The intermittency of wind and solar power could be worse than originally thought, experts say

"Wind Droughts": A 15-state region produced less than 10% of its potential 22 gigawatt wind output over an 82-hour period. For 42 hours straight within that period, the wind output was only 1.5% of the total..

Last month, multiple news outlets reported on the record-smashing year the wind industry had in 2023. The Global Wind Energy Council released its latest report showing the world installed 117 gigawatts of capacity. The Associated Press called 2023 a “record year for wind installations,” and Reuters noted that the U.S. was among the top five markets for wind installations.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration released a report this week showing that installing more wind farms doesn’t necessarily mean generating more electricity. The U.S. tripled its wind energy capacity, according to the report, from 47 gigawatts in 2010 to 147.5 gigawatts at the end of 2023. While that may sound impressive, generation from all those wind farms dropped 2.1% over 2022.

Much of that drop was during the first six months of 2023, when wind generation fell by 14% compared to the same period in 2022.

The capacity factor for the nation’s wind energy fleet, the EIA explained in its report, dropped to an eight-year low of 33.5%. This is the ratio of the amount of power produced compared to the total it could have produced if it were running continuously.

Renewable energy has an intermittency problem, which is why even though it's cheap while it’s producing electricity, it’s more expensive than any other form of energy due to all the costs associated with making it reliable. These extra costs include the costs of battery facilities, baseload backup generators, transmission lines and over building of capacity.

However, as the drop in wind generation in 2023 shows, even with wind farms spread out across the U.S., it’s still possible that the wind won’t be there to turn the turbines. These wind lulls are called wind droughts.

“Wind droughts can happen at any time and are fairly common. As regions of the country become more reliant upon wind turbines producing electricity during periods of high demand, they become more prone to electricity shortages during these wind droughts,” energy experts Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling, write in an article on their “Energy Bad Boys” Substack.

Orr and Rolling, who are policy fellows for the Center of the American Experiment, produced a report in 2022 showing how a 15-state region experienced a "wind drought" lasting more than three days. Science Magazine describes wind droughts as "prolonged periods of low wind speeds," which "pose challenges for electricity systems largely reliant on wind generation."

The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, an organization tasked with managing the flow of high-voltage electricity across that region, produced less than 10% of its potential 22 gigawatt wind output over an 82-hour period. For 42 hours straight within that period, the wind output was only 1.5% of the total. Fortunately, coal and natural gas were available to meet demand.

A new study by researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) found that some parts of the country experience energy droughts lasting a week. Energy droughts are when both wind and solar energy fail as a result of windless, cloudy days.

The researchers found that energy droughts can occur in any season across the lower 48 states, and they vary widely in frequency and duration. California, for example, experienced energy droughts lasting several days, whereas Texas experienced frequent energy droughts lasting a few hours. The study also discovered that these energy droughts happen at the worst times.

“We found that the severity of the droughts that happened during those periods of high load is higher than the severity on average during periods that are not during high load,” Dr. Cameron Bracken, lead author of the study and Earth scientist at PNNL, told Just The News.

The study standardized its findings so that other researchers could use the same tools to and make accurate comparisons across different studies. The PNNL researchers hope their study will provide insight into designing and managing energy storage.

The study wasn’t able to look at what was happening with other energy sources — hydroelectric, coal, gas and nuclear facilities — during these drought events, Bracken said.

“That information is really difficult to come by. It's usually proprietary,” Bracken said. That means, they can’t really determine during any particular drought event they identified what the exact shortfall that occurred on the grid was.

Orr and Rollin, in their analysis of the 2022 MISO drought event, were looking at the impact to grid reliability in Minnesota as a result of decreasing dispatchable generation from coal.

“The problem isn’t that the wind stops blowing sometimes; the issue is that state carbon-free electricity mandates and federal regulations are pushing reliable, dispatchable power plants into retirement,” the duo wrote.

That rate of retirement is likely to increase as a result of the EPA’s new power plant rules released late last month, which require expensive carbon-capture technologies in new gas plants and existing coal plants. The added costs, experts say, may make retirement a more attractive option for the plant owners.

Should that happen, the best hope for maintaining stability as the grid relies more and more on intermittent wind and solar will be battery facilities.

Dr. Ariel Cohen, senior fellow at The Atlantic Council, in testimony he submitted for a Senate Budget Committee hearing Wednesday, explained that storage costs of lithium-ion batteries amount to $338 per kilowatt hour for a battery with a 10-hour storage duration. For comparison, the average retail price of electricity in the U.S. is 12.36 cents per kilowatt hour. A single day of storage in the U.S., according to Cohen, would cost approximately $3.7 trillion per day.

If energy droughts hit American consumers when they need power the most while the grid depends on increasing amounts of batteries to satisfy demand, electricity is going to get a lot more expensive.

I was reading a newspaper article to my daughter about some guy that had his emotional support animal stolen. It was a 5.5 foot long aligater.

She said “That’s just crazy!”

I said - actually, it might be the most sane article in the paper today.

Front Page: “Worries grow as electrical supply falls behind.” (Yes, closing down coal, reducing natural gas, talk of removing dams...)

Second Page: “Homeless funds overwhelmed by new homeless.” (New “immigrants”, people from out of state, etc.)

Ercot has up the second for those with access and down to the individual megawatt where and what percentage of the total grid is by source. At 0039 this morning wind was 53% of the Texas grid. Wind was making 24,000 megawatts and gas was making 13,000 megawatts. A better way to look at it is gas could have made all 37,000 megawatts instead wind saved 18,000,000 BTU per megawatt times 37 or 666,000,000 BTU worth of natural gas PER HOUR this morning. Every BTU not burnt is saved for another day or future generations. Gas is more valuable as fertilizers and plastics vs burning it once to the sky. Gas is used to make concrete and steel and plastics that went into those turbines as well. However that energy used to make those turbines will return 40 times to 100 times the energy in that natural gas harvested by those turbines vs burning once in a turbine to the sky. The scientific term is EROI and wind turbines have a EROI of 40 to 100 for class 5 on up wind fields.

Gas should only be used for peak power or to fill in lows.

“In 2021, the average construction cost for this type of electricity generator stood at 512 U.S. dollars per kilowatt of capacity”

A half cent per kWh fee on wind or solar to fund the build out of those types of fast spin up turbines that only burn precious gas that is a limited resource regardless of what boomers say who don’t have 20 years in the geology industry. It takes millions if not tens to hundreds of millions of years for a total hydrocarbon system to form, go through the oil/gas window and then migrate to geological traps. Humans are burning 400+ million years of fossil sunshine in under 200 by definition and pure mathematics that cannot, is not, and will never be sustainable over a long time period. That’s really not up for discussion as the industry and scientific community has mapped , 3D seismic and geophysical analysis via gravity survey and geomagnetic every basin on this planet. The community knows where and how much is in place, technically recoverable at any price as well. Mine once use many. That applies for natural gas as much as coal or liquid hydrocarbons.

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