Source:
https://www.newsmax.com/larrybell/texas-deep-freeze-windmills-energy/2021/02/19/id/1010709/
"How could this possibly happen here in Texas?
" ... This isn’t supposed to be California, after all, where over-dependence on wind and solar power destabilized the grid during a record 2020 heat wave.
California already leads the nation with the least reliable power system and greatest number of annual outages … 4,297 were recorded between 2008 and 2017.
And conditions will only become far worse as the state now requires that all new homes be nearly entirely electric.
More than 30 cities, including San Francisco, have already enacted bans on new gas appliance hookups. California plans to eventually outlaw gasoline and diesel cars.
... Texas isn’t a place where we who live here ordinarily worry about freezing to death due to a lack of reliable fossil and nuclear power to heat our homes… unlike northern latitudes that routinely get really cold with iced-up failing power lines.
So, in addition to record low temperatures, what happened to change that?
... The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) which oversees the state’s wholesale power market has shifted grid reliance away from reliable coal, nuclear, and natural gas toward heavily taxpayer-subsidized (no free lunch here) wind energy.
That wind generation now constitutes the second-largest electricity power source in Texas.
According to ERCOT, it accounted for 23% of the state supply last year, behind natural gas which represented 45%.
Over the past decade, strict CO2 emission regulations have caused coal’s share of Texas’s electricity to plunge by more than half, to supply 18%.
A power crunch ensued, as bitter cold damp conditions caused wind turbines in West Texas to freeze at the same time it was causing residents to crank up their thermostats.
... Some natural gas wellheads also froze, along with refining facilities in some locations, in turn bleeding natural gas needed for turbines that provide essential back-up “spinning reserve” power for - at best intermittent – wind and solar outputs.
... The spot price of wholesale electricity on the Texas power grid spiked more than 10,000%, surging past $9,000 per MegaWatt-hour.
Even during high demand summer months, $100 per MW-hr would be considered high.
... Germany’s “Energiewende” (energy transition) experience, a policy established in 2000 to decarbonize its primary energy supply.
When the program was first launched, 6.6% of Germany’s electricity came from renewable sources, primarily solar and wind.
By 2019, nearly two decades later, that share had reached 41%.
By 2019, average German household electricity costs during that same period have doubled to 34 U.S. cents per Kilowatt-hour. (Compare this with 22 cents per kWh in France, and 13 cents in the United States.)
... the coldest western Europe weather in a decade have blanketed millions of Germany’s solar panels with snow and ice and rendered 30,000 of its wind turbines idle.
This left the greatest share of vital power coming from coal.
... Harald Schwarz, a professor of power distribution at the University of Cottbus, went straight to the point, saying: ... "The guaranteed output of wind + sun = 0."
... The current trend leaves Germany with no real future alternative but to rely more on natural gas from Russia, coal power from Poland, and nuclear power from France.
And what about America, where wind and solar combined provide, at most, about four percent of our grid electricity (not total energy), versus about 80% from hydrocarbons?
The $2 trillion Biden "Equitable Clean Energy Future" agenda pledges to eliminate those hydrocarbon emissions from electricity by 2035, and then achieve “net-zero carbon” by 2050.
... the plan is for taxpayers to finance a half-million electric car chargers across the nation and add a humongous number of electricity-thirsty electric vehicles to further stress already precarious capacities.
... demand to know where sufficient energy will come from, and at what economic and social cost, to air condition fully-electrified Texas summer and New England winter homes - plus recharge millions of plug-in vehicles - on windless cloudy days and nights – especially during inevitable extreme weather demand periods."