By Ed Ireland
The inherent unreliability of wind power is highlighted by the recent experience in Texas.
I have written extensively about the intermittent nature of wind power (here, here, and here), highlighting that the only way wind power has survived and continues to increase is through federal tax subsidies. Wind proponents have long argued that the intermittent nature of wind is offset by over-building wind generation, based on the theory that the wind is always blowing somewhere.
The reality that the wind is not always blowing where it is needed, even over very large areas, is highlighted by the fact that wind power in Texas has been declining.
Total wind power generation in January 2024 was less than in January 2023. According to Reuters in an article published on February 16, 2024:
Cumulative wind power output in 2023 was 4,500,000 MW, compared to 4,400,000 MW in 2022, LSEG data shows. That 2.4% climb in annual wind output is less than the roughly 3% rise in wind generation capacity within the system in 2023, according to ERCOT. Unusually low wind speeds were the main cause of the stunted growth, with output in April, May and June all falling sharply from the prior year totals.
Adding insult to injury, this decline in wind power occurred even as total wind generation capacity increased by a staggering 28% from 356,000 megawatts (MW) to 455,000 MW in January 2023, according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).
So much for the fallacy that the wind is constantly blowing somewhere. Wind farms in Texas cover thousands of square miles of south Texas, West Texas, and the Texas Panhandle, and, yet total wind power generation declined year-over-year:
Source: U.S. Department of Energy
As is always the case on all U.S. power grids, natural gas came to the rescue to offset the decline in wind power:
As Reuters reported:
Combined output from natural gas and coal was close to 50% greater in January 2024 than in January 2023, underscoring the enduring importance of fossil fuels within the ERCOT system despite the ongoing build-out of renewable generation capacity.
Even Reuters, a champion of so-called “renewable energy,” was forced to admit:
The drop in Texas wind output in January from a year ago follows a disappointing wind generation total for 2023 as a whole, and suggests that even with steep increases in wind generation capacity the ERCOT system may remain unable to rely on wind to supply a steady share of Texas’ power needs (emphasis added).
My Take: The importance of Reuters’ admission that wind power is unreliable is notable. The North American Electricity Reliability Council, NERC, has been sounding the alarm for years that the massive amounts of wind and solar power generation added to all U.S. power grids are destroying the reliability of those grids, putting the U.S. on a collision course with disaster.
This epic failure of wind power in Texas should be the “canary in the coal mine,” so to speak, that the U.S. has already added too much unreliable wind power to the electricity grids, and the first step toward halting more of this insanity is to repeal the Production Tax Credit, PTC. The PTC is the driving force behind the massive misallocation of resources that will perpetuate the overbuilding of wind power in perpetuity thanks to the inaptly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.
A political wrecking ball is the only thing that can stop this madness.
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This post originally appeared at Thoughts About Energy and Economics and is reposted with permission.
Oklahoma just doesn’t suck enough.
Not far off the mark, Okla would ‘suck’ a great deal more if it had some ‘lubrication’ (water)
To create rising air currents instead instead of allowing descending air to dominate,
Isn’t that just The Craziest Thing, planting a water-retentive and non-flammable forest would help the windmills work better.
So what does CliSci do – chop the forests to make room for them.
Could you make that up? (If you believe in the GHGE, yes you already did)
this is the killer quote:”wind generation capacity increased by a staggering 28% from 356,000 megawatts (MW) to 455,000 MW in January 2023,
Does this:
A/ Reflect increasing dryness and desertification over that western half of the US
Slack/dry/wind-less high pressure systems dominate instead of more vigorous wet low-pressure weather systems
aka: Climate Change but where CO₂ is an effect and not the cause
B/ Imply that the folks operating those turbines are lying low-life sh!ts and are deliberately putting the brakes on them so as to manipulate both the energy market and their subsidy revenues.
(It’s obvious to some folks that that is what the offshore ‘mills here in the UK are doing)
I’ve given up on making stuff up; I’ll leave that to the ‘experts’.
The wind only blew for 10 hrs in January 2024?
Please correct all the MW vs MWh issues.
The use of MW as opposed to the correct MWh also annoyed me as well.
It seems to be worse than that. 4,500,000MWh is 4.5TWh, which is surely way below wind output in Texas. If the average output is 25% of 28GW capacity, that would be 7GW over 8760 hours, or 7×8.76TWh, or 61.32TWh. Across the US as a whole, wind generation was 439TWh in 2022.
No matter what the more intelligent and knowledgeable say about sea breeze electricity, our Aussie governments (State and Feds) are still intent on putting up more and more windmills.
Why don’t shipping companies carry freight and passengers in sailing ships? Wind is free! However, a billion tonnes of freight in now transported around the world each year in containers and this is not a job for wind. Wind power reached its zenith 400 years ago when pumping water and grinding grain didn’t have to be undertaken all of the time. The increasing energy requirements and wind’s poor energy density, inefficiency and unreliability have made this power source more and more expensive (Plimer, I. 2022. Green Murder.).
Wind mills will remain as a memorial to our government’s stupidity well after their not so useful life and when the wind power scam has been throttled!
Agree, those monuments of human stupidity will be left to rot, they are worthless now, and less than worthless after 20 years.
Port Phillip has an area of 200,000Ha. That is good for 200GW of wind turbines. The Bay is no deeper than 24m. It never gets large swells. It has a single shipping channel. It has domestic, commercial and industrial loads surrounding its coastline. It has numerous port facilities around the shoreline for service vessels. It is the best location in Australia for offshore wind by a long margin.
From an engineering perspective, Port Phillip could be the Ijsselmeer of the south only bigger and better:
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An unparalleled eye saw for the Teals in Briiiiighton to watch their symbols of faith as the sun sets over them. Tens of thousands of bird choppers churning away as the sun sets charge their BEVs.
Having tens of thousands of wind turbines in Port Phillip would signal to the rest of the world that Victoria is serious in regard “renewable” energy.
Heinz Beanz
Guaranteed wind
The charts understate the problem, because they are monthly. To see the problem you need to look at daily charts. It then appears that in an area the size of the UK, which covers North Sea installations as well as land based ones, you can regularly have several periods per year of a week to ten days with less than 5GW output from a 28GW parc. Less than 5GW. That means low single figures with occasional 5GW peaks. And you can have tens of single days a year with less than 0.5GW.
The UK is really the canary in the coalmine on this. They propose to more than double demand, by converting cars to EVs and home heating to heat pumps. From about 40GW peak at present to over 100GW. And at the same time take power generation to wind and solar.
Solar vanishes at these latitudes in winter. So this means wind.
If you are to solve this problem by overbuilding, you need massive storage, but you also need to be able to guarantee 100GW from your wind when accomodating production of 10% of faceplate or less. Its basic math, you are going to need 1,000GW of wind. Up from 28GW today.
Suppose batteries get a lot cheaper and more practical, and you can do with 500GW? Its still an impossible target to build the things, and once you have built them, in the North Sea, you then have to maintain them.
http://www.gridwatch.co.uk/wind is the easiest place to see this. Or there are free download links from http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk.
The UK has the distinction of broadcasting to the world in great detail the deliberate step by step jump over the cliff that its political class are inflicting on their citizens.
Liberal arts degrees the lot of them. And a few lawyers.
You can see the scale of the problem and its insolubility when you realize this is why the Royal Society thought it was a solution to build 900 caverns into which they would pump hydrogen to be stored for decades. This of course would be green hydrogen, so you’d build out more wind turbines to make the hydrogen.
The fact that this hare-brained scheme seemed like a reasonable solution to them is all you need to know about the scale and intractability of the problem. If its so bad this is is the only plausible solution you need to go back and start again.
Just to add.
The UK is about 800 miles North to South and covers an area of 80,000 Square miles. The off shore dimensions are similar. Giving a total area 2/3 that of Texas. Britain lies pretty much lengthways to the prevailing wind so as wind advocates say is ideally placed for wind generated electricity.
From gridwatch you can tell what the wind conditions are by output from wind. It’s been windy this year on the whole but output from wind has never exceeded 15GW the whole time
” scale ” – – – A concept unknown to canaries and politicians.
The UK doesn’t have a wind problem, yet. Wait until the Labor Party gets their 7-fold wind increase installed. The UK can then join Germany in a state of permanent recession.
“this is why the Royal Society thought it was a solution to build 900 caverns into which they would pump hydrogen to be stored for decades”
Is this a serious proposal? Do they even understand how hard it is to keep hydrogen sequestered for even short periods of time? Lunacy.
“The report, ‘Large-scale electricity storage’, published today, examines a wide variety of ways to store surplus wind and solar generated electricity – including green hydrogen, advanced compressed air energy storage (ACAES), ammonia, and heat – which will be needed when Great Britain’s supply is dominated by volatile wind and solar power. It concludes that large scale electricity storage is essential to mitigate variations in wind and sunshine, particularly long-term variations in the wind, and to keep the nation’s lights on. Storing most of the surplus as hydrogen, in salt caverns, would be the cheapest way of doing this.
“The report, based on 37 years of weather data, finds that in 2050 up to 100 Terawatt-hours (TWh) of storage will be needed, which would have to be capable of meeting around a quarter of the UK’s current annual electricity demand. This would be equivalent to more than 5,000 Dinorwig pumped hydroelectric dams. Storage on this scale, which would require up to 90 clusters of 10 caverns, is not possible with batteries or pumped hydro. Storage requirements on this scale are not currently foreseen by the government. Work on constructing these caverns should begin immediately if the government is to have any chance of meeting its net zero targets, the report states.“
This is from their summary, my emphasis, the full text here. There is also a link to the report itself.
https://royalsociety.org/news/2023/09/electricity-storage-report/
Worth reading to get an idea of just how deranged by climate the intellectual establishment has become. Not to mention the political and media establishments too.
To answer your questions, are they serious? Yes, very. Do they understand? No.
Wind power is unreliable.
The goal of an electric grid is 99% reliability, or no more than 1% of days with less than 24 hours of electricity.
Wind power is the least reliable source of electricity. Windmills should NEVER be added to electric grids.
In SE Michigan we failed to meet the 99% reliability goal in 2023, with four full days without power, just from trees falling on wires. In 2024 we already lost power for one full day for unknown reasons. And we (DTE Energy) get over half its electricity from reliable coal.
The main problem with wind power is not seasonality. The problem is you need power every second of every day to match electricity demand, and wind is highly variable. To make wind “work” you need 100% natural gas backup on spinning reserve (like a car engine idling) for those unpredictable seconds, minutes, hours or days when a whole state has very little wind. This can happen o any day of the year. And probably will happen every week of the year.
In addition to 100% natural gas backup, it is very useful to have high capacity interconnectors to other electric grids. Texas has unusually low capacity interconnectors so can’t be saved by other grids. Assuming they had any power to spare.
If you study the 2011 and 2021 Texas blackouts, you will see that ERCOT does everything wrong all the time.
In February 2011 there were few windmills and natural gas pipeline compressors were powered by gas from the pipeline. The blackout was caused by a temporary natural gas shortage because producers have reduced output during extremely cold weather. The natural gas power plants have no on site gas storage for a few days, and some of them will have a temporary gas shortage in extremely cold weather.
The solution to this problem was building gas storage tanks on site or near gas power plants.
The actual response was building a lot more windmills. And changing the gas pipelines to electric compressors.
In February 2021 during the next period of extremely cold weather, colder and longer lasting than in February 2011, the same natural gas shortage happened again. Made worse by some electric compressors on gas pipelines that were shut off by deliberate ERCOT blackouts to reduce electricity demand.
Conservatives attacked the windmills, and they were a waste of money, but they were doing what they do just about every week when wind speed is low. Low wind power happens frequently but there are no blackouts if enough natural gas is available for back up. But natiral gas just in time production in Texas is not sufficient during those rare periods of extremely cold weather. The problem was first identified in the 1980s and never fixed.
The obvious question:
If windmills need 100% natural gas backup, then aren’t the windmills redundant? Why not just use natural gas? That makes too much sense for leftists!
Natural Gas is Very Cheap
Recently the spot price for US Henry Hub natural gas was the lowest, when adjusted for inflation, since records were kept in 2022. My analysis was based on monthly average prices for each year. Not daily prices
All sailors are familiar with “wind holes” even when conditions are very favorable for sail powered craft.
But boats can usually be navigated out of wind holes and back to areas where the wind is steady.
How are windmills repositioned when they get caught in those inevitable “wind holes”?
Right! “every second of every day”.
Grids use available, predictable generators to match customer demands instantly.
Graphically showing wind output as a solid line is misleading and not helpful. Show the gaps in wind in MW over seconds, minutes, hours…..selecting peak demand days of seasonal and annual demand would be a good start.
The grid must instantly provide capacity to accommodate sporadic, highly variable capacity from wind. Energy graphs hide the instant sporadic nature of wind.
To get a real feel for the “value” of wind outputs, It would be very helpful to show the highs and lows of capacity (MW) produced from wind fields at a single transmission grid delivery point on a minute by minute basis.
Show the running grid capacity (MW) during the same time frames at the wind delivery point.
MW capacity for a period of time amounts to energy. Periodic customer demand fluctuations are rapidly met by dispatchable /or automatic adjustments to running, dependable generators.
What is the actual cost of receiving wind capacity capacity to the grid on “every second of every day”?
Another hidden factor is that energy “produced” by windmills may often be produced *when not needed,* but I’m sure they ignore that when continuing to spout their fiction about how big a proportion of total “generation” was provided by wind power (since it ignores supply vs. demand mismatches) or how many “homes were powered by” wind power (utter nonsense, due to intermittency).
I don’t care how much wind power you build, it can’t even “power” ONE home with it, because it can’t supply power 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Texas is a shining example of what happens to an electric grid once the wind and solar penetration rate is above 20%. The grid is so unstable and unreliable that the $billions wasted on W&S must be matched with $billions invested in dispatchable natural gas energy to make it functional and safe.
Texas decided on November 7, 2023, that unreliable and intermittent wind and solar had resulted in the death of enough of their citizens and passed into law a Bill providing $10 billion of incentives for the construction of natural gas-fired electrical generation. Noteworthy is the legislation specifically prohibits funding battery storage, an even wore waste than wind and solar.
Details
Voters passed a constitutional amendment Tuesday (November 7,2023) that creates the Texas Energy Fund, injecting $10 billion of public money into energy infrastructure, including $7.2 billion for companies that want to build power plants in the state.
The biggest chunk of that money, $7.2 billion, would go into low interest loans and incentives to power companies to build natural gas power plants.
The plan was proposed by lawmakers as a way to improve Texas’ electric grid by increasing what they call “dispatchable” energy sources. That’s a power plant you can turn on when needed — one that’s not dependent on wind or sun to generate electricity.
… some of the lawmakers who championed the proposal said their goal is to put the brakes on renewables and subsidize natural gas power plants.
It’s worth noting that money from the Texas Energy Fund is prohibited from funding big battery storage projects, like grid scale batteries
Original paste
Voters passed a constitutional amendment Tuesday (November 7,2023) that creates the Texas Energy Fund, injecting $10 billion of public money into energy infrastructure, including $7.2 billion for companies that want to build power plants in the state.
The biggest chunk of that money, $7.2 billion, would go into low interest loans and incentives to power companies to build natural gas power plants.
The plan was proposed by lawmakers as a way to improve Texas’ electric grid by increasing what they call “dispatchable” energy sources. That’s a power plant you can turn on when needed — one that’s not dependent on wind or sun to generate electricity.
… some of the lawmakers who championed the proposal said their goal is to put the brakes on renewables and subsidize natural gas power plants.
What was the increase in capacity, and when did it occur?
The data need to be converted to MWh. For example, what good is 5 million MW capacity if it is available for only 5 minutes?
Well with wind, you can’t show capacity in MWh, since there’s no guarantee how many “hours” you’ll get, nor any indication of what portion of “capacity” (read: maximum output under seldom existing “ideal” conditions) you’ll get during those operating “hours.”
You can look BACK at how many MWh WERE produced for a specified time period, but never get any indication of FUTURE generation on a MWh basis.
For any future amount of wind power, all you can do is indicate “something between zero MWh and (maximum capacity x 100% of “hours” during the period) MWh” which would be fairly meaningless but at least honest.
MWh produced is indeed not sufficient information in itself but it is still more meaningful than the theoretical capacity of MWs.
From the article: “Adding insult to injury, this decline in wind power occurred even as total wind generation capacity increased by a staggering 28% from 356,000 megawatts (MW) to 455,000 MW in January 2023, according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).”
So Texas politicians haven’t learned their lesson about adding windmills to the grid, it appears. That’s not the way to secure your electrical grid. Just the opposite.
Does Texas give State subsidies to windmill companies, or is it just the federal government that gives out the subsidies (taxpayer money)?
Oklahoma quit paying State subsidies to windmill companies several years ago. The Oklahoma legislature said if they continued with the subsidies, it would bankrupt the State, so they are not doing it anymore.
And yes, the federal subsidies for windmills and solar should be stopped completely. If they can’t stand on their own, then that’s too bad.
I’m intending to vote for a political wrecking ball in November that will fix a lot of these problems. 🙂
good luck in November. Personally, I believe the problem is much to deep and broad for the best election results to make much difference.
We’ll just have to wait and see what the future brings.
Note the graphic.
I do not see wind power production stalling out in this data. It looks like 2022 was somewhat windier than other years and that may be distorting the picture somewhat.
Well, that graphic, if correct, just points out the uselessness of WH as a measure of getting anything useful done.
I suspect (no research was done) that those that have are using the legislated subsidies to take from those that have not. We, those that have not, can argue, show graphs, talk science, etc. but this is simply a money transfer scheme.
If I recall correctly, Texas doesn’t require any service level agreements to keep the lights on. The power companies have no incentive to provide electricity 24×7. More correctly, there is no disincentive for not delivering power.
I know of a certain political wrecking ball. I’m sure all of you do too.
All turbines “trend down” as they age. They are expensive to install, and must be replaced or overhauled after a certain number of years, because they aren’t performing near original specs.
The wind turbine is no different to any turbine in that respect, but due to other wear and tear issues may “age” faster than first “advertised”, so if the installations being referred were installed more than 5 years ago, then trending down is expected.
Another reason not to build wind turbines.
wind turbines are subject to very significant stresses not seen using thermal generation, i.e. steam, so they are indeed different than other turbines. Also, they are extremely more expensive in terms of materials, land, and labor for any given output.
For a place that is hitting a plateau in renewables, we might look at Germany. Note the attached graphic. The much awaited increase in offshore wind is not apparent. Solar has been stalled for a while. Onshore wind got a bump recently.
It may be that in Germany the Green movement has accomplished its goals. It has cut off access to Russian gas and closed all their nuclear power plants. And, overall electric use has dropped, consistent with a declining industrial base. No reason to build more renewables. Mission accomplished.
Very nice.
A couple things. Number one it doesn’t make any difference that the wind is always blowing somewhere. The point is it isn’t blowing where it is required. That argument is dead at the starting line.
Number two there are a couple simple questions that must be answered by any outfit wanting to build an energy producing system. First what is the quantity (name plate) of energy you propose to generate. Second what percentage of name plate will be available 24/7? Third can your generation be increased or decreased as needed?
Any outfit that can provide a high percent of name plate 24/7 and can ramp up or down are moved to the head, if you can’t you are moved to the end.
Yes but since the government is putting its foot on the scale, the worse-than-useless wind and solar are instead given priority.
All to accomplish nothing. 🙄
base load and dispatchable (if dependable) are both legitimate and need not be incorporated into each power plant
What am I missing? The article states that Texas total capacity in 2022 was 356,0000 MW, yet it states that Texas produced 1,444,000 MW in 2022.
The smaller number (with one less zero) is the theoretical (and seldom reached) accumulated capacity of all the turbines. This is often misleadingly used for comparison of wind turbines to thermal generators, which can operate at or near (sometimes over) their rated capacity as long as enough fuel is delivered – a 6MW rated natural gas fueled turbine will produce close to 6MW hours of electricity from full start until you turn off the tap. A 6MW rated wind turbine will maybe, for a few minutes per year, convert moving air mass at 6MW, and for most of the actual working time will produce 1MW or less.
Non working will be (the majority?) of those moments when there is too little wind to turn the blades at a rate to deliver useful energy.
The second number should be given in hours (work over time) and this number preferably in Terawatts (as 1.4 TWh).
Also non-working when the wind blows too hard and the turbines are braked or disconnected to avoid damage.
Or, since the majority of useful generation is gas, wind can be very different than total.
The numbers are all garbage AFAICS. Texas (ERCOT) produces around 100TWh a year from wind, an average of about 11.4GW from ~28GW of nominal wind capacity, accounting for ~25% of all generation.
The only way a low hydroelectric region can get more than 30% wind power is to lean on another network so it acts as a battery like Germany does in Europe, or install storage. But storage is very expensive.
The ERCOT network appears to be saturated with wind capacity. Adding more capacity just reduces the capacity factor of all generators.
Australia reached saturation a while back but there is still economic incentive for households to install rooftop solar. As more rooftops get connected, the capacity factor of grid scale weather dependent generators declines.
Almost every day in Australia now, grid WDGs are exercising what is now termed economic offloading. It means reducing output because the wholesale price drops below more negative than the LGC subsidy of $47/MWh.
Monday morning in Australia and both Victoria and SA have been offloading WDGs since 0800. Wholesale price currently negative in both Vic and SA.
Attached is from the AEMO of report. It shows the impact of curtailment due to grid constraints and offloading due to negative pricing. Q4 actually saw an increase in grid scale WDG output but in Q3 it went backward tear-on-year due to offloading and curtailment despite capacity increasing.
Note the graphic. The UK is another country which has “bet the farm” on solar and wind. They are totally stalled on solar, and wind power is increasing very slowly. They still rely on natural gas just as much. Their total demand is dropping nicely, though, as power rates go up and they deindustrialize.
If the goal is to deindustrialize, they are doing a good job.
But why would they want to deindustrialize?
Kaczynski has a whole lot of disciples
http://goinggreencanada.ca/images/diminishing_returns_all.png
This article is confusing rather than enlightening. MW of generation can change considerably over a day’s extent. It isn’t the rate of generation that powers anything useful, it is MWh. I understand that the January storm reduced wind and solar MWh for a period by reducing the rate at which electricity as generated but that only explains things on a momentary basis. What does it even mean in terms of usable power to say there were so many MW more or less during one year compared to the next?