"All of a sudden, everyone’s talking about wind and solar, and the chatter ain’t positive.
Solar panels carpeted in inches of snow and ice; wind turbines frozen solid; and breathless, frigid weather led to total collapses in wind and solar output across central USA.
... Texans copped the worst of it, suffering widespread blackouts and power rationing.
When having electricity on tap literally means life-and-death, those demanding it appear to be very keen on having it.
And are none too concerned about where it comes from.
The notion that the proletariat prefers wind and solar over power from coal, gas or nuclear plants soon evaporates when the lights go out, in the middle of a blizzard.
The American fiasco has encouraged Australian politicians to start demanding an end to this country’s ludicrous ban on nuclear power generation.
... it’s encouraged Americans to think long and hard about where their next watt is coming from.
... Total winter generation capacity for the state is about 83 GW, while peak winter usage is about 57 GW.
That’s a margin of over 45% of capacity over peak usage.
In a fossil-fuel-only or fossil-fuel-plus-nuclear system, where all sources of power are dispatchable, a margin of 20% would be considered normal, and 30% would be luxurious.
This margin is well more than that.
How could that not be sufficient?
The answer is that Texas has gone crazy for wind.
About 30 GW of the 83 GW of capacity are wind.
That means that even if all the fossil fuel and nuclear facilities are running at full tilt, you still need at least some wind at all times.
And the fossil-fuel and nuclear facilities are not going to run all the time at full tilt.
You are going to have scheduled outages, and also breakdowns from time to time.
That’s why you would like to have a margin of up to 30%.
It turns out that the cold weather and icy conditions brought some serious breakdowns on the fossil fuel side.
So how how did the wind do at covering the gaps?
The answer is, it’s completely useless.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Winds this past month have generated between about 600 and 22,500 MW.
Regulators don’t count on wind to provide much more than 10% or so of the grid’s total capacity since they can’t command turbines to increase power like they can coal and gas plants.
... sometimes the wind turbines only generate at a rate of 600 MW — which is about 2% of their capacity.
And you never know when that’s going to be.
Texas has its own electrical grid, run by something called the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).
... ERCOT is spinning like a top to try to make it look like its own bad bet on wind energy has not been the main cause of the current disaster.
The official line is that the “great majority” of power facility “outages” in Texas over the past week have been other than wind facilities.
... The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has released data showing that the vast majority of power plant outages in Texas were gas-fired generators.
As multiple experts have documented, the vast majority of power plant capacity outages in Texas are at gas generators.
Got it?
The wind facilities are not having an “outage” (except some that are frozen solid, but that’s a small percent); it’s just that the wind doesn’t blow when you need it.
Somehow, that doesn’t count against wind turbines.
There’s no avoiding the basic defect here, which is that they have peak usage of 57 GW, and only 53 GW of dispatchable capacity.
The right way to look at this is that for 57 GW of peak usage you need 70 or so GW of dispatchable capacity to cover outages, planned and unplanned.
The wind turbines?
They are just for decoration.
You might also be interested in how the New York Times today is spinning this story.
Here is an excerpt from their front page piece today:
[A]s climate change accelerates, many electric grids will face extreme weather events that go far beyond the historical conditions those systems were designed for, putting them at risk of catastrophic failure.
Their narrative is not disturbed at all by the fact that this was a cold versus warm weather event.
It’s climate change!"