They cut cornets and didn’t equip their wind turbines with de-icing systems like those in northern states have. Turbines continue to operate down to -30 degrees all the time.
It’s engineering. Texas did it wrong.
Texas has more than enough capacity of thermal power generation to not need a single watt of wind power. Whether wind is used is not all that relevant as long as there is natural gas available to run the peaker natural gas turbines which make up 30,000+ megawatts of.capacity. what happened and I know this as an energy consultant and operations geologist who drill.daily shale gas wells is the supply crashed from 24 billion cubic feet to half that amount due to the once in a century weather event we had. Texas did not install dewater systems in the feeder and main pipelines from the gas.fields to the city gates. The lines froze it’s that simple. Without the gas to burn the grid lost 41,000 megawatts of thermal power in a few minutes and ERCOT issued a stage 3 oh crap the grid is crashing shed load and within minutes 10,000 and then another 5,000 megawatts were cut off from the grid I have access to the real time data.from ercot the grid.frequency dropped to.critical levels of 59.2 hz that.low.it should have collapse we would have been without power across the whole state for WEEKD during a blacl start. This event was a failure of multiple systems but the gas system was a critical loss wind actually keep 5600 megawatts online that was desperately needed at that time. Thw grid didn’t collapse due to wind thats ABSOLUTELY false it was the loss of HALF of Texas’s natural.gas supply that threw the.grid down. There will be an official report and it will show exacly that.
There were a great many failures at all types of power plants. All sorts of equipment, instrumentation, and controls at all sorts of power plants except nuclear failed in a TX cold snap in 2011, and this appears to be a repeat, but colder.
https://www.balch.com/files/upload/NERC_8_16_2011_SW_Cold_Weather_Event_Final_Report.pdf
That's great, when you have enough electrical power to burn up in the de-icing heaters. When you're low on power, does it always make sense to burn up even more of it for heating idle wind turbines? The driver for all of this is not scientific facts, it's "saving the world from CO2". That would preclude burning coal to heat wind turbines.
South Texas has never had this many days in a group with single digit temperatures. Remember, the wind turbines were placed in order to combat Catastrophic Global Warming, not global cooling.