EIA data showing the collapse of wind power generation in Texas’ winter storm.
Posted on 02/18/2021 8:00:09 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Wednesday morning more than 1.3 million electric power customers across Texas remain without power during the coldest winter storm in decades. Gov. Greg Abbott put all of Texas’ 254 counties under a disaster declaration as the state has been hammered with a series of major and historic winter storms. The reasons for the collapse of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) grid are still being debated, and it’s certain that there is more than one cause and more information will come out.
But one of the most contested issues is the role wind generation has played. Prior to the onset of the storm last week, Texas led the nation in wind power generation and depended on the wind turbines in West-Central and Western Texas, along with a smaller number of turbines along the Gulf Coast, for about 25% of its electricity. As wind power has increased, coal-powered generation plants have been taken offline around the state. Texas has abundant coal, oil, and natural gas, and also has nuclear plants near Dallas and near Houston.
Real-time data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that wind power collapsed as the winter storm swept across the state.
EIA data showing the collapse of wind power generation in Texas’ winter storm.
To understand the graph, the very top line, beige, is natural gas power generation. Hydroelectric is the barely perceptible blue line at the bottom. Wind is the green line; coal is brown. Nuclear power is purple.
The graph clearly shows all forms of power generation dipped, with wind power collapsing from Monday to Tuesday before recovering somewhat. Meanwhile, natural gas, coal, and nuclear power generation also dipped but continued generating power.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
Read post 19. Replacing reliable baseload energy with unreliable non-baseload energy isn’t a “solution”. It will never be a solution.
The wind turbines in Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba do not seem to have a problem with long deep freezing temperatures. You don’t suppose that it could be lack of planning and fore thought on the part of the Texas authorities that brought about this disaster.
There’s no excuse for being caught off guard. This happened during the polar vortex of 2019, and doesn’t surprise any rational thinker employed in the baseload generation industry. We expected it. Read post 19.
They do, they shut down at something like -20F and draw power from the grid to stay warm. Read up on the 2019 polar vortex. Also bitter cold quite often is accompanied by no wind.
It’s ignorance and lack of planning, read post 19.
The little bitty yellow (gold ?) bumps are solar power. Good for only 6 hours a day at the best of times, useless when covered by ice. Useless during the storms themselves (when and is tripping off die to high speed overspeed protective trips!) because the solar panels are covered by vlouds, rain, and ice. Useless in the evenings, nights, and early morning after the storms when it is is clear weather.
Exactly. The point is using unreliable wind power is very expensive.
That is what brought down everything else.
Without the Wind power, there would be far more reliable capacity to use.
See comments 20 and 21.
Germany does just great with wind power (you should see the endless turbines on the North Sea!) but they winterize them. Germany is a darn sight colder than Texas but it suffers no blackouts.
i mean to say as an enhancement, when in fact they were a burden ..
aaaanyways, they were no help when needed the most.
“The far better approach would have been to keep the coal and lignite plants operating (instead of forcing them to shut down) and never have installed windmills.”
That is exactly what should have happened. About a decade ago in San Antonio the energy folks contracted a serious bout of ‘wokeness’ and paid millions to cancel SA’s share of a second nuke and instead paid more millions to start windmill farms. I would venture to sat that the only people in the SA area that are happy with that decision are the ranchers that get $800 to $1,200 per month per windmill on their property.
I fervently hope that any members of ERCOT that supported any windmill project will soon be working at Walmart or better yet, breaking rocks.
Panels and turbines reliably power one third of Germany’s power consumption.
It wasn’t windy...wind generation ROUTINELY goes to zero. Problem was natural gas plants.
“everyone in the baseload energy industry, like me, isn’t surprised at all by what happened”
Is the solution to make the baseload producers more cold-resistant? I think that as an outsider. Doesn’t sound real expensive.
I also think the baseload producers (natural gas, nuclear, coal) need to have sufficient capacity to make wind and solar ‘not required’. Wind and solar can be used when conditions are good for them, but otherwise the baseload producers should be able to get the job done without them.
The Department of Energy tracks electricity generation hourly. On Sunday, Feb. 14 at 8 p.m., this was Texas’s electricity makeup in kilowatt-hours:
The next day, during the height of the storm at 8 p.m., this was the makeup:
Why the delta? Natural gas, for starters, experienced a shortage. Those Texans who do have natural gas heating their homes turned it up, and what would have been available for electricity generation, went to homes. Similarly, nuclear and coal were adversely impacted by the cold. These are failures, plain and simple, and they can be explained away as anomalies in an unlikely, black swan scenario.
But what of wind power? Wind turbines froze and were rendered useless. Here is the real reason for the failure and I’ll prove it with an apples-to-apples comparison.
One decade ago, almost to the day, Feb. 2, 2011, extreme put a strain on the electric grid. The electric grid was unable to meet demand, and many experienced rolling blackouts for “up to an hour.” Yes, fossil fuel plants also struggled in the cold, but this isn’t about spin or protecting industry or pushing an agenda, it’s about facts.
Fast forward one decade and two weeks, and Texas again faced with extreme cold and a straining electric grid, but it’s not the same electricity mix. Texas for the past ten years had made concerted efforts to go green.
In 2011 about 6 percent of the electricity mix was generated from wind power. Today it’s 25 percent. Simultaneously, Texas has increased its overall electricity consumption by 20 percent as the state is attracting people from everywhere and the population is booming. Furthermore, three coal plants were taken offline. Indeed, the same type of storm of 2011 did not play out in the same circumstances in 2021. Did fossil fuels struggle? Absolutely, but their percentage of the grid dropped significantly.
The difference is wind. So serious is this percentage of the electric grid coming from unreliable wind power that more than two years ago, the Chair of Texas Public Utility Commission called lack of dependable electricity reserves “very scary.” Yet, Texans still saw three coal plants removed completely from the equation, even as a back-up, a safety net.
The question is: Why?
In 2005, then-Governor Rick Perry — who most would agree is a “champion” of the fossil fuel industry — signed into law a mandate requiring Texas to increase its wind power electricity. Why? Rick Perry is not an electrical engineer, and I’m not saying he is to blame for what happened. But even fossil fuel advocate Rick Perry, may have the teensiest notion in his head that fossil fuels are “bad,” insufficient, and therefore, we “need” wind.
In 2017, the Sierra Club celebrated the closing of the Monticello Coal plant in Titus County, Texas. Their campaign “Beyond Coal” is funded with over $500 million from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and they pride themselves on taking more than 60 percent of the coal plants offline in America.
I am sure in Bloomberg’s circles this is considered noble, and I started my group Power The Future to advocate for the thousands of people in rural America who have lost their jobs as a result of his green activism.
But there’s another component to taking coal offline: the 1,800 megawatts of electricity it generated could have genuinely helped stabilize the electric grid. Maybe instead of more than 20 deaths from the cold, the number would be less. Sadly, we’ll never know.
There’s a lot of blame going around, and frankly, most of it is quite stupid. “Republicans Blame” is the Washington Post headline. An NBC News column claims that wind and solar are “fairly small slices of the state’s energy mix” as if 25 percent were trace figures. And Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., neither an engineer nor a Texan, tweeted that Texas Governor Abbot needed to “read a book” about his state’s energy supply — whatever that’s supposed to mean. It’s all so very, very stupid.
Energy isn’t sexy. It’s math, physics, and numbers. But it’s also life. We’re told to stop the “existential threat” of climate change we must “go green,” and switch to green energy. I do this for a living and I’ve never seen one confirmed death from “climate change,” but today I can show you several Texan deaths clearly attributable to the cold, and no NBC news spin or AOC twitter stupidity will comfort their families. They are dead from a combination of factors: billionaires don’t like coal, politicians invent mandates, and utility commissioners rest on their reports as well as a severe winter storm.
Fossil fuels aren’t perfect, but renewables aren’t either. They have severe shortcomings, and the results can sometimes be deadly. We can learn from what happened in Texas if we have a serious and necessary conversation about renewable energy. But will we?
China is building more coal plants right now than all of Europe has combined and the reason is simple: it works. China is serious about its energy. I wish we were, too.
Wind speeds dropped off...many froze up...but if they were 100% functional we were never supposed to get more than about 6000MW of wind. So wind cost us 5000 while gas cost us 15000.
Thanks
You have just won the internet.
Amazing so many are so blind to the criminal enterprise that is the Democratic Party and all its tentacles. All of government has become corrupt but they take it to another level.
Ignorant people made stupid decisions
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I think you’re wrong, here.
I think it’s....greedy people were bribed by corrupt corporate interests that knew the money would be coming from the taxpayer after they were told it would be nothing but unicorns, rainbows and lollipops. And that no one could or would be held accountable.
I worked at the salem, nj nuclear plant for about a year. Every time it reined the power went out in the administration building. I was seen getting in my car and driving home for the rest of the day.
I’m not sure, many ignorant people like AOC actually believe it would work. Ignorant people made policy.
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