Wind]d power was not suitable nor sustainable for a recent Texas winter.
“Wind]d power was not suitable nor sustainable for a recent Texas winter.”
You would be wrong I am in the power industry and had real time access to ERCOTs grid management data streams. I watched in horror as the grid went down to 59.2hz and gas plant after gas plant dropped off line. The natural gas grid came within a few hours of total collapse. The power grid was less than three minutes from a total black start event and MONTHS of darkness to black start a grid.
Texas Feb blackout was caused not by wind power failure. Wind actually helped put more megawatts into the grid as the natural gas grid froze up and failed. We told the power industry providers to winterize the oil/gas wellheads and also the power plants back in 2011 and again in 2014. The natural gas grid is still not winterized it will freeze up at the well heads again in a similar subzero freeze. The polymer gathering lines still run on the surface never having been buried below the frost line. The gas oil water separators still lack the insulation to not freeze solid in subzero temps. The plant operators were told by the legislature to winterize but there is no penalty in the mandate so they also just shrugged their shoulders and didn’t invest the billions needed to winterize gas turbines and nuclear plants outdoor critical equipment. We lost a whole nuke reactor and the 1200 megawatts it was making for the grid due to its cooling pumps outdoors temp sensors freezing a few thousand dollars worth of insulation on those sensors and resistance heaters would have saved 1200 megawatts of capacity.
During the freeze it was the gas grid going down that dropped out 60% of ERCOT capacity. The gas grid operators had also not listed their electric pumps as critical grid needs so as the grid was shedding load natural gas pumps were cut off from power cascading the effects. This pumps has previously run on the gas in the pipelines but the EPA mandated NOx limits so rather than install hundreds of SCR cats scattered around at the individual pump sites the operators just switched to electric drives and then didn’t class them as critical infrastructure.
For anyone willing to look there is a detailed report on how the electric grid went down it shows clearly the mistakes in gas supply,winterization,and power management. When the real numbers came it it was a clear case of lack of winterizing both grids as they were told in 2011 and 2014 ,the power plants and not having critical grid infrastructure on power lines that cannot be load shed.