[edbob]

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.

[Shared404]

Doesn't winterize wind turbines

Blames turbines for not working when it freezes.

I'm so freaking tired of hearing this.

[edbob]

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.

[edbob]

Correcting myself here. Wind output dropped to a low of 2% of capacity, not 0.

[pydry]

This isn't true. Gas and coal production suffered a lot more than wind:

https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/feb/16/natural-gas-n...

Wind ran at about 50% of capacity and that was because it wasn't winterized.

[edbob]

> 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.

[0] http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...

[pydry]

Wind turbines have a normal capacity and a maximum output. They weren't running at 50% of maximum output they were running at 50% of normal capacity.

When wind turbines run at maximum capacity prices often go negative or turbines get switched off.

I don't think politifact is the one being misleading here.

[edbob]

I think you have your terms mixed up. Capacity refers to the maximum output. "Normal capacity" isn't a thing. You could say "normal output" or "expected output".