By Paul Homewood
h/t Dave Ward
What a surprise!!
Fortunately Texas still has plenty of gas generation:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/balancing_authority/ERCO
Texans Asked to Cut Electricity Use, As Wind Power Drops Off
“Fortunately Texas still has plenty of gas generation:”
Does anyone know if they are still using the wind assisted grid to power their gas pumps?
Of have they reverted to using gas powered pumping after the last fiasco?
Electricity is electricity, all electrons are the same.
They converted a lot of gas compressors (not pumps) from gas driven turbine to electric motor to reduce emissions. Also electric motors are simpler and therefor more reliable.
But It takes years to do this or reverse it so nothing will have changed since Feb 2021.
These are 10,000 to 30,000 hp units, nothing changes fast.
But you have to have constant electric supply for them, if there isn’t enough you are in trouble.
Feb 2021 hit a wall because it was cold so gas is heavily used in heating.
Summer peak load is air conditioning, all electric, so I doubt there would be a gas supply crunch.
There just isn’t enough reliable generation online.
A choice.
Really? I thought the only reason for the electric pumps on new pipelines was to get permits. I struggle to understand the advantage of running a gas turbine at an electrical generation plant vs running a gas turbine at a NG pump station, Texas still gets most of its electricity from NG. (I worked on pipelines most of my career and never heard of such a thing). But that was before woke.
In summer the threat to gas supply comes from production shutdown due to a hurricane. That’s why there is significant onshore storage that can get tapped to cover an extended shutdown. It also gives a seasonal boost to gas supply to cover winter heat demand.
The EPA, under Obama, regulated use of natural gas pumps away. They didn’t do it on their own accord. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it comes to mind. Now if electrical power is down, so are the pumps.
3PM TO 8PM – That will be the hottest part of the day, just don’t turn on the cooling, and suffer. Wind “energy”, an utter joke. The solution from the green climate nutters…, install more wind “generation”.
I must confess that if I lived in Texas I would be tempted to turn on everything to full power just to make it harder for them to get away with the damage they are doing to Texas. It could hurt people in the short term but longer term, if no-one does anything, Texans look like being totally shafted.
I do live in Texas, and oddly enough, it was the February 2021 disaster that prompted me to take advantage of the Covid-1984 workplace disruption to flee living in central Texas to a region that I deliberately chose to be outside of ERCOT.
SPP is a more north-south spread which is more likely to be immune to jet stream changes unlike ERCOT which seems to be deliberately designed to be fully underneath the regular summer high pressure dome that is responsible for both prolonged triple digit temperature heatwaves and a lack of surface wind.
It was like some evil genius tried to conjure up a way to maximize failure in the ERCOT grid – mocking the fact that Texas could very easily be the cheapest and most reliable energy zone on earth due to the easily extracted coal, oil, gas and nuclear fuels laying under our feet.
It was the “four minutes and thirty-seconds away from total grid failure” that was my wakeup call. Total means total, which means Mad Max Thunderdome. No gas stations, no EVs, that means even the government would have been demanding martial law and supplying rationed everything to its favored constituencies. Then factor in the 72 hour rule which would be madness given that it takes months if not years to replace broken distribution transformers sourced from our “friends” in China.
So when people joke about doing things that would trigger an outage to “teach them a lesson” its important that the politicians hate you, hate Texas, hate everything about you and your customs and traditions and place high stakes politics just for the sake of the “high” from wielding so much deadly power without any personal consequences. These people dope psychologically in the Dark Tetrad and probably find that your pain is their Viagra.
Unfortunately, words cant fix the problem. These lizard brain people only understand tar and feathering.
Kiss up, and piss down! It’s the cardinal rule of those positioned high on the Dark Tetrad scale!
It seems that ALL humans exhibit these four traits to some degree; how we got the current batch of politicians who peg the needle at 10 (or 11) is the most important question of our time! The Bribe’em Administration seems replete with an amazing number of twelves!
You deserve 25+ 👍Well said
You do know that SPP has even more wind, proportionately, than ERCOT?
SPP as a grid has negative prices, 30% of the time as a result.
I wonder of Mad Max will ever get to drive a BEV!
They asked people to turn it up to 78 lol. That’s hardly a hardship my friend
The air temperature is not the only variable here. The dew point is just as important. For people that live in places (like Houston) where the dew points regularly get into the 70’s, a 78 degree indoor air temperature can be quite stifling.
And if most people do comply, it just makes it easier to push it up to 79 or 80 next time. At what point does it become unreasonable? How much must I suffer to assuage your irrational guilt at being wealthier than any other human civilization before us?
Does not matter if wind is so cheap, if you can’t count on it to be there when you need it, it worthless.
Wind is not only worthless, it is very expensive.
Free is always expensive. Just for someone else.
Raw resources are cheap, even free, such as living trees, oil and gas and coal in the ground, waves and tides and wind and the sun.
It’s converting them to useful resources that is expensive.
About the only true natural resource is the air. Even drinking water from a stream requires some effort, and wild berries and fruits and veggies have o be harvested.
I do not consider living trees cheap. They are a truly precious resource.
Thirty years ago, when I moved to my then new neighbourhood, the original trees had been removed for farming and grazing purposes but the land was being slowly transformed into suburban housing blocks.
The view from my then new house was mostly domestic roofs, roadways and commercial buildings. It has taken most of those 30 years to transform into leafy suburbia. The temperature range has narrowed due to all that greenery. The dust levels have reduced. The traffic noise deadened. Wildlife proliferates – even a rare peregrine falcon having lunch in one of the backyard trees.
I do not regard trees as cheap. They are a precious resource that is generally undervalued. Cutting any down to make way for solar panels and wind turbines is just plain stupid.
Free does not mean worthless. Air is free but precious.
They claim that wind is cheap, in reality, it isn’t.
When you consider the number of wind turbines it takes to replace a single FF fuel plant.
The increased cost of all the extra infrastructure needed to wire all those turbines into the grid.
The fact that those turbines only last 1/2 to 1/3rd as long as a fossil fuel plant.
And the efficiency of wind turbines degrades significantly over it’s short life span.
And that’s before you add in the cost of whatever has to kick in when the wind stops blowing.
You forgot the “environmentalist’s” most important cost factor when discussing fossil fuel plants, the societal cost factor.
In this case: The number of living things killed daily, weekly, yearly, by each and every “average” bird chopper.
The number of children working in mines obtaining the required minerals for the production of such bird choppers.
The amount of pollution spread about at these third world mines.
The amount of slave labor in the factories that process the materials to produce the raw materials used for build bird choppers.
Add your own and!
Wind and solar power AREN’T cheap! One simply has to account for the costs and subsidies and voila` – it AIN’T cheap!
The obvious conclusion from this is one that also follows from an examination of the UK power generation record. It is that you cannot get to net zero in generation, or anything like it, if you try to use wind as the main source.
You cannot get there by using a generating technology which is both unreliable and unpredictable. Its not fit for purpose. And no-one does, no-one is even trying. Though the UK Labour Party, if it comes to power, may make a run at it if their current announcements are turned into policy.
Nick Stokes has reached a correct and logical conclusion on this. His argument is the only one that has any chance of addressing the issue. It is that you run wind as a supplement to a gas system, with the financial justification for doing so being the supposed fuel savings.
He is still positioning the gas as a supplement to the wind, but in fact to any unbiased observer the system is actually working the other way around.
He has never produced a business case or a proper paper showing this. The most he’s done is put up a graph showing UK CO2 emissions from all sources falling from the 1990s to the present, but with no demonstration that the cause of the reductions is installation of W+S and no account of the financials.
When you’re reduced to this argument for wind, it amounts to the admission that previous climatist arguments for it have failed in the light of experience.
The most devastating refutation of the viability of wind is an observation from the UK that I have cited a couple of times before. Jon Butterworth, chief executive of UK National Gas, is quoted by the Telegraph as saying:
“If we hadn’t had gas in 2022, there were 260 days when we would have had rolling blackouts, and for 26 of those days we would have had a full blackout.”
Think about what all this means. The conclusion is, the UK is running a gas system supplemented by wind (and in summer, solar). And that no-one has ever shown that this is a cost effective way to run power generation. By which I mean, shown that its less expensive to run a gas + wind system, as compared to a conventional coal + gas system.
I am skeptical that adding W+S actually even lowers emissions. Another thing that is claimed but not rigorously shown.
I would like to correct michel, who says “the UK is running a gas system supplemented by wind”. The correct statement is “the UK is running a gas system disrupted by wind”.
I am also skeptical that lower emissions will significantly decrease future warming and that, if it does happen to do so, then I’m also skeptical that a bit warmer is a net negative.
Funny thing is a bit cooler is a new glaciation.
All of the wind installs are simply virtue signaling. The issue is they destroy the economic viability of the 100% needed reliable gas system.
We see this every day on the Alberta grid page. Wind and solar is extremely variable, so if we somehow get to 4GW of wind contributing to the grid we cannot turn off 4GW of gas to allow the wind on as the fluctuations are so rapid,
Instead all or most of the reliable gas system is running at reduced output so it can be dialed up quickly.
But gas turbine efficiency craters quickly if not run at full load so if all these generators are running at 70% output they are likely still using 90% or more of the fuel required for full output.
So the MW supplied per unit of gas decreases, makes gas electricity appears more expensive, and impacts the stats such that gas availability looks worse than it would be.
And not saving much emissions.
You can get around some of this by using simple cycle peakers but they are 40% eff compared to combined cycle 60%.
The renewables are simply a useless cost.
Nick Stokes has reached a correct conclusion. I must have been out that day. But good for him. I’m confused now.
He has concluded that a system of 100% wind and solar can’t work. And that conclusion is correct.
He still tries to push the nonsense that a power system can be primarity wind and solar with natural gas as a backup, and that such a system will be cheaper than what we have today. In that belief he is wrong.
Thanks for clearing that up.
You say:”Nick Stokes has reached a correct and logical conclusion on this.”
No he hasn’t. His basis for going through the mental gymnastics is wrong. CO2 can’t do what he claims, heat the earth to some disastrous effect, so there is absolute no need to any of this.
if your predicate is wrong you can’t reach a logical conclusion.
Unfortunately, despite what he told the Telegraph, Jon Butterworth is also fully signed up to wind power and has recently joined a subsidiary of National Gas – National Grid Ventures – to Wind Europe. “We’ll continue to build onshore wind projects and also take an active role ensuring the success of US offshore wind” They are also into building the transmission infrastructure to connect up the windfarms. Eggs in many baskets!
https://windeurope.org/membership/members-interviews/jon-butterwoth-ceo-of-national-grid-ventures/
Grrr…. Subsidiary of National Grid not National Gas
Nick assumes that there is a 1:1 relationship between the amount of power being generated by wind and solar, and the energy savings from gas and coal.
The problem with this is the fact that you can’t start up a gas or coal plant on a moments notice.
This means that even when they aren’t being used, gas and coal plants are consuming energy.
The less power they consume, the cooler they will be and the longer it will take to bring them back to full power.
From the article: “Texans Asked to Cut Electricity Use, As Wind Power Drops Off”
Texans should tell their politicians to build more conventional, reliable electric generating facilities to eliminate this problem.
Texans Asked To Not Hang Out Washing Which Causes Wind Power Drop Off
Has there been any meaningful study that looks into “Climate Change” that comes as a result of major surface wind interference from windmills?
This is a huge globe, but if a handful of SUVs can boil oceans, than surely these monster fans are causing turbulence and disrupting local weather, pollination, cloud formation from convection, etc.
“The trails of disturbed air produced by wind turbines—known as wakes—can alter downwind temperatures and humidity, and a new U.S. Geological Survey study has demonstrated for the first time that wakes can impact vegetation in the vicinity.
The study’s insight into the effects of wakes from wind turbines on vegetation is an important first step to understanding how wind energy affects terrestrial ecosystems.”
https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/wind-turbine-wakes-can-impact-downwind-vegetation
But only after many thousands have already been built.
My ex-boyfriend liked to claim that windmills cause global slowing by pushing against the earth’s rotation. He’s my ex for a couple of reasons, but that’s not one of them.
You could add it, though….
Any wind will eventually stop, due to friction with the earth. This is true, with or without wind mills.
In the extra tropical NH the prevailing winds are westerly. So slowing them down is accelerating the earth’s rotation. If that is something he wants to worry about.
https://www.offshorewind.biz/2022/08/18/long-range-wake-losses-offshore-much-greater-than-expected-new-study-shows/
So an actual study shows that the models they used, skewed to claim higher “energy” production were wrong for facilities to get approval, were wrong by 10%.
How close is that 10% to the projected profit margin of the facilities after all the subsidies and forced purchase of the “energy” output are factored in?
There is no free lunch. The sun generates weather which generates wind, wind affects the environment.
Wind turbines remove energy from the climate and so they have to be affecting something.
At the scale the climate/insane want to install them it eventually has to add up to a noticeable effect.
But only noticeable to some
Like how the warming due to CO2 is only noticeable to some?
If my memory is correct, the marginal prices over the past few days have exceeded $1000/MWh, sometimes by multiple times that numbers. In what world is that inexpensive reliable power?
It’s a world of constrained supply. Exactly what the renewable advocates claimed wouldn’t happen
What did people use for lights before candles?
Electricity
(I know, an old joke. But all this *cough* cheap, *cough* “green” energy makes it more and more true.)
Or before FF oil, whale oil!
Here near Texarkana the power failed briefly yesterday; briefly like for just a few seconds, before the generator had a chance to kick on. We’re in a 2 year-old, 1,800 sf, spray-foam-insulated house powered mostly by solar, but even with a roof full of panels it still takes some power from the grid to operate this time of year. The A/C’s set to 82F, too, so it’s not like we’re sitting around in sweaters. They didn’t put any windmills in this region and it’s a good thing because the wind hasn’t blown above five knots on more than a day or two in the last three months. The wind sock in the pasture barely twitches even in the afternoons. Last year we looked into adding a little wind generator, but at best it would be a very minor addition to the power supply and worthless right now.
The solar’s strictly for independence purposes; it’s sure not for saving money. For 10 months of the year we can sell power back to the grid, but it can’t cover the A/C and normal electric use (no appliances running) this time of year. It was also stupid-expensive, requires replacing the battery at least every 10 years (or more frequently) at $10k a pop, and will never pay for itself.
2 questions. Why even have air conditioning if you set it at 82F? Knowing the solar limitations, why did you install it?
I can answer the air conditioning question. Early in my career, when I was getting over being a poor college student and transitioning to an entry level employee, I lived in North Carolina, a high humidity state. I kept the AC set at 80-82, which was comfortable if the air was dry–which is one thing an AC does–and saved some precious cash doing so. I didn’t have to worry about anybody else, just me, and I was comfortable. I know that is not an answer for everybody, but I also worked in an office where the men set the AC at 68 degrees and the women had heaters under their desks.
Don’t know about the solar part–I have never had solar on anything, and I am not sure I would.
It’s 82 degrees F in the room I’m sitting in right now, in Oklahoma. It’s 102 degrees F outside (109 Heat Index).
It’s not bad at 82 degrees.
82F (27C) is very comfortable. I guess a lot depends on the local humidity. Here it’s usually around 60%
What these guys said: When it’s 104 outside and humid, with a heat index even higher, walking back in to a dry 82F feels really good. As long as there’s some air movement with a small fan it’s comfortable. Also, I’m retired and cheap: The less the solar powers, the more I sell back to the grid, or this time of year the less I use the grid. On top of paying off the solar it was $50 for the grid power last month. I know it all sounds stupid but the solar’s not for saving money. It’s for being as energy independent as possible for when I get “debanked” and cut off for wrongthink.
People do seem to set the air conditioning a bit too cool in summer.
Read about Edison batteries on WUWT. IF they were still manufactured they would be the ONLY batteries I would consider for an off grid solar fixed installation. They are 100% renewable for 100 years or more. Just very heavy, and they take up more space, which, in any home application such as yours, would not be an issue.
I wonder why no one manufactures them anymore? Does the classic “planned obsolescence” paradigm apply? Rhetorical questions only.
82 is way better than 92, or whatever it might reach without AC. AC also drops the humidity, so the heat index is lower. When I was younger, stronger, and way poorer, we lived in a house with no cooling. For a month or two in the summer it would be mid 90’s inside in the afternoon and evening, it was miserable.
Here in the Mojave we run a swamp cooler, because of the usually very low humidity. It will keep the house about 25 degrees cooler than the outside temp, and the humidity at a healthier level. So, we are at about 82 a lot of the time. During a heat wave we might see 85 inside, and that’s with the cooler running day and night. 85 is starting to be uncomfortable.
This was a reply to slowroll
We had a swamp cooler at my house in Oklahoma when I was a kid.
It did a pretty good job most of the time, but I recall several occasions where it was so hot that all the cooler did was blow hot air. No relief whatsoever.
During high humidity, which I think Oklahoma gets a fair bit of, the cooling effect is reduced. The temp and the humidity of the air coming out of the cooler increases as the humidity increases.
Normally, our swamp cooler output is about 30 degrees F cooler than the outside air. Right now, I just measured it, it is outputting about 18 degrees cooler than the humid 90 degree pre-hurricane gunk outside.
We were limited by our own ignorance. We don’t have the know-how to install stuff ourselves so we were restricted to what the installers use, and most of them work only with specific products. Installer A uses only Company X and installer B won’t use anything but Company Y.
“The solar’s strictly for independence purposes”
Only if you have at least 16 hours of battery backup.
Wind generation is niche solution that only works well for the eco-billionaires like Tom Steyer and his buddies, who can harvest the subsidies to increase their wealth! I, myself, have too much love for the natural world, especially birds of prey, to ever advocate it’s wide spread use.
Only in desert regions with high winds, like the Sahara, the Gobi or Antarctica, does it make any sense to use vastly overrated and expensive wind power. I do like the old-fashioned windmills for water well pumps! That’s a tried and true technology, first developed by the Dutch centuries ago, and still useful today in some situations.
Wind works for those water pumps because you have a cost effective means of storage. The watering trough.
The tank is the storage, not the troughs. But. yeah – the windmill is a way to fill the tank. Apparently submersible pumps powered by solar PV have largely replaced them now. The pumps require less maintenance, and the power is less intermittent.
Just a sign of what’s to come across the once-great USofA.
Unless we change direction.
Doomberg nails it in this podcast
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pYkmJOhWtSU&feature=youtu.be
Do you still pay for electricity and gasoline?
Not me, we have a PV system to power household and electric cars.
I think most people here would not argue that it is possible to get a off grid set up working with the right investment in the right place with reasonable expectations. But that is not analogous to running a modern industrial civilization off PV, wind etc
Issuing a smug alert!
Beware of high levels of smug at this time! Do not partake of heavy mental exercise as the smug will attack your thought processes with damaging consequences!
And remember, kids, from the bottom of a deep enough well you can see the stars by day!
fascinating comparison : looking at stars through well bottoms chimneys and tubes because it can be both true and false and confounded by dust in the air etc, but I see what you mean . I think?
No roof top system is capable of powering a house, much less have anything left over for charging a car.
And doubtless you live in the desert SW and rarely if ever stray from your 15 minute city.
Must be some big PV array to charge cars in less than a week.
That’s what I was thinking. The poster must have a very expensive systems, if he is powering all his needs with solar.
Anyone notice he never mentioned his new PV system payment costs?
Ours was $32k for an 1800 sf house. To add enough capacity to be entirely off-grid in the peak months of July-September would have been another $30k. Outside of those three months the existing panels can keep us entirely off-grid and let us sell a little back to the electric company, but we can’t cut the tie completely unless we cough up another 5 figures. The battery has to be replaced about every 10 years for $10k, so the operating cost is high and ongoing. It will never pay for itself. The goal isn’t savings, but having some power when SHTF.
I should mention that we added a wood-burning stove to heat the place in the winter, so the solar doesn’t operate the furnace, although it can. It’s a gas furnace and refilling a 250 gallon propane tank was $500 the winter of 2021-22. Three refills/winter = the stove pays for itself in three years. The stupid and depressing thing is that in the 21st century I have to collect pinecones and firewood to heat my house.
Oh, no! . . . you still pay and pay and pay for electricity and gasoline, as both are intimately involved with the farming/production/distribution of food (plant- and animal-based) that you consume, in providing city water and sewage and trash pickup services (assuming you use such), and in the manufacturing, transportation, storage and retail marketing of goods and services that you purchase.
And do you think that any governmental services that you use/interact with don’t use FF-generated electricity or gasoline in their operations that ALL taxpayers fund???
The old saying is true now more than ever: no man is an island.
Since it is really sciency to set up such a system, please provide the readers here, many of whom are sciency, with the full list of your solar panels, average output per week, for 52 weeks a year, storage means, average daily temperatures weekly for the 52 weeks of the year, your cooling and heating methods to include water heating, where you get your water, and the cost of this “I call BS, you are a l!er” system.
Unless you live in a tropical location where no heating or cooling is necessary and you don’t use a refrigerator, where your electric CARS (plural really?) are never used and where you produce all of you own food, I definitely call BS.
Your religion is showing.
Is it grid connected? or are you disconnected from the grid?
Do you only use electricity during sunny days ?
Texas needs a power generation system based on a more reliable source. Perhaps they should design a generator that feeds off the lies of radical environmentalists and socialist politicians – there will be no downtime.
Like the gumption and perseverance of heavy dope smokers, the lies of eco-loons and socialist politicians are too diffuse and intermittent to power a modern industrial society!
Now if you could just capture the politicians during campaign season, and the environmental nutters out at Burning Man or some such; you could get close to the density needed for modern living. Hell, you’d almost be at teenage-boy-on-first-date levels of energy; enough to power whole cities.
You can’t be too careful when the Texas wind drops. There is a story about a huge ranch with free-range chickens, where the wind blows all the time. On the rare event when it does stop–all the chickens fall over. A daunting sight.
Sometimes I find that I am torn between wanting to be welcoming to people that show up here that are just beginning their journey of discovery ( that much of what they have been told is actually very poorly conducted science) at the risk of being played by random troll like operatives. Fortunately we here at WUWT are plagued by less of the later than most sites.
I took a more up to date look at what happened. First, here is the ERCOT demand forecast and outturn. At first blush it looks as though their call for demand restraint was effective. But look back to the 15th, and we see they grossly overestimated demand, so they may have done the same thing for the 17th and 18th. They have some interest in crying wolf in the light of past failures. Texas is not yet out of the woods in terms of dispatchable capacity so it makes some sense to make a noise about that. I’ve not seen comment on whether the new market features introduced by the PUC and the legislature are working.
Next I updated on the generation. Peak gas hit 50GW in the hour to 8p.m. when solar was still making a contribution (albeit fast declining to sunset), and wind actually picked up into the evening. Earlier in the day when demand was higher solar made a good contribution to cover for the lack of wind. Perhaps after all they were lucky that the wind picked up when it did.
Yep, and I would always rather rely on luck rather than proper preparation.
Your “crying wolf” in your previous post is ridiculous. They were showing the necessary caution (necessitated by all the wind unreliability on the system) while you are using 20-20 hindsight.
I have examined the data over 2 posts because I can only post 1 chart at a time. I have considered what might possibly have been going on at ERCOT, and I reached the conclusion that they were not unreasonable in giving a warning. Why do you think otherwise? I pointed out that actual demand fell short of the forecast, and considered the possible reasons that might have been so – their warning was effective, or their warning was unnecessary because they overestimated demand – but it is not until the second post looking at generation that I freached a conclusion – that it was a sensible precaution.
If you have any update on how attempts to increase dispatchable capacity are going in Texas they would be welcome.
Blatant admission that expensive, heavily subsidised, intermittent wind power = power cuts
Voluntary poser cuts in this lucky instance. Maybe not so lucky next time.
Build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators and remove all wind and solar from the grid.
Please don’t charge your car !!
meh, I’m happy we have wind, solar, and gas. I hate the politicization of this stuff. They all have their advantages.