How's the weather?

[JSngry]

http://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_3f272ecb77944d60e1912e5e87737c60

A pretty good look at just how complicated it all is. But it's made more complicated by certain hard-wired philosophies about what all this should be.

[RiRiIII]

Very interesting. Thanks.

[mjzee]

2 hours ago, JSngry said:

http://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_3f272ecb77944d60e1912e5e87737c60

A pretty good look at just how complicated it all is. But it's made more complicated by certain hard-wired philosophies about what all this should be.

I was curious, so I did searches on the three people quoted for insight in the article (Bordoff, Jenkins, and Cohan).  All seem to be invested, from their academic/governmental positions, in promoting wind power and shifting from fossil fuels.  

ERCOT appears to be a large part of the problem, and it'll be interesting to see what emerges from investigations.  See: https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/2021/02/16/texas-gov-abbott-calls-ercot-reform-emergency-item-amid-blackouts/6765855002/ and https://dailynewshouston.com/politics/gov-abbott-orders-investigation-into-texas-energy-company-amid-blackouts-freezing-temperatures/

Finally, this shows what a terrible decision Biden made in shutting the Keystone Pipeline.  Talk about not making realistic plans about future energy needs!

 

[JSngry]

1 minute ago, mjzee said:

I was curious, so I did searches on the three people quoted for insight in the article (Bordoff, Jenkins, and Cohan).  All seem to be invested, from their academic/governmental positions, in promoting wind power and shifting from fossil fuels.  

 

Any factual errors that can be found in this article please present them.

Also any fact-based opposing positions are gladly solicited.

4 minutes ago, mjzee said:

Talk about not making realistic plans about future energy needs!

 

Let's talk about investing renewables, profiting off renewables, but not having as much as a basic contingency plan for something as basic as upkeep of wind turbines. Rule number one - protect your investment.

Protecting your investment goes far beyond protecting your money.

[AllenLowe]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/16/ercot-texas-electric-grid-failure/

[mjzee]

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/crenshaw-texas-wind-oil-energy-california

[medjuck]

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-02-17/texas-severe-weather-power-crisis-secession

[JSngry]

"Blame the turbines" ain't gonna cut it. EVERYTHING was affected, natural gas, refineries, all of it, because everything was affected by the hard freezes, because winterization plans were inadequate. Water 

ERCOT references 2011 (aka The Winter Where Nature Fucked Jerry Jones), and ok good, "improvements" were made. Good, let's make some more.

Only this time, let's not fight the last war, and let's not pretend that this is an "unforseen" and/or a "once in a lifetime" event. Both are patently untrue.

I've lived in N/NE Texas most of my life, and yeah, this shit has always happened. Not annually, but often enough. This whole "warm weather" thing is tourist trap bullshit, and that was true even when traditional weather patterns could safely be expected.

[ghost of miles]

Also from the CNN article:

The energy crisis in Texas raises also questions about the nature of the state's deregulated and decentralized electric grid. Unlike other states, Texas has made a conscious decision to isolate its grid from the rest of the country.

That means that when things are running smoothly, Texas can't export excess power to neighboring states. And in the current crisis, it can't import power either. 

"When it comes to electricity, what happens in Texas stays in Texas," Cohan said. "That has really come back to bite us."

[mjzee]

There's an interesting editorial in today's Wall St Journal titled "The Political Making of a Texas Power Outage: How bad energy policy led to rolling blackouts in the freezing Lone Star State":

Why are millions of Americans in the nation’s most energy-rich state without power and heat for days amid extreme winter weather? “The people who have fallen short with regard to the power are the private power generation companies,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott explained. Ah, yes, blame private power companies . . . that are regulated by government. 

The Republican sounds like California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who lambasted private utilities for rolling blackouts during a heat wave last summer. Power grids should be able to withstand extreme weather. But in both these bellwether states, state and federal energy policies have created market distortions and reduced grid reliability.

Mr. Abbott blamed his state’s extensive power outages on generators freezing early Monday morning, noting “this includes the natural gas & coal generators.” But frigid temperatures and icy conditions have descended on most of the country. Why couldn’t Texas handle them while other states did? 

The problem is Texas’s overreliance on wind power that has left the grid more vulnerable to bad weather. Half of wind turbines froze last week, causing wind’s share of electricity to plunge to 8% from 42%. Power prices in the wholesale market spiked, and grid regulators on Friday warned of rolling blackouts. Natural gas and coal generators ramped up to cover the supply gap but couldn’t meet the surging demand for electricity—which half of households rely on for heating—even as many families powered up their gas furnaces. Then some gas wells and pipelines froze.

In short, there wasn’t sufficient baseload power from coal and nuclear to support the grid. Baseload power is needed to stabilize grid frequency amid changes in demand and supply. When there’s not enough baseload power, the grid gets unbalanced and power sources can fail. The more the grid relies on intermittent renewables like wind and solar, the more baseload power is needed to back them up. 

But politicians don’t care about grid reliability until the power goes out. And for three decades politicians from both parties have pushed subsidies for renewables that have made the grid less stable.

Start with the 1992 Energy Policy Act signed by George H.W. Bush, which created a production tax credit to boost the infant wind industry. Generators collect up to $25 per megawatt hour of power they produce regardless of market demand. The credit was supposed to expire in 1999, but nothing lasts longer than a temporary government program, as Ronald Reagan once quipped.

The renewables lobby found GOP allies in windy states like Texas, Oklahoma and Iowa. Former Enron CEO Ken Lay, who had made a big bet on wind, begged then Texas Gov. George W. Bush in 1998 to lobby Congress to extend the credit for five years. Congress has since extended it more than a dozen times, most recently in December.

Wind producers persuaded former Gov. Rick Perry to back a $5 billion network of transmission lines to connect turbines in western Texas to cities. This enabled them to build more turbines—and collect more tax credits. Because the Texas grid is often oversupplied, wind producers sometimes pay to off-load their power, though they still turn a profit with the tax credits.

Coal and nuclear are more strictly regulated and can’t compete, and many coal plants have shut down in Texas and elsewhere. Over the last decade about 100 gigawatts of coal power nationwide has been retired—enough to power 60 million homes. Many nuclear plants are scheduled to shut down, including large reactors in New York and Illinois this year. 

Renewables and natural gas are expected to substitute, but Texas is showing their limitations. In the Lone Star State, bad weather has constrained the supply of gas, but government policies do the same in other states. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey’s Phil Murphy have blocked pipelines to deliver shale gas from Pennsylvania to the Northeast. 

Their pipeline blockade has driven up the cost of electricity. The average retail price of power is about 50% higher in New Jersey and New York than in Pennsylvania. They and other governors have also poured subsidies into wind and solar, though neither can provide reliable power in frosty weather. 

Many states also have renewable mandates that will force more fossil-fuel generators to shut down. New York has required that renewables account for 70% of state power by 2030. Then layer on Democratic policies at the federal level that limit fossil-fuel production and distribution.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is supposed to ensure grid reliability, but under Barack Obama it promoted renewables over reliability. Democrats opposed efforts by Trump appointees to mitigate market distortions caused by state renewable subsidies and mandates that jeopardized the grid. On present trend, this week’s Texas fiasco is coming soon to a cold winter or hot summer near you.

[kh1958]

5 hours ago, JSngry said:

They didn't winterize the wind turbines.

I read this morning that most (87%) of the failures are gas and coal generators that were not winterized.

[JSngry]

Exactly.

Blaming wind turbines alone is ill informed at at best and a disingenuous distraction at (possibly) worst.

NOTHING works right if you don't do preventative maintenance. It's not complicated.

The future is here to stay!!!!! 

[kh1958]

 

In reality, wind turbine outages have been responsible for less than 13% of Texas’ total power shortages, the nonprofit electric grid overseer Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) told Bloomberg and local news outlets on Tuesday.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/02/16/wind-power-isnt-to-blame-for-texas-electricity-crisis/

[medjuck]

29 minutes ago, mjzee said:

There's an interesting editorial in today's Wall St Journal titled "The Political Making of a Texas Power Outage: How bad energy policy led to rolling blackouts in the freezing Lone Star State":

Why are millions of Americans in the nation’s most energy-rich state without power and heat for days amid extreme winter weather? “The people who have fallen short with regard to the power are the private power generation companies,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott explained. Ah, yes, blame private power companies . . . that are regulated by government. 

The Republican sounds like California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who lambasted private utilities for rolling blackouts during a heat wave last summer. Power grids should be able to withstand extreme weather. But in both these bellwether states, state and federal energy policies have created market distortions and reduced grid reliability.

Mr. Abbott blamed his state’s extensive power outages on generators freezing early Monday morning, noting “this includes the natural gas & coal generators.” But frigid temperatures and icy conditions have descended on most of the country. Why couldn’t Texas handle them while other states did? 

The problem is Texas’s overreliance on wind power that has left the grid more vulnerable to bad weather. Half of wind turbines froze last week, causing wind’s share of electricity to plunge to 8% from 42%. Power prices in the wholesale market spiked, and grid regulators on Friday warned of rolling blackouts. Natural gas and coal generators ramped up to cover the supply gap but couldn’t meet the surging demand for electricity—which half of households rely on for heating—even as many families powered up their gas furnaces. Then some gas wells and pipelines froze.

In short, there wasn’t sufficient baseload power from coal and nuclear to support the grid. Baseload power is needed to stabilize grid frequency amid changes in demand and supply. When there’s not enough baseload power, the grid gets unbalanced and power sources can fail. The more the grid relies on intermittent renewables like wind and solar, the more baseload power is needed to back them up. 

But politicians don’t care about grid reliability until the power goes out. And for three decades politicians from both parties have pushed subsidies for renewables that have made the grid less stable.

Start with the 1992 Energy Policy Act signed by George H.W. Bush, which created a production tax credit to boost the infant wind industry. Generators collect up to $25 per megawatt hour of power they produce regardless of market demand. The credit was supposed to expire in 1999, but nothing lasts longer than a temporary government program, as Ronald Reagan once quipped.

The renewables lobby found GOP allies in windy states like Texas, Oklahoma and Iowa. Former Enron CEO Ken Lay, who had made a big bet on wind, begged then Texas Gov. George W. Bush in 1998 to lobby Congress to extend the credit for five years. Congress has since extended it more than a dozen times, most recently in December.

Wind producers persuaded former Gov. Rick Perry to back a $5 billion network of transmission lines to connect turbines in western Texas to cities. This enabled them to build more turbines—and collect more tax credits. Because the Texas grid is often oversupplied, wind producers sometimes pay to off-load their power, though they still turn a profit with the tax credits.

Coal and nuclear are more strictly regulated and can’t compete, and many coal plants have shut down in Texas and elsewhere. Over the last decade about 100 gigawatts of coal power nationwide has been retired—enough to power 60 million homes. Many nuclear plants are scheduled to shut down, including large reactors in New York and Illinois this year. 

Renewables and natural gas are expected to substitute, but Texas is showing their limitations. In the Lone Star State, bad weather has constrained the supply of gas, but government policies do the same in other states. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey’s Phil Murphy have blocked pipelines to deliver shale gas from Pennsylvania to the Northeast. 

Their pipeline blockade has driven up the cost of electricity. The average retail price of power is about 50% higher in New Jersey and New York than in Pennsylvania. They and other governors have also poured subsidies into wind and solar, though neither can provide reliable power in frosty weather. 

Many states also have renewable mandates that will force more fossil-fuel generators to shut down. New York has required that renewables account for 70% of state power by 2030. Then layer on Democratic policies at the federal level that limit fossil-fuel production and distribution.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is supposed to ensure grid reliability, but under Barack Obama it promoted renewables over reliability. Democrats opposed efforts by Trump appointees to mitigate market distortions caused by state renewable subsidies and mandates that jeopardized the grid. On present trend, this week’s Texas fiasco is coming soon to a cold winter or hot summer near you.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial was contradicted by its own reporting.   Meanwhile El Paso is fine because its power company prepared for this emergency.   I've also read that you can winterize wind turbines but in Texas they chose not to. (I'm too lazy to look up whether the turbines are publicly or privately owned but  in California, privately owned power companies look to short term profit not long term safety. )

[JSngry]

Of course wind turbines can be winterized. They are regularly used in cold weather climates.

But as already noted, wind turbines have not been the main cause for the outages. Not even close. An overall failure to adequately winterize is. Wind, oil, and gas.

Water freezes if you let it. I mean, who knew?

I got me some entrepreneurial spirit here, so hey - R&D  money to develop self-triggered defrosting technology! Automatic alerts when a turbine is facing impending freezation!

Dare To Dream, America! Don't say that it can't be done, say that it hasn't been done. Get busy dreaming and get busy spending! 

And quit fucking around, Goober, time"s a-waistin'!

[clifford_thornton]

El Paso gets its power from NM/western grid, not TX grid, correct?

[mjzee]

There's another interesting editorial in tomorrow's Wall St Journal, which seems to address some of the comments made here: "Texas Spins Into the Wind: An electricity grid that relies on renewables also needs nuclear or coal power":

While millions of Texans remain without power for a 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 megawatts (MW) including all power sources. Total power demand and generation, however, at their peak are usually only around 57 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.

Between 12 a.m. on Feb. 8 and Feb. 16, wind power plunged 93% while coal increased 47% and gas 450%, according to the EIA. Yet the renewable industry and its media mouthpieces are tarring gas, coal and nuclear because they didn’t operate at 100% of their expected potential during the Arctic blast even though wind turbines failed nearly 100%.

The policy point here is that an electricity grid that depends increasingly on subsidized but unreliable wind and solar needs baseload power to weather surges in demand. Natural gas is crucial but it also isn’t as reliable as nuclear and coal power. 

Politicians and regulators don’t want to admit this because they have been taking nuclear and coal plants offline to please the lords of climate change. But the public pays the price when blackouts occur because climate obeisance has made the grid too fragile. We’ve warned about this for years, and here we are.

[JSngry]

Sigh...

[ghost of miles]

No, Wind Farms Aren’t The Main Cause Of Texas’ Blackouts

... the WSJ talks about “the lords of climate change”?! More like the lords of fossil fuels and climate denialism. Note to Texas state govt and private industry: join the U.S. grid and winterize your turbines along with the rest of your energy sector, since extreme weather is more and more likely, in part because of our fossil fuel addiction. Good god almighty.  

[JSngry]

Complaining about equipment failure and not having winterized is like comparing that your car is a lemon when you never change the oil.

Baseline of reliability should not be based on user negligence.

[jlhoots]

Thirty degrees & sunny. Snow is melting.

BTW, Texas officials sound like idiots. "Survival of the fittest" my ass.

[medjuck]

70 degrees, blue skies and a small breeze.  But before you begin cursing me, we're in a draught  (though the foliage still looks pretty good). 

[JSngry]

We were predicted to get up to 34 today, which isn't really enough to affect any meaningful melting.

However here we sit at 42 and significant meltage already! Global Warming returns! 

[JSngry]

At least the magnetic poles didn't reverse. That would be fucked!!!!!

https://www.axios.com/earth-magnetic-poles-climate-environment-38e47bcd-134c-4d20-8618-b02e2a31aeb4.html

[GA Russell]

It's snowing here in Raleigh today.

This often happens once a year in January.

Earlier the wind chill was 29, but it feels to have dropped in the past hour.