Funny, everyone was happy about how Texas scrapped so many coal plants and built so many windmills until it reached a cascade failure point and then the narrative shifted to "OMG, look at all the deregulation!"
Texas had no power because they forgot everything they learnt the hard way from their "once-in-a-decade snow storm" they had 2011.
Coal piles freezing solid because there is no roof, gas valves impossible to operate because nobody would put a box around them, no water too cool reactor cores because the pipes froze: these are not failures somehow cascading from the fact they build some windmills.
When I learnt that turbines on Texas nuclear plants stay under the open sky I was REALLY surprised. It was the reason behind the single failure, otherwise nuclear plants have weathered this crisis perfectly.
I guess the lesson is that not even Texans think nuclear is so safe it doesn't need weather protection, or maybe it's some pesky federal regulation that says that at least the reactor needs to be protected...
The failure point was a repeat of previous cold events -- it wasn't really a cascade event, of course, given wind turbines provide only 20% of power on the ECOT mini-grid.
Given there are similar capacity wind turbines running happily in Antarctica, and the heads-up from the 2011 & 2019 events to winterise the Texas fleet, it's difficult to see how this is a 'windmill problem'.
I wouldn't frame the blackouts as a "windmill problem" as they're primarily a "winterization problem", but having so much capacity invested in unreliable wind generation was a very significant contributor to the blackouts that should not be ignored. ERCOT is a world leader in wind production, and that was pretty punishing when its 25GW of wind capacity was producing 0. We invested billions into a generation source that at one point produced 0 and eventually "exceeded projections" by producing slightly more than 0. We could have invested those billions in basically any other source and had significantly more electricity available. Winterization would have helped somewhat with less turbines freezing, but it doesn't help at all when the wind stops blowing.
I see you've made many sweeping comments in this thread, some of which I can't confirm the veracity of.
> ... but having so much capacity invested in unreliable wind generation was a very significant contributor to the blackouts that should not be ignored.
Has that grid suffered lots of blackouts at times other than big freezes?
If it hasn't, then that would suggest that the designers / operators of the grid factored in the unreliability of wind, and have the baseload well covered by gas, nuclear, etc.
> ERCOT is a world leader in wind production, and that was pretty punishing when its 25GW of wind capacity was producing 0.
And yet:
"About half of the state’s wind capacity was offline Sunday because of turbines that had frozen in west Texas, according to the Austin American-Statesman, but high winds from the winter storm were spinning coastal turbines faster and generating more power to offset those losses." [1]
> Winterization would have helped somewhat with less turbines freezing, but it doesn't help at all when the wind stops blowing.
'fewer'
I'm not sure where you're getting information that the wind stopped blowing, or why that's a reason to not use wind turbines as part of an overall power generation strategy, or indeed why you seem to be surprised that if ECOT prepared wind turbines, as well as gas & nuclear (which both lost a fair chunk of capacity) then the outcome wouldn't have been so appalling.
You're reading a lot into my comments. You seem to think that I'm against using wind power, which is absolutely not true, as I've commented in the past. I'm against the current narrative's misinformation which cherry-picks stats to push a political agenda. I would like ERCOT to continue to "use wind turbines as part of an overall power generation strategy", but in order to do this intelligently it is necessary to understand the strengths and weaknesses of different generation sources. The fashionable anti-nuclear, pro-wind propaganda is not helping anyone to understand reality.
All of my information about the output of different sources comes from personally digging through ERCOT's minutely detailed reports[0]. I haven't seen a nice, neat fact-checking propaganda piece that deals with the relevant data, but I haven't really searched that hard because all the data is right there, straight from the source.
The "Fuel Mix Report" lists the output of each generation type in 15 minute intervals[1]. There are over 25000 GW of wind capacity, so we would expect to see a maximum of a bit less than 6250 GWh of wind output in the best 15 minute periods ("a bit less" is taking into account that we don't expect 100% output even in the best circumstances). The data matches this, as we see peaks reaching about 5600 GWh. The values are conveniently totaled for each day, and with a theoretical ceiling of 600,000 GWh capacity per day we see that the most actually produced on any day in Jan or Feb 2021 was 458,000 GWh on January 6th, 76% of capacity.
If we look at February 15, 16, and 17, wind output was 225,000 GWh for all three days combined, or a whopping 12.5% of capacity. This matches the pitiful performance that I was seeing in real time in ERCOT's feed.
None of the 15 minute periods report 0 GWh, the lowest being 149 GWh on Feb 15th. So either the granularity is not fine enough or I was just wrong to say that wind dropped to zero, and I would like to revise my position to say that wind output dropped to 2% of capacity.
Hopefully you can understand how I can both support intelligent use of wind power while being dismayed by fact-checking pieces that turn "only 25%" of our capacity being 87.5% offline into vague terms like "exceeded projections" and "wind wasn't a problem", as if 15,000-20,000 GW of capacity being offline was not a significant factor. (87.5% of 25,000 GW is 21,875 GW, but again I am not expecting wind to be able to produce at 100%).
> indeed why you seem to be surprised that if ECOT prepared wind turbines, as well as gas & nuclear (which both lost a fair chunk of capacity) then the outcome wouldn't have been so appalling.
This comes off like you're just making things up to troll me. I've specifically mentioned winterization many times. It's also very telling that, like the fact-checkers, you have to stick to vague terms like "lost a fair chunk of capacity" without getting into the actual numbers which would show how massive that disparity really is.
Well, you conceded that it's primarily a winterisation problem, but then immediately say:
> ... but having so much capacity invested in unreliable wind generation was a very significant contributor to the blackouts that should not be ignored.
The word 'unreliable' is ambiguous here -- clearly world+dog understands that power generated by wind is highly variable, and ERCOT (as for any ISO, and similar orgs in other countries) maintains and improves their forecasts around this variability.
This is factored into the overall grid provisioning and maintenance of power to consumers. It's why I asked about the effect of this variability outside of major cold events. Evidently not so much?
So, using the word 'unreliable' in a way that sounds like wind turbines can't be trusted seems disingenuous, since there's no surprises with the way they operate, and the variability in the power they can generate.
Your comment that billions should have been invested in anything except wind, and this would have guaranteed significantly more electricity available - isn't supported by the facts. Nuclear, gas, and coal all failed in various but predictable ways.
So you're kind of conceding that winterisation would have helped, but only in the context of fewer wind turbines being taken out. The fact coal, gas, and nuclear failed, because they hadn't been properly protected against cold weather, you seem to be discounting.
I haven't stared at the ERCOT numbers, and am disinclined to do so -- the fact that much of the state was without power for several days, and early reports suggested the grid was some minutes away from catastrophic cascading failure, suggests to me that concise numbers aren't the important thing here.
What's clear is that despite the 2011 heads-up, and the audit two years ago that highlighted the continued lack of preparedness, it was way more than the predictable freezing of some wind turbines. The history and political motivation for this highly isolated ISO further highlights the problems of poor planning and poor regulation. Were they not so intentionally disconnected, power could have easily been sourced from elsewhere in the country.
I did find an interesting 'actual number' that their lack of maintenance for their wind turbines was a major contributory factor:
"Though frozen wind turbines were a contributing factor, wind shutdowns accounted for less than 13% of the outages, Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations for ERCOT, told Bloomberg." [0]
Further in that article:
"According to a report from ERCOT, solar accounts for only 3.8% of the state's power capacity throughout the year. Wind energy accounts for 10% of Texas's winter energy capacity and throughout the entire year it is able to provide 24.8%, the second-largest source of energy in the state under natural gas, which accounts for 51%."
Which suggests your 25% figure is misleading, as that's a yearly average - it's 10% (about the same as nuclear) during that time of year.
Every power source had some failures, but the only power sources that dropped all the way to 0 were solar and wind. Nuclear operated at 75% of capacity, while fossil generation seems to have been around 60%. Wind recovered slightly and "exceeded projections" by producing in the 15-30% range, but closer to 15% at night when it's coldest.
All sources were notoriously un-winterized, but wind generation had the additional problem of not working when there wasn't enough wind, which is why it dropped to 0 at one point. Suggesting that wind would perform adequately if it were only winterized is simply inaccurate. It's common knowledge among non-zealots that wind and solar are far too unreliable to supply baseload generation needs, and that unreliability led to a missing 15-20 GW of generation when we needed it. Base load must be supplied by something else, like perhaps nuclear which performed pretty well despite not being winterized.
> Wind ran at about 50% of capacity and that was because it wasn't winterized.
That's bullshit. I was watching the ERCOT feed [0] during the blackouts, and I never saw it exceed 30%. I posted about it here extensively during the event, and no one reported seeing higher numbers. Right now wind is 5727 MW (23% of installed wind capacity), which is actually a little higher than the average generation I was seeing during the blackouts. PolitiFact very suspiciously doesn't want to say which sources are supposed to support which claims, but I can't find any support for their figures in their ERCOT links, which are the only actual sources provided.
Edit: I did a little more digging, and found that it's your claim that "wind ran at about 50% of capacity" that is completely false. The truth is that only half of the capacity was frozen, but that does not mean that the other half was producing. About half of the unfrozen capacity was not producing for other reasons. The truth is that wind output was 15-30% of capacity due to a combination of factors, including turbines freezing, batteries losing capacity and plain lack of wind. PolitiFact is not outright lying, they're just being as misleading as they possibly can be by cherry-picking stats like "50% was unfrozen" but omitting highly relevant data like "70-85% was offline". That's propaganda, not fact-checking.
Yes. The big secret is they're hybrid windmills ;) The grain mills are separated from the wind turbines by electrical lines, unlike their mechanically-linked Dutch grain mill predecessors. Any excess electricity goes into BitFlour, a cryptocurrency that's "milled" instead of "mined".
(For those who missed it, the parent is asserting that "windmill" should be reserved for wind-powered mills.)
It was also... amusing watching capacity payments suddenly cease to be an evil subsidy to big coal and become an essential part of competent grid operations that Texas stupidly didn't have because they're right-wing libertarian nutjobs that think the free market solves everything. And by amusing I mean we're all fucked.