More than 2.5 million American electricity customers lost their power Sunday night and Monday morning – primarily in Texas – as wind turbines proved incapable of functioning in cold, icy conditions.
Texas power officials instituted rolling blackouts in an attempt to keep the grid from failing, plunging people into the cold and the dark throughout the state.
The rolling blackouts are continuing as this article goes to press.
Temperatures dropped to just 4 degrees Fahrenheit Monday morning in Fort Worth. Temperatures dropped to 7 degrees-below-zero in Amarillo as this article went to press.
Since 2015, Texas officials have more than doubled the amount of wind power in Texas, while simultaneously retiring fully operational coal power plants.
Wind power, as a result, has surpassed coal power as the second-leading power source in Texas.
Unlike coal and natural gas power, which are available on-demand and are largely impervious to the weather, wind turbines provide power only when wind speeds are in an ideal range.
Moreover, wind turbines have proven to be particularly susceptible to icy conditions.
Climate activists have long championed wind power for its asserted reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.
Texas public officials have bought into wind power, with Texas now having more than triple the wind power capacity of any other state.
Now, people throughout Texas are forced to endure below-freezing temperatures without any electricity.
Read more at Climate Realism
Even though the wind is blowing, a frozen turbine is USELESS!!! Nighttime cold and below frigid temperatures will shut down output for long periods, and there is no guarantee that it will be operational when the thaw eventually comes!!!
Hard to believe that a state as conservative as Texas has been swallowed the fallacy that intermittent power like wind is a good idea. Also, very frequently when it gets really cold it is due to a high pressure system and winds drop to near zero MPH. Hard to generate electricity without the wind blowing.
A couple winters ago when Minnesota had an extremely cold snap the winds were non-existent. The energy company for much of the state is Xcel (same as we have here in eastern Colorado). Because the wind turbines were generating zero power Xcel had to count on their gas-fired plants to pick up all the slack. But since it was so cold the demand for gas to heat their homes the residents were sucking up so much natural gas that the power plants struggled to generate the required electricity so Xcel was asking their customers to set their thermostats back so as to consume less gas.
This demonstrated one of the fallacies of using natural gas for base load as opposed to nuclear or coal, both of which have sufficient stock of fuel whereas natural gas needs a continuous feed which may not be available if the demand is higher than capacity. It was a great power source for the marginal demand where these plants can be ramped up and down very quickly.
The prioritizing of residential heating above power generation appears to be the same issue ERCOT is facing now. Thus the standby power stations to backup the frozen turbines cannot operate effectively to generate and transmit electricity. This is the perfect chicken and egg problem, if your house has NG pressure but no electricity, your fine HVAC furnace is taking up space in the basement doing nothing. I sure hope that Texans still put wood burning fireplaces or wood stoves in their homes.
To make matters worse Texas has decommissioned about half their still serviceable coal plants over the last decade so they depend much more heavily on the gas-fired plants along with wind. Kinda blew it, right? Not only that but Texas has an isolated grid so they can’t import electricity from nearby states. Thought that was great since a grid failure elsewhere won’t take theirs down as has happened elsewhere in the country.
Solution: Build more NG generating plants.
No, build more nuclear and coal power generating plants.
Can’t believe that we now want to be more like China.
Wind Turbines and totaly useless their hazard for Birds especialy the large ones like Eagles and Condors their a noise maker and Eyesore on the land and replacing Traditional Power Plants with them is a total’y idiotic and irresponsible
Shut off all the electricity and Natural Gas to every politician’s house who is responsible for this GREEN MESS and shut it off to all the government offices until all the TAXPAYERS have been served.
Down here in the third world we anticipate grid failures and those of us that can afford to do so install small home diesel generators that come on automatically when they sense grid failure.
Hello USA, welcome to the third world.
DiCaprio and the rest of the liberal Eco-Freaks wont ever be bothered by Power Outages since they have their own Backup systems on their vast Estates
With the big time fraudster pushing the Climate Change barrow, we know that they are in it for the money and it is an extreme fraud.
I’m referring to Bill Gates as the big time fraudster