Quote:
Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist
This is very silly and an extremely misleading graphic. Wind was vastly exceeding expected supply during the windy part of the storm. It was not intended to supply that much power in February, but was a bonus that it did. The wind capacity installed was also not optimized for cold weather and was only ever supposed to supply an average of 6.1GB in February. It averaged about 50% of that during the cold snap. You know what else only did 50% of expected capacity? Gas. I guess gas isn't the solution either. One of the four nuclear plants dropped too. I guess it's not the answer either. Whatever will we do.....
Resiliency is important, and we don't have storage solved, absolutely. You're hyperbole here is silly though, as by your own metric, none of the generators are the answer. The answer is regardless of fuel type, resiliency needs to be built in with connections to other grids, cold weather upgrades, and longer term more distributed production.
While distributed solar would not have averted this catastrophe, if even one in 10 homes had solar and battery they could've helped a lot of neighbors. With costs decreasing distributed energy is essential in load balancing and resiliency
|
The graphic isn't silly or misleading, it's the reality of what happened on the ground. It's the truth. It also protects against wind and solar apologists trying to "both sides-ism" this argument. Did *some* natural gas fail due to the weather? Yes but the chart speaks for itself in that natural gas was able to ramp up spectacularly and save the day while wind did the complete opposite. If that natural gas capacity wasn't there then this would be an even worse disaster. Both energy sources had some weather failures but only one was able generate dependable power in an emergency. It's not even debatable.
I do care about resiliency, that's what we should all care about for our power grid. Natural gas, coal, and nuclear have it, wind and solar don't. "Wind was vastly exceeding expected supply during the windy part of the storm."...until it wasn't windy anymore but still cold and people needed power. Wind and solar work great until they don't, you always need actually reliable power sources as your base. Making these sources the majority of the grid would be pure folly, as proven by Texas.
Your argument is essentially wind and solar were never expected to carry the freight for power generation, which is true, but then you're also stating that you wish these unreliable energy sources formed the majority of our grid. You can't have it both ways, again unless you're fine with having blackouts on a regular basis.