I believe this happened just 2-3 days ago in Texas, on a perfectly clear and normal spring day.
The wind stopped blowing and suddenly the renewables share dropped on the grid dropped close to zero, sparking a mini crisis in the ERCOT grid
Time to fire up the gas generators
“believe this happened just 2-3 days ago in Texas, on a perfectly clear and normal spring day.
The wind stopped blowing and suddenly the renewables share dropped on the grid dropped close to zero, sparking a mini crisis in the ERCOT grid”
Not a crisis the call went out to bring online peaker turbines and power storage systems. It was a clear day both days so solar was still making it’s expected 13,000 megawatts for those days during the midday solar plateau. A better way to look at is for every megawatt of wind on the grid is 18,000,000 btu of natural gas that gets to be used for something else more valuable like say fertilizers or plastics or saved for future generations use. You can burn it once or use it for something more valuable. The EROI on wind power in a class 5 wind field is well over 40 that’s all in that’s how EROI is defined. So the better way to look at it from an actual scientific not emotional view. You can burn that natural gas once to the sky or you can use it to make concrete,steel and plastics for a turbine then get back FOURTY TIMES as much energy as just burning it to the sky. Yes you need peak turbines but those are cheap under $900kw in capex and can spin up and down rapidly burn only the gas you need for the peaks save the rest for more valuable uses or higher EROI uses.