Essay by Eric Worrall
Echoes of the 2021 Texas ice storm outage – Texans are once again learning the hard way that you can’t count on renewables during extreme weather events.
Texas Heatwave Highlights A Major Problem With Wind Power
By Irina Slav – Jul 13, 2022, 5:00 PM CDT
A major heatwave has hit Texas and put the Lone Star State’s energy grid under severe stress.
At the same time, low wind speeds mean that wind turbines in Texas are operating at just eight percent of their capacity.
Ultimately, intermittency is a major problem for wind power, especially during periods of hot weather when demand increases and wind speeds fall.
Texas is suffering a major heat wave. Three-digit temperatures are straining the state’s grid and earlier this month prompted ERCOT, the Lone Star State’s grid operator, to ask Texans to conserve energy. It also severely affected wind power generation.
Bloomberg reported this week that wind turbines in Texas are operating at just 8 percent of their capacity because of low wind speeds. This is really unfortunate because demand for electricity is on a strong rise because of the weather.
There is a certain irony that the biggest wind energy generator in the U.S. cannot utilize its capacity to serve its citizens at a time of peak demand. But it is certainly no surprise that this is happening. Wind power generation depends entirely on the weather; when the weather is unfavorable, generation drops.
Europe was reminded of the importance of wind speeds last year when these fell below average, causing lower than normal wind power output and partially contributing to the energy crunch that hit much of the continent in the autumn. The wind industry recognizes this fact: wind industry journal WindPower Monthly had an article that explained how wind park output depended more on wind speeds than on turbine performance, regardless of the age of the turbines.
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Read more: https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Wind-Power/Texas-Heatwave-Highlights-A-Major-Problem-With-Wind-Power.html
On Tuesday ERCOT received permission from environmental regulators for fossil fuel generators to exceed pollution limits, to satisfy a record demand for power.
U.S. Central states, Texas power use to break more records this week
Tue, July 19, 2022, 11:19 PM
July 19 (Reuters) – Power use in Texas and other Central U.S. states will likely break all-time highs in coming days as homes and businesses crank up their air conditioners to escape a lingering heat wave, regional electric grid operators forecast on Tuesday.
Grid operators in the region have already started taking early steps to ensure they have enough resources to keep up with soaring demand.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which operates the grid for more than 26 million customers representing about 90% of the state’s power load, got permission from the state’s environmental regulators to allow power plants to exceed their air permit pollution limits on Monday.
Last week, ERCOT met demand in part by urging customers to conserve energy to avoid taking much bigger actions to reduce usage, like rotating outages.
The Southwest Power Pool (SPP), which operates the grid for almost 18 million people in 17 states from North Dakota to Texas, has not taken as many steps as ERCOT to control usage.
SPP, like ERCOT, has asked its members to postpone maintenance on some critical equipment like power lines and generating plants, a common step grid operators take to ensure resources will be available during times of high demand.
Extreme weather is a reminder of the February freeze in 2021 that left millions of Texans without power, water and heat for days during a deadly storm as ERCOT scrambled to prevent a grid collapse after an unusually large amount of generation shut.
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Read more: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-central-states-texas-power-131933439.html
I’m at a loss for words. How many more times does this have to happen, how many Texans have to die, before Texan politicians accept they backed the wrong horse? If the Texan state government is worried about air pollution from fossil fuel generators, they should increase their fleet of reliable zero carbon nuclear reactors.
Reducing US emissions of CO2 to zero will have no impact on any potential CO2 driven warming due to the actions of China and India compounded by the need to provide electricity to hundreds of millions if not billions of people who have no electricity.
Those pesky Texans failed to learn
Greene’s Law of Windmills:
“One windmill + no wind = no electricity
One bazillion windmills + no wind = no electricity”
Which followed my famous 1997 climate prediction:
“The climate will get warmer,
unless it gets colder”
Which followed my 1990 Iron Law of Leftism:
“If leftists are in favor of it,
And leftists are in charge of it,
Then it will fail.”
I am hoping for a Nobel Prize or at least
a Nobel Prize Participation Trophy.
So far no Texans have died because of a power outage this summer because we haven’t had one yet. I checked ERCOT’s very nice summary page this afternoon and we have about 3-4 GW of reserves during the peak hours. Of course, I will not be running the dishwasher, washing machine, or dryer until the power demand from my AC drops a bit. However, the wind has dropped out every day during this several week-long hotter than normal spell. The wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine, but coal and gas always burn and uranium (and thorium) always fission.
There was no mention of record temperatures. Does this mean the grid has not been upgraded to meet rising demand? Or does this mean that the grid is dysfunctional because of the large percentage of “renewable energy” sources? I don’t think the heatwave is the problem as they are pretty common in Texas this time of year.
Eric,
Did you ask “how many Texans have to die, before Texan politicians accept they backed the wrong horse?” after the Uvalde or do you think that thoughts and prayers are a sufficient response to mass shootings but not blackouts?
Great job at letting us know you’re an anal sphincter without actually telling us you’re an anal sphincter!
It is so odd that discussions about grid reliability and rolling brown outs are currently in those locations where they have a lot of renewable energy. It would take a smarter man than me to understand the connection though.
In case anybody missed the sarcasm this is the truth: Wind and solar power are parasites on traditional thermal sources of energy.
To your truth add: Storage of renewable electricity is a parasite on the whole grid. If not storing renewables excess, then storage is pulling from dispatchable sources. Another unnecessary cost.
But, But, BUT, the greenies claim the “Extreme Events” will end when we reach Net Zero and are CO2 free.
Gazprom has always fulfilled and intends to continue fulfilling all of its obligations. The attempts of our partners to shift their own mistakes onto Russia and Gazprom have no basis.
So what is happening with energy supplies? Look, in the first half of 2020, gas in Europe cost 100 euros per 1000 cubic meters. In the first half of last year [2021] – 250 euros. Today, it’s 1700 euros per 1000 cubic meters. So what is happening? I have already spoken about this many times. I don’t know whether it is worth going into the details about the energy policy of European countries, who neglected the importance of traditional energy sources and took a bet on non-traditional ones. They are great experts in non-traditional relations, so in the field of energy they also decided to rely on non-traditional sources, such as solar and wind. But the winter turned out long and non-windy – and that’s it.
Vladimir Putin, 2022
Wait, isn’t ERCOT the place where “The impossible becomes possible”?
Because of subsidies, wind power is effectively free. That’s the problem, along with environmental idiocy
When Texas has more than 20 days of 100 degree weather within a 26 day time frame, the power supply is going to be close to capacity. This summer will likely exceed 40 days of 100 degrees. In the 90s and early 00s, there was about 20% spare capacity in the grid supply. Bush deregulated the grid and the electricity generators decided to make money on the excess capacity by selling it to Oklahoma below cost. The following years they said they needed more resources to build new generators, because they didn’t have enough to meet capacity guidelines. As a compromise, ERCOT reduced the amount of required spare capacity and allowed additional fees on the electric billing for new plants. Then TB Pickens got involved, convinced ERCOT that going green with windmills would solve the spare capacity issue, be cheaper than new gas/nuclear plants, get Fed subsidies, and look good for everyone. And also add a $5 fee for new power lines to west Tx for eternity. Since the Fed was paying for some of it, and politicians wanted to look like they were doing something, wind generation expanded beyond the spare capacity requirement, and into the peak demand curve. More green money and expansion has increased unreliable generation into the top of the summer baseload range. If wind and solar aren’t generating enough, the natural gas generators have to come online. And if there aren’t enough regular plants online, ERCOT sends out a call for generation and small scale power generators can sell to the grid at spot energy prices. If the spot price exceeds the cost of fuel, they won’t come online, which was one of the issues with the Feb 2021 blackout. Natural gas prices were way higher than the offered spot price for electrical generation. The other issue in Feb 2021 was the electric pumps on the gas distribution network. Obama’s EPA put emission regulations on the natural gas pumps in the pipelines, so instead of putting emission controls on all those pumps, they were replaced with electric pumps tied to the local grid. That was poorly documented, like most of wildcat work is. So when rolling blackouts where on-going, they didn’t know which pumps had power until it was lost.
I live in Texas and Eric is right. We have hundreds of years of natural gas and build all these useless wind mills to get the federal subsidies. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Three words. If you are going to go renewable … Off-Shore Solar.
It’s the only renewable that doesn’t destroy habitat (it actually creates it) and doesn’t kill raptors, bats and other innocent fauna.
But … I’d say nuclear is the best option.
They just can’t bring themselves to admit the words unreliable and not dispatchable so they tie themselves up in semantic knots trying to avoid the bleeding obvious-
Former carbon pricing mastermind Greg Combet backs proposed fix for Australia’s energy crisis (msn.com)
We know what capacity really means you blithering idiots.