people on the planet. Only in areas where there is little to no education can you find a more ignorant group, and considering what our universities are producing, that’s really a low bar.
“the most ignorant class of people on the planet”
Have you looked at the majority of UK politicians?
JF
2
And we have a double-whammy with the current PM!
I had never thought Bigoilyblob was a Lefty, but he makes the same mistake as people like AOC by confusing a tax deduction with a subsidy.
Total subsidies for renewables per unit of power produced are
MUCH LARGER than than for other sources of power.
The oil depletion allowance, similar to depreciation,
is not a subsidy. If you think it is, then all corporations
using depreciation to lower taxes, are ALL subsidized.
“The oil depletion allowance, similar to depreciation,
is not a subsidy. If you think it is, then all corporations
using depreciation to lower taxes, are ALL subsidized.”
The ODA is:
The environmental, safety and health Ben Dovers. The AGW costs. The 12 -13 figure USD (just in the CONUS, onshore and off) to be shirked, asset retirement obligations. The subsidized political/military risk, best exemplified by the ~$50B/year we spend on the 5th fleet in Bahrain to defend the oil and gas interests of our mirror shaded, embassy body butchering “Partners in Peace”. These are the larger, largely ignored communized costs of our “fast food” fossil fuel energy sourcing.
Utterly unreadable baffle-gab.
Sorry to offend your delicate sensibilities. But feel free to rebut any of it.
To the last point – if the US is able to locate, drill, pump, and transport enough oil to supply our own needs – something that we were able to do a bit more than a year ago – we wouldn’t need to have that fleet in that place. Other than to prop up the socialist regimes of Western Europe to keep them from complete collapse under the insane energy policies of the “Greens.”
We also wouldn’t make ourselves into an international laughingstock by sending a demented, incontinent old fraud to fruitlessly plead for more oil from those “mirror shaded, embassy body butchering” Sheiks.
What is to rebutt it’s jargon dribble, somehow the military budget gets conflated as a subsidy. That military hardware and personnel would exist with or without oil as part of the US defense capabilities. They are going to be on the payroll you might as well deploy them somewhere useful as a strategy and if you don’t understand that then you have real issues.
“That military hardware and personnel would exist with or without oil as part of the US defense capabilities.”
What valid defense missions are accomplished by protecting the economic interests of woman hating royal families? Pretending that there is any other mission over there is just political 2speak. Mothballing/redeploying the fleet, redeploying/early outing the personnel would in fact, better serve our defenses, as we would be less identified with despotism.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/03/heres-one-way-to-stop-the-brutal-repression-in-bahrain/273983/
So, even if your point is valid, the vast supply of unrecovered fossil fuel resources on the American Continents should be considered to be available for use in a sane world. So that kind of takes woman hating royals of the Mid East out of the equation.
In any case, the only reason Biden is begging the Saudis and their woman hatting friends for Oil is because he is so beholden to the radical leftist environmentalists in the US that he can’t allow reasonable and safe development of fossil fuel resources in this country. Trump had us energy independent is a few short years and bungling Biden managed to undo that in less than a year
“…. the vast supply of unrecovered fossil fuel resources on the American Continents should be considered to be available for use in a sane world.”
If produced with best practices, with a carbon tax, equitably, regularly, fully rebated to every US resident (after paying back CCS projects) and with more than a tiny fraction of the required $ held back or otherwise bonded for asset retirements, hell yes. As a private sector domestic and international petroleum engineer for my adult life, I would be a hypocrite to clam otherwise. In a sane world, it would be used as I previously described.
“In any case, the only reason Biden is begging the Saudis and their woman hatting friends for Oil is because he is so beholden to the radical leftist environmentalists in the US that he can’t allow reasonable and safe development of fossil fuel resources in this country.”
Ah, the “blame Biden” BS again. US fossil fuelers did this to themselves. Bad business practices and unforgiving geology for the last 15 years have come home.
As for Biden’s begging:
Even in a mostly green developed world the US and allies would have to be on guard in the middle east to keep it from being taken over by “mad mullas” who will use the money from the oil to fund world domination and destruction, and we have to also make sure “the oil stays in the ground” – if Russia or China or [insert name here] took over then for sure all the oil would be pumped out, and burnt with the least amount of environmental protections.
You’re about as conversant in international relations as Joe Biden.
sadly, you are wrong roaddog. As had as it is to imagine, even dementia Joe is more conversant in international relations than the bigoldboob,
my take is you would not like the results of such an analysis. True cost of renewables has to include the backup costs for when they don’t work, which comes down to keeping fossil fuels in the loop for the sole purpose of covering the periods of failure that intermittent renewables cannot handle on their own. The complexity that is required on the grid alone makes renewables a bad choice. Now if we can just get politics out of the middle of the discussion……
“True cost of renewables has to include the backup costs for when they don’t work…”
True
“….which comes down to keeping fossil fuels in the loop for the sole purpose of covering the periods of failure that intermittent renewables cannot handle on their own.”
Also true. And why not? AGAIN, do you run your house Generac 24/7/365, with the concomitant fuel and maintenance costs, just to make sure it’s “reliable” in an emergency or extreme weather event? May be you do, but it’s really not that thoughtful to do so.
Nat gas is an ideal bridge fuel. One that we need now. We already have the supporting natural gas to electricity infrastructure in place, minus the relatively minor expenditures required to harden it against extreme weather conditions. To waste it, and then to whine down the road, when the costs for AGW and accelerated asset retirement for the depleted fields come due is also not that thoughtful.
“The complexity that is required on the grid alone makes renewables a bad choice.”
The technology has been proven at least in this century. It’s a matter of building it out. This will be required in any case, as we increasingly move to the boonies and multiply.
“Now if we can just get politics out of the middle of the discussion……”
From your lips to Abbott’s deaf ear…..
“The renewable technologies have been proven” unreliable this century and unfit for the grid that people rely on. If politics were not involved there would be practically no wind/solar on the grid, except probably in remote places off the grid.
And why do you promote a carbon tax? CO2 is plant food. Fossil fuel energy is the main reason for the prosperty in the developed world, and left wing progressives the reason for all the misery since the French Revolution, wars of the 1800s, WW1 and 2, the Cold War and the proxy wars.
Michael Bloomberg began work as a professional liar at Salomon Brothers (made infamous by Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker).
The fact of the matter is that he has never been anything other than a professional liar.
Trump has a funny impersonation of Bloomberg where he bends down below the microphone and looks up.
Damn Trump was funny.
I still chuckle every time I hear or read about Pocahontas. That’s a nickname that nobody will ever forget.
She should have been charged and tried for committing fraud.
Fauxcahontas, you mean?
aka Lieawatha.
I’m not an energy trader. I am not a paid energy analyst. I can simply read other articles and see that there are quite a number of LNG tankers that have been making journeys between the GOM and EU. The LNG doesn’t appear like magic, it is produced from wells, and that production is going to show up in someone’s charts.
Furthermore, Texas energy policy greatly favors energy that comes from Walmart, Google, Amazon, Facebook et al who are mightily invested in Wind/Solar in the State of Texas. Walmart, for example, has over fifty-four square miles of windmills just between Corsicana and Waco. When the cold front blew through, it was quite easy to see how Big Wind could bid energy supply at or below any other method (since they make money from subsidies and selling Carbon Credits).
SCGT gas plants, which are inferior to CCGT gas plants in terms of efficiency, are basically load levelers for Big Wind/Solar. That is, if you have someone promoting the Unreliables, chances are they have an investment in natural gas.
So what happens? For weeks there is a lot of production to back-stop Europe while they are engaged in energy foreplay with Putin. Then a strong old front blows in, spins the windmills increasing their capacity, the underbid everybody in the auction and the load-leveling natgas plants drop off for the two days of heavy, constant winds during the temperature drop.
Natgas isn’t generally stored on site since storage has a cost that makes it even less competitive against the heavily subsidized and prioritized wind/solar. So production for those plants drops off since SCGT thermal energy is not needed.
Texas politicians (read: Republicans) have taken in Big Tech money, essentially destroyed electrical reliability through their stupid and misguided efforts to be loved by Communists for pushing unreliable energy that concentrates benefits to Big Tech (who owns the wind/solar farms) and disperses the costs to rate-payers who have no say in energy policies.
Judging by the ridicule that is coming from the Left (who will always be tribal and will always twist a narrative to attack their ideological enemies) and scorn from their constituents for selling them out for no return, they will do as usual and find a scapegoat, like they did last year with ERCOT. ERCOT doesn’t set energy policy. They have to try to have reliable energy in a market that is actively being destroyed by Big Tech, stupid politicians who want to be loved by the wrong people, FERC and an innumerate, ignorant and cognitively dissonant voter base that believes that perpetual energy flow freely and magically from the wall outlet.
“Texas politicians (read: Republicans) have ”
Increased wind production to suck money out of California.
I am for it.
“Stupid politicians” want to be loved by the right people; rich people. Proper control of “stupid politicians” through rational application of Constitutional principles is the only way to slow the very profitable “stupidity.”
When are these politicians ever going to get through their thick heads that virtual signalling Greener’s with unreliable energy sources is a losing proposition. It does not matter how many windmills you put up or how many coal plants you shutdown it is never enough for these useless idiot Greener’s to give you any slack. You might as well ignore these useless idiots and have a reliable power grid because doing what they are whining about is not working to your favor.
A classic example is the power company in Ohio. They were threatened and taken to court to eliminate all reliable coal power plants before a certain date. To replace the lost power generation the utility proposed a couple of large Natural Gas fired Co-generation power plants with the highest standards of pollution controls in the design. A lot of the same Green groups who made the coal plants shutdown fought the approval of the new power plants. So what happened the coal plants were shutdown under penalty from the courts and the new power plant was not even built or approved yet. Ohio has to import power from another state to make up for the loss which also drops their power grid reliability by depending on an outside remote source.
Stop pandering to these Green losers.
A planner advising the CEO of a generating company would say that he needed to have management present the results of analysis of two alternatives.
The first would be gas generation to meet forecast demand.
The second would be the same amount of gas generation plant supplemented by a significant amount of wind generating plant.
Do proper NPV analysis on both. You will find that the wind supplement lowers the rate of return and the NPV.
Now, subsidies may make up some of this deficit. But then you also have to plan for the uncertainty of their continuing for the life of the plant.
People always evaluate wind versus conventional on its own. But you can’t run it on its own, it has to have backup. They also evaluate it on the basis of levelized costs, which mainly consists of assuming that when the power is generated is immaterial, whether it coincides with demand or not.
No proper team of analysts, doing it right, would ever endorse a generating plant of combined gas plus supplementary wind.
Where your analysis goes off track is that any random person can build a wind farm. They are profitable because of the federal tax credits. There is zero chance of losing the credits because they are pre-authorized.
So what is the point that Bloomberg wishes to reinforced here? That somehow natural gas is no more reliable during such weather than renewables are? Do they think they can be that distracting from the real elephant in the room?
The WSJ and Bloomberg were mistaken to claim that this relatively mild event was a harbinger of future system performance. In particular, the all too common unitary mistake of confusing a BCF with an MMCF is a ubiquitous MSM error. As is the conflation of volumes and rates.
But the facts remain:
Mr. M’s wished for alternative, the freezing of future Texas wind energy development would not be the practical solution. To substitute fossil fuel sources for future wind expansion would be ludicrous.
Texas shale – the most obvious source – is now in Death Star Harvest Mode. Revenue from recent price increases have gone – exclusively and rationally – to like for like acquisitions, stock buy backs, and dividends. The shalers know that these activities will reduce head counts and will make it even easier to continue to shirk their ever rising asset retirement obligations.
OTOH, about no producers are planning on sustainable development CAPEX, for basic geological and economic reasons. Frac hits are rising, and we petroleum engineers have been unable to economically counter them with operational changes. Haz waste disposal is busting out of it’s seams (as it already has in Oklahoma). Salt water disposal rates into 50+ year old wells are many, many times historic. And oilfield servicers, who have been stripped bare by the producers for the last decade, would eat up most of any increased CAPEX spending with skyrocketing rate increases anyhow.
Until we figure out real, acceptable ways to move the “temporarily” stored nuc waste from the back ’40’s of the facilities that created them, renewable sources are by far, the lowest total (internal + those now communized upon the rest of us) cost, cradle to grave, method of electrical production. Most distinctly, in renewable low hanging fruit, Texas…
They should never allow wind on the grid unless those providers ensure they provide energy when it’s needed.
Fixed it for you,
You are welcome.
I agree. The natural gas to electricity infrastructure was allowed to self govern. Even after the advice from the feds to Texas to fix it was spoon fed 10 years ago.
Weird how those same feds closed down coal plants and subsidized unreliable energy.
I am starting to think you Simon’s brother from another mother.
Tell us more about which coal plants the feds “closed down” for no good cause. Name names. As always we’ll wait…
https://www.wtae.com/article/firstenergy-closing-coal-fired-plants-in-greene-washington-counties-1/7462062#
Don’t be that stupid Bob. I suppose you believe Benghazi was started by an internet video?
Who is “we”?
And why didn’t you go to your grave as 246 Texans did because of freezing weather in 2021?
Aks Abbott. Aks ERCOT.
Wind energy should never have been allowed to grow to present quantity. It is a failed experiment that has proven to be unreliable and expensive in total costs.
The environmental impacts of wind energy have rarely been discussed. The additional mining of materials to produce windmills, the huge amount concrete to install the equipment, the huge amount of real estate required for installation of wind farms, the horrendous impact on wildlife, and the difficulties in disposal at end of life for the equipment makes wind energy a lose-lose proposition.
We should get rid of these parasitic boondoggles before they cause irreparable harm to the economy and environment.
“The environmental impacts of wind energy have rarely been discussed.”
They have been compared to fossil fuels, cradle to grave, for years. Your hysterical blindness does not let you off the hook for ignoring that. The only factor often left out are the vast, mostly non funded, oil, gas, coal asset retirement obligations.
One link, found in 15 seconds.
https://scholarworks.uark.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1029&context=csesuht#:~:text=Overall%2C%20wind%20energy%20has%20a,land%20than%20coal%2Dfired%20energy.
Do those studies consider every aspect of the wind farm setup? I.e. do they actually consider the environmental impact of the materials used to construct the wind farm? I’d check myself but my hysterical blindness prevents me from trying.
“Do those studies consider every aspect of the wind farm setup? I.e. do they actually consider the environmental impact of the materials used to construct the wind farm?”
Yes, and yes. Multiple independent studies reach the same conclusion.
“I’d check myself but my hysterical blindness prevents me from trying.”
Sad, but true…
Your “Independent Studies” never seem to consider the huge costs of rare earth mining, oil reliant manufacturing and deploying massive Windmills and vast Solar farms over huge areas, that kill vast numbers of birds and other wildlife. Not to mention the cost of decommissioning old and broken units that includes vast amounts of real estate and toxic waste on a scale that is unimaginable. The biggest unsolvable problem with renewables is simple scalability. You cannot possible create them on a national scale without huge virulent side effects that defy resolution. Plus the complexities and vast physical network required for the Grid are currently beyond comprehension.
So give it up bigoilbob… no matter how much you believe in a renewable energy world, the larger it gets the more prone it gets to collapsing under its own weight.
I’m still trying to figure out how an increase of 450% in electricity produced by natural gas keeps getting spun into a drop in power.
I guess some people are more interested in selling an agenda rather than understanding.
Just hit BooB right between the eyes with the TRUTH.
Because not that much
of the electricity shortfall
versus demand
before the blackouts
could be explained by
actual wind output vs.
forecast.
Wind output was EXPECTED
to be very low in February.
With optional blade deicers,
Texas wind output would have
met or exceeded the forecast.
Texans were too cheap to buy blade deicers.
“With optional blade deicers,
Texas wind output would have
met or exceeded the forecast.”
Please link to any viable deicing programs now under use in Iowa. The innards of the turbines can be made much more temp resistant. And there is ongoing testing and modeling to reduce blade icing. But I haven’t yet seen or heard of such commercial processes that would have been practical in Texas, in 2/21.
The problem was the ERCOT, “Pray the problem away”, faith based rule making for the natural gas to electric infrastructure. The message from ERCOT to that infrastructure, both pre and post 2/21, has been “Do the best you can. Keep the dark $ rolling in, and we’ll give you your God Given freedom to do WTF you feel like doing”.
Why waste the money?
Since I did not mention your referenced “drop in power” and explicitly criticized the hyperbolic, incorrect Bloomberg and WSJ articles, I’m at a loss as to what you’re getting at…
Oh, sorry. I remember now. You are referring to a comment made many months ago, by you or someone else. AGAIN, the “450%” parameter is a deflective head fake from the actual problem. That being how much otherwise available deliverability in 2/21 was severely impaired by the lack of routine, run of the mill, weather hardening.
%
So BOB, some same question, different post.
I do not expect an answer to these questions.
Your insipid rhetoric is just astounding.
“WHO will be responsible to remove all of the wind and solar crap at the end of their so called use full life?”
The equipment will be constantly upgraded and replaced. Unlike one and done oil and gas fields, the land is, by definition, the best cited for it’s particular renewable project. Most will be co-used by the renewable project, ag, and/or whatever, into the foreseeable future. FYI, turbine disposals are the least of our problems. The blades are made mostly from silica (sand) and wood. And volume wise, the are an inert, tiny, tiny, part of our future land filling. OTOH, oil and gas asset retirement obligations are such a headache that oil their lobbyists have made it part of their life’s work to shirk them. Hydraulic integrity, naturally occurring radioactive material, just to start. It’s only in the headlights of fact free renewable haters that renewable asset retirement obligations are a consequential problem.
“When the total wealth of a nation and therefore the average wealth of its citizens is calculated, please explain how solar and wind are not a reduction in that total wealth since 100% backup supply is required for all of the unreliable generation.”
100% backup hardly ever. And fuel free. I agree that if you wanted to run your house Generac 24/7/365, and suffer the resulting fuel and maintenance costs, then it would probably be ready for emergency use. But this is, in fact, the functional alternative you’re proposing. And it is also a pretty good guarantee of a “reduction in total wealth”.
“Only when you do not include the REQUIREMENT to have 100% backup energy sources for the grid. Those sources are required to be ramped up and down, reducing the efficiency and usable lifespan and increasing substantially the maintenance cost of those cycled generation assets.”
DUDE! it’s already there! All it needs is the extreme weather hardening that is easily available, per such infrastructures in normally colder climes.
“As to nuclear waste storage, there was never any sense in blocking the reprocessing of nuclear waste as MANDATED by our last most pitiful president, one you probably voted for twice, Jimmy, and the late sh!tty Harry Reid, who blocked the storage at Yucca Mountain in NV, where it should have been moved and a reprocessing facility built to produce new usable fuel.”
That *”***ty Harry Reid reflected the strong wishes of his constituents. Sorry Drake, we get to CHOOSE whether or not we want the responsibility for tens of thousands of generations of waste stewardship that we would have to hand over to our progeny. You and I might disagree on our future ability to even remember what’s down there, but I hope that you are not suggesting that the citizens of Nevada shouldn’t have the final say.
FYI, the feds are now soliciting RFP’s from any interested states who would like to take this waste. So far, crickets. Unless you’re volunteering….
Having worked in the nuclear weapons field, I’ve always thought that vitrification of nuclear waste into large blocks, transporting them to a fenced area in a remote desert, installing extensive signage of the danger within and providing adequate security is the only rational way to store radioactive waste, especially considering its potential future value.
Any possible future problems mental masturbators can dream up arising from that scheme can be dealt with cheaply as they occur. Nuclear war and comet strikes don’t count for planning purposes. Vulcanism and earthquakes theoretically take permanent care of the vitrified waste. Large terrorist attacks are infeasible and conventional explosives can’t distribute vitrified waste over any appreciable area.
What’s not to like?
We have a place like that. Radical Democrats prevent us from using it currently.
I live next to it in Las Vegas, NV. Most people I meet don’t know why it is referred to as the Rocky Flats Test Site. Nobody seems to know that ongoing multidecadal detailed health testing of “Downwinders” have failed to reveal any adverse reactions to the radiative particles and dust produced by the decadal nuclear testing at that location.
Locals and tourists would stand on high-rise buildings in Las Vegas to observe the results of the nuclear detonations. It is only hysterical speculation by professional bed-wetter’s and related politics that ruined the nuclear power industry. Although, that may be changing due to necessity trumping ideology.
I’ll comment only on the following points:
“ERCOT should never have assumed good wind performance in 2/21 conditions.”
COMMENT:
ERCOT assumed about 6% of nameplate capacity output.
Averaged about 4% because many blades froze
But was also much lower for a few hours
before the February 202 blackouts.
Should have been easily covered
by fossil fueled backup
“The shortfall should have and could have been easily made up from otherwise available natural gas to electricity deliverability.
COMMENT:
Agree
“Hardening this deliverability for 2/21 extreme conditions is – along with improved interconnectivity – the most practical, low cost method of improving extreme weather ERCOT performance.”
COMMENT:
More inter-connectivity would be practical
and relatively low cost.
But winterizing the entire Texas energy
infrastructure would be very high cost
and will never happen. Texans will pray
for global warming, instead !
“The current faith based prodding by industry complaint regulators should be replaced by handsome rewards to the natural gas to electricity infrastructure, to harden it for 2/21 conditions. Rate payers should have to pony up to pay for those rewards.’
COMMENT:
This would be a huge expense
and might never be needed again.
And winterizing involves the entire
Texas energy industry, not only power plants.
The August 2011 report on the rolling blackouts
in February 2011 (affected 3.2 million Texans)
explained the lack of winterizing problem when
windmill nameplate capacity was about
1/8 the level it reached in February 2021.
There’s just not much February wind in Texas.
They could dust off the 2011 report
and change the date to 2021
No one wants to spend the money
to fix the cold weather problem
— that was obvious since 2011.
They invested in lots of windmills, instead.
Without optional deicers.
Windmills did not solve the problem from 2011.
The extreme cold weather in 2021 was
colder, and lasted longer, than in 2011,
so the problem was worse in 2021.
I imagine it will happen again some day.
Yep, the real answer is to stop using wind power on the grid. Only use reliable .
Q: Who owns those windmills that aren’t winterized?
A; Independent energy producers like Google, Walmart, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, CCP, etc.
There are no requirements for an energy source be available. ERCOT, like most other RTOs hold auctions for every five or fifteen minute interval. No one is required to bid. They could all sit on their hands and do nothing. Google just wants the tax deductions, sell Carbon Credits and pump up its ESG scores. Otherwise, there is no moral or ethical motivation to actually provide electricity, they do so purely for the credits and subsidies. if Google decides that it costs a lot of money to winterize their mills, they may just let the mills freeze in place for the rare day or two every dozen or so years.
You socialists have a wildly poor understanding of human nature. No one acts altruistically.
Utilities negotiate interruptible gas contracts to keep the price reasonable.
When such an interruption occurs the IPO must have backup available. That’s not wind.
But when the s**t really hits the fan it all comes unraveled.
I retired from 35 years in power gen and was working at Tolk station in 2010 when a similar cold weather problem occurred. Unit 2 was down for maintenance and we were lucky to keep 1 on-line. The loss of 550 MW would have challenged the IPO.
Wind didn’t fail. Wind and solar plant outputs are strongly anti-correlated with extreme cold weather events.
The electricity capacity planning tools failed. Across the country, utilities and their regulators (that you elect, or that are appointed by people you elect) have agreed to ignore this well known fact. Instead of using detailed hourly models of how weather and the output of wind and solar plants interact, they use some version of an ELCC.
ELCC is Electric Load serving Capacity Credit. Basically, a 100MW plant with a 20% ELCC is modeled to contribute 20MW during peak load hours. This works kind of ok for average weather. It is cheap and easy to model. And simple enough that even a regulator can understand it.
It is worthless for regional heat and cold waves. If you don’t like it, go to their public meetings and tell them.
Better models are available.
Wind didn’t blow. What good is it then?
Wind works great in Texas in Spring & Fall, when demand is lower. It doesn’t work well in Summer & Winter, when demand is higher. I suppose that something designed to fail doesn’t actually fail when it fails… /SARC?
No need for the sarcasm tag, what you said was exactly the response of the renewables advocates last February
“Of course it’s not reliable, everyone knows that, therefor it’s not to blame”.
Even though they all say it’s reliable and predictable, except when it isn’t then fossil fuels are to blame
Wind is reliable for purposes of participating in an auction. I’m looking at weather models that predict wind speeds over any given windmill farm for several hours in advance. Those several hours are good enough to be able to decide to what degree a windfarm can participate in the next five minute interval energy auction.
If the wind isn’t blowing, I don’t get in the auction. If the wind blows where I can reliably get 30% nameplate for five minutes, I bid that amount of production for that five minutes, and the chance is very high that during that five minutes, that power will indeed be delivered.
This “reliability” argument is based in the incorrect model of thinking that energy producers are actually relied upon to deliver dispatchable energy whenever it is needed. It is not. The correct understanding is, will the RTO find enough suppliers in any given capacity auction to promise to deliver at the bid price.
Whether you get any electricity is no one’s responsibility. There literally is no one responsible in the ERCOT region to guarantee that electricity is available.
“If the wind isn’t blowing, I don’t get in the auction. If the wind blows where I can reliably get 30% nameplate for five minutes, I bid that amount of production for that five minutes, and the chance is very high that during that five minutes, that power will indeed be delivered.”
What happens if not enough power is delivered, as was promised? Penalties?
http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServlet
The system is biased. We can see an explicit subsidy on the alberta AESO page where wind and solar are never listed in the DCR column, dispatched contingency reserve.
That is the job of all the reliable generation, to cover shortfall when wind and solar drop off expected or unexpected.
A purchase decision failure.
Wind does what it always does:
Highly variable and unpredictable.
It is obviously purchased to challenge
the grid operators who might otherwise
get bored with their jobs.
And mainly to virtue signal
about saving the Earth for the
children. No price is too high to pay for
some good virtue signalling. You’d know
that if you were a leftist.
Mother Nature demonstrates wind power is a niche resource. She runs primarily on solar energy. (More precisely, she runs on stored solar power – our Achilles’ Heel for that source)
Plugging wind power into the national grid is akin to the infamous mixing of junk bonds in with higher quality assets – the criminally stupid activity that played a huge role in breaking the world economy in 2008. The higher quality assets did not strengthen the junk bonds in the mix. Rather, the weak link of junk bonds broke the whole cable the world economy hung on. We see the same thing play out with wind power. And we’ll keep seeing it play out – at some of the worst times for it to play out – until the madness ends.
Beware – the madness won’t simply “end”, it will have to be stopped.
Good analogy.
Somewhat, but the major collapse was due to the crappy lending policies forced in by Bill Clinton, requiring banks to loan to everyone regardless of their ability to repay the loan, and to give loans with 5% down. Canada, which has always required 20% down to get a mortgage, did not have the real estate collapse that the US did, and the US collapse took down the rest of the world. ALL CLINTON’S FAULT!
Jerry Doyle was a radio personality at the time of the collateralized securities collapse and had an incredibly simple solution, have the federal government buy every sub prime mortgage interest down to 2%, which would inject cash into the banks AND reduce almost everyone’s mortgage substantially, for about 1/4 the cost of the eventual Bush bailout. That would have ended the crisis immediately.
See the numbers: $200,000 mortgage, 6% rate, $1000/month on the payment, 2% would reduce the payment by $667 per month, to $333. Everyone who wanted to would have kept their homes, jobs would have been unaffected, etc. etc. and banks would be flush with the points buy down, no liquidity problem. So of course that was never considered. How do you siphon money from the American citizen to the chosen few by doing that?????
Yes, I see lots of discussion of how that crisis was caused by rebranding crap as gold
But these investment houses aren’t idiots
The subprime market was a direct government creation foisting crap onto banks, when faced with that the smart guys did what they needed to do to get it off their books.
Not the right thing but most likely felt little option.
It was entirely a creation of the us govt
Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac bought up all the sub-prime mortgages and converted them into mortgage-backed securities. The securities were valued by an algorithm that didn’t work in a down real-estate market and subsequently blew up the financial system as described in my post, above.
In reality, much of the disaster was caused by the universal use of a valuation model for mortgage-based securities which was developed by a Chinese citizen living in the U.S. The fundamental problem with the model is that it only worked for situations where real-estate values were constantly rising. When real-estate values began to fall, the value of the securities tanked and it destroyed financial markets. The Chinese national quickly hightailed it back to China.
Let me see if I have this right: Texan natural gas plant fails again, solely because of the effects of the cold weather, just as it did last year and somehow this is the fault of wind power?
If the gas plant had not failed due to the cold, there WOULD have been power. End of!
Gas didn’t fail. The Bloomberg article was a pack of lies.
Gas didn’t fail griff. You can see clearly from the chart as wind production dropped sharply, gas increased to fill the void.
I can tell you in Tennessee, the output of solar and wind was about zero during this storm. Complete overcast, solar panels covered in snow in minutes and absolutely dead calm. Temps between 25F – 15F.
Fortunately I, and the rest of the state remained nice and warm due to fossil fuels, and a little nuclear.
Don’t assume Griff can read a chart. Most High school grads can’t. (Few college grads can unless they took some STEM classes.
I think you could have ended the first sentence after the 5th word. 😉
It is clear you don’t know how to read a chart the ones David posted.
Why echo the lies of the Bloomberg article?
Normally I don’t down vote you but I did this time for so egregiously ignoring the facts
As usual, griff doesn’t have anything right.
Natural gas plants didn’t fail. Not a single one.
Why is it that when griff reads something, he never actually tries to understand what he is reading?
Maybe the Grifter is talking
about February 2021,
not December 2021,
or conflating both issues,
which requires a magic
decoder ring to understand.
Everyone knows the Grifter
is really written
by Charles’ Rotten
the Moderator,
making comments
that boost page views.
He gets a little bored Moderating,
compared with his prior life
as lead singer for the Sex Pistols
band, under the moniker
Johnny Rotten. You could
look this up.
Moderator Bait
Do you think Simon, BigOil, Ghalfrunt, Lloydo are real?
They are just as dumb as Griff
Put another way, Griff
1 million is 1/1000 of a billion
Texas produces 25 billion a day
So this event cost them 1/25,000 of production
Or 0.00004
Do you see yet how this isn’t a problem?
That gas didn’t “fail”?
Do you know of any systems of any kind that are affected by a loss of capability of 0.00004?
Considering that wind regularly loses close to 100% of its capability within a matter of minutes, do you yet see the fallacy you are promoting?
I think you just proved the point aimed at you a number of times you can’t analyze data and argue the data … all you can do is mimic the line you have been told or paid to push.
Math is hard
I know this post is about the media, but all the failures were the result of human error, as failures almost always are.
I don’t think politicians’ errors are human errors.
Some winterization projects succeed, some don’t. Now operators know better where to focus their efforts. Call it a stress test.
Some gas fields are decades old, some are new
In some cases the old stuff may be worn out, in other cases the new stuff may not be up to snuff.
All not created equal in other words.
Maintenance is one thing, wholesale upgrade is another cost entirely.
But as Dave pointed out with data nothing unusual occurred, the whole Bloomberg story was incorrect, the epitome of climate emergency reporting
The Texas energy infrastructure
winterizing plan
is not going according to plan,
because there never was a plan.
That assumes that the operators want to throw more money at winterizing against a rare weather event. To the wind merchants, a frozen mill is absolutely no different than their mills sitting under a high pressure dome (no harvestable wind). They don’t wring their hands and try to get wind to blow, and in the same indifference, there is no need to throw money at winterizing when the costs are the equivalent of losing a hundred days of Carbon Credits, subsidies and tax deductions.
People pretend that these wind farms are about providing reliable electricity – that thinking does not factor, the wind farms are for ESG scores, Carbon Credits, subsidies and tax deductions.
I wonder if the words “stress test” appear on any of the resultant tombstones.
Hmmm … Texas has been hit with cold spells before.
Since when has a cold spell been a problem for the Texas power grid?
After being forced to go to solar and pinwheels to power the grid AND key components of the “evil” fossil fueled (and nuclear?) backups?
PS If the switch is to prevent “warming”, why is so cold?
“Since when has a cold spell been a problem for the Texas power grid?”
Minor problems in 1980s and 1990s.
Big problem in early February 2011
When rolling blackouts affected 3.2 million Texans.
Wind power nameplate capacity then
was about 1/8 the capacity in February 2021.
Here is the official February 2021
report published in August 2011.
I read it in February 2021.
Good for insomnia.
https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/08-16-11-report.pdf
Texas also has shuttered many oil and low-grade coal plants in worship of Mother Gaia. Texas has also greatly expanded their population base, picking up House seats in the last census. Texas also “deregulated” the grid which [insert ten thousand word explanation] resulted in going from an incentive system to overbuild and oversupply energy, to a system that rewards Politically Correct and unreliable wind source by people whose only interest in generating electricity is because it really generates Carbon Credits, good ESG scores, tax deductions and subsidies.
Bloomberg Corrects Gross Exaggeration of Emissions Related to Cold Weather (Corrects 1 Billion cubic feet to 1 Million cubic feet)
The typical liberal interprets million versus billion as half probably more than half it’s still worse than we thought.
I’m still on my 1st cup of coffee, so I’m a little dull, but I need some help with the graphs. Either one alone is fine, but they show completely different quantities and results. What am I missing?
This is a stacked area chart of daily generation in megawatt hours, with an overlay in daily DFW high & low temperatures.
This is a line chart of hourly generation in megawatt hours.
Same data, different presentations.
Yes, and the first one shows solar as if it was producing all day by providing total daily production while the second shows the total drop off for most of every day and the drop off of over 50% of regular production on Dec. 31st.
Watching the coal line in the second chart cycle so much scares me for the people of Texas. That HAS TO BE greatly increasing production and maintenance costs.
I updated the captions to better explain the presentations.
Both plots are instructive. The stacked area plot of daily generation shows how the entire system, particularly natural gas, ramped up for cold weather. The daily plot shows how wind totally cratered overnight Jan 2 through Jan 3 and how natural gas rapidly ramped up right when the Bloomberg article falsely claimed it was failing to meet demand.
Reading Griff usual idiocy below, maybe what is needed is a good explanation from a mechanical engineer of the realities of what is involved in having to ramp gas fired plants up and down continuously to accommodate the vagaries of wind and solar.
From the graphs below it’s clear that coal and nuclear are base load, they don’t modify their output much.
But gas follows the inverse of renewables, going up when they go down to cover the shortfall.
While gas turbines are better able to do this than current nuclear, or coal thermal plants, that doesn’t mean it’s the best thing for them.
Gas turbines lose efficiency dramatically fast when not running at full load meaning the amount of gas used per mw increases, increasing costs.
Starting and stopping, ramping up and down are all far harder on such equipment, far more than just running them flat out. More maintenance, shorter life, all comes from this.
All of these lead to endless unnecessary costs forced onto the gas generators and onto us that would not exist if not for the presence of renewables.
Maybe that needs to be explained?
You just explained it.
There are also gas “peaker” power plants to
cover peak morning and evening demand hours
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant
I’m not an expert
Let’s have an expert put real $$ on it
Like a turbine running at full power produces 1 unit of electricity from one unit of gas, but running at 0.5 unit output requires 0.8 unit gas, a dramatic escalation of cost to produce power all of which is forced onto to gas generator books because they have to curtail to allow wind in when it’s present.
$$ upon $$ of cost that does not occur in the absence of wind on the grid
Just suggesting it be spelled out in an irrefutable way
Gas turbines can start quickly to come on line and produce power. The problem is size of scale leads to a longer window for that power to be available. The larger the gas turbine unit the longer the start to power production time frame. Example we had 1200 KW units that could be started and online in 45 seconds but only producing 1200 KW. A Frame 7 GE would take us 4 hours from a dead stop to online. The GE Frame 7 could reduce that start time requirement if it was constantly turning on the starter motor or steam turbine starter to about an hour to full load but you are then supplying energy to the start system all the time. We had a 14 MW Gas turbine that was capable of reaching full load from a dead stop in 12 minutes When these 14 MW units are installed as Co-Gens the boiler takes about 20 minutes to get up to full steam load even with Auxiliary firing.
So the planning of where you are getting your power supply from becomes more critical as these utilities lean more heavily on unreliable Wind and Solar supplies.
The climate alarmist enterprise has sabotaged the global energy market.
And now that their successful campaign has started bearing fruit in energy hyperinflation and supply disruption, they blame everyone but themselves.
This reminds me of the excellent WW2 in real time YouTube documentary by Indy Neidell and colleagues that is currently running, it’s just reached the start of 1943.
It’s accompanied by the parallel series “war against humanity” by Spartacus Olson.
This is horrible but necessary viewing, detailing the holocaust week by week (“never forget!”).
In late 1942 the holocaust came to the attention of the world press and was publicised worldwide.
What was the response of Goebbels and the Na3i regime? To attempt denial?
No – you wouldn’t believe it but the response was to blame the Jews!
While murdering Jews in their millions, they make themselves the victim, accusing them of causing reputational damage and emotional distress to Germany!
Odd that someone with a name like Bloomburg would practice law from the Goebbels play-book.
Government could F/U a wet dream. The best thing government can do is get out of the way.
“Politics is the art
of looking for trouble,
finding it everywhere,
diagnosing it incorrectly,
and applying the
wrong remedies.”
Groucho Marx
I have a theory on why Bloomberg made the mistake that one billion cubic feet were lost rather than 1 million cubic feet.
The oil and gas industry is a quirky place to work. There are many references that go back far enough that no one can understand why they are used. The unit Barrel is one, API gravity is another. The other is how volumes of gas are shown. In the oil and gas industry, M stands for “a thousand” and MM stands for “a million”. But B is “a Billion”.
Anyone outside the industry might see MM as Billion.
Which leads me to my rant. Journalists and media are ignorant about anything other than how to write an article or present a story. They know nothing about the subject they are reporting on. In most cases they are not engineers, scientists, doctors, MBA’s etc.
Those journalists who are most ambitious will conflate a story to advance their career. They know that attracting the most number of “hits” is what leads to promotion. They are not interested in the truth, only in advancement. A journalist’s bias directs the story in a certain direction
Sergio Chapa, one of the authors, is the Houston Chronicle’s energy correspondent. His work is usually a lot better than this.
OK, I guess we have to assume that the writer(s) of the original Bloomberg article are driven by ambition and bias. The basis for my rant. But I would still hold open the option that they could be stupid.
It’s sweet of you to assume such a thing is just a mistake when this site is a daily catalogue of the misinformation these type of people disseminate
We are slowly coming out of the deep freeze here in AB and as pathetic as our solar output is on this nice clear day, 11%, our wind is still a dud at less than 5%
http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServlet
To be fair, I have seen it come above 50% a couple times during this 3 week cold snap, for an hour each time.
Over delivering, in Griffs words
This article should have
covered these two points:
(1) The early 2021 blackouts
were significantly affected by
natural gas infrastructure deficiencies,
and only slightly caused by windmills
(doing what windmills do — unreliable,
unpredictable power output — even worse
without optional blade deicers)
The February 2021 blackouts were caused
primarily by the failures of windmill backup !
in fact, all source or power,
even nuclear power and coal,
had cold weather problems
Nuclear output was not down by much
compared to pre-blackout, so was
the most reliable power source,
as expected.
Texas does not have, and has never had,
energy infrastructure that works
properly during unusually cold weather,
especially if it lasts over one day.
That includes more than just
the Texas power plants.
They had cold weather problems
in the 1980s, 1990’s
with few, if any, windmills
and again in February 2021,
with lots of windmills.
Same cold weather problem
— too expensive to fix.
A huge increase
in windmill nameplate
capacity from 2011 to 2021
did not help at all, especially
so many windmills without
optional blade heaters.
Minimal inter-connectors with other grids
remains a stupid decision. Changing that
might be the best “band-aid” rather than
expensive winterizing of the entire state
energy infrastructure.
The key lesson is windmills
make a grid less reliable,
and require 100% backup power
that is reliable
in all weather conditions.
That reliable backup did not
exist in Texas — not during
unusually cold weather.
(2) As the charts in the article show
(and even more so before the
2021 February blackouts),
windmills have low output
during Texas winters,
which is predictable,
but sometimes
near zero output
for an hour or two,
often at least once
a week.
Since reliability
is the primary objective
of an electric grid,
the use of the least
reliable source of power,
windmills, at great expense,
is insane from an engineering
point of view. Every article
mentioning windmills
should make that point.
The key lesson is politicians and bureaucrats
often pretend to be experts on every subject,
and waste taxpayers’ money subsidizing windmills,
and solar panels, but the real experts are engineers.
Of course i have a solution to the many
windmill deficiencies: My portable nuclear
powered fans to spin those pesky windmills
when there’s no wind.
The fans are painted green too.
I call them Greene’s Green Energy Machines.
— Only 1,745 1% shares in my company
are still available for interested investors.
I anticipate a huge return on investment,
at least for me.
“Texas does not have, and has never had, energy infrastructure that works properly during unusually cold weather, especially if it lasts over one day.”
I think that you need to reference that, Texas has had many similar, all different but many more than one day freezes since formal records were kept (1880), even historical accounts before then. On the coast the wind moves as much water as the small astronomical tide, mostly in spring and fall except for the high wind tropical storms. When you consider frictional forces, wind is not something to be counted on, period and its use is new whomever is too blame. Always been lots of individual and local problems due to lack of preparation, but never heard of anything like this and my family has been in Texas since well before formal records.
Question: Is it blade heaters or transformer heaters (maybe both) that shut down the wind turbines? In the Mid-West, 480 volt irrigation control panels will not start the electric motor if the oil viscosity of the control panel transformers are to thick (a safety feature). There needs to be an internal electric heater inside the control panel for the transformers to work in cold weather, hence allowing the electricity to start the motor. The transformer heaters are rarely installed, since irrigation is not done (generally) during prolonged periods of cold weather. Maybe transformer heaters were not installed in the wind turbines, since the weather was supposed to be getting warmer (global warming), not colder? Has this been discussed?
Look at that beautiful straight line from the nuclear plants!
If only we go to 100% WIND can we keep wind from failing.
Just like 100% vaccines will stop coronavirus.
Just like 100% taxation will stop poverty.
I think I’m getting it finally!
I wonder what sort of or how many disasters are required to waken the intelligent mind? Observing the COVID-19 crisis suggests a lot!
Some knowledgeable person needs to publish the difference between subsidies and tax incentives/deductions. Not in some professional paper but plaster it all over social media, news sites, political organizations, in other words every where.
Media? Oh, you mean the Fake News.