Texas is the number one wind power producer in the USA. The Lone Star State has over 33,100 MW of wind
turbines installed. These turbines produce enough energy to power over 3.5 million Texas households and
provide over 25,000 jobs.
Posted on 08/20/2023 12:03:25 PM PDT by george76
Earlier this week Texas grid operator ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) asked residents to reduce energy usage amid a sweltering heat wave to avoid rolling blackouts.
ERCOT manages electric power to more than 26 million Texas customers and represents 90% of the state’s electric load, according to the company.
Temperatures soared to 115+ degrees with the heat index in parts of Texas on Thursday amid an excessive heat warning.
ERCOT issued the voluntary conservation notice due to extreme temperatures, forecasted high demand and lower reserves due to low wind generation.
...
The wind turbines aren’t producing enough energy.
Texas electricity prices surged 6,000% and are climbing toward the $5,000 price cap, according to data from ERCOT.
...
Spot electricity prices jumped to $4,750 per megawatt-hour Thursday afternoon from the average of $75 on Wednesday afternoon, according to data from grid operator Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT)
...
ERCOT asked customers to take the following steps to cut electricity use:
Raise thermostats by a degree or two.
Avoid using large appliances i.e., washer/dryer etc.
Turn off and unplug non-essential lights and appliances.
Set pool pumps to run early morning or overnight; shut off during peak hours.
Commercial Businesses: Turn off any lights an office equipment when space not in use.
Commercial Businesses: Turn off air-conditioning outside of business hours
Can they use gas generators to run their windmills?
Texas is the number one wind power producer in the USA. The Lone Star State has over 33,100 MW of wind
turbines installed. These turbines produce enough energy to power over 3.5 million Texas households and
provide over 25,000 jobs.
It was 100 degrees in Dallas Friday night at 9 PM. Turn off the AC in offices over the weekend, and the places won’t cool off until late September.
Ban plug in electric vehicles.
I’m sure they were helping out their buddy T. Boone Nosepickens.
I am all for nuclear. By far one of the best electrical power generators. I am also for launching spent fuel into outer space.
I don’t follow this, but weren’t wind turbines supposed to lower prices? Looks like Texas is turning into California in terms of lack of electric power. Hasn’t the current Republican governor instituted changes?
Seems I remember T Boon Pickens had a lot to do with building wind energy and made a little profit in the process
Pickens spent about $100 million since 2008 on his Pickens Plan, a grassroots campaign that called for building wind farms and an improved electric grid, offering incentives for energy efficiency and expanding use of natural gas-powered vehicles. That created a strange-bedfellows alliance between Pickens and Democrats.“Here is a man who was my mortal enemy,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said in 2008. “He’s my pal now.”
Texas Billionaire Pickens Blows Off Plans for Wind Farm
HOUSTON – Plans for the world’s largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle have been scrapped, energy baron T. Boone Pickens said Tuesday, and he’s looking for a home for 687 giant wind turbines.
Pickens said he has leases on about 200,000 acres in Texas that were planned for the project, and he might place some of the turbines there, but he’s also looking for smaller wind projects to participate in. He said he’s looking at potential sites in the Midwest and Canada.
In Texas, the problem lies in getting power from the proposed site in the Panhandle to a distribution system, Pickens said in an interview with The Associated Press in New York. He’d hoped to build his own transmission lines but he said there were technical problems.
Wind power is a big part of the “Pickens Plan,” which was announced a year ago Wednesday. Pickens has spent $60 million crisscrossing the country and buying advertising in an effort to reduce the nation’s reliance on foreign oil.
“It doesn’t mean that wind is dead,” said Pickens, who runs the Dallas-based energy investment fund BP Capital. “It just means we got a little bit too quick off the blocks.”
Pickens announced in 2007 plans to install the turbines in parts of four Texas Panhandle counties.
He had hoped to complete the four-phase project in 2014 and eventually have 4,000 megawatts of capacity, enough to power more than one million homes. The total cost was expected to approach $12 billion.
Published July 8, 2009 8:23am EDT | Updated January 14, 2015 12:54am EST
https://www.foxnews.com/story/texas-billionaire-pickens-blows-off-plans-for-wind-farm
Good info.
“... the problem lies in getting power from the proposed site in the Panhandle to a distribution system,”
Some things haven’t and won’t change.
The big problem is that wind has a 20% to 28% capacity factor. That means you get 20% to 28% of the nameplate rating of the turbine. Of course, the bigger problem is what Texas is experiencing now - the wind doesn’t blow when it is extremely hot and you need the power the most. To get through the “wind droughts,” you need massive amounts of storage. The 4X to 5X overbuild of the turbines plus the batteries to get through week-long wind droughts means wind costs 10X to 20X conventional plants.
It is utterly ridiculous.
During the last True Texas Project meeting I attended, there was a Texas pol in attendance, and I let him know how angry I was over that.
The TTP gets my support, that's about it. I have no reason to vote next year.
Everybody with the brains God gave a goose pretty well knew this would happen. Now what’s it going to be like with a cold winter? It’s about time someone went to D.C. & started thumping heads. There was a time something could have been done about it & it rather looks like that ship has sailed. Now how long will it be before most states are facing this crisis? The time that America needed a real president (and an energy secretary) has come & gone & we still are waiting to even have the election. I don’t know what lead time is for a conventional power plant, but somebody better get busy in a hurry. I know that nuclear plants are probably better, but I suppose lead time is even longer. We used to have a city power plant here & now we have a host of solar arrays probably largely destroyed by the last hail storm. They may get them repaired in time to be largely ineffective. Is there a message here about our power grid? There sure seems to be. With a possible hard winter coming up in some areas & more EVs being pushed all the time, we could be in a real spot. The U.S. used to be the bright spot on a world map showing the lighting, but will this still be true?
If it’s bad now (current heat wave), it will be worse when it gets very cold and cloudy with no wind. (Demand higher, generation lower, and solar goes to zero at night when it’s coldest.)
We are a long way from being able to provide batteries to get through week-long wind droughts. And even if we could, the capital costs would be crazy. Granted that big capacity in standby (probably gas fueled) generation isn’t cheap either. “Cheap” green energy is a figment of the imagination.
Texas shot itself in the foot..
Nothing funnier than stalled windmills in the middle of an oil field with pumping wells. To be sure thse wells were scaping the bottom until fracking gave everyone a new lease on life. But you could build nukes. Well you can’t because there is no insurance you can get against random acts of feral bureaucrats.
Those do NOT exist in the US. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/first-u-s-small-nuclear-reactor-design-is-approved/
The US Navy has more operational reactors than any State in the United States. If it was up to the Navy...
The plans for such have just recently been approved and you can see in the article the fear that exist surrounding safety.
I’m of the opinion the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, one of many organizations belonging to the fourth branch of Government called unelected bureaucrats is responsible for the lack of private nuclear power in the United States.
https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc.html
The world’s biggest battery installation is at the Moss Landing power plant on the California coast. It could power the US for a couple of seconds.
“the capital costs would be crazy” — yes, trillions of dollars.
First you need to overbuild the wind / solar power plant system because they have horrible capacity factors. Then you need to build an enormous secondary power plant (the energy storage system or gas turbines) to back up the poor primary power plant performance (wind or solar). Third, you need tens of thousands of miles of copper wires to collect the power from those wind and solar generators scattered allover the landscape. Fourth, the view shed of the beautiful USA is destroyed. Fifth there will be staggering disposal costs to remove the relics and remediate sites. All the companies will be bankrupt and you will have a trillion dollar removal, disposal ad recycle cost that will be borne by USA taxpayers.
You truly could not find a more horrendous way to generate electricity if you tried.
Commissioner Christian Pens Letter to Governor Abbott and Land Commissioner Buckingham Opposing Offshore Wind Farms Off Texas Gulf Coast
“Texas must stop President Biden’s offshore wind farms from invading the Gulf of Mexico, which endanger our gulf coast by harming delicate ecologies and vital industries and further cripple our electrical grid with more unreliable power,” said Commissioner Christian.
“From funding his ‘green’ energy fantasies with the passage of the largest climate bill in history to an unrelenting barrage of bureaucratic rules from his agencies, Biden has kept his campaign promise of transitioning America away from fossil fuels and our nation’s middle class is worse off for it,” continued Christian. “Offshore wind is just President Biden’s next ploy of taxpayer subsidized boondoggles that will have far-reaching implications for environmental ecosystems, industries, transportation, supply chains, local communities and more.”
That’s a great start, but I doubt the Railroad Commissioner will have a lot of influence. The PUC Chairman needs to speak up.
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