Well, similar to your example, one of two reactors at a nuclear power facility automatically shut down on a safety trip due to not being built to withstand cold weather. And the gas is easy to keep flowing if you have crews ready to do that type of thing. I did that job as a teenager. So again, poor cold weather planning. And from what it sounds like just poor regulations all around.
Exactly. A once in a generation cold snap exposed some extreme temperature resiliency problems that are not due to renewables, and are not solvable via renewables. It's a straw man argument.
"Oh, your grid isn't resistant to a severe cold snap. You should build some wind farms!"
Said no on ever
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This is very silly and an extremely misleading graphic. Wind was vastly exceeding expected supply during the windy part of the storm.
But that was before the problems started on the 15th. It peaked at 9GW at 16:00 on the 14th but began steadily dropping, down to 5.2 GW at 00:00 on the 15th just before the troubles began. And it kept on going down until the late afternoon.
And based on the sudden and nearly simultaneous drop in natural gas and coal generators, some (if not most) of the generation probably did not drop from weather issues, but because demand was significantly higher than available supply, leading to a drop in grid frequency and causing generators to "trip" to protect themselves from damage.
This lack of reliable generation can be traced to wind, where Texas in the last decade despite significant population growth (and therefore electricity usage) has seen its coal+natural gas+nuclear generation capacity decline while installing more than 20 GW of wind. Texas's grid is increasingly un-resilient because it spent all of its resources on wind. As Texas is summer-peaking in demand leading to some stations being off-line with maintenance, Texas probably only had just enough reliable generation to make it through this winter storm if available coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants worked at 100%.
Last edited by accord1999; 02-21-2021 at 01:44 PM.
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No, it can't be traced to wind. Every expert is saying so. Texas had about 25GW of installed wind capacity, but it is not expected to contribut e 25GW during the winter. Low wind played a role, but a very minor one.
Here's what the IEA had to say:
Last edited by Street Pharmacist; 02-21-2021 at 02:24 PM.
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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.
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.
I think I'm not being clear enough.
Here's what I said earlier about building 100% solar and wind:
Quote:
There's arguments against it for reliability reasons, environmental reasons, and even economic reasons. You could definitely do it though
I was simply pointing out that the old argument that there wasn't enough sun and wind to power the grid isn't actually true. Only a small fraction of a percent would give us all the power we need. In 2021 it isn't worth it, but you can certainly expand it a lot from where we currently are, and technology will make that possible.
You cannot build to 80% and not have serious issues right now. Storage isn't there and you'd have to massively overbuild which prices it out of reasonableness. It also isn't going to work in every climate.
What is actually silly, is pointing out that the 2.8GW of expected wind that was lost due to low wind and frozen turbines when over 30GW of gas was lost is simply misleading. Posting that frequency was lost when the 2.8GW of wind that was lost when over 30GW of gas was offline, is dumb. Posting that Wind is the reason for poor resiliency in this storm when this was overwhelmingly a gas failure is disingenuous.
Saying that Wind isn't the answer to the resiliency when, of course it's not, is silly. Nobody thinks that 25GW of nameplate wind capacity would ever fix a 30GW shortfall in the winter. I mean, that's literally what the gas generation was built for and failed to do!!!!
Last edited by Street Pharmacist; 02-21-2021 at 04:58 PM.
We need more nuclear energy. We just need different reactor technology. Molten salt reactors are the answer. Small. Efficient. Safe. No bomb making material.
Personally I like the traveling-wave reactor. Uses spent uranium that lasts upwards of 40 years before replacement. AFIK they also use a cooling process that eliminates the reactor meltdown scenario.
Sadly the US has prevented the technology from going to countries that are willing to use it.
Last edited by DownhillGoat; 02-21-2021 at 10:10 PM.
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Its more akin to using water in the radiator instead of antifreeze. Sure, you save a few bucks but when eventually the #### hits the fan, you are paying out the ass for completely preventable repairs.
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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.
If only there was some form of energy market that allowed for renewables but also protected against their downside by compensating other power plants for their capacity. What a great idea you've come up with DiracSpike. We shall call it...a market based on capacity. I think that has a nice ring to it.
Of course not. We already know Texas was due to generators not upgrading in light of the 2011 report that said this would happen if they didn’t prepare for cold weather.
But we are now talking about the downside of renewable energy, and it’s inability to work during the night/windless days, is obviously the biggest downside. But that is alleviated in a capacity market when we start to “rely” on renewables too greatly.
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But really neither could natural gas. They have over 75 GW of installed capacity of it yet when the problem occurred you can see it producing roughly half that.
46,000 MW was forced offline, 28,000 MW of that was thermal because of things like pipes were freezing. It's almost like being told that your infrastructure isn't capable of operating in cold weather and needs to be upgraded, but instead doing nothing and then having cold weather resulted in problems.
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