[pclmulqdq]

I would like to point out that the New York Times has made the same claim very recently too (in the same context, a defamation trial).

Events like the Texas blackouts rarely have one sole cause. Reliance on renewables was clearly one factor out of many.

[michaelmrose]

It's actually not a meaningful factor AT ALL. Where renewables failed it wasn't because the nature of the technology but because of failure to winterize.

[hadleybelter]

It was, and is, a hugely meaningful factor. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending that it's a republican smear campaign doesn't help.

Texas has more wind power generation than any other state in the US by far. Texas is all aboard the wind train. It's a huge part of the economy. Texas wants wind to win. But that doesn't change reality.

In the last month, Texas has gotten close to electricity demand exceeding supply. A significant factor behind this is that Texas gets nearly 20% of its electricity from wind generation. On your average summer day, wind generates between 15 and 25 GW. However, during the recent heat wave, wind speeds dropped in west Texas (where the bulk of the wind farms are) and wind was only generating less than 2 GW during the hottest part of the day.

Similarly, Texas usually gets about 10 GW of power from solar. However, solar drops off to 0 GW very rapidly around 7 or 8 PM. However, in the summer in Texas, the temperature is still at its peak around 7 PM, so there is still significant demand while solar generation is dropping.

Wind and solar are unlike thermal generation in that we (humans) can choose to burn more oil and create thermal generation when needed. But with solar and wind, we cannot choose to suddenly create more wind or sun. We are at the whims of nature, and until we figure out better solutions for these problems (battery storage, maybe), wind and solar have their disadvantages compared to thermal. Pretending otherwise is not helpful.

[justin66]

> We are at the whims of nature, and until we figure out better solutions for these problems (battery storage, maybe), wind and solar have their disadvantages compared to thermal.

Pumped storage hydro works very well in many places. You can store as much energy as you can store water, and you can bring a lot of generation capacity online fast. Those facilities are pretty cool engineering projects. Texas hasn't got onboard yet AFAIK, but they've got enough land that they could maybe (water's a big factor, too) make it work to offset downtime of their wind and solar.

edit: I think Texas's largely go-it-alone strategy with their power grid might be pretty strategically misguided, but making it work could at least be an interesting problem

> It was, and is, a hugely meaningful factor. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending that it's a republican smear campaign doesn't help.

This could have been a really good comment if you hadn't started it out this way. Wind was one factor, but it did not suffer the largest outages of Texas's various electricity sources - someone in another comment shared a pretty good youtube video by Practical Engineering on this topic. And there really was a republican smear campaign against wind power following the event.

[hadleybelter]

>Wind was one factor, but it did not suffer the largest outages of Texas's various electricity sources - someone in another comment shared a pretty good youtube video by Practical Engineering on this topic. And there really was a republican smear campaign against wind power following the event.

We're talking about different events. The Practical Engineers video is talking about the 2021 winter storm, and in the midst of that storm there were republican talking points about wind failure. That's a different event than the one I am talking about in my comment, which is the general unreliability of renewable energy as witnessed in the current summer where lacking wind generation _really is_ a huge factor in the threatened blackouts, but posters like the one I was responding to are still pretending like any decrying of renewable energy is fake news. Sometimes it is fake news, and sometimes its reality. It's important to recognize the difference.

[briffle]

Or they could simply setup connections and agreements with states west of them, to supply power later into the evening

[toast0]

Setting up connections to other grids isn't simple or the Tres Amigas project might have been built.

[michaelmrose]

There is nothing but incompetence and greed keeping Texas from having as good a grid as the rest of the US.

[hadleybelter]

You mean the rest of the US that has been facing widespread threats of blackouts this summer?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dypnja/majority-of-us-power-...

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/31/us/power-outages-electric-gri...

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-rene...

https://www.eenews.net/articles/grid-monitor-warns-of-u-s-bl...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/02/blackout-...

I'll agree with you that there's greed and incompetence all over Texas's politicians and state management. But it isn't unique to Texas. We have a widespread societal problem with our electrical grid that transcends state lines.