The Blog

2021-

2021-02-22 b
TEXAS FREEZE II
"Most of the nation needs more than intermittent electricity from wind and solar, they need continuous and uninterruptible electricity from natural gas, nuclear, and coal to support the health and economy in their state to survive extreme weather conditions year-round."
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"There’s no place for intermittent energy in a reliable grid."

Assigning Blame for the Blackouts in Texas

The story from some media sources is that frozen wind turbines are responsible for the power shortfalls in Texas. Other media sources emphasize that fossil fuel resources should shoulder the blame because they have large cold induced outages as well and also some natural gas plants could not obtain fuel.

Extreme cold should be expected to cause significant outages of both renewable and fossil fuel based resources. Why would anyone expect that sufficient amounts of natural gas would be available and deliverable to supply much needed generation? Considering the extreme cold, nothing particularly surprising is happening within any resource class in Texas. The technologies and their performance were well within the expected bounds of what could have been foreseen for such weather conditions. While some degradation should be expected, what is happening in Texas is a departure from what they should be experiencing. Who or what then is responsible for the shocking consequences produced by Texas’s run in with this recent bout of extreme cold?

TRADITIONAL PLANNING

Traditionally, responsibility for ensuring adequate capacity during extreme conditions has fallen upon individual utility providers. A couple decades ago I was responsible for the load forecasting, transmission planning and generation planning efforts of an electric cooperative in the southeastern US. My group’s projections, studies and analysis supported our plans to meet customer demand under forecasted peak load conditions. We had seen considerable growth in residential and commercial heat pumps. At colder temperature these units stop producing heat efficiently and switch to resistance heating which causes a spike in demand. Our forecasts showed that we would need to plan for extra capacity to meet this potential demand under extreme conditions in upcoming winters.

I was raked over the coals and this forecast was strongly challenged. Providing extra generation capacity, ensuring committed (firm) deliveries of gas during the winter, upgrading transmission facilities are all expensive endeavors. Premiums are paid to ensure gas delivery and backup power and there is no refund if it’s not used. Such actions increased the annual budget and impact rates significantly for something that is not likely to occur most years, even if the extreme weather projections are appropriate. You certainly don’t want to over-estimate peak demand due to the increasing costs associated with meeting that demand. But back then we were obligated to provide for such “expected” loads. Our CEO, accountants and rate makers would ideally have liked a lower extreme demand projection as that would in most cases kept our cost down. It was challenging to hold firm and stand by the studies and force the extra costs on our Members.

Fortuitously for us, we were hit with extreme winter conditions just when the plan went in place. Demand soared and the planned capacity we had provided was needed. A neighboring entity was hit with the same conditions. Like us they had significant growth in heat pumps – but they had not forecasted their extreme weather peak to climb as we had. They had to go to the overburdened markets to find energy and make some curtailments. The cost of replacement power turned out to be significantly greater proportionately than we incurred by planning for the high demand. They suffered real consequences due to the shortcomings of their planning efforts.

However, if extreme winter had not occurred, our neighbor’s costs would have been lower than ours that year and that may have continued many years into the future as long as we didn’t see extreme winter conditions. Instead of the praise we eventually received, there would have at least been some annoyance directed at my groups for contributing to “un-needed expenditures”. That’s the way of the world. You can often do things a little cheaper, save some money and most of the time you can get away with it. But sometimes/eventually you cut it too close and the consequences can be extreme.

The Approach in Texas

Who is responsible for providing adequate capacity in Texas during extreme conditions? The short answer is no one. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) looks at potential forecasted peak conditions and expected available generation and if there is sufficient margin they assume everything will be all right. But unlike utilities under traditional models, they don’t ensure that the resources can deliver power under adverse conditions, they don’t require that generators have secured firm fuel supplies, and they don’t make sure the resources will be ready and available to operate. They count on enough resources being there because they assume that is in their owner’s best interests. Unlike all other US energy markets, Texas does not even have a capacity market. By design they rely solely upon the energy market. This means that entities profit only from the actual energy they sell into the system. They do not see any profit from having stand by capacity ready to help out in emergencies. The energy only market works well under normal conditions to keep prices down. While generally markets are often great things, providing needed energy during extreme conditions evidently is not their forte. Unlike the traditional approach where specific entities have responsibilities to meet peak levels, in Texas the responsibility is diffuse and unassigned. There is no significant long term motivation for entities to ensure extra capacity just in case it may be needed during extreme conditions. Entities that might make that gamble theoretically can profit when markets skyrocket, but such approaches require tremendous patience and the ability to weather many years of potential negative returns.

This article from GreenTech media praises energy only markets as do many green interests. Capacity markets are characterized as wasteful. Andrew Barlow, Head of the PUC in Texas is quoted as follows, “Legislators have shown strong support for the energy-only market that has fueled the diversification of the state’s electricity generation fleet and yielded significant benefits for customers while making Texas the national leader in installed wind generation. ”

Why has Capacity been devalued?

Traditional fossil fuel generation has (as does most hydro and nuclear) inherent capacity value. That means such resources generally can be operated with a high degree of reliability and dependability. With incentives they can be operated so that they will likely be there when needed. Wind and solar are intermittent resources, working only under good conditions for wind and sun, and as such do not have capacity value unless they are paired with costly battery systems.

If you want to achieve a higher level of penetration from renewables, dollars will have to be funneled away from traditional resources towards renewables. For high levels of renewable penetration, you need a system where the consumers’ dollars applied to renewable generators are maximized. Rewarding resources for offering capacity advantages effectively penalizes renewables. As noted by the head of the PUC in Texas, an energy only market can fuel diversification towards intermittent resources. It does this because it rewards only energy that is fed into the grid, not backup power. (Side note-it’s typical to provide “renewable” resources preference for feeding into the grid as well. Sometimes wind is compensated for feeding into the grid even during periods of excess generation when fossil fuel resources are penalized. But that’s another article. )

Traditional planning studies might recognize that wind needs to be backed up by fossil fuel (more so under extreme conditions) such that if you have these backup generators its much cheaper to use and fuel them, than to add wind farms with the accompanying significant investment for concrete, rare earth metals, vast swaths of land …. . Traditional planning approaches often have to go to get around this “bias” of favoring capacity providing resources over intermittent resources.

When capacity value is rewarded, this makes the economics of renewables much less competitive. Texas has stacked the deck to make wind and solar more competitive than they could be in a system that better recognizes the value of dependable resources which can supply capacity benefits. An energy only market helps accomplish the goal of making wind and solar more competitive. Except capacity value is a real value. Ignoring that, as Texas did, comes with real perils.

In Texas now we are seeing the extreme shortages and market price spikes that can result from devaluing capacity. The impacts are increased by both having more intermittent resources which do not provide capacity and also because owners and potential owners of resources which could provide capacity are not incentivized to have those units ready for backup with firm energy supplies.

Personal Observations

Wind and solar have value and can be added to power systems effectively in many instances. But seeking to attain excessive levels of wind and solar quickly becomes counterproductive. It is difficult to impossible to justify the significant amounts of wind and solar penetration desired by many policy makers today using principals of good cost allocation. Various rate schemes and market proposals have been developed to help wind and solar become more competitive. But they come with costs, often hidden. As I’ve written before, it may be because transmission providers have to assume the costs and build a more expensive system to accommodate them. It may be that rates and markets unfairly punish other alternatives to give wind and solar an advantage. It may be that they expose the system to greater risks than before. It may be that they eat away at established reliability levels and weaken system performance during adverse conditions. In a fair system with good price signals today’s wind and solar cannot achieve high penetration levels in a fair competition.

Having a strong technical knowledge of the power system along with some expertise in finance, rates and costs can help one see the folly of a variety of policies adopted to support many of today’s wind and solar projects. Very few policy makers possess anything close to the skill sets needed for such an evaluation. Furthermore, while policy makers could listen to experts, their voices are drowned out by those with vested interests in wind and solar technology who garner considerable support from those ideologically inclined to support renewables regardless of impacts.

A simpler approach to understanding the ineffectiveness of unbridled advocacy for wind and solar is to look at those areas which have heavily invested in these intermittent resources and achieved higher penetration levels of such resources. Typically electric users see significant overall increases in the cost of energy delivered to consumers. Emissions of CO2 do not uniformly decrease along with employment of renewables, but may instead increase due to how back up resources are operated. Additionally reliability problems tend to emerge in these systems. Texas, a leader in wind, once again is added to the experience gained in California, Germany and the UK showing that reliability concerns and outages increase along with greater employment of intermittent resources.

Anyone can look at Texas and observe that fossil fuel resources could have performed better in the cold. If those who owned the plants had secured guaranteed fuel, Texas would have been better off. More emergency peaking units would be a great thing to have on hand. Why would generators be inclined to do such a thing? Consider, what would be happening if the owners of gas generation had built sufficient generation to get through this emergency with some excess power? Instead of collecting $9,000 per MWH from existing functioning units, they would be receiving less than $100 per MWH for the output of those plants and their new plants. Why would anyone make tremendous infrastructure that would sit idle in normal years and serve to slash your revenue by orders of magnitudes in extreme conditions?

The incentive for gas generation to do the right thing was taken away by Texas’s deliberate energy only market strategy. The purpose of which was to aid the profitability of intermittent wind and solar resources and increase their penetration levels. I don’t believe anyone has ever advanced the notion that fossil fuel plants might operate based on altruism. Incentives and responsibility need to be paired. Doing a post-mortem on the Texas situation ignoring incentives and responsibility is inappropriate and incomplete. (read more)

Additional Articles of Interest:

https://www.eurasiareview.com/08022021-noreasters-would-be-disastrous-to-a-green-america-oped/

https://cpowerenergymanagement.com/why-doesnt-texas-have-a-capacity-market/

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/02/18/midwest-have-no-surplus-power-for-texas/

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/08/23/solar-plasma-temperature-is-plunging-should-we-worry/

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/25/renewable-energy-our-downfall/

https://talkmarkets.com/content/commodities/how-wind-power-caused-the-great-texas-blackout-of-2021?post=298668&page=3

http://landscapesandcycles.net/cold-snaps-expose-climate-science-fragillity.html

https://joannenova.com.au/2021/02/texas-was-prepared-for-global-warming-but-not-the-return-of-the-cold/

https://www.rt.com/usa/516079-texas-cold-food-shortages/

http://www.moralindividualism.com/monopol3.htm

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/02/17/the-day-after-tomorrow-ercot-fail-edition/

Selected Comments to Original Article:

President Donald Trump and Energy Secretary Rick Perry were absolutely correct when they asked the FERC to ensure that our coal-fired and nuclear power plant be kept in service. If coal generation had not been reduced, and compressors operated directly from NG production, and wind and solar never built, this cold would have been easily endured.
... And even sans the cold, on the wee morning hours of the 16th, the wind dropped to two mph and all wind failed. This was NOT a spare capacity problem!

xxx

I think the implication is quite clear – nuclear power, in one form or another (properly designed plants can be accomplished these days, France has a lot of them, still), must become a bigger part of our power generation mix in the United States. How much of a percentage of the mix, of course, will depend upon how much people are willing to invest in these facilities. And how much the U.S. Government can be convinced that its nuclear regulatory policies are currently far more of a hindrance than a help.

xxx

Good analysis. The capacity market has been devalued relative to an energy only market for the same reason that savings is devalued relative to consumption, or employment relative to welfare as an anti-poverty program. It is a sort of adolescent mindset that has gripped much of the world, especially the West since WWII.

xxx

According to the ERCOT web site:

“The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is a nonprofit organization that ensures reliable electric service for 90 percent of the state of Texas. The grid operator is regulated by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Legislature.”

“ERCOT has four primary responsibilities:
• Maintain system reliability.
• Facilitate a competitive wholesale market.
• Facilitate a competitive retail market.
• Ensure open access to transmission.
———————————–
“Who is responsible for providing adequate capacity in Texas during extreme conditions? The short answer is no one.”

This article is wrong from the beginning. ERCOT is assigned the responsibility for maintaining system reliability in Texas.

They have shirked their duty for over a decade, spending money to add wind/solar instead of winterizing infrastructure. The winterizing of infrastructure was one of the main recommendations to come out after the 2011 weather fiasco. ERCOT is the *only* one to blame for the conditions in TX currently.

xxx

As a lifelong Texan living through this mess, actually you are both right. The problem is that ERCOT does not designate which generators are responsible for emergency generation -ergo “no one is responsible”. They rely on the conglomerate of generators to supply varying loads in various areas based on demand. One report I read said they had planned only for 10% excess of forecast from the whole of the system then 26% of the system went down (25% wind, 1% solar) and the actual peak demand was double forecast. (We have LOTS of Peoples Republik of Kalifornia transplants) The result was that most generators were overloaded and failed in a cascade throughout the grid. Like doubling the load of your house and cutting the available power by half, you cant keep the main breaker on.

If 100% of the power generation were traditional, there still would have been outages due to forecast deficiency and poor safety margins but the outages would not have been nearly as severe or long. There are still a huge number of people without power and may not get it back for weeks.

It should also be noted that most members of the board of ERCOT do not even reside in Texas.

Of course there will be an investigation and lots of finger pointing.

Me, I live in hurricane alley so I have my own generator because I know from experience to be self sufficient.

xxx

I agree that “no one is responsible” is a BS answer. This mindset makes organizations/bureaucracies inefficient and slow to make needed changes. I agree that ERCOT is to blame directly and Utility Commission indirectly.

The Texas Comptroller states ERCOT is responsible for:

– Dispatch (scheduling and managing how electricity will flow through the network – telling producers how much to generate and utilities if necessary how much to cut demand)
– Planning new power plant additions and ensuring that the mix of generation technologies is suitable for Texas,
– Operates the electricity market in Texas, performing financial settlements for sellers and buyers

What is their primary obligation with these responsibilities? MAINTAIN SYSTEM RELIABILITY.

It’s the second bullet above where they have screwed up the whole interconnect system by not planning power plant additions properly to maintain a reliable system. This Planning Engineer author type would be first on my list to axe if involved in the ERCOT planning new power additions over the last decade.

xxx

[T]he ERCOT board is right now comprised mostly of officials from the utility companies themselves. The self-serving descriptions of ERCOT and the Texas Comptroller are just that: self-serving and designed to support and maintain the current deregulated system and its mythology. They mean little or nothing in terms of actual day-to-day operations. And there is, in a system that is an “energy-only market” (generators get paid for only what power they actually generate, not for facilities to provide built-in reserve or excess capacity) by law, this is what you get. ERCOT didn’t create the system, the Legislature did. And it is the Legislature who will have to fix it. Whether or not they have the stones to change or fundamentally alter ERCOT’s role is another question entirely.

xxx

ERCOT has the responsibility…. but read the monthly meeting agendas for both the board of directors and the operating committee. there is no mention of reliability, adverse weather or spinning reserve for the last 8 months. the agenda focus is special interest commercial issues 80% and tech relay coordination 15%. ERCOT needs to be reconstituted before it will include reliability.

xxx

“No one is responsible” may be a BS answer, but it’s the truth – no one is responsible because (a) nobody takes responsibility and (b) nobody gets held responsible.

xxx

I agree with the assertion that “no one” is functionally responsible for providing adequate capacity. While they can say that on the “website states the responsibilities” obviously running a energy only instead of having a capacity option in the market was intentional. They do not reward capacity, and thus rely upon the suppliers to give them the energy they need. I do not care what they say they are doing or their responsibility in their documents. What they do and how they react are what defines them. They do not guarantee a stable system by their actions, and thus no one is responsible.

Should they be using sound engineering practices and planning around having capacity? Yes, of course, but their politically correct and green credentials will not allow them. Until that changes no one will be responsible to make sure that there is capacity to deliver power in times of need.

xxx

ERCOT, especially the BOD, *is* responsible for:

“Facilitate a competitive wholesale market.”

That includes having a market that provides proper capacity, including reserve capacity in the case of a situation.

I agree they will be defined by what they do now. But I have absolutely no hope of the right thing happening unless every member of the existing BOD is replaced.

xxx

This was an engineering failure, inherent to the non suitability of wind and solar to the grid, not a spare capacity failure.

I do however agree that ERCOT is and was responsible.

xxx

[T]hose four responsibilities have precious little to do with creating system reserve capacity, a “readiness to serve.” The Legislature gave ERCOT absolutely no teeth to enable them to do what you are describing; on the contrary, the Legislature assumed that there would be little need at the time of ERCOT’s creation to do the kinds of things that the notion of “ready to serve” entails. The Legislature is the one who created the current deregulated system. When deregulated generation companies only get paid for the actual amount of electricity they produce, without any concept of compensation for insuring capacity to cover excesses in existing peak demand, they will do only what the market encourages them to do and no more. ERCOT is not the one encouraging and spending money on wind/solar power – the Legislature and the other governing regulatory bodies in Texas who oversee utilities, and the electric utilities themselves, are the ones encouraging and doing that. ERCOT is far more guilty of propagandizing and sitting on their hands when they were in a position to see that Texas was heading down a bad road. But the ERCOT governing board itself is full of officials from electric utilities themselves. Not a very good prospect for saying that the emperor has no clothes.

xxx

I just don’t agree. ERCOT is assigned the responsibility for a reliable grid in Texas. They can do this by controlling the wholesale market, i.e. what is capitalized and what isn’t plus what is incentivized and what isn’t. ERCOT controls where capital is applied in the grid – and that includes providing capital for needed reserve power when intermittent, unreliable energy generation falls by the wayside.

The legislature didn’t deregulate anything. They assigned responsibilities to ERCOT and ERCOT reports to the TX Public Utility Commission.

The ERCOT Executive Committee is full of officials from electric utilities, not the ERCOT Board of Directors. You can’t find out who is on the Board or what their profiles are any longer because they deleted all that from their web site on Wednesday morning. A sure admission of guilt!

xxx

Hedging their bets with the “unreliables” to please political constituents is something they could have refused to do.

xxx

“It was an engineer’s wheelhouse to see that the infrastructure is capable of getting the power from generators all the way into people’s homes.”

Not anymore. The problem was explained in a previous post on this subject. In the old days, you had a local electric company who generated the electricity, sold it to you, and then delivered it to you over it’s distribution system. Everything was local, they “lived’ in the local community, and were answerable to them.

That is no longer the case. The electrical generation is done by a separate company whose owners may even be in a foreign country. The company that sells you the electricity is a separate company, that again, may be a company far away from your local community. (In lots of areas you have a choice of what company you buy your electricity from). The company you buy your electricity from, then pays the distribution company (the “wire guys”. Which is probably all that is left of your old local electric company) to deliver the electricity to you.

So you see, it’s nobody’s job to plan. The generation company just generates the electricity, and does not care about anything but meeting it contractual obligations to generate a certain amount of power. The company that sells you the power just cares that it has contracts with the suppliers to deliver so much electricity to the grid. The distribution company just has to maintain the wires to get the electricity to your house.

We need to go back to the old days.

xxx

Those companies, be they generators or retailers operate, in the marketplace dictated by the ERCOT. It is the ERCOT that determines the rules for playing in the TX market. ERCOT can lay out rules for reserve power capacity to be able to compete in the TX market. And the bottom line is that ERCOT was more interested in incentivizing the addition of intermittent, unreliable wind/solar than in ensuring the reliability of the TX power grid.

Every member of the BOD of ERCOT should be fired and replaced with people more interested in reliability than in being green. Then the TX PUC should be investigated to find out why they let ERCOT cause this debacle, ERCOT reports to them and apparently there was insufficient oversight of ERCOT by the PUC.

xxx

Texas in not part of a multi-state pact/grid. It operates its own stand-alone grid. I’m not sure they could have gotten enough capacity anyway from other states.

I suspect we will find that a lot of the black outs were due to load shedding to maintain frequency and phase. Sub-stations overloads were probably a problem too.

Losing 15% – 20% of load capacity would be difficult to cover in any case. I am surprised they didn’t lose the whole shebang back to ground zero. Relying on gas with just in time delivery was a disaster in and of itself.

Now that they know it is possible to lose massive parts of the system they should include reserve sources with local stored fuel, namely nuclear and coal.

xxx

I think there should never be any reliance on interconnecting supplies, because that possibility relies on a catastrophic weather event not affecting adjacent areas as well as the preparedness of the neighbours to help you in an emergency when their own circumstances may be approaching a critical stage. Relying on interconnectors merely gives politicians an “easy way out” to avoid essential expenditure. The answer, as usual, is more coal-fired generation.

xxx

Yes to more coal-fired generation, but no, you must continue to rely on interconnecting supplies sometimes, just to insure the balancing out of the electric grid. Especially when you have more demand than generation in a given hour of the day. Even a 50 MWh deficit/imbalance could seriously compromise the grid.

xxx

The fault lies with ERCOT, pure and simple. Their mission is “We serve the public by ensuring a reliable grid, efficient electricity markets, open access and retail choice.” They did NOT ensure a reliable grid. End of story. No more B.S. By the way, the Board Chair is Sally Talberg…..in her bio, it says “she co-led the development of Michigan Saves, a nonprofit green bank that has financed over $200 million in energy efficiency projects, while also helping staff the state’s wind zone board and offshore wind council.”

Getting the picture?

xxx

It is becoming more apparent that people in charge of making energy decisions are not up to the task. They are caught up in the hype of going green and don’t understand how they are setting themselves up for failure. And I suspect, that more and more, they don’t care if there are failures. They have little regard for the average citizen. We are just people they have to put up with. They are definitely not interested in making America great again.

xxx

I would submit that the people who are really in charge of making energy decisions know little about where energy comes from and how it is transformed into the forms we actually use. They don’t understand any of the limitations of the system, and they don’t care if those limitations create problems. So, yeah, we the little people are on our own.

xxx

The ERCOT electricity peak load is summer AC, met by seasonal natgas peakers. It appears they did not plan for a winter peak when there is additional natgas heating demand. Therefore the gas reserve capacity was inadequate.

The ‘crime’ is that this was foreseeable. There were rolling ERCOT blackouts Super Bowl week 2011 for the same weather reasons as this week. Every ten years is something that should have been planned for. The reason 2011 did not end in complete disaster like this week is simple: there was much less unreliable wind on the grid, and much more baseload coal that has since been retired.

xxx

Yep. ERCOT had a dress rehearsal for this in 2011. The causes were very similar. However, it was over a much shorter duration and not nearly as cold as 2021. Wind had a much smaller share of our capacity and coal had a much larger share. The overall grid was more resilient.

Most of us shared in the rolling blackouts. It was annoying, but not a “crisis.”

xxx

In Alberta, wind power gets “first access” to the grid and is paid a preferential high rate vs other generation. Natural gas and hydro generation are shut in to make room for wind. When wind dies, natural gas and hydro generation are ramped up. This is an enormous hidden subsidy for wind power. Ratepayers would pay much less for power if we simply never built the wind power in the first place.

xxx

I nailed the current global cold Winter forecast in August 2020 below. The hard part is forecasting where the polar vortex is going next – but those who forecast a warm winter were delusional.

Regarding the warmist loons who claimed “Global Warming caused this extreme cold” – their lies are not even credible enough to be specious.

From previous posts on wattsup:
CO2, GLOBAL WARMING, CLIMATE AND ENERGY
by Allan M.R. MacRae, B.A.Sc., M.Eng., June 15, 2019
[excerpts]

This formula works reasonably well back to 1982, which is the limit of my data availability.

5. UAH LT Global Temperatures can be predicted ~4 months in the future with just two parameters:
UAHLT (+4 months) = 0.2*Nino34Anomaly + 0.15 – 5*SatoGlobalAerosolOpticalDepth (Figs. 5a and 5b)

6. The sequence is Nino34 Area SST warms, seawater evaporates, Tropical atmospheric humidity increases, Tropical atmospheric temperature warms, Global atmospheric temperature warms, atmospheric CO2 increases (Figs.6a and 6b).

I wrote in August 2020:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/08/23/solar-plasma-temperature-is-plunging-should-we-worry/#comment-3068819
Check out NIno34 temperatures, again down to Minus 0.6C – winter will be cold.comment image

Nino34 SST anom’s hit minimums of minus1.4C-1.3C in Oct2020 and Nov2020 – so global coldest temperatures (+4 months) should be Feb2021 and Mar2021.*

xxx

Reserve power for emergencies is critical – just ask those people who spent two or three days without any power during an epic cold streak in Texas.

Wind and solar really have no place in large scale energy grids – they are niche technologies that make sense in unusual circumstances. Stop the subsidies for wind and solar (and electric cars while we are at it).

xxx

It was falsely reported that only 5 gw of wind went offline, leaving 5 gw remaining. That is a fiddled figure – a typical MSM fiddle.

Texas installed wind capacity is 30 gw, which COULD have all operated given the right conditions. So in reality 25 gw of wind was offline – which demonstrates the complete unreliability of wind. And wind suppliers have done NOTHING to build in backup storage facilities. If Texas went all renewable, it would require 6,000 gwh of backup energy – just for electricity, not including transport or heating. At present Texas has less than 10 gwh of storage facilities.

What happened is that there was a lack of storage – for both renewables and gas. Wind was offline due a lack of wind and and lots of blade icing. Gas went offline due to everyone turning on their gas heaters, so no gas was available for the power stations. As far as I can see the Texas electrical mix totals went something like this – for the 15th Feb…

Wind ……. 30 gw installed – 10 gw expected – 5 gw online .
Solar ……… 2 gw installed – 0.5 gw expected – 0 gw online (day only)
Gas ..……. 35 gw installed – 35 gw expected – 15 gw online
Coal ……… 15 gw installed – 15 gw expected – 15 gw online
Nuclear … 11 gw installed – 11 gw expected – 10 gw online
(Note: a total of 25 gw dropped off the grid during the freeze.)

So wind and solar COULD have alleviated this situation, if they were remotely reliable. But they are not reliable, so Texans froze.

Note that coal and nuclear were doing fine, because they have sufficient fuel storage facilities. While gas does not have so much storage, as it is expensive. And domestic gas usage went through the roof, depleting supplies to the power stations. But if gas had any incentive to invest in storage, it could. Meanwhile wind and solar make no effort whatsoever to construct backup storage systems, because they are hugely expensive and would make them totally uneconomic.

So wind and solar only remain sort-of economic, because they are wholly dependent upon fossil and nuclear fuels to back them up. Were they to construct sufficient backups, they would be 10x more expensive. This is NOT a sustainable electricity production system.

And we have not even begun to look at enough renewable energy to cover transport and space-heating requirements.

Addendum:

Another problem is that gas suppliers CANNOT allow the domestic gas system to lower in pressure, otherwise air will get into the pipes. This is a MAJOR deal, and can take weeks to rectify.

So what they did is to call the gas power stations and told them to close down – to reduce demand.
So gas-fired power reduced by 30%.

xxx

The Texas grid is about the same size as the UK grid. The UK would need 3,500 gwh of backup energy, if it ever went 100% renewable, and at present we only have 10 gwh of backup – Dinorwig. But Dinorwig was the most expensive power station ever constructed in the world, so expanding that model would be completely uneconomic.

But that is only a fraction of the problem. If the UK (or Texas) went totally renewable (including transport and heating) they would require 8x their current renewable generation capacity. Plus they would also need some 14,000 gwh of backup supplies to allow for renewable outages. And that is simply uneconomic.

The alternative is to maintain a parallel fossil fuel backup system which, as we have just seen, would need to be able to supply 95% of required consumption. So running two energy systems, to provide the energy of one system. The whole thing is madness.

I wrote about these problems back in 2004: WUWT – Renewable Energy, Our Downfall.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/25/renewable-energy-our-downfall/

xxx

The reduction in output of wind by 93% (from close to it’s average production – which itself is quarter of nameplate capacity) was initially handled by other generators ramping up, but demand for electricity and gas was skyrocketing. While all the generators appear to have had problems from not being sufficiently weather hardened, the massive drop in wind output put extra strain on the gas supply just as it was already being stretched.

xxx

And we all know that you can NOT rely on getting any output at any time it is needed, so there is no point in connecting the whirlygigs to the grid in the first place if you actually want a reliable electrical supply.

xxx

It seems ironic that the Trump administration tried to slow the demise of coal and nuclear by placing a value on plants that could store 90 days of energy on-site. The plan was opposed by both the natural gas lobby and the green energy lobby, the same people who failed in Texas.

xxx

It was opposed by almost everyone except the coal and nuclear lobbies. However, the past week has demonstrated that grid resiliency is essential and it is critical to maintain a fleet of coal-fired and nuclear power plants.

Perhaps the most galling thing, is that they expected the wind turbines to fail.

xxx

Sweden and Norway do not have problems with their turbines, and they operate them in much colder environments. The problem with Texas operators is that they were dedicated to cutting costs instead of focusing on reliability: https://www.iqpc.com/media/1001147/37957.pdf

So if they “expected” them to fail, they must have calculated the cost/benefit of de-icing systems and choose not to have them installed so that their bottom line didn’t suffer.

xxx

On the contrary. Sweden and Norway do have problems with their turbines despite the heavy investment in heaters for turbine blades, nacelles, bearings and gearboxes, and motors. The added costs, reduced performance and extra maintenance all figure in to decisions about including cold weather protections into wind turbines. Danish turbine manufacturer Vestas has produced over 132GW of turbine capacity – of which just over 1GW has the cold weather options installed.

Fortunately neither Sweden nor Norway have much dependence on wind as yet, although Sweden is considering the foolish route of shutting nuclear capacity and replacing it with wind.

xxx

And electrical power (batteries) could be stored on site by the windfarm operators, but they chose not to because there is no incentive for them to provide even an approximation of reliable power. Had battery storage held even a single day’s worth of average wind output – let alone a week, the power dropout from wind could have been eased. However the batteries would have probably frozen in Texas, so this would have just been another expensive failure.

xxx

Why do you keep going on about de-icing?
It doesn’t matter
When the wind doesn’t blow they don’t turn.
On Monday I was using my Weather Channel app looking at different locations in Texas
No wind

Same as we had here in Alberta for 9 days from the exact same weather system.
Our turbines are rigged out for cold weather
And we had between 0-10% of nameplate for over a week.

Utterly useless in a cold winter system like that

Beyond useless as they are drawing power from the grid to keep warm until the wind blows again

So they were a negative for over a week!!

So useful right?

xxx

I have been in the power industry for over 40 years and have seen the evolution (de-evolution?) of the industry. Before deregulation occurred in the 90s each state had a Public Utilities Committee (PUC) that would oversee the electric utilities in that state. In their analyses the utility committed to having a reserve over the maximum anticipated load. This would help in overcoming the extreme conditions that could be experienced. The utility that I worked for had a standard 20% reserve.

Also built into each fossil fuel power plant was spare equipment to make sure that outages from equipment failure was limited. The failure of one pump would result in a decrease in load until the spare pump would be started up. The repair of the damaged pump would then take place with the unit still on line at full load.

The plants were designed for a 30 year life, which meant robust equipment. A lot of plants built during that time have exceeded that design life with many operating over 50 years.
All of this cost money and the movement to deregulate caught on and the power of the PUCs decreased. Supposedly to reduce electric rates. Well to reduce rates you have to reduce costs. Plants being built after that time period were not designed for the long life or with the spare capacity of equipment. Why spend money on freeze protection for an event that will occur only every 10, 20 or 30 years and is temporary condition as an appropriate example? There is no payback. And, of course you could not have much reserve, it would be too expensive to have spare plants sitting around not generating electricity but every few years.

Over time the older plants have been shut down and the more modern plants that were less robust became the standard bearer for power production. Of course the plants that were extremely old also became less reliable. Resulting in more shut downs and trips.

Now add wind and solar and those fossil fueled power plants have to vary load, sometimes hourly, to meet the intermittent loads of the wind and solar plants. This is extremely hard on plants that have not been designed to have this fluctuating load. Making them even less reliable.

Texas and California are not alone in making their electric grid less reliable. This is occurring throughout the U.S. and the World.

xxx

As someone involved in energy industry and regulatory affairs I see another issue responsible for the state of our rotting infrastructure.

For decades the people in government understood the value of maintaining and expanding
infrastructure to meet our needs. But keeping the lights on or maintaining
roads, etc has become boring. People in public service want to change the
world, I call it the Avenger Syndrome, so they are cajoled and flattered into
climate issues or eliminating poverty.

What is more exciting saving the world or keeping the sewage plant operating? Politicians
must always be marketing themselves to keep their jobs. Unfortunately being an
Avenger is much sexier than making sure the things that make daily life better
for all of us work efficiently.

xxx

It says they have to shut them off to de-ice
No power generated when they are off

Based on the size of them I bet it takes more power to run the de-ice heaters than the turbine can produce, even a small induction motor space heater takes 1200-1400w, driving heaters for those massive blades has to be a lot of power.

So they detect ice, shut them down, draw power from “reliable” energy somewhere to melt the ice off but I doubt they can run again until the ice weather passes.
I guess they could run and use the power it generates to keep the ice off but what would be the point?

I drove by a lot of shutdown turbines on a windy day in Saskatchewan last week when it was -36 and lots of ice crystals in the air.

xxx

How about this thought experiment:

Assume a fossil fuel/nuclear power grid that fully meets demand. Add a unicorn intermittently providing 20% to 50% of demand for free with semi-predicable outages of minute, hours, or days.

What happens to costs? In the real world, all the existing equipment would still be needed to cover unicorn shortfall/outages. Capital, operating, and maintenance costs remain the same or increase due to cycling. Only fuel costs are reduced.

Thus, the value of non-dispatchable power is at most the avoided fuel cost for the back-up systems.

xxx

Any such analysis comparing Mw to Mw cost is false due to intermittency.

I’ll even allow that 100mw of wind power is cheaper than 100mw of coal

But to get 100mw of power from coal I need to build 105

To get 100mw of wind over the year I have to build 250-300 and I must widely space them out to get even that, so more grid connection.

And then even though you built the 300mw you still need the 105mw of coal as the wind will be zero much of the time.

Show me the saving in there compared to just building the 105mw of coal needed for reliable power?

Poof goes the ridiculous myth once again

xxx

Wind can’t make electricity in a useable load-following way. It makes it in a useless whimsical random way unconnected with demand. A true unbiased cost analysis will show the intermittents to always a crease the price of electricity and decrease its reliability. That’s what happens to electricity bills.

Anyway “ERCOT”, “Electric reliability” has now provided the whole world with a good laugh during this dark pandemic period so we should thank those not-so-bright Khmer Vert idealists for that at least.

xxx

No windmill in use in Texas has or ever will return it’s cost of installation. Rather than passing off speculation about the attitudes of Texans as some sort of factual argument, I challenge to to present a single data point that disputes my claim. Sure 100 of them may return the cost of 50 of them but there is no single ONE that has returned the cost of itself.

xxx

I had to read the article three times but I think I have it figured out. Essentially when traditional energy sources (oil, gas, coal hydroelectric) are devalued (which includes condemning them for something, reducing their ability to produce, adding more and more requirements on them to exist, taxing them for carbon etc) and non-traditional sources (such as wind and solar) are promoted including providing lots and lots of subsidies, don’t be surprised when the electrical grid fails. Because suppliers will have gone where the money is and the subsidies given to wind and solar is where the money is. At the same time, pay no nevermind to the fact that wind and solar are inefficient and unreliable in emergency circumstances.

So a perfect storm was created in Texas – traditional energy sources were reduced (because of increased costs) in favour of renewables (because of increased subsidies which gave the appearance renewables were stable and just the bestest thing ever) and in the end Mother Nature is a bitch and doesn’t really care what havoc she causes.

xxx

Fair competition is capitalism. The push by Democrats is of course to diminish capitalism, because capitalism has placed most political power in the diffuse middle class. To concentrate power into the hands of the elites means by definition taking it away from the middle class by destroying the middle class and in doing so create a command economy controlled by bureacrats that transfers political power to central authorities. You and I are the problem in their minds. They want (need) to break us.

I can only hope this ERCOT fiasco wakes people up to the stupidity of more wind and solar. It is not only more expensive, it destabilizes grids and increases the likelihood of black-outs. And in the bigger picture of what the Democrats are intent on bringing, it is a central part of eliminating affordable energy for the middle class.

xxx

[W]ind and solar actually destabilize the grid in two different ways, both bad.

First is intermittency, which requires backup. Depending on grid details, renewable penetration less than 10% of normal capacity isn’t destabilizing, because normal grid reserve capacity can cover with no extra cost. Higher penetration means additional underutilized backup cost to the grid, NOT the renewable operator, as things now stand.

Second, renewables by definition provide no grid inertia (frequency control) that is provided free by the kinetic energy in large heavy rotating generators.

There is a solution that again the renewable operators do not provide: synchronous condensers. These are ‘just’ large generators without the driving turbine. Almost as e pensive as backup power.

Why, given these unavoidable electrical engineering deficiencies, renewables are subsidized is climate madness.

xxx

Referring to the announced closure of the Coleto Creek coal power plant by 2027
https://ieefa.org/vistra-to-close-648mw-coleto-creek-coal-plant-in-texas-by-2027/ this article by the “Energy Collective Group”, part of Energy and Sustainability Network, proposes an all-solar replacement for 17 GW of retiring coal capacity…

https://energycentral.com/c/ec/can-texas-shut-down-its-remaining-coal-2030

“With this announcement the list of TX coal closures continues to grow. Currently there is still about 17.4 GW of coal capacity left in TX and half of this capacity now has an announced closure date.
What would it take to shutdown all of the remaining coal capacity in TX by 2030 and replace the current coal generation without adding new NG plants? 40 GW of new solar capacity in TX or about 4GW/year.
Current capacity of solar in TX is about 4GW and another 4 GW will be added next year. Can this pace be maintained for the full decade?

xxx

Because of intermittency, ERCOT has always calculated a very low capacity factor for wind (i.e., fraction of nameplate capacity that can be relied upon). On their generation webpage, ERCOT even calls them what they are, Intermittent Renewable Resources. Coal and nuclear on the other hand usually run reliably with capacity factors of about 90% or better. Most gas units could achieve nearly the same, except they must ramp up and down to compensate for the variability of intermittent renewables. If gas shows capacity factors substantially below coal and nuclear, it is largely artificial due to renewables, not because of inherent technology deficiencies.
At best, they only expected about 33% of nameplate from wind on that fateful day, but actually got about half of that, a small fraction of demand. During the week afterward, wind varied tremendously, but never made a significant difference in the load recovery. Coal and nuclear kept churning out power reliably, and gas slowly ramped up to make up the shortfall. In a disaster, intermittent renewables are just that, intermittent and unreliable.

Aside from poor real-time performance in this crisis, this article rightly holds intermittent renewables indirectly to blame for their negative impact on the overall generation portfolio that set up this disaster.

Aside from inconvenience, when the toll in damages to infrastructure, economy and human life are counted, Austin is going to hear about this. You can’t just scapegoat the ERCOT board, even if they are accountable and should be fired (and sued personally?) Our legislature and executive branch, yes even Republicans, have failed their constituents by bowing to the Green Dragon.

xxx

Who cares what bullshyt name alarmists choose for the scam of manufacturing alarm from naturally chaotic weather and climate?

Correlation may not be causation, but in countries like Germany and Australia, electricity bills go up and grid reliability goes down in direct proportion to the percent of intermittents “supplying” the grid. How spectacularly stupid do you need to be to imagine that adding intermittent supply unrelated to demand will have any positive effect on either price or reliability?

Your Khmer Vert mob rule the media and politics so you and your thug friends can fiddle the numbers and re-write the rules all you like. Then go a-gaslighting to tell us all how right and wonderful this ecofascism really is.

But this Texas fiasco is a dose of reality that you wont be able to gaslight your way out of. Citizens are now receiving electricity bills 30 times higher than normal.

xxx

Here in the UK 23% of every domestic electricity bill is for ‘environmental and social obligations.’ and environmental levies are forecast to be £11.2 billion in 2020/21 and £12.5 billion in 2024/25.

xxx

Bethan, clearly you are a child or young adult. Many on this blog have lived long enough to have seen multiple extreme weather events. Being from Texas, this week’s weather was rare but not “unprecedented” nor unexpected. I have lived through at least two such events long before anyone was talking about alleged manmade climate change.

If you would calm down, listen and learn, you would frequently find people on this blog repudiating, with ACTUAL DATA, the many false claims of the climatariate and their media mouthpieces.

Live, learn and gain some wisdom and humility. I am an environmental professional (a meteorologist and soil scientist by degrees) with over 40 years in the field, yet one learns humility when faced with the sheer magnitude and complexity of this blessed world in which we live and one’s own inability to fully measure, explain, understand and model it.

Maybe you have grown accustomed to the ugly world of social media and want to play those childish games, but that will not get you far on this site. People here are on a journey of learning and discovery, with input from some of the world’s best scientists, engineers, economists, business people and thoughtful laypersons. We tackle important issues with grace and humor, and we have some fun along the way. So why don’t you set your preconceived notions aside and have a mature conversation?

xxx

One of the things that few people understand, whether in Texas or outside, is that no matter how much we try to plan things out carefully, nature does not always follow the game plan and bites us hard in the butt. All you have to do is look what happened during the East Tohoku earthquake in Japan on March 11, 2011. The Japanese were probably the most prepared people on earth for a big earthquake and tsunami (and I give them credit, too: if they had not been prepared as they were, the death toll would have been more like 219,000 or more instead of 19,000). But the tsunami in question overtopped almost all of their sea walls and caused frightening damage and chaos for months thereafter, despite their best-laid plans.

These historical lessons, along with the observations in the article above, explain why it is so important to provide a sufficient reserve/excess capacity in all of our utility systems. While there is never any guarantee that some disaster may come along that destroys everything anyway, if responsible public utilities provide a way to be “ready to serve” when the vast number of crises come along, you will not see the number of problems that come along like the ones we in Texas are having right now.

Unfortunately, this means that the State of Texas and its Legislature are going to have to take steps to make sure that public electric utilities/electric generation companies provide that “readiness to serve” I am talking about. Because they will not do it on their own without some regulation in that regard – there is no immediate return in doing it right now – and without some guarantees from the law in return. Yes, by all means, public electric utilities/electric generation companies will need to be additionally compensated in some way to stand ready to serve with a much bigger reserve generation capacity than Texas has right now.

As a former municipal utility attorney, I know that the compensation, regardless of who it hits first, will be passed on to the ultimate consumer. But I know how that stuff works, too, and public input will be needed into how this gets compensated for, so that the public is not gouged and abused.

This time, I was lucky I did not lose my electric power this time around. But when I owned my own home, I lost my power due to storms, brownouts, blackouts, and allocated outages a number of times (not just in the winter, either). Far too many times – it reminded me sometimes of a stinking third world country.

This must end.

xxx

“One thing that happened was the false story of global warming diverted over 1 trillion dollars of money that could have been spent on resolving real problems.”

xxx

Texas gets 20% of its energy from intermittent sources. Usually that is where the indigestion is noticeable. Other grids with higher penetration of intermittents rely on interconnections with other grids to hold them up.

The costs of integrating intermittents skyrockets once penetration goes above 20%. There needs to be a sophisticated market in what is known in Australia as FCAS – Frequency Control and Ancillary Services.

When South Australia was islanded this time last year due to an interconnector outage, the FCAS charges went sky high. So much so that wind and solar generators, that bear a portion of the FCAS costs, just voluntarily curtailed (they were initially ordered off so the system could be kept in control). For the two week period that the line was out, the FCAS charges were as much as the wholesale price. Over that two week period, the Hornsdale battery recovered its entire capital cost by serving a good portion of the short term FCAS market, much more significant than the price arbitrage it makes its daily income from.

The political recognition of FCAS followed the blackout in South Australia in 2016 although there was an existing market. But the blackout made the need “real” not just something that electrical engineers think about. I expect ERCOT will be looking closely at its market design. Of further note is The Australian grid operator’s administration costs have increased 30% year-on-year for the last three years as managing the FCAS market is getting increasingly complex.

Australia regularly goes through a period of warm days each summer that stretches the grid with air-conditioning demand – probably not as bad as freezing to death in Texas but still tough on people who normally live in air-conditioned rooms.

xxx

There are two facets to the Texas energy catastrophe that I’ve seen on this site: the delivery problem and the capacity problem.

The “Planning Engineer” dismisses delivery problems in Texas thusly:

“Considering the extreme cold, nothing particularly surprising is happening within any resource class in Texas. The technologies and their performance were well within the expected bounds of what could have been foreseen for such weather conditions.”

With that issue resolved, he proceeds to ask, “Who is responsible for providing adequate capacity in Texas during extreme conditions? The short answer is no one.” He turns the rest of his discussion solely to questions of capacity and market forces.

From all that we’ve seen of the Texas emergency, it appears that they had more problems with delivery than capacity. It doesn’t matter how much fuel you have in reserve if your turbines or water cooling systems freeze up, or your power lines go down. Systems set up to shed heat in a Texas summer need a whole different approach to handle cold. Generators failed because of the way they were housed and winterized.

The problems in Texas began with infrastructure weaknesses and cascaded outward from there.

I’m not sure what a “planning engineer” does, but I wonder if he ever goes out in the field and actually fixes things.

xxx

I think that is ERCOT getting their retaliation in first, or putting up a smokescreen. My guess (looking at the EIA hourly generation data) is that events went something like this:

On the afternoon of the 14th, with demand forecast to hit records in the evening, the ERCOT control room was manned by the most experienced team, and they succeeded in meeting the demand peak (8 p.m.) by cranking up the available gas generation pretty much to maximum and with the aid of still about 8GW of wind generation. There will have been a shift change, and with the expectation that overnight demand would fall back, but the following daytime would again be very challenging, it’s likely a less experienced team took over.

To begin with demand did ease off slightly, and dropping wind generation still allowed a small easing of gas generation as well. Then sometime after midnight the first gas generator tripped out – a plant failure of some kind, perhaps due to a problem with inadequate water feed for cooling. No problem in the control room: they rustled up some hydro and asked for a bit more coal burn. Between 1 and 2 a.m. they lost almost 2 GW of gas generation, and they ran out of spare coal capacity which they maxed. It’s already possible that these were cascading trips and at least partly motivated by underfrequency.

Just after 2 a.m. all hell broke loose, with 9.2GW lost including 7.3GW of gas and 1.75GW of coal. That was almost certainly mainly caused by cascading trips for underfrequency. Underfrequency occurs when supply is less than demand, and when the frequency drops too far plants start tripping out for safety reasons: they are not designed to operate at full load at rotation speeds that can set up mechanical instabilities and lead to the plant destroying itself. There are two ways to deal with underfrequency: find some spare generation capacity PDQ to restore balance – or start instituting blackouts to curb demand below the available supply. A bit like flying a large aircraft or piloting a large vessel, system response is lagged, so it can be difficult to guess whether you have done enough or not, especially with the risk of other trips worsening the situation.

My guess therefore is that the inexperienced team did not impose blackouts fast enough to restore grid balance, and that in consequence more plants were tripped out, requiring even more blackouts to restore balance. I suspect they may not have been helped by there not really being a plan in place to dictate where blackouts should be imposed when they suddenly had to run much deeper. Grid management software normally operates to have contingency set for the loss of the single largest element on the system, and to cater for any individual loss whether of transmission, generation or demand. Although there were clearly some plans to maintain power to critical users (e.g. hospitals), it is doubtful that anyone had really considered the effects of knocking off over 10GW in short order.

What we see in the hours after that are mostly more sporadic losses, including one of the nuclear plants (known to be a frozen water feed problem), some coal and another 5GW+ of gas. This is where there is a combination of plant failures and gas supply problems, likely caused by loss of power to gas pipelines. Some of these losses might not have occurred had earlier losses been stemmed more quickly.

xxx

I don’t believe we can trust government utilities to deliver the promised energy. The failure in Texas should be a wake up call for all of us. We have an 8K generator that will power much of our household. I recommend now that people visit harbor tools, northern tool, Home Depot and Menards and look at the Portable generators that can be used to keep your family safe when government utilities fail.

xxx

Reading the article, and then reading the comments depressed me enough to put pen to paper – or arthritic fingers to keyboard, anyway.

We would all like it to be a problem caused by one simple thing – renewable energy – and with one simple answer – e.g. coal. Or nuclear power. But the reality is more complicated than that, and it behoves us to look closely at our political philosophy to understand how such a thing could happen and what are the options to prevent its re-occurrence.

Firstly what is becoming apparent to the ordinary person, as opposed to electrical and other engineers, is that the sort of reliability that accrued from conventional thermal power stations running off local stores of e.g. coal and uranium with nice large spinning masses giving a decent measure of short term frequency stability on a grid, costs extra when applied to a renewable grid.

This is the dilemma between energy markets and capacity markets: Capacity markets are a way of pricing and selling reliability. More on that later.

Now it is a general axiom of engineering that is so basic no one ever bothered to quote it or give it a name but it goes like this. As an engineering service the income derives from the average usage case, but the cost derives from the worst case.

For example, most income from running an airline comes from boring uneventful three quarters full aircraft flights, or thereabouts. But nearly all the cost in the aircraft business comes from ensuring that it can take 2g positive and 1 g negative loading – the sort of turbulence that can kill passengers – the duplication of flight controls and instruments in case one set goes wrong, the excessively conservative maintenance schedules that are supposed to guarantee nothing breaks in flight and indeed the extra fuel carried to allow contingency routing. Add in the pilot hours on simulators to ensure that the pilots are trained on that one in a thousand freak event….What your airplane ticket buys you is not just a flight, it is a safe flight.

In the context of the current crop of near failures on the grid, irrespective of causes, ultimately any solution is going to cost money, and add to the cost of electricity.

So that is the first fundamental point that cannot be gotten around – how much (more) is the US consumer willing to pay for a more resilient electricity supply?

Again, having had that political debate, the question arises of how – should the answer be ‘enough to do the job’ – are the changes to be implemented? Irrespective of blame or causes.

Now there are a range of solutions on offer, and no doubt I will get downvoted for advocating them when in fact I am not.

Firstly the way the Texas grid seems to operate is a very free market in energy. Free markets work very well when there is potential diversity of supply, and no natural monopoly, and the customer is free to pick any supplier in an emergency who can meet his demands – albeit at a higher price.

The United States loves its free markets. So do I, but I am a pragmatist and a realist, and with certain sorts of product a free market doesn’t work as it should.

First of all the electricity grid itself – the distribution mechanism for the product, electricity, is a natural monopoly. Free market ideology cannot get around that simple fact. Secondly, the way electricity is sold people do not have a trading platform attached to their electricity meters so they can switch suppliers when the one they are contracted to cannot deliver.. the way they could with e.g. domestic coal for heating.

Those facts stop a free market process from operating effectively.

In the UK, during WWII, we nationalised everything as a matter of wartime expediency. Roads, railways, coal mining, power generation and distribution, telephone services, the post office. That meant that central planning and control could deliver what were considered to be essential services for the nation, reliably.

The inevitable downside to that was that investment became politicised, and so too did the work forces. To the point where the coal miners union – essentially run by hard left agitators – became more powerful than government. It was into that context that Margaret Thatcher was elected, to essentially restore the reliability of power generation and the authority of government from the political instability with which it had become burdened.

Her solution – hated then and now, by the Left – was to privatise what were, in effect, in many cases natural monopolies.

Privatisation removed the politics from investment and allowed modernisation to occur without argument over funding it. But it also raised a serious problem. These were in many cases natural monopolies – not coal mining, but railways, the national power grid, the telephone system, the post office and so on. These were still regarded as critical national infrastructure and couldn’t be allowed to exploit their natural monopolies to gouge consumers.

What happened in effect was the the boards of these nationalised industries morphed into politically controlled regulatory authorities. OFCOM for telecoms, OFWAT for water, OFGEN for electrical power and so on. These were given serious teeth. And their job was to act as a sort of proxy shareholder and customer in the monopolistic areas. So that they could set standards of delivery and fine the agencies responsible if they failed to deliver.

Having thus set a level playing field for any or all participants – there are for example many water companies, regionally split – in effect the government both set a standard for delivery and additionally set a cap on profits. That is an ongoing process – at regular intervals commercial companies sit down with official regulators and argue the case for price rises while the regulators negotiate expected standards for public utility delivery.

Now that is, for better or for worse, how it’s done here. It looks like ERCOT is an attempt to do the same thing in Texas, that has singularly failed.

So a partial resumé: Resilience costs money, and it is a political decision ultimately whether or not people are prepared to pay for it. In the case of natural monopolies or arm’s length commercial contracts between suppliers and customers, the free market mechanism is inefficient in delivering the desired result, and nationalisation places far too much power with both unions and central government. The awkward compromise that has worked reasonably well – I will say no more than that – in the UK is to bring these natural monopolies under state oversight, but not state ownership. To make this work, the regulatory authorities need teeth, and they need competence. They acquire both by statute. Staff can be fired politically, and laws can be passed giving them powers of retribution against commercial companies.

Now it has to be said that in the case of electrical power, in the UK, the mechanism is close to failing because the political goalposts have been changed from the supply of the lowest cost most reliable electricity, to meeting spurious ‘renewable obligations’ designed to favour renewables over conventional generation, even though no carbon dioxide emissions are reduced as a result.

This ultimately cannot be blamed on the regulatory authorities – they are only doing what their political masters have instructed them to. In fact my long road to being an ardent Brexit supporter started with trying to establish who in fact was responsible for what was clearly a policy leading to disaster … well I suppose here we would call it the green blob. A cadre of profit making crony capitalists who have marketed a myth so powerful that governments and in particular the EU, cower in its face. But I am preaching to the converted. Accept my apologies.

To return to Texas, as the case in point. Clearly ERCOT has failed to deliver what people have suddenly discovered they need. Reliable electricity in a winter freeze.

What ‘planning engineer’ is saying, and I can’t offer an opinion on the veracity of that, is that they were not tasked with that, ultimately. Well if not, then it is a political decision as to whether they should be.

What he is also saying is that by implementing an energy market and not a capacity market, there is no financial incentive to invest in plant that would cover extreme situations, or more gas storage, or the ‘winterisation’ of conventional power stations. The UK has increasingly had to run a capacity market for precisely these reasons. Because OFGEN is tasked with maintaining sufficient capacity as well as planting windmills. In fact what has happened is that strictly adhering to ‘renewable obligations’ and resilience constraints has led to huge numbers of fossil powered inefficient backup plants being deployed to the extent that – as in Germany – emissions have not really reduced at all!

And this brings me to the causes. Not cause, but causes. Looking at the graphs it is clear that although the frozen wind power was a joke, it was not the biggest problem. And indeed ERCOT was merely being a tad economical with the truth when they pointed out that gas, coal and nuclear had taken hits as well.

The dominant failure was gas. And let’s not twat on about fracked gas having high moisture content and freezing. That’s just spin. The serious issue is that gas is what people use to heat their homes with as well as generate electricity with, and there wasn’t enough put by.

Why not?

Because there is no money to be made in supplying over capacity in an energy, as opposed to a capacity, market. Power comaines lose less by failing to supply than they would have lost by building excess capacity for a once in a decade event.

Why is there an energy, as opposed to a capacity, market?

Because windmills and solar panels have no capacity to sell. That is a point being made here. capacity means you get paid for reliable ability to supply.

And that seems to me to be the salient point. In order to incentivise renewables, ERCOT and whoever else is involved, have disincentivised maintaining adequate capacity. Even of gas.

In short it wasn’t the windmills per se that were the problem, it was the whole political and commercial framework designed to put the windmills there, that disrupted the market enough to cause the problem.

That’s how it seems to me. The UK has had to patch a capacity market on the side of the renewable energy market to guarantee continuity of supply, and its not working that great, but so far it is working. And the regulator has the teeth to do it. It isn’t the solution, but it is a solution.

Ultimately, irrespective of carbon dioxide affecting the climate, (even if it were true), we have somehow been suckered into ‘renewable energy‘ when we ought to be focussing (if the warmunistas are right) on emission reductions. The bland assumption that renewable energy reduces emissions overall must be challenged, and we must start to recognise that there is cash value in reliability as well as megawatt hours.

But please, dont get sidetracked into making simplistic claims that are clearly false. Windmills per se were not really the problem, it was the whole policy framework and the mind set that put them there that was the problem.

And there I will stop. I am not competent to pronounce on the intricacies of US or Texas regularity law. Or its politics.

xxx

Leo, that was an interesting analysis that, using different words and examples, pretty much repeats what the lead article said. Wind power was in part a proximal cause and a minor player in the recovery in Texas since it could not provide reliable, dispatchable base load, but policies favoring intermittent renewables were a major indirect cause. The question for Texas in coming months and years is how to repair the damage to grid reliability in the face of massive misinformation and lobbying by activists and special interests.

xxx

Thinking about this disaster for awhile, it becomes obvious the root cause was global warming.

After the 2011 incident, where 3.2 million people faced rolling blackouts from unusually cold weather, the August 2011 official report said the Texas energy infrastructure needed to be ‘winterized’.

Assuming some people read the report, they probably decided that with global warming, another “2011 event” was unlikely, so they spent their money on more windmills instead (global warming virtue signalling).

The number of windmills quadrupled by 2021. The new windmills could have been equipped for unusually cold weather, at a higher expense. But why ‘waste money’? The post-2011 decision looked smart for about ten years.

For one hour, about a week before the blackout, wind power accounted for 58% of all ERCOT electricity generation. During the blackout, down to about 5% (of course half the windmills were frozen, but the wind happened to be weak for those windmills not frozen). Windmills are highly variable sources of electricity. One day, when batteries cost about 10% of the current price, windmills may be very useful.

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“ERCOT” set the Texas power grid up to fail and it has done so, spectacularly. They will now screech for more money to be pissed away on wind mills and solar panels, all while blaming everyone else for what they created, a disaster.

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The critical data in understanding the weatherization problem with wind/gas turbine co-location in Texas is hidden by not splitting out large scale natural gas plants with the gas turbine backup co-located with the wind powered turbines.

Whenever conditions or equipment failures prevent the wind turbines from operating (an occurrence less common in west Texas than most anywhere else, but still common) these natural gas powered turbine engines kick in. Follow the data and you can see natural gas production skyrocketing as wind power collapses.

With eleven thousand windmills scatted through the backroads of west Texas, thousands of these backup generators needed to be resupplied… by road… to keep the natural gas figure at its peak. Something made impossible by the extreme weather. What portion of the natural gas falloff starting on the 16th was due to these backup generators running out of gas, and what portion was caused by disruptions to traditional natural gas powerplants?

Preventing future failure would require knowing the difference between the two natural gas methods of power generation.

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