Source:
https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/18/the-failure-of-the-texas-power-grid-is-worse-than-you-think/
"Why did Texas lose power?
Math — apolitical, non-ideological, and sometimes cruel math.
During such an extreme cold for which Texas is mostly unprepared, the demands on the electric grid exceeded its output capacity.
The majority of Texans heat their home with electricity, and, under typical circumstances, it makes sense.
Why spend money to bring natural gas heat into the home when it’s very likely you can go an entire winter without turning it on?
As temperatures plummeted, Texans turned on and turned up the heat.
... The extreme cold was impacting all electricity production.
All of it: coal, natural gas, nuclear, but most of all wind.
The Department of Energy tracks electricity generation hourly. On Sunday, Feb. 14 at 8 p.m., this was Texas’s electricity makeup in kilowatt-hours:
Natural Gas: 43,798
Coal: 10,828
Wind: 8,087
Nuclear: 5,140
The next day, during the height of the storm at 8 p.m., this was the makeup:
Natural Gas: 30,917
Coal: 8,023
Wind: 649
Nuclear: 3,785
Why the delta?
Natural gas, for starters, experienced a shortage.
Those Texans who do have natural gas heating their homes turned it up, and what would have been available for electricity generation, went to homes.
... Here is the real reason for the failure and I’ll prove it with an apples-to-apples comparison.
One decade ago, almost to the day, Feb. 2, 2011, extreme cold put a strain on the electric grid.
The electric grid was unable to meet demand, and many experienced rolling blackouts for “up to an hour.”
... fossil fuel plants also struggled in the cold ...
Fast forward one decade and two weeks, and Texas again faced with extreme cold and a straining electric grid, but it’s not the same electricity mix.
In 2011 about 6 percent of the electricity mix was generated from wind power.
Today it’s 25 percent.
... Texas has increased its overall electricity consumption by 20 percent as the state is attracting people from everywhere and the population is booming.
... three coal plants were taken offline.
Indeed, the same type of storm of 2011 did not play out in the same circumstances in 2021.
... The difference is wind.
So serious is this percentage of the electric grid coming from unreliable wind power that more than two years ago, the Chair of Texas Public Utility Commission called lack of dependable electricity reserves “very scary.”
Yet, Texans still saw three coal plants removed completely from the equation, even as a back-up, a safety net.
... Why?
In 2005, then-Governor Rick Perry ... signed into law a mandate requiring Texas to increase its wind power electricity.
... In 2017, the Sierra Club celebrated the closing of the Monticello Coal plant in Titus County, Texas.
Their campaign “Beyond Coal” is funded with over $500 million from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and they pride themselves on taking more than 60 percent of the coal plants offline in America.
But there’s another component to taking coal offline: the 1,800 megawatts of electricity it generated could have genuinely helped stabilize the electric grid.
Maybe instead of more than 20 deaths from the cold, the number would be less.
Sadly, we’ll never know.
... An NBC News column claims that wind and solar are “fairly small slices of the state’s energy mix” as if 25 percent were trace figures.
... Energy (is) math, physics, and numbers.
But it’s also life.
We’re told to stop the “existential threat” of climate change we must “go green,” and switch to green energy.
I do this for a living and I’ve never seen one confirmed death from “climate change,” but today I can show you several Texan deaths clearly attributable to the cold ...
... billionaires don’t like coal, politicians invent mandates, and utility commissioners rest on their reports as well as a severe winter storm.
Fossil fuels aren’t perfect, but renewables aren’t either.
... China is building more coal plants right now than all of Europe has combined and the reason is simple: it works. China is serious about its energy. I wish we were, too."