In response to the excellent commentaries about the Texas wind energy fiasco (e.g. from Tucker Carlson), there is a lot of pushback baloney — because the guilty parties never want to acknowledge the failures of their policies.
It is always the fault of someone else, or something else. Always.
This brief, simplified article is about the primary core problem, that essentially no one is talking about…
In every electric grid (like the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, ERCOT, in Texas), Supply and Demand have to be matched every second.
Otherwise, when Demand exceeds Supply there would be blackouts — which would happen daily (as occurs in some Third World countries).
To assure that this matching is continuous, there is a Grid Safety Reserve. This consists of operating standby fossil fuel supplies, amounting to 15±% of the current demand.
When Demand exceeds Supply+Safety Reserve, again there would be blackouts — which is what is currently happening in Texas.
The two-fold purposes of this Safety Reserve are for the Grid to able to fully handle:
1 – unexpected changes in electricity Demand, plus
2 – unexpected downtime for electricity Sources.
That sounds sensible, so what’s the problem?
Well, for industrial wind to work on any Grid, it needs to have a 100% augmenting supply to compensate for its continually, rapidly, changing power output (i.e. to maintain the per second balance explained above). For technical and economic reasons, this augmenting supply is almost always gas.
OK, so for every 10 MW wind project, does that means that there needs to be a dedicated 10 MW gas facility? YES!
Is that happening — e.g., in Texas? NO!
Why not? Because:
1 – To maintain the false narrative that wind is inexpensive, wind developers (and their political allies) resisted acknowledging that such augmentation is necessary.
2 – Wind developers didn’t pay for the augmentation their product requires — which they should (i.e. not ratepayers).
3 – Since the wind wasn’t properly paying for it, utility companies said: let’s save some money and skip the necessary augmentation.
4 – The Grid operator (ERCOT) failed to require wind developers to pay for the necessary augmentation, or for utilities to provide it.
5 – Worse, the Grid operator allowed utility companies to steal from the Safety Reserve (!) to absorb the frenetic daily wind fluctuations.
Such theft is totally wrong — and should be illegal — as the Grid Safety Reserve is for unexpected Demand or Supply changes. Conversely, wind energy is expected to continuously change throughout the day, every day.
The Grid Safety Reserve was never intended to compensate for continuous, inherent unreliability.
All Grid operators should impose a penalty on any normal operation of their wind fleet that steals from the Safety Reserve — as it jeopardizes all of their ratepayers.
To be clear, this embarrassingly ignorant set of realities is going on in most US Grids. How they get away with it is simple:
1 – The public is deceived about the necessity of augmentation, and
2 – In most other places in the US, the wind contribution to the Grid is in low single digits — e.g. 5%. In such a scenario, wind can steal 5% of the 15±% Grid Safety Reserve, and no one will be the wiser. Everybody looks the other way…
However, in the Texas case, Wind energy is claimed to be 28±%. Clearly, a 15% Safety Reserve can’t handle a loss of 28% — which is exactly what happened this week.
So, when the wind goes to near zero in Texas, the Grid will have blackouts — even if everything else is at full capacity! If there are also failures of conventional capacity, the situation will be worse.
Read more at RealClearEnergy
There is news coming out of Texas that the reserve was actually allowed by ERCOT to be as low as 10%, which is a third less than the minimum requirement.
ARRGGGHHH
How come none of these renewable-crbon-free geniuses mention the miracle fuel -THORIUM?
Thorium is a silvery metal, a bit like lead. It exists in huge quantities in the Earth, all over the world. Like uranium in it’s natural state, it’s very slightly radioactive, but you could carry a pound of it around in your pocket without any danger. It’s not a new find; it was discovered in oxide form by Swedish chemist Jons Berzelius in 1828. He named it for the Norse god of thunder, Thor.
Advantages of thorium:
• When Thorium is found – and it’s easily mined – all of it can be used to create power, unlike uranium, where only 0.7% of it can be used and then only after separating out the useful bits in a huge, expensive centrifuge.
• One ton of Thorium has the energy potential of a million tons of coal.
• A Thorium reactor does not need the massive shielding and cooling that a uranium plant requires.
• A small Thorium reactor could be in a large warehouse, providing power for a medium-sized town at a fraction of the cost of present methods (unless the government taxes it!); uranium-powered nuclear reactors can only operate in very large plants.
• Once it gets going, a Thorium reactor runs by itself, needing only regular inspection. A uranium reactor requires hundreds of staff constantly monitoring it 24/7.
• A Thorium reactor cannot melt down. Were it to over-heat for any reason, a plug in the bottom of the reactor would melt, the fluid would drain into secure storage jars and the nuclear reaction would simply stop.
• A Thorium reactor can use some of the waste from other reactors; not only that, but it can actually re-use its own waste, making it truly inexhaustible.
• Thorium waste has a half-life of around 300 years, compared to millions of years for uranium waste.
• The concerns about fuel security and the probability of run-out in the near future has prompted renewed interest in Thorium. The Chinese have a working reactor and are poised to commission many more. A Japanese consortium is developing one in Norway. Several other countries are developing Thorium reactors. Sadly, not the UK.
• The big plus for Thorium is that it’s cheap; widespread of use of Thorium could cut energy bills by 90%. For ever.