By Robert Bradley Jr.
“Our affection for Texas runs deep, but so does our concern over its grid. It’s time for a candid conversation about the state’s energy policies—one that acknowledges the true costs and challenges of a blindly pro-renewables approach and seeks solutions that ensure the resilience of the grid and the well-being of Texans.” (Doug Sheridan, below)
Texas is turning to government-aided natural gas to fix its broken political grid. Yes, wind and solar did that in one of the natural gas meccas of the world.
Doug Sheridan, a reliable voice on social media, posted this at LinkedIn:
It was big news last week that the Texas PUC received 125 applications for 56 GW of new gas-fired generation. The legislation behind the initiative—which appropriates $5B in state grants and loan guarantees to the plants—was intended to spur 10 GW of new gas-fired capacity on ERCOT.
We’ve seen commentary about what the supposedly massive “oversubscription” means, with plenty of energy industry insiders hailing it as a rebuttal to the massive buildup of renewables on the state’s increasingly shaky grid. We’re not so sure.
The subsidized fund for gas-fired generation is far from a solution to the grid’s large and growing problems. More likely it’s a political fig-leaf to cover up poor grid management by state leaders—that is, a way to say, “Don’t blame us, we tried to fix it” should the system suffer catastrophic failure due to the non-performance of renewables.
The truth is many of the same state politicians who championed this particular law have actually enabled the very situation on the grid they now supposedly decry. We say supposedly because, to be clear, there’s absolutely no *mea culpa* here—from anyone. We don’t get those anymore.
We suspect analysis of political contributions from renewable energy interests to Texas politicians would show there’s too much in the way of donations flowing to the political class to expect they’d ever disallow more damaging renewables on the system. Again, we may be wrong on this point, but we doubt it. In time, we hope to do that analysis.
Leaders in Austin seem determined to tempt fate in other ways as well. As reported by David Blackmon, Lt. Gov Dan Patrick is now referring to a “Texas Miracle”… presumably of economic growth and prosperity. Careful Sir, there are too many problems lurking on the Texas grid to be claiming miracles at this point.
When it comes to the 125 applications for new gas-fired capacity, many questions remain. Certainly more honest and complete math needs to be done. Our sense is that honest analysis would show that Texas rate- and tax-payers are now effectively financing the kind of inefficient duplicate backup generation capacity critics of renewables have been warning about for years.
The lack of public understanding of what’s going on as it relates to the Texas grid is also a concern. That’s because it limits the public’s ability to act as a governor in real time to politicians… and their policy makers and moneyed interests. Unable to punish politicians at the polls in advance of breaking our grid, it leaves only the regrettable option of punishing them after the fact.
Our affection for Texas runs deep, but so does our concern over its grid. It’s time for a candid conversation about the state’s energy policies—one that acknowledges the true costs and challenges of a blindly pro-renewables approach and seeks solutions that ensure the resilience of the grid and the well-being of Texans.
Final Comment
Hear, hear. The wind/solar/battery experiment in Texas has wounded a once reliable grid by replacing consumer-driven, taxpayer-neutral, economic, reliable energies with inferiors. And where has anyone calculated what the benefits are in terms of avoided “climate change”? Instead, the wilds of Texas are being industrialized, a not-so-green outcome that Big Green does not want to contemplate. Kudos to the Doug Sheridans for speaking truth to political power to such wind/solar/battery apologists such as Doug Lewin on the Texas electricity ‘market’.
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However a big part of the Texas cold disaster was failure of the gas supply system which also happened in PJM’s near blackout. How is that helped here?
It isn’t. However there has been some focus on those problems. In Texas a lot of supply was lost when electrically powered line compressors were cut off by power cuts: this led to review of rolling blackout zones. The Texan gas system has a degree of resilience built in via storage of dry gas because offshore production gets shut in every time a hurricane blows through the GoM. Storage is also used to support seasonal demand variations. Reconfiguring the system to handle onshore production loss as happened in Feb 21 has also I believe been looked at. Attempting to winterise the onshore production is likely to be uneconomic compared with increasing midstream resilience.
Clearly new plant should only be approved where supply is adequately protected. If the electricity grid wants generation reinforcement at other locations there needs to ve a proper process to ensure the gas supply to support it.
All true but PJM does not have these features so there may be a deeper reliability problem. We have switched from coal to gas which may make us vulnerable to very cold weather. I call for figuring this out here:
https://www.commonwealthfoundation.org/research/avoiding-deadly-blackouts/
I thought that all gas pipelines had been required to power their compressors with electricity. That would apply to PJM as well.
That was a big problem. In the past they ran on reliable natural gas engines.
Yes but PJM did not have rolling blackouts, just a failure of the natural gas system. They levied billions of dollars in fines to contracted capacity that failed. This is a serious reliability issue that has nothing to do with wind and solar. Replacing coal with gas has not worked for cold weather.
It works fine in Russia, where much if the gas originates in Siberia. Perhaps the US should take lessons? Incidentally, the big transmission pipes from Tyumen were powered by RB211 Rolls Royce compressors installed in the late 1970s. Specification included handling the climate, and continuous operation for 2 years between maintenance cycles.
Building a bunch of nice, reliable coal fired plants is part of the solution. Good point.
Glad somebody took the time to see what I am saying. Switching from coal to gas created a new cold weather vulnerability. This has nothing to do with wind and solar.
Better use of storage gas sounds like a good step. It’s well polished and is more likely to make it to the generation facilities.
They load shed the pipeline compressors. Natural gas goes through at least a glycol dryer, and a lot of it goes through cryo plants. All the gas coming in from the Gulf is also available. The problem was caused by the bird choppers going down and idiots load shedding fuel infrastructure. Supply was not the issue.
But it was in PJM.
I believe the failure was exacerbated due to the failure of electric heaters to keep above ground natural gas valves from freezing. Heaters could not operate with the rolling blackouts.
Here in Alberta, where it can get to 40 below, we are adequately prepared to protect the valves, albeit the failure of Wind & Solar during the winter has caused grid alerts.
re: “a big part of the Texas cold disaster was failure of the gas supply system”
NO ONE remembers these things; SAME DAMN THING happened in 2011 (WHICH anyone can look up and VERIFY.) Gas pressure was even low at the retail level and a number of residential furnaces would not fire up.
Propaganda lies. The big part of the cold disaster was when DEI hires load shed the pipeline booster compressors supplying gas to the gas-fired electric plants. They also load shed HALF the freaking cooling water pumps to the freaking NUKE plant.
Spec gas does not freeze up. The public doesn’t understand the difference so the green commies got away with this lie.
That does not explain PJM’s loss of 30% margin when the nat gas failed to deliver. There was no load shedding that I know of.
30% of plant outages in PJM were not gas, but mainly coal. Both gas and coal stations failed because of inadequate winterisation. Gas supply dipped because of well shut-ins due to freeze-offs (many wells produce wet gas with not only water but light hydrocarbons that need to be knocked out before being added to downstream supply), almost certainly helped by the fact it was Christmas so many workers who might have helped fix it were on vacation. PJM lacks the dry gas storage buffer available to Texas.
Anyone that supported the installation of wind turbines and grid solar is “mea culpa”.
This is the essential point. Allowing intermittent wind and solar sources to inject their output into the grid with no responsibility for anything at all when it is calm or dark, has been inherently parasitic to the system all along.
Wind and solar are like condoms that fail at the most inopportune time.
The better analogy is ED.
I understand your point. Each concerns unreliable tool(s).
They are the very model of a major modern modeller-
‘Read the fine print’: AEMO reveals the cost of renewables push (msn.com)
With polls showing the old antithesis to nukes having dissipated (particularly the young) the Dutton Opposition has thrown down the gauntlet to Labor with their fickle energy more of the same. So with bipartisanship already with AUKUS nuclear subs that only leaves an argument about respective cost and hence the AEMO attempt to placate their current masters with fickle costing.
Every electric grid in the United States has been put in jeopardy by the addition of windmills and solar and the retiring of conventional generators.
Every grid in the country has put out warnings about possible coming brownouts and blackouts.
It’s obvious what the problem is: Windmills and Solar are not fit for purpose. Replacing conventional electric generation with Windmills and Solar will inevitably bring down the grid when it is under pressure from extreme weather events.
How does Texas find itself in this position? An in dept history of who, what and when is necessary. The people who put Texas in this position need to be smoked out and made to defend their decisions in public.
What does Governor Abbott think about the Texas grid? Does he think adding additional wind and solar is desirable? And what about the rest of the politicians in Texas? Where do they stand? They better think about their answers because it might not be long before they have to come up with some because Texas gets real hot in August.
re:”How does Texas find itself in this position?”
Grifters seeing easy profits from wind (and solar) generation; guaranteed money-maker w/o the/a huge investment/commitment otherwise … DIRECT OPPOSITE of the ‘utility’ (a supply of something everyone needs, uses) concept.
What about the T. Boone Pickens plan?
I retired from a large drinking water plant in Ohio.
Wind and solar was added to the grid. We had drills (I forget what they were called. “Interlock”? “Internock”?) to see how low we could cut our power and still produce water.
We always had warning so we’d top off our clearwells before the drill.
(What’s a “clearwell”? The last stage of the treatment process. It gives the disinfectant used time to kill the potential pathogens before the water is pumped out to the distribution system and the consumers. Ours could hold about 75 million gallons. An average day’s pumping for us.)
We got a few real alerts in advance when a hot day was forecast in the summer. Same routine.
I worked there over 30 years. We had always tried to shift our power usage to the night to keep our peak usage down since our electric bill was based on our peak usage for the year.
But we never cut back because the power might not be there before wind and solar was added to the grid.
“”a once reliable grid…”
I think we’ll all look back fondly on the days when we had one. But reliable grids – in the name of Gaia, St. Michael of Mann et al – have to go and pretty soon. Tick tock. The best we can hope for in formerly merrye olde England is that our hairshirt example will serve as a warning to others.
If only we could hope that [genuine, objective] science will prevail.
“”At its annual congress last week, it [the GMB Union] urged Labour to ‘listen to the advice of the scientists, engineers and energy specialists’ and abandon its 2030 pledge. Starmer dismissed these warnings as ‘utter nonsense’.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/17/britain-will-pay-a-high-price-for-labours-net-zero-fanaticism/
Starmer is the quintessential managerialist/technocrat.
As I said on a previous thread Starmer knows nothing about energy and electricity production and relies on Miliband who knows even less.
“utter nonsense”
not a compelling argument- but a severely arrogant argument
Based on his comment, he is not a technocrat.
These days there are no technocrats. Only quangocrats and dirtyrats feeding off the subsidies.
“And where has anyone calculated what the benefits are in terms of avoided “climate change”?”
Be careful what you ask for. The purely fictional “social cost of carbon” is being ramped up just for that purpose, i.e. to compute a “benefit” from avoided emissions to push the make-believe decarbonization movement.
There is no benefit from avoided emissions, or from the avoided climate response to those emissions, because incremental CO2 is not capable of driving ANY amount of perceptible warming down here, certainly not to any harmful extent.
Why do I keep saying this? One very good reason is the concept of energy conversion in the general circulation. [Internal energy + potential energy] <-> [kinetic energy]. Lorenz described it. ERA5 computes it. More here to demonstrate why this is so important to grasp. Please read the text description at this short video for the full explanation.
https://youtu.be/hDurP-4gVrY
The social cost of carbon is no longer the administrative construct. Ever since the Stern Report to the UK government in 2006 the fashion has been that the carbon price is whatever it needs to be to meet the current emissions target, never mind the consequences in real economic damage.
Only people like Lomborg continue to try to estimate a true social cost of carbon, which is of course vastly lower, and justifies mutilation as you go policies rather than emissions avoidance.
Autocorrect! Mutilation should read mitigation.
Autocorrect! Mutilation should read mitigation.
ALA (as long as) the (financial) goals are seen only as being in the next quarter, expect NOTHING to change.
Economics of Nuclear Reactor vs nat Gas
by Illinois EnergyProf
Thanks for sharing this video. I really enjoyed the discussion. In the end, the discussion brought to my mind Adm. Rickover and his plan to develop what would become a certified, rated, nuclear power plant for the U.S. Navy. So long as you selected from the pre-approved designs and they were built to specifications, you didn’t have to go through the whole planning and design certification phase. I wonder if we could get to that point with commercial power plants. You could develop a rated and pre-approved modular design so as to built capacity by reducing the time it takes to sit through lengthy design reviews and permitting. Then, when a power company wishes to add generating capacity to the grid, you just select from the pre-approved designs that would get you what you need in your environment.
They better be ready, because another big event could happen this winter.
Or this summer! Our electrician is scoping out our system for backup.
Could be, last summer though, we made it without a blackout, the world will probably not get that hot again for at least 25 years. Unless another Honga Tonga goes off.
Seriously though, you are making the right move, I think another Texas killer freeze is setting up.
‘…I think another Texas killer freeze is setting up.’
In which case Mason’s electrician should specify a propane-fueled standby generator.
I live in the Woodlands, and during a power failure there are more and more whole house generators roaring, that are running off the consumer gas lines. I wonder if neighborhoods are plumbed for that much consumption. Dual fuel is a smart backup option.
Very well said.
We live in a post-accountability world. Don’t expect anyone to take responsibility and don’t expect apologies.
Personally, I think voters would appreciate hearing “I was wrong.” Instead, politicians double-down on failed policies.
Unfortunately a large segment of the voting population has been trained to want to hear only what politicians want to tell them.
The great delusional syndrome is in full effect.
I think that syndrome has always existed since the dawn of the human race. It’s amazing all things we’ve accomplished- for a bunch of naked apes- but the lies and liars have always been with us.
Plus, the majority loves the free stuff.
Any debate over the Texas grid should also include a discussion of the climate modeling fraud that was used to justify the transition to renewables. This started with the work of Manabe’s group at the US Weather Bureau in the 1960s. (The Bureau became the National Weather Service in 1970). In 1967, Manabe and Wetherald (M&W) claimed that doubling of the CO2 concentration would produce an increase in ‘equilibrium’ surface temperature of 2.9 °C for clear sky conditions. This is a mathematical artifact created by three fundamental errors in the 1967 one dimensional radiative convective (1-D RC) model used by M&W.
When the funding decreased at NASA as the Apollo (moon landing) program ended, the planetary atmospheres group switched to ‘earth studies’. In 1976 they blindly copied the fraudulent 1967 M&W model and created warming artifacts for 10 ‘minor species’ including methane and nitrous oxide [Wang et al, 1976]. Later, in 1981, Hansen’s group added a 2 layer ‘slab’ ocean, the CO2 doubling ritual and claimed that they could use this model to simulate a ‘global climate record’. This work provided the foundation for the pseudoscience of radiative forcings, feedbacks and climate sensitivity still used by the climate models today [Ramaswamy, 2019].
The final part of the climate fraud was added in the Third Climate Assessment Report (TAR) published by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2001). The radiative forcings were split into anthropogenic and natural contributions. This approach was used to claim that increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations would cause an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. This was based on work by Stott et al and Tett et al at the UK Hadley Climate Centre. This ‘attribution’ of ‘extreme weather’ to greenhouse gases provided the justification for today’s disastrous Net Zero energy policies.
Manabe got part of the 2021 Nobel Prize for climate modeling fraud.
This fraud is discussed in detail in the recent paper ‘A Nobel Prize for Climate Modeling Errors’ published in the open access on-line journal Science of Climate Change 4(1) pp. 1-73 (2024) https://doi.org/10.53234/scc202404/17
Interesting- though a bit over my head. It just goes to show, climate science ain’t settled! If only the other side was honest and admit that it ain’t settled. When they say it’s settled, that’s proof to me how extraordinarily ignorant they are. When they say it’s settled- that their way of saying “we’re not gonna discuss it any further- give us all your money”. It’s a kind of modern armed robbery.
“When they say it’s settled- that their way of saying “we’re not gonna discuss it any further- give us all your money””
Yes, that’s why they do it. They want people who claim the science is not settled to shut up and accept the Climate Alarmist version of the Earth’s climate and weather.
Of course, logic tells us the science is never settled. It is always being revised as new information comes in.
Claiming the climate science is settled is just another way for the climate alarmists to try to shut people up and not question the climate alarmists or their speculations.
It’s attempted censorship.
Twenty years ago, the world was facing the dilemma of increasingly scare oil & gas with the prospect of ever-increasing prices. Wind and solar were seen as economically viable alternatives and given temporary subsidies to encourage their development. That changed ten years ago when widespread fracking greatly expanded production and reserves. There is now a politically entrenched “renewables” lobby that uses Climate Change to justify continued subsidies for the intermittent power that destabilizes grids.
They’re parasites.
Very nice. Another clear example of government incompetence. There is only one question that needs to be asked to clear up this whole mess. How much power can you supply 24?7? We don’t give a damn about your name plate capacity. The only other meaningful question is can you power up and down? Ask these two questions and wind, solar and battery simply disappear.