Wind Power Did Cause The Texas Blackouts!
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | February 22, 2021
There has been a marked lack of data made public about last week’s blackouts in Texas, which has allowed all sorts of misinformation to fly around. I suspect this is quite deliberate.
I have however found hourly data on the US EIA website. This is what happened on those crucial couple of days:
https://www.eia.gov/beta/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-view/electric_overview/US48/US48/GenerationByEnergySource-4/edit
The chart is interactive, and below are the actual numbers from Sunday evening to Monday morning:
| MW | Wind | Gas | Total Generation |
| Sunday 18.00 | 9015 | 41042 | 66449 |
| Sunday 22.00 | 7083 | 43720 | 66804 |
| Monday 02.00 | 5205 | 40405 | 62198 |
| Monday 03.00 | 5154 | 33096 | 52952 |
So, consider this.
Between 6 pm and 10 pm on the Sunday, wind power suddenly lost 2 GW, about a quarter of its load. Fortunately, gas power was quickly ramped up to fully compensate for this.
Wind power continued to be shed, with another 2 GW disappearing by 2.00 am on the Monday morning. As demand was also declining, gas power was reduced accordingly.
However, it was between 2.00 and 3.00 am that gas power too fell off the cliff.
It must be fairly evident that this had nothing to do with weather conditions, which could not possibly have had such a sudden impact. (In this respect, gas power was perfectly stable after 3 am for the rest of the day and week).
So what did cause that sudden drop in generation, something we also see with coal at exactly the same time, which dropped from 11 GW to 9 GW in that hour?
There is only one possible conclusion, and it is that the grid itself has become totally unstable, as wind power fell away. The evidence points to massive tripping out at gas and coal power stations as generation and demand got out of balance.
I would guess that just one gas plant tripping out in this fashion would have a cascading effect.
Whilst it has been evident from the start that the sudden shedding of wind power played a major part in the blackouts, the establishment media have been quick to close ranks by putting most of the blame on gas power stations, which having much greater capacity naturally suffered bigger drops in generation.
They have done so without publishing any of the detailed data, which I have done above. All they are interested in, of course, is deflecting the blame from renewable energy.
If they had done so, it would have been obvious that the real culprit was unreliable wind power.
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Let’s see: we have unreliable wind power versus reliable toxic environment. Easy choice.
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Wind, solar, even hydro have more ecological impact (habitat destruction) than oil and gas.
The only supposed benefit is co2 emissions (not a pollutant).
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As the saying goes, numbers don’t lie but liars use numbers. If the graph was expanded you would see that wind is never constant and goes up and down based on time of day and season. Hence the need for also having other types of energy available. When the wind isn’t blowing the other energy sources usually kick in. Why didn’t they do it this time? And no the only possible conclusion isn’t that wind is unreliable, we already know that, just like we know solar is also unreliable and only works during the day. Another conclusion is those other sources of energy which are supposed to be more reliable weren’t. Why weren’t they?
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It appears that you commented without reading the article.
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“There is only one possible conclusion, and it is that the grid itself has become totally unstable, as wind power fell away.”
The wind stopped blowing and wind power fell away in the past and the grid didn’t fail, so why should the only conclusion be wind power is to blame this time? Maybe the grid become totally unstable because there were not enough additional sources of power besides wind when the demand required it.
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The wind generation stopped at the same time as load soared. They found a pace that the carbon fuels plants could not be ramped up fast enough for.
The more intermittent generation that there is the greater the back up needs to be. It seems that Texas’ wind capacity is too much and must be reduced as a share of generating capacity.
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Conservative Australian politicians also blamed their electrical blackouts on unreliable renewable energy sources like wind and solar. What fixed it was a way to store the energy of renewable energy sources.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a31350880/elon-musk-battery-farm/
Of course there are other means to store energy besides batteries, for example, the Bath County Pumped Storage Station which has been in operation for decades and is the largest pumped storage project in the world.
http://www.virginiaplaces.org/energy/pumpedstorage.html
Your solution to reduce wind capacity would only further consolidate rather than diversify where we get energy from. The more consolidated things become the more reliant and less reliable a system is when significant events occur. Similar to investing in the stock market, you don’t put all your assets in to one stock, you diversify so one bad stock isn’t going to bring down your whole portfolio.
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First off, batteries lose most of their charge in sub-freezing temps. Battery storage is beyond hopeless:
Popular Mechanics is nonsense propaganda. I would only use it to identify disinformation campaigns.
Outside of pumped storage (Texas is mostly flat and pumped storage has vast environmental footprint), gas has the singular ability to ramp up and down.
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“First off, batteries lose most of their charge in sub-freezing temps. ”
That depends on how long the batteries are at subfreezing temps and how low those temps are. Was the whole state of Texas below freezing and for those parts which were, what was the temp and for how long? Not to mention it isn’t hard to keep batteries warm or cool by placing them in insulated enclosures or buildings. Tesla cars are used in Norway where temps drop to -40 below and they still operate. Texas temps didn’t get close to that.
Don’t trust Popular mechanics, try googling South Australia tesla battery farm, it isn’t just PM which talks about the battery farm in southern Australia. The battery farm was so successful Australia is building more of them. Don’t trust me try googling it. Ironic you don’t trust PM but you trust all those those other links you send me. And my guess is the authors are funded or lobbyist for the oil and gas industry.
As far as Texas being flat, the highest point in Texas is Guadalupe Peak has an elevation of 8,751 feet. Pushing only facts and opinions which support your biases doesn’t help your argument that wind power is to blame for the blackouts in Texas. Nor your conclusion that wind power should be reduced. But I will agree with you that the grid in Texas has problems.
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Again, read the linked articles. Batteries could not have met Texas’ load for but a few minutes.
Part of the problem is that heat pumps, which are common in Texas, suddenly need to rely on the grid once temps fall to extreme lows:
So much standby capacity needed. So little remaining reliable generation, What to do?
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Those few minutes is all that is needed to give other sources of power time to spool up and get connected into the power grid. Before Australia installed their battery farms those spikes in demand caused the same problems as they did in Texas, as demand exceeded supply, circuit breakers tripped causing blackouts.
Gas, oil, and coal plants can not connect instantaneously into the grid, They take time to start and spooled up to operating speed before being connected into the grid. The energy stored in a battery farm can connect immediately into the grid when demand spikes. It acts like a shock absorber for the system until other power sources can get online.
After the battery farm came online in Southern Australia demand spikes where held in check. Which is why Australia and other places are beginning to install more battery farms.
But don’t trust me ask any electrical engineer who understands how an electrical grid works and do your own research.
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Notice that Australia, California and Texas all have the highest levels of intermittent power and have also been the sites of unprecedented power grid failures.
It seems that you have yet to read the linked articles.
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Yes I read the article and made a reply. I agree with most of what he has to say, but think the problem isn’t with Texas’s renewable energy policy but in not offering incentives to non renewable energy producers who’s power plants are more costly operate and maintain, which results in energy that is more costly to produce.
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Those states and country aren’t the only ones to use wind power. Yet other states and countries manage to ensure they can provide power when needed. How do they do it?
My guess is the problem California had, and Texas has is they deregulated their power grid. The marketplace decided solar and wind where the cheapest forms of energy production, in spite of it being intermittent. With the result being the regulators didn’t ensure enough incentives for other forms of energy which are more reliable.
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