Texas, California Blackouts Reveal Fatal Flaw in Biden’s Energy Plans

Does President Joe Biden really want the United States to cede its hard-won energy independence and leadership position in the world? Because that is precisely what will happen if the president tries to sweep away the inexpensive, reliable forms of energy that have been powering America for decades.

To understand the disaster that awaits the nation if Biden makes good on his pledge to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar power, we need only look to California and Texas, two states that have already tried to do exactly that.

Power outages are now commonplace in California. Its troubles are explained by officials who now admit to an over-reliance on wind and solar power. Even the Los Angeles Times reported:

"… gas-burning power plants that can fire up when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing have been shutting down in recent years, and California has largely failed to replace them …"

Consequently, the state has fallen thousands of megawatts behind its needs. Governor Gavin Newsom admitted, “we failed to predict and plan for these shortages” and took responsibility for the rolling blackouts. Of course, he wants everyone to conserve while they look for new sources of energy. And that energy will have to be supplied by fossil fuel from neighboring states. This, as California continues its misguided intent to transition to 60% renewable energy by 2030 and 100% “climate-friendly energy” by 2045 (which is required by state law). And note, Biden has gone even further and committed to making the nation 100% renewable within 15 years.

And what about Texas, where an over-reliance on wind and solar power was clearly a major reason that millions of Texans shivered in the dark for several days in late February?

Dr. Sterling Burnett, senior fellow of the Illinois-based Heartland Institute, showed that Rep. Khanna’s statement that “the vast majority of the dip in electricity supply [during the blackout] came from fossil fuel generation” is highly deceptive. In “Wind and Solar Power Fail When You Need Them the Most,” he explained that there was practically nothing coming from wind and solar in the days before the cold snap. Burnett wrote:

Data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas shows four days before the first snowflake fell, wind and solar were providing 58 percent of the electric power used in Texas. Fortuitously, the sun had been shining and the wind blowing. These conditions ended, and within a matter of hours more than 13,000 megawatts of wind and solar power went offline. The wind died off and the turbines began to freeze, and winter storm clouds blocked the sun.
As always, natural gas, coal, and nuclear facilities ramped up production when wind and solar failed. Then the storm hit. Even as the wind picked up, ice had formed on the turbines, keeping them offline, and snow and ice coated solar panels, preventing them from generating power. More wind and solar failed, and the cold had a cascading effect on coal, natural gas, and nuclear. Some gas lines froze, other gas, due to contracts, was being shipped out of state, some equipment failed, and some powerlines snapped and transformers broke. More coal, natural gas, and nuclear failed during the storm than wind and solar, but only because wind and solar had failed even before the storm hit. What power remained during the crisis was delivered almost entirely by natural gas, coal, and nuclear. Wind and solar power remained almost wholly offline for the duration.

The following plot from the Energy Information Administration shows this clearly:

The result was inevitable: over eight million Texans (including Burnett), in more than four million homes, lost lights, power, and heat.

At first glance, it appears that gaining useful energy from the sun and the wind should be possible and relatively inexpensive. After all, we have long used the wind to sail boats and grind grain and the sun to heat a multitude of things. Producing electricity from an intermittent source of power is, however, an entirely different matter.

Most people are unaware that the supply of electricity to an electric grid must equal the demand at all times. At any point when this is not the case, the grid will collapse and we have a blackout, such as in Texas. It is not possible for the supply to almost meet demand; it is all or nothing.

On a large electric grid such as that in Texas, the lack of a small amount of solar or wind power can and will and did cause the grid to crash. If all the available supply of natural gas, coal, or nuclear power is at maximum availability but only one percent or less of the online supply of wind and solar becomes unavailable when the wind is not blowing or the turbine is iced up and the sun is not shining or the solar panels are covered with snow, the grid will and did crash.

Mathis stated:

Unreliable wind and solar are destabilizing our electric grid. When power drops quickly as it often does with wind/solar, it must be replaced by natural gas in an instant. Too much wind/solar on the grid makes this challenge unreasonably difficult.

It is amusing that a shortage of natural gas is also being blamed, though well it should. Amusing, because the government has been shutting down gas pipelines, but more amusing yet because of the electric energy rule of thumb coined by Terigi Ciccone and this article’s co-author, Dr. Jay Lehr. The rule says:

All solar and wind power on an electric grid must be backed up with an equal or greater amount of fossil fuel power (normally natural gas) on standby 100% of the time ready to go online in seconds.

Most respectfully, what you wrote was nonsense.

First, nobody should count on wind or solar to be reliable. they need full backup.
Moreover, it would be idiotic to rely on natural gas to provide backup power during a winter cold snap when the natural gas system is already heavily stressed. Instead, the gas fired power plants should switch to oil. gas plants would need storage tanks, oil burning apparatus and the inventory of oil.

Providing one week of backup would add about 4% ($40 per kilowatt of capability) to the cost of building a new power plant. It was major blunder that Texas did not require such obviously needed backup. Most other states do, although only 3 days is common.

The one-time cost of retrofitting this amount of backup capability for every gas fired plant in Texas would be about $3 billion.

Finally, the graph you provided from the US Energy Information Administration is stupid. The X-Axis is labeled “megawatt-hours”. It should be labeled “megawatts”. What the USEIA showed is like a graph showing how fast your car was going being labeled “miles”, instead of “miles per hour” Your tax dollars at work.

I appreciate your post, thanks. You’re preaching to the choir though. This bankrupt state has been spending an inordinate amount of money developing solar power. What a few short years ago were productive farm fields are now acres of photovoltaic panels. In early December we had a Nor’easter that deposited between 2 and 4 feet of heavy wet snow, then we had a rainstorm followed immediately by 3 months of below freezing temps.

All winter I drove by acres and acres of panels buried in stubborn snow. 0 benefit from millions of dollars of infrastructure spending. As an aside our residential electric rates are 43 cents p/kwh. Does spending taxpayer dollars in this manner sound reasonable to anyone?

I’m just sick of the drip, drip, drip of these insane policies. We’re getting it anyway, lets just get it over with.

Texas needs to winterize the gas grid which the RRC ignored us industry experts who told them to mandate it in 2011. They didn’t want to spend the 3 to 4 billion needed to winterize the gas grid and thermal power plants. Texas has more than enough installed thermal power to have zero wind or solar at anytime day or night provided the gas grid doesn’t go down. The EIA graph clearly shows that gas ramped up to completely cover the losses and also picked up an additional 20 gigawatts of peak demand. This would have been a non event had the gas grid not lost 50+% of its capacity losing 20+ billion cubic feet per day in output in a few hours crashed the electric grid that’s overly dependent on gas powered plants. The solutions are winter up the gas grid and fund gas storage on a massive scale. It won’t be cheap but it would have prevented this. Starting at page 18 is the economic or gas storage. Not cheap at all the cheapest way is to mandate on site oil back up at gas turbines and the equipment needed to bifuel the turbines that’s ruffly $40 a kw in capital and at $3 a gal for #2 fuel oil 21 cents per kWh or $21 per megawatt hours in fuel costs.

https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-05/UndergroundNaturalGasStorageReport.pdf

https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/texas-blackouts-natural-gas/amp/

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