By Bill Peacock
“Texas problem with wind and solar generation has been growing for years. In 2022, wind farms generated 25% of the electricity used in ERCOT. Solar farms generated 5.65%. Ten years earlier, wind’s market share was 12.25% and solar’s 0.03%. This has placed a great strain on the grid because neither of these generation sources can be counted on when needed.
Source: Reuters
Reuters recently ran a story highlighting wind generation’s failure through the early months of 2023:
The Texas power grid operator urged homes and businesses to conserve electricity on Tuesday as the first major heat wave of the season spurs residents to crank power-hungry air conditioners. Power prices for Tuesday topped $2,500 per megawatt hour (MWh) in the state’s day-ahead market on expectations that demand would reach record levels later in the day, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).
In addition to the heavy demand for cooling, the Texas grid is also under strain from a recent dip in power generation from wind sources, which if sustained may deprive the ERCOT system of a key source of clean power when it is needed most. Wind power is Texas’ second largest source of electricity behind natural gas, so any prolonged drop in wind generation may leave the ERCOT system under strain just as the peak demand season kicks off.
Reuter’s columnist Gavin Maguire continues:
In May, the total amount of wind power generated in the ERCOT system was just under 310,000 megawatts (MW), which is down 40% from the nearly 520,000 MW generated in May 2022…. In the first 19 days of June, around 185,000 MW of wind power was generated, which is down 45% from the 336,000 MW generated in the same period in 2022.
A look at a recent day confirms the problems with wind generation. Wind peaked at 15,131 MW at 1:19 a.m. on Wednesday, June 21, and dropped throughout most of the rest of the day. When Austin temperatures peaked at 102 degrees around noon, wind generation was down to 7,016 MW on its way toward its low of 5,947 at 2:09 p.m. It did not reach 15,000+ MW again until 7:44, when the temperature in Austin had dropped to 73 degrees.
Source: ERCOT
Texas’s problem with wind and solar generation has been growing for years. In 2022, wind farms generated 25% of the electricity used in ERCOT. Solar farms generated 5.65%. Ten years earlier, wind’s market share was 12.25% and solar’s 0.03%. This has placed a great strain on the grid because neither of these generation sources can be counted on when needed.
Wind’s market share is far higher in temperate months than in the hot summer months or the cold winter months when loads are heavy and generation is needed. In March, April, May, October, and November, wind’s market share is 31.7%. In the winter months of December, January, and February, wind’s market share drops to 25.7%. In the summer months of June, July, August, and September, wind’s market share plummets to 18.1%.
Source: ERCOT; Author’s Calculations
Solar has been proclaimed to be the savior of the electric grid because it tends to generate more electricity when it is the hottest. While that is sometimes the case, Texas has already experienced scenarios when solar failed to produce because clouds covered solar panels in West Texas while the rest of Texas was simmering in the summer heat. In addition, as expected solar generation drops precipitously during the winter. Its market share in December is almost half of what it is in June and July.
Reuter’s claims that more wind capacity will solve wind’s intermittency problem:
A rebound in wind generation levels due to new capacity and greater wind speeds will provide a major boost to ERCOT resilience and may enable the Texas grid to avert any further power scares from upcoming heat waves.
It is unclear why Reuter’s believes that wind speeds will magically pick up in the future and solve wind generation’s problems–perhaps this is the result of global warming? In any case, more wind capacity will exacerbate the problem of wind’s intermittency. The simple truth is that the more Texas relies on wind generation, the less reliable the Texas electric grid will be; the more Texans need electricity to protect themselves from weather extremes and keep their lights on the less electricity wind and solar will provide.
One last thing. Beyond the problems of intermittency and unreliability, wind and solar generation is vastly more expensive than natural gas, coal, and nuclear generation. The 2023 cost in Texas of renewable subsidies and protecting the grid from renewables will exceed $2.7 billion (it was 2.04 billion in 2021).
The Texas Legislature this session did nothing to address Texas’ decades long support of wind and solar through subsidies and benefits. Instead, it doubled down on subsidies by authorizing $8.9 billion of subsidies and loans to traditional thermal generation. But Texas, or more accurately, Texas taxpayers, can’t buy their way out of the problems caused by renewables. The only way out is to end subsidies for all generators and let market participants use market prices to figure out what energy sources best meet our needs.
“As short a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a ‘categorical pledge’ were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.”
I am sure Texas will be swimming in chocolate after they add a few more solar panels and wind turbines!
Essentially, no joke. When I flew across Texas on my way to the Heartland Institute’s February Florida climate conference, it was stunning to see the amount of wind facilities in Texas. Even the iconic lonely Texas intersection in the final scene of the 2000 Tom Hanks “Cast Away” movie has been subsequently blighted by those things, as seen in this 2014 Google Streetmobile 360° view.
The climate alarmist nut zero cultists think by installing more and more and more wind & solar, that they will eventually totally replace fossil fuels and nuclear – what these brainwashed idiots don’t seem to get is that when the wind blows too slow, or too fast, or when the sun doesn’t shine at night or dull cloudy, stormy days, no matter how many wind or solar farms you build, they generate nothing, zilch, all at the same time – you cannot replace primary power sources such as gas, coal and nuclear, with these engineeringly incompetent intermittent sources
We have to demand that nut zero crowd PROVE that they can do what they claim and they must give the cost. Perhaps the motto of the “deniers” is “PROVE IT”.
slow learners – that is exactly what happened in the Valentine day freeze – Texas was getting 40+% of its electricity from intermittentent sources before the freeze which immediately fell to 8% – all the windmills in the world wouldn’t have made a difference
IMO they aren’t that stupid. They know and don’t care.
A lot of people have never said or heard a sentence containing “cents per kilowatt hour”.
Have to allow for the fact that demand is increasing, yesterday’s demand beat last year’s record at ~80 MW, expected to reach ~83MW today.
83GW not MW
With wind and solar you’re taking a gamble on the weather. Sometimes you’ll win, more often than not you’ll lose.
The dependable, reliable, affordable energy we were accustomed to was beyond the problems of intermittency and unreliability. Which is what the industrial revolution was all about; not relying on periods of clement weather.
Back to the future….
“It’s been a struggle to clean up the shipping industry but one solution is to use wind-powered ships. That may seem like going back to the days of the Cutty Sark….”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/23/cargo-ships-powered-by-wind-could-help-tackle-climate-crisis
“Sometimes you’ll win, more often than not you’ll lose.”, and, the loss can be catastrophic, as demonstrated by Texas during Winter Storm Uri.
What these renewables ignoranti can’t seem to understand is that these failures too often occur at peak demand periods.
The only time reliability is truly important is when its really hot or really cold.
I love everything to do with ships boats and the sea, most of my family is or has been in maritime related fields( Navy, Coast guard, Naval architecture and marine engineering, small boat design repair( marine solar, wind hydro turbine)
Commercial sail? Even with the most advanced technology it simple does not work out economically. And this is coming from individuals I am very close to and are at the cutting edge of the field of naval architecture and marine engineering. I wish it would work but it is just viable unless the price of oil skyrocketed and then there would still be problems and a massive drop in our standard of living.
Cargo ships powered by wind are inevitably limited in size to around 250-300 metres IIRC. A modern container ship can carry 20,000 containers. It would need a great many wind powered ships to replace just one container ship.
On most routes, a cargo steamer can make two or three round trips while a wind-powered cargo ship makes one. Even if the ships were the same size, you need 2 or 3 times as many to carry the same cargo. Each ship needs a larger crew to handle the sails, and much more maintenance on the sails. Shipping rates would have to skyrocket to cover the cost of more ships, the cost of more and larger crews, and the increase in maintenance costs and down time. In the windjammer era (around 1880-1910, when sailing ships grew very large and competed with steam ships on price alone), able seamen worked for very little and were plentiful, while skilled engineers were scarce; the economics has reversed now.
And just-in-time shipping would end. Windjammers arrive when the wind gets them to their destination, so customers accepted that they had to wait for the ship to come in. Now, customers start looking for other suppliers when you are a day late with a delivery, and often require contracts with heavy penalties for delays. With delivery by windjammers, you must order items shipped long before you need them, accept them whenever they happen to arrive, and store them for weeks and even months until they are needed. And if the market changes while the stuff is in transit or storage, someone is going to take a heavy loss.
Simply put, the Greens want us to have weather dependent energy. Imagine if we depended on the weather for water instead of building dams so we can have water all year around.
More simply put; they want old people and people with poor stateof health to die in their homes without even being able to run a fan to cool them.
OT, sorry:
Bjorn Lomborg: Actions That Would Do More Good Than Wasting Trillions on Climate Change
A John Stossel video.
I really like Stossel and Lomborg!
No, I think it’s on-topic, although in a more generalised sense. Bjorn Lomborg has shown that what can be achieved with less resources will make a huge difference to the world. The problem is that the grandstanding career politicians all want their little strut on the world stage and to be seen to ‘do something’ global – a ‘legacy’ move, even if it achieves nothing and leaves a godawful climate disaster to be cleaned up by future generations. We need something that will pull back the curtain and expose the wizard to be just a con artist – voting in other parties, alternatives to the grifters we’ve got at the moment would be a start, but they’d have to get a lot of traction with the general public first.
Anyone with an ounce of brain power, critical thinking abilities, or common sense, can see clearly that wind and solar are not the answer to the future and current energy demands of the world. And, Texas is just a prime example of the failure of these bogus claims purporting to support a path to “net zero” whatever.
Which leads me to believe that the multitude of “scientists” claiming wind and solar will meet the demands are nothing more than highly paid charlatans of the snake oil salesman variety found on the backroads of decades past. Which further my conclusion that they can’t be trusted to make any sort of decisions for any of us about anything at all. Their pronouncements of doom and gloom are better served by them standing on a street corner somewhere carrying signs stating “the end is near”. They have nothing to offer the rational people of the world than that sort of alarmism.
There is no substitute for the sources of energy which has made the world a better place for most of its inhabitants. The benefits of wind and solar are relegated to those who support and produce the windmills and solar panels. And the government lackeys worldwide who push for the systems.
“Follow the money” is always a good guide to see who actually gains from any politicized idea where the taxpayer is asked to subsidize their implementation. Texas, wake up.
As every sailor learns, the wind is often not there just when you would like it to be.
Slow learners, those wind turbines fans.
One wind miller suggested higher windmills…to get up there where the wind blows stronger…he must be a blowhard, eh?
Yeah send him aloft in a bosun’s seat when the breeze is > 30 knots and see if he still thinks that’s good idea.
It could work in terms of grabbing more wind. But doubling the height of a tower just to hold the same load increases the cost by far more than double (it’s not stacking a second tower on top of the first, but building a much stronger lower half to hold the original tower for the upper half). It also multiplies the problems with stability and anchoring the tower against wind pressure. If you put the same windmill on top of your twice as high tower, you’ve doubled the leverage the tower exerts against the base, and if you made the windmill more powerful, it gets that much more difficult to keep that tower from breaking off the foundations, or picking the whole foundation up and turning on its side. Failures become more catastrophic.
Maintenance becomes harder. More and more of the working day is spent just climbing up and down the tower, so as the job gets bigger, the workers get less time to do it. The cranes you need for maintenance become so large you’ll have to move them in pieces and borrow a huge piece of land to set them up, so you’ve spent a fortune and several days before the work can even start.
The more wind and solar installed the more likely nuclear will become part of the energy picture again.
While true, nuclear is not a good solution for renewable intermittency. Nucs don’t like to cycle. They are quintessential baseload. CCGT can cycle down to 40% load with little loss of efficiency, so the only main hit is underutilized capital.
Sorry to disagree but modern nuke design has moved on, especially in France (before the EPR nightmare!).
I’ve read that later plants can ramp up and down a bit faster that coal although not as fast as gas.
However the economics of nuclear work best as baseload, as you say.
Every bit of ramping up or down puts stress on components.
All big base load is best run at a pretty constant level for efficiency as well as wear and tear.
Or for that matter the more likely any more ACTUALLY USEFUL power plants (coal, oil, gas OR nuclear) will get built until the mess they’re so eagerly creating crashes big time.
If you read the wind literature, nuclear power is the biggest enemy of wind. This is because the nuclear plant will just run 24/7 to maximize its income because the marginal cost of fuel is zero. No other thermal power source can say that, not even geothermal I THINK. (If you extract too much heat too fast, that is not good.I am vague on this point.) So, when wind is blowing strong and electricity prices drop because of oversupply, nuclear just doesn’t care. It just keeps producing energy.
This helps to explain why the Greens don’t like nuclear power.
Geothermal power is depending on the supply of hot fluid, its depth, pipe size, and recharge rate. Like any steam plant, if you can dump the steam through the engine faster than you make (or deliver) it, you can pull the pressure or temperature down and lose your head. It doesn’t really matter if the lack of steam is the pipe is too narrow, too long, clogged, or the feed water trickles in too slow, or has insufficient exposure time to the heat source, or the hot rocks cool down too far, any hiccup in creating and delivering the steam to the turbine will drop the power delivery. So they can sort of load follow, but they run better as baseload.
That sound like nuclear in a way. Use it or lose it.
Maybe overpromises on turbine lifespan will flatten things out, unless of course more tax credits are piled on to make premature replacements. Call it the Who Could Have Known Credit.
Nick Stokes will be along shortly to explain that down is really up.
Well when you live in the upside down world…
Problem with location.
I am still waiting for Nick to rely to my comment that LNG has a carbon foot much bigger than NG and is in fact bad for the climate if you think CO2 is bad.
Stokes is late actually – he should have been here now, explaining how perfectly fine it is to rely on off-again/on-again green power for such things as food refrigeration and hospitals – it’s not like him to pass up an opportunity to annoy everyone with his insanity.
Perhaps his Tesla has run out of battery? You gotta hand it to old mate, he gets knocked down, but he keeps on punchin’ away, he’s got some resilience, you gotta give him that.
” . . . and greater wind speeds . . .”
Recall the cartoon with two folks at a chalk board: … and then a miracle happens
CNN “reports” that up to 2/3rds of the US could see blackouts in the event of extreme heat. You will notice how they talk around WHY that might be? Just a sentence on retirement of fossil fuel stations with no reason given as to why such perfectly good and functional facilities have been shut down. They’re so pathetic.
Extreme heat means two-thirds of North America could suffer blackouts this summer (msn.com)
And the EV startups are blowin in the wind.
story tip
Lordstown Motors files for bankruptcy, sues Foxconn (yahoo.com)
Thorium liquiod salts cooled reactors can provide abundant cheap safe power 24/7.
If only they existed on a utility scale…but they don’t
How many in service?
How many committed for delivery?
Unfortunately not for a ~decade, and then only in China to begin with.
But eventually…
One problem is the degradation of the blades which begins at start-up. Studies of a number of wind farms indicates a 1.6+/-O.2% decline annually in power output due to degradation (erosion roughness, material bonding cracking etc.), also, at 12% degradation, a 9% increase in power costs.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148113005727
It’s argued that this is true for all spinning gear, but the big difference is spinning gear on the ground can be maintained with planned periodic maintenance and generally can be built with robust parts. A good example of this difference is the DC3 aircraft designed and built before and during WWII!
“there are an estimated 164 DC-3 in all variants flying on a regular basis. This includes military variants (the C-47 and Dakota) as well as those in commercial operation.”
https://simpleflying.com/dc-3-operation/
In my small town in north central Woke-achusetts, there is an airport that annually hosts old planes including some DC-3. I’ve wanted to go to the airports to see them but haven’t so far. But then 2 years in a row, I saw DC-3 flying right over my house at the minimum possible elevation- which I think in this state is 500′. Sure looked like that though I don’t know. It was exciting to see these big, old planes buzzing my neighborhood. I can only imagine how it must have been a fearful site for any enemy to see one overhead.
Well, I don’t know how terrified any enemy is going to be if they are buzzed by a cargo plane. An AC-130 Ghostrider; yes, the bringer of abject terror.
There were also gunship versions of the C-119 and C-47.
Gunship – Wikipedia
OK- that shows my ignorance of planes. Perhaps it wasn’t a DC-3. I think it was a B29 Superfortress. Yuh, just looked them up- the DC-3 only has 2 engines- what I saw was huge and had 4 engines. But I’m still not sure. Whatever it was, it’s pretty impressive only 500′ over your house.
AC-130 of which there have been several versions. With FLIR, thermal imagining and God only knows what else, it is not a good thing to have looking for you. Went to a range at the Eglin AFG complex, after a walk along a trail with the required Air Force guide because of the duds laying about. we climbed into a concrete bunker, and each of us got a chance to call for fire using polar coordinates. 40mm, 105mm, and 20mm stuff depending on the nature of the target.
There are only two restored B-29’s flying today – “Doc” and “Fifi”. You may have seen one of them.
I was on the ground (laying in mud) watching a modified AC-130 help us out in a nighttime firefight. WOW! Miniguns (with tracers that looked like red snakes) and 20mm cannon.
My first experience with an AC-130 gunship was on a night in June 1969, when the Phu Bai Combat base was attacked with rockets and sappers.
I had never seen one fire their miniguns before and it was quite a sight. First you hear the aircraft circling, then you see a thin, solid red line snaking down to the ground from the aircraft and then when the bullets hit the ground it looks like a red fountain has erupted, but the “water” is really thousands of bullets. And of course, you hear the distintive sound of the minigun.
You don’t want to be on the receiving end of that.
When the gunship showed up, the attack on Phu Bai was over.
Odds are good that they were B-17s with maybe a B-24 flying around also. Both have 4 engines. They do shows at many local airports along with the P-51 Mustang fighters. Most of the time they offer rides to help defray the cost of maintenance. I’ve seen them at the local airport in Ft Myers. There are no flying B-29s left.
another OT story, sorry: 🙂
Never Make Predictions
Problem is that the nut zero’s take the total power generated in the country divide it by 8,760, ignore the fact that they need to add the energy needed for ALL transportation, not just the EV’s, all manufacturing, and all fossil fuels used to mine the raw materials to make the unreliables. they then take Net generated power/8,760 and declare they only need that much wind and/or solar generation ignoring the storage problem. Worse, then force the shutdown of any power source that is not certified as Renewable.
Oh dear….
But how many people, apart from ‘lawyers’, actually believe this garbage,
“”Major research lost after cleaner turned off fridge, lawsuit says
BBC filed it with the tag: “Solar power”
…that they actually kept 20 years of work inside one single fridge and with no backup, no copy and seemingly, no records either so that they could replicate what was in there
Right, because the bean counters overseeing the scientists are more than happy to provide square footage and additional very low-temperature freezers to preserve duplicate samples. /sarc
And leave the on/off switch and/or power supply exposed with no lockouts so that anyone can turn it off? /sarc.
I’ve seen similar things happen even without involving research work that few people understand. A squadron snackbar at Cannon AFB with several large freezers and refrigerators loaded with hotdogs, ice cream, burritos, coke, milk, and so on, plugged in along the back wall. Once week a civilian cleaning crew was set to cleaning and buffing the vinyl tile floors in the hallways. Next morning, the freezers and fridges were all shut off because the circuit breakers popped. Repeat several times, each time “a thousand dollars” worth of food went into a dumpster.
Since most of the squadron were electronic technicians or electricians, it wasn’t hard to figure out once we realized what was on the other side of the snackbar’s back wall – a long hallway. The power outlets on both sides of that wall were on the same circuits. The floor buffers had the most powerful engine UL allows to plug into a standard 15A wall outlet, drawing 12A. The freezers and fridges drew more than 3A each. When the buffer and the freezer or fridge compressor ran at the same time, the breaker sensed an overload and popped, like it’s supposed to. Their buffer stopped working from that outlet, so the cleaners moved the cord down to the next outlet…
After a while, this particular hallway was added to the places we cleaned ourselves rather than letting civilians do it. All the enlisted below E6 took their turns on this detail. It was a pain having to run long extension cords from elsewhere for the buffers, but it was worth it to be sure there’d be food at the snackbar when you got held late or called in early.
The answer is more wind. After all, if something you eat gives you a stomach ache, you just eat more of it until it doesn’t. Simples!
The first big rounds of wind farm investments went for the best wind locations. Now with continuing build out, I guess it just depends on the tax credit windage. Isn’t that right Uncle Joe?
I’m a bit confused
In May, the total amount of wind power generated in the ERCOT system was just under 310,000 megawatts (MW), which is down 40% from the nearly 520,000 MW generated in May 2022…. In the first 19 days of June, around 185,000 MW of wind power was generated, which is down 45% from the 336,000 MW generated in the same period in 2022.
A Watt is measured as Joules/Second
So how did they get the total Watts, is the data available measured in second intervals? Or did they use some other method?
Wouldn’t it have been easier as energy in MWh which is how it’s paid for?
He’s a journalist; what do you expect?
You are right, they got the units messed up. This is why I am not a fan of using MWh as a unit for energy, too easy to confuse with MW. Using Joules (the SI unit for energy) eliminates the problem.
Using Joules (or worse, ergs) soon has you struggling to remember your power of 10 prefixes. Plus there’s that 3,600 seconds in an hour which is not such an easy conversion. Annual GWh to average MW is easier – divide by 9 for a good first shot.
I was no fan of BP’s decision to change from measuring large scale primary energy use in mtoe to EJ. That’s partly because of familiarity with the numbers, and partly again because of some easy conversions: 50mtoe=1 mb/d, 1toe=12MWh. It’s also handy to remember that 6,000kcal/kg standard quality coal is 7MWh/tonne GCV.
Journalists should be forbidden to write about energy systems, until after they have graduated from an engineering college, to avoid spreading nonsense.
In this case, just add an h after MW, and the nonsense is cleared up.
“Free Energy” sure cost a lot.
Wind is problematic not just because of its short-term variability but because it’s seasonal. It generates 37% of nameplate capacity. Solar is at the bottom of the list, producing 25% of nameplate capacity. Nuclear is at the top of the list, producing 90% of nameplate capacity.
There are some forms that rank below solar, but I think that’s because they are used only during peak demand periods.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=table_6_07_a
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=table_6_07_b
Texas has brought all of this misery on themselves. If they had spent the same money on fossil fuel and nuclear generation as they have on wind and solar we wouldn’t be having this discussion. They are being stupid.
Wind droughts are the fatal flaw in the system and one can envisage a book titled How Wind Droughts Destroyed Western Civilization. Think about the consequences of a system blackout if Net Zero policies are pursued to the bitter end in Western Europe and Australia.
Texas in 2021 gave us a glimpse of the abyss during a spell of low wind and a serious cold snap. Hundreds died and it would have been thousands if the state had gone completely black, instead of hanging on by a thread. Now, Texas is planning to subsidise gas producers to maintain capacity in the face of competition from subsidised wind and solar power.
This is a link to a series of short pieces published recently in Australia.
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2023/06/19/its-about-the-wind-droughts-stupid/
The first describes the parallel universe situation where the people in one universe think we are having a rapid green transition and the others know that we are going anywhere fast and it is not going to happen.
The second describes The Voice of wind literacy and the series of studies of wind droughts in Australia, with little or no wind across the whole of the NEM, the electricity grid of SE Australia.
The third explains the three factors that combine to destroy the sustainability of wind and solar power.
The fourth expands the scope to Europe which is haunted by the spectre of power failure. The question is asked: why was there no warning from the professional meteorologists?
The fifth joins the dots to see the connection between the role of the WMO, the World Meteorological Organization, in the rise of climate alarmism and the ongoing activities of meteorologists around the world in adjusting official temperature records and not noticing wind droughts.
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2023/06/19/its-about-the-wind-droughts-stupid/
From The Reuters’ article
In May, the total amount of wind power generated in the ERCOT system was just under 310,000 megawatts (MW), which is down 40% from the nearly 520,000 MW generated in May 2022….
I believe the metric should be in mWh to accurately portray energy delivered over time
Yup.
“How fast did you go?”
My speed was only 31 miles today, way slower than the 52 miles I was going at yesterday.
You have that backwards, they gave the total generated but used the units of rate of generation (MW). Like saying ‘I drove 200mph yesterday’ when 200 miles was meant.