While millions of Texans remain without power for the third day, the wind industry and its advocates are spinning a fable that gas, coal, and nuclear plants—not their frozen turbines—are to blame.
PolitiFact proclaims “Natural gas, not wind turbines, main driver of Texas power shortage.” Climate-change conformity is hard for the media to resist, but we don’t mind. So here are the facts to cut through the spin.
Texas energy regulators were already warning of rolling blackouts late last week as temperatures in western Texas plunged into the 20s, causing wind turbines to freeze.
Natural gas and coal-fired plants ramped up to cover the wind power shortfall as demand for electricity increased with falling temperatures.
Some readers have questioned our reporting Wednesday (“The Political Making of a Texas Power Outage”) that wind’s share of electricity generation in Texas plunged to 8% from 42%.
How can that be, they wonder, when the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (Ercot) has reported that it counts on wind to meet only 10% of its winter capacity.
Ercot’s disclosure is slippery. Start with the term “capacity,” which means potential maximum output. This is different than actual power generation.
Texas has a total winter capacity of about 83,000 megawatts (MW) including all power sources. Total power demand and generation, however, at their peak are usually only around 57,000 MW. Regulators build slack into the system.
Texas has about 30,000 MW of wind capacity, but winds aren’t constant or predictable. 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.
Wind turbines at times this month have generated more than half of the Texas power generation, though this is only about a quarter of the system’s power capacity.
Last week wind generation plunged as demand surged. Fossil-fuel generation increased and covered the supply gap.
Thus between the mornings of Feb. 7 and Feb. 11, wind as a share of the state’s electricity fell to 8% from 42%, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
Gas-fired plants produced 43,800 MW of power Sunday night and coal plants chipped in 10,800 MW—about two to three times what they usually generate at their peak on any given winter day—after wind power had largely vanished.
In other words, gas and coal plants held up in the frosty conditions far better than wind turbines did.
It wasn’t until temperatures plunged into the single digits early Monday morning that some conventional power plants including nuclear started to have problems, which was the same time that demand surged for heating.
Gas plants also ran low on fuel as pipelines froze and more was diverted for heating.
“It appears that a lot of the generation that has gone offline today has been primarily due to issues on the natural gas system,” Electric Reliability Council of Texas senior director Dan Woodfin said Tuesday.
The wind industry and its friends are citing this statement as exoneration. But note he used the word “today.” Most wind power had already dropped offline last week.
Gas generation fell by about one-third between late Sunday night and Tuesday, but even then was running two to three times higher than usual before the Arctic blast. Gas power nearly made up for the shortfall in wind, though it wasn’t enough to cover surging demand.
Read rest at WSJ ($)
Lets just total ban Wind Turbines and take down the wind turbines and bury them in those Colbalt Mines pits no more of those Bird maiming eyesores
Let’s just face it. Given the majority of media “enablers” for renewables, it will be difficult to have an HONEST discussion about the power grid failure in Texas. That’s a shame as we are being given another “gift” to open a fully informed and thoughtful discussions about REAL alternatives in the ongoing energy transition. Don’t worry, looks like we will miss another opportunity to make needed policy changes that are driven by PHYSICAL science, not political science…
And then you’ve got the ignorant fool in Congress, Sandy Cortez, who claims that Texas wouldn’t have had a problem if only they totally went with her “Green New Deal”. What an idiot!
Recent history has proven that wind and solar can reliably supply no more than a small fraction of the power needed at any one time.
They do not have now, nor will ever have, the capacity to replace baseload power.
Therefore, what is the point of them, particularly given that alarmists regularly say that climategeddon can only be avoided if these renewables replace all fossil fuel usage?
We’re spending an untold fortune on technology which cannot deliver any climate change amelioration (even if carbon dioxide emissions are the climate problem and they clearly are not) without it working in a way that it palpably can’t.
Talk about an impossible dream. This is not the stuff of a rational mind.
The blizzards palpably show that there is, indeed, a climate problem, namely, that humanity does not control the climate, either with carbon dioxide or anything else.
That leaves us, therefore, in the same boat we’ve always been in, coping by using whatever technology we have at hand that actually works.
That usually means burning stuff and a lump of high-quality coal is as good as it gets.