"Texas to Add 35 Gigawatts of Wind & Solar in Next 3 Years — Boosting Grid Resilience" (was a CleanTechnica headline)
(but) the news story of the week — well beyond CleanTechnica's headline — has been Texas and some neighboring regions freezing over and losing electricity.
The vast majority of the power plants that went offline were thermal power plants (mostly natural gas).
They were not equipped enough for the cold.
A number of wind turbines were also down because no one had bought the “cold-weather package.”
... wind is a key component of our grid, generating 20-24% of our electricity over recent years.
... As temperatures dropped below normal in the DFW area on February 7, wind output dropped from 35-65% of capacity to 10-30% from February 9-18.
Over the same time period coal and natural gas power plants ramped up to nearly full capacity very quickly.
As of Sunday February 14, the system was functioning normally.
As temperatures plunged from 20 to 40 °F below normal in the DFW area, some thermal power plants went offline for a variety of weather and demand surge related issues and by Monday morning ERCOT was in full emergency mode.
... more wind generation capacity would have been ... useless
ERCOT’s single biggest failure was the lack of reliable backup capacity for wind power… ERCOT expected the wind power to fail under these conditions.
It appears to me that the only way ERCOT could have made it through this unscathed, would have been for natural gas, coal and nuclear power to have delivered 80-90% of capacity for 7-10 days during record-cold weather (20-40 °F below normal in the DFW area) with a system geared toward hotter than normal weather.
... ERCOT also failed to be sufficiently proactive in implementing rotating outages and when they did, they were unable to adequately rotate the outages.
... Texas Republicans were quick to blame the state’s wind turbines ...
Texas leads the nation in wind power, with nearly 15,000 wind turbines producing 23% of the Lone Star State’s electricity last year.
Many of the turbines shut down when the cold descended on Texas.
“There are a variety of cold weather and anti-icing technologies ... to help prevent the buildup of ice on turbine blades, detect ice when it cannot be prevented, and remove ice safely when it is detected."
The sensors can even tell which blades have ice on them and which ones don’t.
When ice is detected, heating elements inside the blades turn on to melt the ice.
For safety reasons, the turbines are shut down while the heating elements melt off the ice ... Once the ice is removed, the turbines are turned back on and the blades can safely spin in the wind again.
In Texas, wind turbines are not equipped with such deicing packages because operators there never expected to need them ... "