Green energy is helping to keep the Texas power grids alive amid a weekslong heat wave that has left power usage at an all-time high.
The perfect meteorological conditions have allowed renewable energy generated by wind turbines and solar panels to supply the grids with enough power to meet demand, experts told ABC News.
“OPERATING RESERVES: 6,610 MW NORMAL CONDITIONS There is enough power for current demand.” ERCOT
This seems like the eleventyeth day in a row with a high temperature over 100 °F and ERCOT has only issued a handful of voluntary conservation alerts, like this one:
News Release
Jul 13, 2022
ERCOT Issues Conservation Appeal to Texans and Businesses
Appeal Effective Wednesday, July 13, 2022
AUSTIN, TX, July 13, 2022 – As extreme hot weather continues driving record power demand across Texas, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is issuing a Conservation Appeal for Wednesday, July 13 between 2-8 p.m. ERCOT is asking Texans and businesses to voluntarily conserve electricity during this time. Currently, no system-wide outages are expected.
Today’s conditions are expected to be similar to those experienced on Monday, July 11, 2022. On that day, Texans and businesses responded by voluntarily conserving electricity and helping ERCOT successfully meet record power demand by reducing their energy use by 500 MWs.
Conservation is a reliability tool ERCOT has deployed more than four dozen times since 2008 to successfully manage grid operations. This notification is issued when projected reserves may fall below 2300 MW for 30 minutes or more.
[…]
Factors driving the need for this important action by customers:
Record high electric demand. The heat wave that has settled on Texas and much of the central United States is driving increased electric use. Other grid operators are operating under similar conservative operations programs as ERCOT due to the heatwave.
Low wind. Wind generation is currently generating less than what is historically generated in this time period.
Forced thermal outages. The number of forced outages in thermal generation exceeds ERCOT forecasts.
Solar. Developing cloud cover in West Texas has reduced the amount of solar generation.
Under current projected scenarios, performance of the generation fleet Wednesday is:
Installed Capacity
Wednesday (7/13) Tightest Hour (3-4 p.m.)
Percentage of Installed Capacity Available at Tightest Hour
One has to wonder what did ERCOT expect fron its thermal power plants? 100%? If the number of thermal (almost all natural gas, coal & nuclear) outages is exceeding your forecast and your dispatchable sources (almost all thermal) are still delivering 84% of capacity, your expectations might just be a tad bit on the high side.
The Texas grid is handling the heat just fine because of natural gas… PERIOD!
JULY 26, 2023
Texas power grid met record-breaking demand for electricity during recent heat wave
Data source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Hourly Electric Grid Monitor Note: Values shown are the maximum hourly reported demand for the day, which may differ from an instantaneous peak in demand.
An extreme heat wave in late June and July led to record-breaking demand for electricity in Texas as homes and businesses turned up their air-conditioning, fans, and other cooling equipment to cope with the heat. Power plants in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT)—the grid operator for most of the state—increased output to meet elevated demand.
“Power plants in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT)… increased output to meet elevated demand.”
What types of power plants can increase output to meet elevated demand?
Wind? No.
Solar? No.
Hydroelectric? Not really… And Texas has very little of this.
Batteries? ROTFLMFAO!!!
Nuclear? Not really… But I wish we had more of these.
Coal? Used-to-could (H/T Jeff Foxworthy)
Natural gas? BINGO! Give that man a cigar!
We’ll first focus on the period discussed in the EIA article: June 23-July 23, 2023. The ABC News pack of lies was published in the midst of this period.
Solar power basically keeps “bankers’ hours.” Wind ramps up and down with… well… with the wind. Natural gas and, to a lesser extent, coal ramp up and down to meet demand and cover for wind and solar, when they fail to show up for work.
Here’s the daily generation with fossil fuels and nuclear power highlighted:
Solar, wind energy Fossil fuels and nuclear power keeping Texas power grids running amid weekslong heat wave
On a daily basis, wind power provided an average of 21% of ERCOT’s electricity, ranging from a low of 8% on July 2 to a maximum of 32% on June 28. Solar was more reliable, delivering a steady 7% to 9% of the electricity, almost all delivered during bankers’ hours (10 AM to 6 PM). Fossil fuels and nuclear power generated an average of 71% of the electricity, ranging from a low of 60% on June 28 to a maximum of 83% on July 2… Why do those dates sound familiar?
If there had been the slightest problem with ERCOT’s grid during this heat wave, the headlines would have screamed: Fossil fuels failed again!
A more truthful headline would be:
Solar, bailing out Texas wind power amid weekslong heat wave
Here’s a plot of ERCOT’s fuel mix on July 31, 2023:
Aimed at increasing the reliability of the ERCOT power region in Texas, Senate Bill 2627, or the Powering Texas Forward Act, creates a taxpayer-funded, low-interest loan program for up to $7.2 billion in upgrades or new construction of dispatchable electric generation facilities such as natural gas plants. To be eligible for a loan, upgrades to existing facilities or new construction must, in each case, result in a net increase of at least 100 megawatts to the ERCOT power region. Electric energy storage facilities are not eligible for loans under the new program. Loans under the bill may be issued at the discretion of the PUC based on various listed factors, including an aggregate cap on the program of 10,000 megawatts of generating capacity, and each loan must have a term of 20 years, be payable ratably starting three years after the estimated commercial operation date for the facility and bear an interest rate of 3%. The program also provides for “completion bonus grants” to be paid to companies that get qualifying new or upgraded plants connected to the grid by certain deadlines. Grant amounts will be disbursed to recipients in equal annual payments over 10 years and are based, among other factors, on megawatts of capacity provided to the ERCOT power region, not to exceed $120,000 per megawatt. The bill also includes caps on amount of the fund balance that can be expended at any given time.
Senate Bill 2627 is the enabling legislation for Senate Joint Resolution 93, which proposes a constitutional amendment providing for the creation of the Texas Energy Fund to support the construction, maintenance, modernization, and operation of electric generating facilities.
Unfortunately, they failed to pass bills that would have subjected wind and solar projects to the same sort of permitting and environmental compliance as thermal power plants.
Where is the lie here. As I understand the situation for that tightest hour:
Demand 78451 MW
Dispatchable 67076 MW
Wind+Solar 12.281 MW
Total power available 79,357 MW
which is just enough to meet demand. Looks just like what the headline said:
“Solar, wind energy keeping Texas power grids running amid weekslong heat wave”
They would be stuck without them.
Nick, having an expensive source that irregularly shifts from supplying 8% of the grid to supplying 23% of the grid is not a good project.
It is a diversion of assets from more reliable sources like combined cycle gas or nuclear.
Nick has faith in wind and solar- so the fact that it doesn’t work as well a ff, is irrelevant in the goal of “saving the planet”. No matter how badly green energy fails us- it’ll be defended as all religious cults are.
They are stuck WITH ruinables that they have to hope will not fail. All of those bird shredders and slaver panels will fail long before any real power plants built at the same time.
By your lame ‘logic’ as long as ruinables produce a watt, they’re holding up the grid. An all gas and nuclear grid would be trouble-free and much cheaper, without despoiling the landscape or devastating wildlife. There is no climate emergency and no justification for the ruinables boondoggle.
When George Orwell wrote “Animal Farm” he needed a boondoggle that oppressive governments promote in order to create an appearance of progress. Orwell chose the windmill.
“Solar has its place for sure.”
Correct, especially for individual usage, not grid-level where it mainly destabilizes the grid (wind turbines even more so).
Life expectancy of solar panels ~ 20-25 yrs; of power walls ~ 15 yrs, then they get replaced. NG or coal or nuclear, with routine maintenance, > 60 yrs.
Ironically, with the current administrations’ energy policies making the grid more fragile, individual owners like you may be better prepared than the rest of us for the likely blackouts.
I’m the author of this post… A post that largely ripped utility scale renewables. That said, if individual consumers decide that they will benefit from solar panels I say… Power to them👍. Yeah, the subsidies suck, but that’s the playing field.
LOL… Talk about grasping for straws… and missing !
Wind and solar are only providing 12.3GW out of 78.5GW
Dispatchable installed is 80GW, so it could have provided ALL the electricity if wind and solar was not given precedence, or it went MIA…
.
Imagine if it was a cloudy, windless day !
Good thing they have enough available REAL electricity to cover the grid.
apparently the climate religious cultists just don’t mind all that much if there are power outages thanks to undependables
but I hate power outages- ruins my day- sometimes ruins all the food in the ‘frig- keeps me from working in my home office
of course the leaders of this cult are often very wealthy- they will not suffer these inconveniences- you know they’ll have generators in their homes- I’d like to install one but they’re not cheap, including the cost of an electrician to install it
Imagine that Texas had invested the money in gas and nuclear instead of wind and solar. Result: cheap, reliable power throughout the year, completely unaffected by the weather.
Please tell us WHY you think W and S should be part of the grid? I can’t think of any advantages at all.
Nick, total capacity for coal, gas nad nuclear is somewhere near 90gW. 80gW is the summertime capacity. We have been fortunate that the solar panels have generated near capacity during the limited time of the sun, when the wind drops off. If we had installed a little more coal or nuclear for a small portion of what was spent on wind and solar, we would have all that extra capital to invest in real things like chips, metals, cars, etc.
ast Updated: Aug 2, 2023 13:14 CT
CURRENT GENERATION
SUMMER CAPACITY
MAXIMUM CAPACITY
Solar
13,227 MW(16.7%)
12,636 MW
21,162 MW
Wind
7,583 MW(9.6%)
10,427 MW
38,695 MW
Hydro
23 MW(0.0%)
478 MW
600 MW
Power Storage
1 MW(0.0%)
447 MW
4,795 MW
Other
101 MW(0.1%)
163 MW
113 MW
Natural Gas
42,669 MW(53.9%)
53,446 MW
69,890 MW
Coal and Lignite
10,599 MW(13.4%)
13,568 MW
14,321 MW
Nuclear
4,933 MW(6.2%)
4,973 MW
5,448 MW Note: Maximum Capacity values do not represent the actual capacity ERCOT reasonably expects to be available at any given time. Previous Day| Real-Time| Current Day
I suspect the table heading % Available is only correct for wind and solar as the grid is required to take all available. Since gas (the main dispatchable) is ramped up and down to meet load there must be more available in reserve than actually used. As the table indicates only 84% of dispatchable used at peak there could have been up to a 16% of 80,000 (12,800 MW) reserve. That’s as much as the total wind/solar contribution. Or do you think ERCOT actually runs their grid with no reserve when it gets hot?
Poor Nick.. please let us know when wind and solar can produce anywhere near 84% of their installed capacity, 24/7
You know it was just PURE LUCK it wasn’t cloudy and windless. !
No-one can RELY on wind and solar.
It just isn’t possible.
If they hadn’t been so STUPID as to let their available installed dispatchable supply lag behind their peak demand, they wouldn’t be in that predicament.
You know that, so stop the idiotic straw-clutching,
No, they could probably have achieved more. The warning is issued when the <i>forecast</i> reserve drops below 2,300MW. It is also quite common when such warnings are issued for plants that can help out by speeding up a return from maintenance or delaying it an extra few hours for the sake of some remunerative generation to make themselves available. So let’s look at what actually happened.
The first thing to note is that ERCOT were consistenly making very conservative forecasts for afternoons and peak demand hours – i.e. they were over forecasting peak demand, at least as recorded by the EIA. A natural reaction to having been caught out before. The highest level of dispatchable generation was 63,354MW, which was well below the nominal quoted availability, and for the hour they were worried about actual demand turned out to be 79,987MW and dispatchable generation was 57,794MW – well below the availability.
They also ended up substantially underestimating particularly wind but also solar generation when they made their call for demand reduction. Of course, this only highlights how difficult it is to make good forecasts of the weather and weather powered generation. However, wind ranged from 3,325MW to 24,179MW over the period, so the caution is understandable.
They were “needed” because they were part of the grid. If they weren’t part of the grid, ERCOT would still have about twice as much coal-fired capacity as it currently does, and we would only be having serious problems in Texas when it was fracking colder than Hell.
.
As a side note… Why are the phrases “hotter than Hell” and “colder than Hell” in common usage? 😎
W&S weren’t needed – they were REQUIRED by idiot leaders looking to signal their cultist adherence to all things green. Any sensible energy planner would invite all players to the table, but on an apples to apples basis: renewables would have to guarantee stable and reliable power, and foot the bill for whatever that takes (batteries, pumped hydro, etc.).
Solar and wind mandates are just making electricity more expensive for the consumers. ERCOT wouldn’t have to go begging for voluntary reductions if it relied only on real sources of energy and not sources of crony handouts and wishful, unscientific thinking.
Among other things, the lie is that had they not stopped building natural gas and coal, there never would have been a problem.
To borrow your insane claims from last year. How can you credit solar with saving the day, solar was just doing what it was designed to do, generate power during the middle of the day and only during the middle of the day.
Wind on the other hand is designed to produce power whenever it feels like, whether it is needed or not.
As to the claim that batteries were helping, now that is a complete and utter lie.
The batteries store enough power to hold up the grid for a few minutes at best. The sole purpose of batteries is try and make up for the fact that neither wind nor solar have any form of frequency stability.
“Solar, wind energy keeping Texas power grids running amid weekslong heat wave”
They would be stuck without them.
Nick,
So they made the sun shine longer and stronger and forced the wind velocity to increase to meet the extra demand from the extreme heat?
Or did they rely mostly on natural gas?
At least the solar was pretty constant, which of course is usually a feature during major heat waves. While winds drop off and greatly fluctuate during heat waves.
In the WInter, solar will always be much lower, even on good days. The wind often blows harder but wildly fluctuates.
Coal and especially natural gas are much more reliable.
Why am I even needing to state such an obvious thing???
You obviously wanted to blurt out something absurd as fast at possible to be the first one to respond to this thread to see how much attention you could get.
That’s clearly your mission here, Nick.
Sometimes you make decent points but other times, like this one you state something retarded to get attention.
“Why am I even needing to state such an obvious thing???”
I just did obvious arithmetic. The media claim that W&S kept the Texas grid running was called a media lie, but it is simply, arithmetically true. Without it, they could only have generated about 80% of demand.
Of course, without gas or coal or nuclear they couldn’t have either. All it means is that W&S are now just part of the generation resource, as they should be. People refer to coal and gas as despatchable, but only up to their max, And also limited by machines that at a time are unable to produce. Here was a case where despatchability wasn’t enough.
If all the funds hadn’t been wasted on unreliable intermittent supplies…
.. but instead spent on making sure that there was sufficient dispatchable supply available , plus some…
… none of this would be a problem.
It is the absolutely idiocy of relying in inherently unreliable supplies, while downgrading their reliable supplies..
… all on a fake anti-science, anti-CO2, moronic-left agenda.
Realists have warned time and time again this this would happen.,
These problems are TOTALLY the making of those stupid unthinking cretins and AGW cultists who back the use of intermittent supplies over reliable coal and gas.
It was the FORECAST of the available capacity. In the UK we’ve had a couple of LOLP notifications in recent days because the forecast capacity availability was not enough to provide an adequate margin. By the acutal event, the shortages had evaporated, because more capacity became available, doubtless on the back of signing lucrative short term deals. Exactly the same would have happened in ERCOT, certainly if there was any real threat of shortage – just as it did in Feb 21. In the event, wind and solar turned out better than forecast at the critical times, and extgreme system stress was avoided. But if the low points of renewables output had occurred on different timing we would have seen whether they system was really able to cope.
Dispatchability, alone, “wouldn’t have been” enough over that specific two hour period according to ERCOT’s forecast.
Without wind and solar, ERCOT would have more dispatchable generation sources and the potential shortfall wouldn’t have occurred. Prior to the dependency on wind power, we only had these sorts of problems during exceptionally deep winter freezes. Hotter than Hell summers are the norm here, colder than Hell winters are the exception. February 2021 was so cold that one of the two South Texas Nuclear Generating Station reactors had to shut down.
Wind power works great in Texas in spring and fall, when the winds over the Llano Estacado are strongest and electricity demand is lowest. The addition of solar power to the grid has compensated for wind’s summer weakness.
Wind is now an integral part of the grid… It’s also the weakest component. When the decision was made to build out the transmission lines from West Texas, natural gas prices were high, we were importing LNG, and ERCOT was heavily dependent on coal. Tapping the world class wind resource made sense back then. Roll forward 15 years and natural gas is cheap, abundant and we are exporting LNG. While I wouldn’t rip out the wind turbines, I wouldn’t add any more and I would only support adding enough solar to level out the duck curve.
Headlines that claim that wind and solar are saving the Texas grid are flat out lies.
Here is an analogy for Stokes’ assertions: A perfectly healthy man amputates one leg, and gets it replaced by a wooden peg leg. He then claims that he would fall over without the wooden leg. Absolutely true, of course, but only because of his folly in amputating his leg in the first place.
The headline of this post specifically refers to the ABC News article and the other news media headlines.
The EIA and ERCOT quotes were part of my refutation of the media lies.
You are the English major, with a better physics background than me, you should be able to avoid red herring and strawman fallacies better than this… Or should it be “that”?
It has long been the case that Texas has had insufficient dispatchable capacity. That was why they were unable to meet demand during the Feb 21 freeze leading to a cascading trip and blackouts: it was to be expected that wind and solar could become insignificant, with wind dropping down to 649MW. The reason for that is that lower merit order plant gets to run too rarely when elbowed aside by subsidised and preferenced wind and solar, and absent other means of keeping it in reserve, it closed.
This is exactly why the PUCT has devised new market mechanisms.
You’re so right, Nick. How in the heck did Texas provide enough power in the summer to its citizens before wind turbines and solar PV? They’re so gosh darn lucky that wind and solar came along just in time to rescue them from power blackouts during the hot summer. The weird thing is that the more power is generated from wind and solar, the more they’ve struggled to handle peak loads, especially in winter when not having power is far more dangerous than it is in summer. I wonder why that is?
Nick, I keep beating this dead horse, but you have yet to respond without deflecting. Using your own ERCOT numbers to replace the current Thermal (dispatchable sources) 67076 MW / 12.281 MW = 5,461.770214151942 times. ~5500 times the current installed renewables base are required when the wind and solar are at minimums????? And I thought 35 times was a bad prediction, this pales in comaprison.
How large does that renewables (wind/solar/battery/pumped/etc.) replacement number have to be to make you understand that they just are not fit for the purpose? These kinds of numbers are available for any grid to calculate the needed expansion investment.
How deluded must you be to ignore the implications of your own data?
The issue has never been that solar PV and wind don’t produce electricity. They do.
The issue is that they are not reliable hence must have nearly 100% backup – and this backup cost is NOT factored into LCOE.
On the other side of the intermittent problem: the low relative cap factor of wind and solar PV means 2x and 3x, respectively, electricity production during peak intermittent production periods. This drives wildly varying wholesale pricing, which, when coupled with “buy renewables first” mandates means dispatchables like nuclear wind up subsidizing the wind and solar PV more and more, as intermittent penetration increases.
California already has a duck curve which is negative pricing in 2023; that’s only going to get worse.
And? Lots of down thumbing lurkers. without even the wherewithal to whine on line. Personally, I don’t thumb people, but just read for the eyerolling chuckles…
Separately, when will we see your next post about the triumph of Permian Shale Oil?
Tom Halla
August 1, 2023 6:28 pm
Somehow deducting from the subsidies paid to wind to pay for the conventional backup required by such weather dependent sources would have been preferable.
antigtiff
August 1, 2023 6:42 pm
CO2 is not causing any problem so screwing up electric utilities is just self inflicted pain and cost….for nothing. Consequences happen when wrong actions are taken….pretty simple and easy to understand. Next time….try to get it right in the beginning.
Even Nick has given up trying to pretend that global warming is a problem.
He’s latest shtick is to try and pretend that wind and solar are such a great deal, that it justifies government forcing people into paying for them.
About 2,000 years ago, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote, ““The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
He and George Orwell would have well understood each other. And both would have agreed that Stokes is lying. The only question is is Nick actually that stupid or is he paid to promote propaganda.
I wonder if Arizona will ever wake to the fact that Texas and California are robbing it of its wind energy and the precipitation carried by the moist air currents from adjacent bodies of water.
Air flow from ocean to land is a precious resource that will get increasing attention as more wind energy is extracted to convert to electrical energy rather than moving moisture.
Any tropical ocean above 28C is part of the global convective engine. These regions absorb 200W/m^2 at the surface to produce water vapour. That heat is lost to space above the level of free convection to develop convective potential that fires convective instability sporadically; averaging about once every two days. The actual work going into lifting the atmosphere over that cycle averages 11W/m^2. So it takes 200W/m^2 of surface sunshine to get only 11W/m^2 of “mechanical” power elevating the tropical atmosphere. It is that elevating of the atmosphere in the tropics that drives global circulations. The centre of mass of the tropical atmosphere is typically 900M higher than the CoM of the polar atmosphere: http://www.pmd.gov.pk/rnd/gsm_output/gsm_charts/500windht/1.png
11W/m^2 across the tropical oceans translates to a big number across the globe but no one knows how delicate the balance is at local level. How much wind energy can be extracted in Texas before it has a detrimental impact on precipitation in Arizona!
Its been years since I read details but one of the many differences between El Nino and La Nina is where much and little rain falls. Last year, in the La Nina, Arizona had much rain, this year, so far in the developing El Nino, Arizona has had little rain. Is that the norm for the two difference regimes?
While wind turbines in Texas may have have some effect on precipitation beyond Texas, untangling the contributions probably isn’t simple and it would probably take a rather humongous number of wind turbines to compete with ENSO.
I am a little confused – isn’t Arizona mostly desert?
How exactly are wind mills stealing moisture as opposed to say, the Mohave mountains between California and Arizona?
The perfect meteorological conditions have allowed renewable energy generated by wind turbines and solar panels to supply the grids with enough power to meet demand, experts told ABC News.
If only the weather were perfect and unreliables were reliable 24/7/365.
Then, and only then, could I get on board with wind and solar.
Wow, you have to hand it to the renewables shrills. They claim success even when they have achieved a complete failure!
During a heat wave, wind managed to provide just 12% of its installed capacity. Then to suggest solar was the big success it achieved 68% of capacity during one hr of the day. Six hours later it was producing zero energy but that truth gets ignored.
We must thank our good fortune we have fossil fuel to deploy in times of need.
Meanwhile here in the UK, during our summer heat wave that is covered so widely by the BBC. This past month has been the wettest and one of the coldest July’s on record. August is looking to continue that cold wet summer trend, with ground frosts in northern parts of the country expected later in the month.
“The perfect meteorological conditions have allowed renewable energy generated by wind turbines and solar panels to supply the grids with enough power to meet demand, experts told ABC News.”
a big duh! So, what about when you don’t have perfect meteorological conditions in Texas or anywhere else? Oh, and this information is provided by EXPERTS!
But, but the answer is obvious. OVERBUILD those low cost renewables sources.How much?? You don’t really want to know. For ERCOT somwhere between 35 to 5,500 times. AND REMEMBER THE GUMMIT WILL PAY FOR IT NOT THE RATE PAYERS! 😉
Ian_e
August 2, 2023 5:53 am
Hmm, personally, I have always felt that the only certain things in life are death and Texas.
c1ue
August 2, 2023 8:13 am
There’s something wrong with the graphs – they are showing continuous solar power from midnight to midnight. Unless this is a Spain spotlight situation – that should not be happening.
Also: one issue with wind is that it apparently tends to blow around midnight – also a low demand period.
Lastly: I would note that the wildly variable pricing due to intermittent production is really bad, economically, for the slower ramping up/down sources like nuclear power plants. You can’t turn on/off a nuclear power plant on a dime – so mid-day and/or midnight negative price periods literally suck money out of nuclear plant operators into the pockets of wind and solar PV due to “renewable buy first” setups.
Really speaking, there is a small role for intermittents in 1st world electricity generation but “renewable buy first” should not be part of that.
The interesting part with Texas is whether its low natural gas prices will hold up. Last year, Texans saw record utility bill increases. LNG capacity continues to ramp up even as fracking activity seems not to be – so at some point the fracking induced NG glut is likely to go away.
Also takes the focus off the disastrous performance, or lack thereof, during the valentine day freeze when the wind & solar production went from about 40% to less than 8% in one day causing massive blackouts which lasted for a week or more
Oh but the Eco-Nazis will tell you it was because of the gas plants (that stopped getting gas…because the idiotic requirement to use electric pumps (as a condition to get the pipelines built) to move gas through the pipelines instead of just using gas as is normally done…because the wind power face-planted).
Kevin Kilty
August 2, 2023 3:44 pm
I spent the last couple of days in Santa Fe and had the misfortune to meet a Houston resident who is a devoted wind advocate yesterday morning at breakfast — full of misinformation she was.
First she told me that wind saved Texans from the recent heat wave by supplying 40% of electricity. I suggested the other 60% must then have also saved Texans. However, after breakfast I checked the EIA hourly grid monitor and learned that wind actually provided 23.5% (22.5% if weighted by demand) of electrical energy during July. So, the other 76.5% actually saved Texans.
But this was not all. She explained how 700, which she revised to 800, Texans died in the cold spell of 2021. I suggested that fossils fuels saved what could be saved of that situation but she insisted that the shortage was all the fault of fossil fuel providers who’d failed to insulate their equipment. And besides burning fossil fuels simply poisons Houston residents with bad air.
Then she drifted into tinfoil hat territory by suggesting that the contribution of wind in February 2021 could not have been near zero because wind turbines do not freeze in the cold. Nothing was said about them not turning when there is no wind.
Where is the lie here. As I understand the situation for that tightest hour:
Demand 78451 MW
Dispatchable 67076 MW
Wind+Solar 12.281 MW
Total power available 79,357 MW
which is just enough to meet demand. Looks just like what the headline said:
“Solar, wind energy keeping Texas power grids running amid weekslong heat wave”
They would be stuck without them.
Nick, having an expensive source that irregularly shifts from supplying 8% of the grid to supplying 23% of the grid is not a good project.
It is a diversion of assets from more reliable sources like combined cycle gas or nuclear.
Nick has faith in wind and solar- so the fact that it doesn’t work as well a ff, is irrelevant in the goal of “saving the planet”. No matter how badly green energy fails us- it’ll be defended as all religious cults are.
They are stuck WITH ruinables that they have to hope will not fail. All of those bird shredders and slaver panels will fail long before any real power plants built at the same time.
By your lame ‘logic’ as long as ruinables produce a watt, they’re holding up the grid. An all gas and nuclear grid would be trouble-free and much cheaper, without despoiling the landscape or devastating wildlife. There is no climate emergency and no justification for the ruinables boondoggle.
When George Orwell wrote “Animal Farm” he needed a boondoggle that oppressive governments promote in order to create an appearance of progress. Orwell chose the windmill.
interesting- I read that so long ago I forgot 100% of it – now I’ll have to read it again- perhaps some quotes from that book would be useful
I’ve had panels on my roof for 10 years now and normally 100% off grid with my powerwall. So there’s that. Solar has its place for sure.
Power to you bro…🍻
“Solar has its place for sure.”
Correct, especially for individual usage, not grid-level where it mainly destabilizes the grid (wind turbines even more so).
Life expectancy of solar panels ~ 20-25 yrs; of power walls ~ 15 yrs, then they get replaced. NG or coal or nuclear, with routine maintenance, > 60 yrs.
Ironically, with the current administrations’ energy policies making the grid more fragile, individual owners like you may be better prepared than the rest of us for the likely blackouts.
Hence my reply… “Power to you bro…🍻”
I’m the author of this post… A post that largely ripped utility scale renewables. That said, if individual consumers decide that they will benefit from solar panels I say… Power to them👍. Yeah, the subsidies suck, but that’s the playing field.
LOL… Talk about grasping for straws… and missing !
Wind and solar are only providing 12.3GW out of 78.5GW
Dispatchable installed is 80GW, so it could have provided ALL the electricity if wind and solar was not given precedence, or it went MIA…
.
Imagine if it was a cloudy, windless day !
Good thing they have enough available REAL electricity to cover the grid.
“Dispatchable installed is 80GW, so it could have provided ALL the electricity”
No, they couldn’t. 67 GW is all that was available.
Once again, Nick either doesn’t know, or hopes nobody else knows, the difference between current generation and total capacity.
84% of installed..
Still WAY more than either wind or solar.
And it was available, no matter the weather..
A few clouds and no wind.. what happens to wind and solar !
Trying to RELY on something which is inherently unreliable, is pretty darn stupid, wouldn’t you agree.
And where are all the headlines when there is no wind or solar saying..
“Fossil fuels meet 100% of demand…”
You know, like in saner times.
apparently the climate religious cultists just don’t mind all that much if there are power outages thanks to undependables
but I hate power outages- ruins my day- sometimes ruins all the food in the ‘frig- keeps me from working in my home office
of course the leaders of this cult are often very wealthy- they will not suffer these inconveniences- you know they’ll have generators in their homes- I’d like to install one but they’re not cheap, including the cost of an electrician to install it
Nick, and replace this “Dispatchable installed is 80GW with renewables is ~5,500 times the current renewables installed costs. What’s your point?
Imagine that Texas had invested the money in gas and nuclear instead of wind and solar. Result: cheap, reliable power throughout the year, completely unaffected by the weather.
Please tell us WHY you think W and S should be part of the grid? I can’t think of any advantages at all.
And think how much money would be available after not installing all the wind and solar generation.
Nick, total capacity for coal, gas nad nuclear is somewhere near 90gW. 80gW is the summertime capacity. We have been fortunate that the solar panels have generated near capacity during the limited time of the sun, when the wind drops off. If we had installed a little more coal or nuclear for a small portion of what was spent on wind and solar, we would have all that extra capital to invest in real things like chips, metals, cars, etc.
ast Updated: Aug 2, 2023 13:14 CT
CURRENT GENERATION
SUMMER CAPACITY
MAXIMUM CAPACITY
Solar
13,227 MW(16.7%)
12,636 MW
21,162 MW
Wind
7,583 MW(9.6%)
10,427 MW
38,695 MW
Hydro
23 MW(0.0%)
478 MW
600 MW
Power Storage
1 MW(0.0%)
447 MW
4,795 MW
Other
101 MW(0.1%)
163 MW
113 MW
Natural Gas
42,669 MW(53.9%)
53,446 MW
69,890 MW
Coal and Lignite
10,599 MW(13.4%)
13,568 MW
14,321 MW
Nuclear
4,933 MW(6.2%)
4,973 MW
5,448 MW
Note: Maximum Capacity values do not represent the actual capacity ERCOT reasonably expects to be available at any given time.
Previous Day| Real-Time| Current Day
“which is just enough to meet demand.”
Which is EXACTLY what is required.
“They would be stuck without them.”
No, they wouldn’t…
There was plenty of spare dispatchable for when wind and solar decide to take a break.
I suspect the table heading % Available is only correct for wind and solar as the grid is required to take all available. Since gas (the main dispatchable) is ramped up and down to meet load there must be more available in reserve than actually used. As the table indicates only 84% of dispatchable used at peak there could have been up to a 16% of 80,000 (12,800 MW) reserve. That’s as much as the total wind/solar contribution. Or do you think ERCOT actually runs their grid with no reserve when it gets hot?
They said
The key word is forced. 67GW is all they could achieve, out of 80 GW. Hence the appeal.
Poor Nick.. please let us know when wind and solar can produce anywhere near 84% of their installed capacity, 24/7
You know it was just PURE LUCK it wasn’t cloudy and windless. !
No-one can RELY on wind and solar.
It just isn’t possible.
If they hadn’t been so STUPID as to let their available installed dispatchable supply lag behind their peak demand, they wouldn’t be in that predicament.
You know that, so stop the idiotic straw-clutching,
… it makes you look like a mindless zealot.
Like the article said, they had “The perfect meteorological conditions”. How often does that happen in Texas?
No, they could probably have achieved more. The warning is issued when the <i>forecast</i> reserve drops below 2,300MW. It is also quite common when such warnings are issued for plants that can help out by speeding up a return from maintenance or delaying it an extra few hours for the sake of some remunerative generation to make themselves available. So let’s look at what actually happened.
The first thing to note is that ERCOT were consistenly making very conservative forecasts for afternoons and peak demand hours – i.e. they were over forecasting peak demand, at least as recorded by the EIA. A natural reaction to having been caught out before. The highest level of dispatchable generation was 63,354MW, which was well below the nominal quoted availability, and for the hour they were worried about actual demand turned out to be 79,987MW and dispatchable generation was 57,794MW – well below the availability.
They also ended up substantially underestimating particularly wind but also solar generation when they made their call for demand reduction. Of course, this only highlights how difficult it is to make good forecasts of the weather and weather powered generation. However, wind ranged from 3,325MW to 24,179MW over the period, so the caution is understandable.
Without the “investment” in wind and solar, ERCOT would approximately be 52% natural gas, 40% coal-fired and 8% nuclear… With no summertime blues.
https://youtu.be/GAM1k9vEVqg
What source ramped up to meet demand?
The sources together met the demand. As the “lie” headline said, “dispatchables” could not do it alone. W&S were neded.
They were “needed” because they were part of the grid. If they weren’t part of the grid, ERCOT would still have about twice as much coal-fired capacity as it currently does, and we would only be having serious problems in Texas when it was fracking colder than Hell.
.
As a side note… Why are the phrases “hotter than Hell” and “colder than Hell” in common usage? 😎
Banjo Patterson wrote about two hot places in NSW that discomfited him, Hay and Booligal. He pleaded:
“Oh, send us to our just reward
In Hay or Hell, but, gracious Lord,
Deliver us from Booligal!”
+42×1042
That’s Cohen brothers worthy…😎
Yep, country NSW was very hot around that time. !
Hell is exactly like “Climate Change”, applicable to all situations.
W&S weren’t needed – they were REQUIRED by idiot leaders looking to signal their cultist adherence to all things green. Any sensible energy planner would invite all players to the table, but on an apples to apples basis: renewables would have to guarantee stable and reliable power, and foot the bill for whatever that takes (batteries, pumped hydro, etc.).
So in whatever world you inhabit, whatever demand is right now, just happens to match total available?
Solar and wind mandates are just making electricity more expensive for the consumers. ERCOT wouldn’t have to go begging for voluntary reductions if it relied only on real sources of energy and not sources of crony handouts and wishful, unscientific thinking.
Nick likes to pretend that he doesn’t understand the tables that he reads.
Among other things, the lie is that had they not stopped building natural gas and coal, there never would have been a problem.
To borrow your insane claims from last year. How can you credit solar with saving the day, solar was just doing what it was designed to do, generate power during the middle of the day and only during the middle of the day.
Wind on the other hand is designed to produce power whenever it feels like, whether it is needed or not.
As to the claim that batteries were helping, now that is a complete and utter lie.
The batteries store enough power to hold up the grid for a few minutes at best. The sole purpose of batteries is try and make up for the fact that neither wind nor solar have any form of frequency stability.
“Solar, wind energy keeping Texas power grids running amid weekslong heat wave”
They would be stuck without them.
Nick,
So they made the sun shine longer and stronger and forced the wind velocity to increase to meet the extra demand from the extreme heat?
Or did they rely mostly on natural gas?
At least the solar was pretty constant, which of course is usually a feature during major heat waves. While winds drop off and greatly fluctuate during heat waves.
In the WInter, solar will always be much lower, even on good days. The wind often blows harder but wildly fluctuates.
Coal and especially natural gas are much more reliable.
Why am I even needing to state such an obvious thing???
You obviously wanted to blurt out something absurd as fast at possible to be the first one to respond to this thread to see how much attention you could get.
That’s clearly your mission here, Nick.
Sometimes you make decent points but other times, like this one you state something retarded to get attention.
“Why am I even needing to state such an obvious thing???”
I just did obvious arithmetic. The media claim that W&S kept the Texas grid running was called a media lie, but it is simply, arithmetically true. Without it, they could only have generated about 80% of demand.
Of course, without gas or coal or nuclear they couldn’t have either. All it means is that W&S are now just part of the generation resource, as they should be. People refer to coal and gas as despatchable, but only up to their max, And also limited by machines that at a time are unable to produce. Here was a case where despatchability wasn’t enough.
If all the funds hadn’t been wasted on unreliable intermittent supplies…
.. but instead spent on making sure that there was sufficient dispatchable supply available , plus some…
… none of this would be a problem.
It is the absolutely idiocy of relying in inherently unreliable supplies, while downgrading their reliable supplies..
… all on a fake anti-science, anti-CO2, moronic-left agenda.
Realists have warned time and time again this this would happen.,
These problems are TOTALLY the making of those stupid unthinking cretins and AGW cultists who back the use of intermittent supplies over reliable coal and gas.
People like YOU, Nick !
“All it means is that W&S are now just part of the generation resource, as they should be”
NO, THEY SHOULD NOT BE..
Not if you want reliable on-call electricity.
There is absolutely NO NEED for them.
They have destroyed or are destroying every grid that they infect.
Nick really is this dense. He’s not pretending.
They are called dispatchable because they can be ramped up and down as required.
They produced 67GW because they didn’t need to produce any more to meet demand. Not as Nick stupidly infers, that they couldn’t produce more.
Just remember folks, he uses his keen sense of logic to add to the dross that is climate science.
“Not as Nick stupidly infers, that they couldn’t produce more.”
No, it was ERCOT who said that they couldn’t produce more
and they said this was the capacity available at the tightest hour.
It was the FORECAST of the available capacity. In the UK we’ve had a couple of LOLP notifications in recent days because the forecast capacity availability was not enough to provide an adequate margin. By the acutal event, the shortages had evaporated, because more capacity became available, doubtless on the back of signing lucrative short term deals. Exactly the same would have happened in ERCOT, certainly if there was any real threat of shortage – just as it did in Feb 21. In the event, wind and solar turned out better than forecast at the critical times, and extgreme system stress was avoided. But if the low points of renewables output had occurred on different timing we would have seen whether they system was really able to cope.
Dispatchability, alone, “wouldn’t have been” enough over that specific two hour period according to ERCOT’s forecast.
Without wind and solar, ERCOT would have more dispatchable generation sources and the potential shortfall wouldn’t have occurred. Prior to the dependency on wind power, we only had these sorts of problems during exceptionally deep winter freezes. Hotter than Hell summers are the norm here, colder than Hell winters are the exception. February 2021 was so cold that one of the two South Texas Nuclear Generating Station reactors had to shut down.
Wind power works great in Texas in spring and fall, when the winds over the Llano Estacado are strongest and electricity demand is lowest. The addition of solar power to the grid has compensated for wind’s summer weakness.
Wind is now an integral part of the grid… It’s also the weakest component. When the decision was made to build out the transmission lines from West Texas, natural gas prices were high, we were importing LNG, and ERCOT was heavily dependent on coal. Tapping the world class wind resource made sense back then. Roll forward 15 years and natural gas is cheap, abundant and we are exporting LNG. While I wouldn’t rip out the wind turbines, I wouldn’t add any more and I would only support adding enough solar to level out the duck curve.
Headlines that claim that wind and solar are saving the Texas grid are flat out lies.
Here is an analogy for Stokes’ assertions: A perfectly healthy man amputates one leg, and gets it replaced by a wooden peg leg. He then claims that he would fall over without the wooden leg. Absolutely true, of course, but only because of his folly in amputating his leg in the first place.
“Absolutely true, of course”
But the headline here says it is a media lie.
But I think the analogy is rather of a man who gets on a bicycle. He can sail along using much less energy. But he has to learn not to fall off.
The headline of this post specifically refers to the ABC News article and the other news media headlines.
The EIA and ERCOT quotes were part of my refutation of the media lies.
You are the English major, with a better physics background than me, you should be able to avoid red herring and strawman fallacies better than this… Or should it be “that”?
It has long been the case that Texas has had insufficient dispatchable capacity. That was why they were unable to meet demand during the Feb 21 freeze leading to a cascading trip and blackouts: it was to be expected that wind and solar could become insignificant, with wind dropping down to 649MW. The reason for that is that lower merit order plant gets to run too rarely when elbowed aside by subsidised and preferenced wind and solar, and absent other means of keeping it in reserve, it closed.
This is exactly why the PUCT has devised new market mechanisms.
https://www.puc.texas.gov/industry/electric/reliability.aspx
You’re so right, Nick. How in the heck did Texas provide enough power in the summer to its citizens before wind turbines and solar PV? They’re so gosh darn lucky that wind and solar came along just in time to rescue them from power blackouts during the hot summer. The weird thing is that the more power is generated from wind and solar, the more they’ve struggled to handle peak loads, especially in winter when not having power is far more dangerous than it is in summer. I wonder why that is?
Nick, I keep beating this dead horse, but you have yet to respond without deflecting. Using your own ERCOT numbers to replace the current Thermal (dispatchable sources) 67076 MW / 12.281 MW = 5,461.770214151942 times. ~5500 times the current installed renewables base are required when the wind and solar are at minimums????? And I thought 35 times was a bad prediction, this pales in comaprison.
How large does that renewables (wind/solar/battery/pumped/etc.) replacement number have to be to make you understand that they just are not fit for the purpose? These kinds of numbers are available for any grid to calculate the needed expansion investment.
How deluded must you be to ignore the implications of your own data?
The issue has never been that solar PV and wind don’t produce electricity. They do.
The issue is that they are not reliable hence must have nearly 100% backup – and this backup cost is NOT factored into LCOE.
On the other side of the intermittent problem: the low relative cap factor of wind and solar PV means 2x and 3x, respectively, electricity production during peak intermittent production periods. This drives wildly varying wholesale pricing, which, when coupled with “buy renewables first” mandates means dispatchables like nuclear wind up subsidizing the wind and solar PV more and more, as intermittent penetration increases.
California already has a duck curve which is negative pricing in 2023; that’s only going to get worse.
Nick’s comment currently has a -70 rating and the post only has 71 comments… 😎
And? Lots of down thumbing lurkers. without even the wherewithal to whine on line. Personally, I don’t thumb people, but just read for the eyerolling chuckles…
Separately, when will we see your next post about the triumph of Permian Shale Oil?
Somehow deducting from the subsidies paid to wind to pay for the conventional backup required by such weather dependent sources would have been preferable.
CO2 is not causing any problem so screwing up electric utilities is just self inflicted pain and cost….for nothing. Consequences happen when wrong actions are taken….pretty simple and easy to understand. Next time….try to get it right in the beginning.
Even Nick has given up trying to pretend that global warming is a problem.
He’s latest shtick is to try and pretend that wind and solar are such a great deal, that it justifies government forcing people into paying for them.
______________________________
Bingo!
“Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the
restatement of the obvious” George Orwell.
About 2,000 years ago, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote, ““The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
He and George Orwell would have well understood each other. And both would have agreed that Stokes is lying. The only question is is Nick actually that stupid or is he paid to promote propaganda.
I wonder if Arizona will ever wake to the fact that Texas and California are robbing it of its wind energy and the precipitation carried by the moist air currents from adjacent bodies of water.
Air flow from ocean to land is a precious resource that will get increasing attention as more wind energy is extracted to convert to electrical energy rather than moving moisture.
Any tropical ocean above 28C is part of the global convective engine. These regions absorb 200W/m^2 at the surface to produce water vapour. That heat is lost to space above the level of free convection to develop convective potential that fires convective instability sporadically; averaging about once every two days. The actual work going into lifting the atmosphere over that cycle averages 11W/m^2. So it takes 200W/m^2 of surface sunshine to get only 11W/m^2 of “mechanical” power elevating the tropical atmosphere. It is that elevating of the atmosphere in the tropics that drives global circulations. The centre of mass of the tropical atmosphere is typically 900M higher than the CoM of the polar atmosphere:
http://www.pmd.gov.pk/rnd/gsm_output/gsm_charts/500windht/1.png
11W/m^2 across the tropical oceans translates to a big number across the globe but no one knows how delicate the balance is at local level. How much wind energy can be extracted in Texas before it has a detrimental impact on precipitation in Arizona!
Atmosphere over Phoenix Arizona currently too dry to develop convective potential:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2023/08/02/0400Z/wind/surface/level/overlay=cape/orthographic=-105.67,14.16,786/loc=-112.097,34.456
Atmosphere is the direst it has been in the last 10 years in early August. Same day in 2017 had enough moisture to develop convective potential:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2017/08/02/0400Z/wind/surface/level/overlay=cape/orthographic=-105.67,14.16,786/loc=-112.097,34.456
Its been years since I read details but one of the many differences between El Nino and La Nina is where much and little rain falls. Last year, in the La Nina, Arizona had much rain, this year, so far in the developing El Nino, Arizona has had little rain. Is that the norm for the two difference regimes?
While wind turbines in Texas may have have some effect on precipitation beyond Texas, untangling the contributions probably isn’t simple and it would probably take a rather humongous number of wind turbines to compete with ENSO.
I am a little confused – isn’t Arizona mostly desert?
How exactly are wind mills stealing moisture as opposed to say, the Mohave mountains between California and Arizona?
If only the weather were perfect and unreliables were reliable 24/7/365.
Then, and only then, could I get on board with wind and solar.
shouldn’t it be 24/7/52.25 or 24/365
To me 24/7/365 doesn’t really make sense 😉
Wow, you have to hand it to the renewables shrills. They claim success even when they have achieved a complete failure!
During a heat wave, wind managed to provide just 12% of its installed capacity. Then to suggest solar was the big success it achieved 68% of capacity during one hr of the day. Six hours later it was producing zero energy but that truth gets ignored.
We must thank our good fortune we have fossil fuel to deploy in times of need.
Meanwhile here in the UK, during our summer heat wave that is covered so widely by the BBC. This past month has been the wettest and one of the coldest July’s on record. August is looking to continue that cold wet summer trend, with ground frosts in northern parts of the country expected later in the month.
And today, 8:00 AM 2nd August, they are forecasting high winds and thunderstorms for much of the UK. By 5:00 PM they will be screaming climate change!
Just get rid of the gas and coal since Big Biz and Gummint have all the money we need to transition so then we don’t have to pay for that-
Australian households ‘shouldn’t have to pay’ for renewables: Kylea Tink (msn.com)
Simples really.
The phrase “there’s no free lunch” immediately pops to mind…
“The perfect meteorological conditions have allowed renewable energy generated by wind turbines and solar panels to supply the grids with enough power to meet demand, experts told ABC News.”
a big duh! So, what about when you don’t have perfect meteorological conditions in Texas or anywhere else? Oh, and this information is provided by EXPERTS!
But, but the answer is obvious. OVERBUILD those low cost renewables sources.How much?? You don’t really want to know. For ERCOT somwhere between 35 to 5,500 times. AND REMEMBER THE GUMMIT WILL PAY FOR IT NOT THE RATE PAYERS! 😉
Hmm, personally, I have always felt that the only certain things in life are death and Texas.
There’s something wrong with the graphs – they are showing continuous solar power from midnight to midnight. Unless this is a Spain spotlight situation – that should not be happening.
Also: one issue with wind is that it apparently tends to blow around midnight – also a low demand period.
Lastly: I would note that the wildly variable pricing due to intermittent production is really bad, economically, for the slower ramping up/down sources like nuclear power plants. You can’t turn on/off a nuclear power plant on a dime – so mid-day and/or midnight negative price periods literally suck money out of nuclear plant operators into the pockets of wind and solar PV due to “renewable buy first” setups.
Really speaking, there is a small role for intermittents in 1st world electricity generation but “renewable buy first” should not be part of that.
The interesting part with Texas is whether its low natural gas prices will hold up. Last year, Texans saw record utility bill increases. LNG capacity continues to ramp up even as fracking activity seems not to be – so at some point the fracking induced NG glut is likely to go away.
The daily graphs are of the daily totals.
Also takes the focus off the disastrous performance, or lack thereof, during the valentine day freeze when the wind & solar production went from about 40% to less than 8% in one day causing massive blackouts which lasted for a week or more
Oh but the Eco-Nazis will tell you it was because of the gas plants (that stopped getting gas…because the idiotic requirement to use electric pumps (as a condition to get the pipelines built) to move gas through the pipelines instead of just using gas as is normally done…because the wind power face-planted).
I spent the last couple of days in Santa Fe and had the misfortune to meet a Houston resident who is a devoted wind advocate yesterday morning at breakfast — full of misinformation she was.
First she told me that wind saved Texans from the recent heat wave by supplying 40% of electricity. I suggested the other 60% must then have also saved Texans. However, after breakfast I checked the EIA hourly grid monitor and learned that wind actually provided 23.5% (22.5% if weighted by demand) of electrical energy during July. So, the other 76.5% actually saved Texans.
But this was not all. She explained how 700, which she revised to 800, Texans died in the cold spell of 2021. I suggested that fossils fuels saved what could be saved of that situation but she insisted that the shortage was all the fault of fossil fuel providers who’d failed to insulate their equipment. And besides burning fossil fuels simply poisons Houston residents with bad air.
Then she drifted into tinfoil hat territory by suggesting that the contribution of wind in February 2021 could not have been near zero because wind turbines do not freeze in the cold. Nothing was said about them not turning when there is no wind.
Woe is us.