Some brief background on why so many Texas households suddenly seem to be without power:
Two problems in #Texas, one short term and exacerbated by the long term issue, and one long term. 2/10
— Chuck DeVore (@ChuckDeVore) February 16, 2021
Texas came very close to having a system-wide outage for the whole state (ERCOT area, about 85% of the state) due to not arranging for more generation. 4/10
— Chuck DeVore (@ChuckDeVore) February 16, 2021
In the last 4-5 years, Texas lost a net of 3,000 megawatts of thermal out of a total installed capacity 73,000 megawatts today. We lost the thermal power because operators couldn’t see a return on investment due to be undercut by wind and solar… 6/10
— Chuck DeVore (@ChuckDeVore) February 16, 2021
Meanwhile, Texas has seen a growth of 20,000 megawatts of wind and solar over the same period to 34,000 megawatts of installed capacity (they rarely perform anywhere close to capacity). This subsidized (state and federal) wind and solar have pushed… 8/10
— Chuck DeVore (@ChuckDeVore) February 16, 2021
Texas is experiencing what California has – with California affecting the entire Western Interconnection due to its policies. Blackouts are a feature of the push to have more unreliable renewables on the grid. Must pay $$ for reliable backup w/ renewables 10/10
— Chuck DeVore (@ChuckDeVore) February 16, 2021
Expect more on this subject in the near future.
Tags: Austin, Chuck DeVore, Energy Policy, oil industry, Regulation, solar power, Texas, Texas Public Policy Foundation, wind power
Yeah, would love to see a long form discussion of that with cites so it could be forwarded far and wide.
Welcome to the Green New Deal.
I worked in the energy industry for over 30 years for a municipal utility in northeast Iowa. We had 2 coal-fired/ natural gas generators onsite and a oil/natural gas combustion turbine offsite. Late in my tenure, I was sent to MAPP headquarters in St. Paul MN for extra training. The general opinion at that time was that solar and wind were boutique power sources with no place in a system’s base loading. Without a central base load capacity that is available 24/7, you can’t have a reliable generation system. You need coal, oil, gas, hydro or nuclear to carry the base load of your system at all times. As I said, solar or wind is boutique, good only to make people feel good.
Remember, as James Delingpole said, “alternative energy is just that; an alternative to energy.”
I am not an expert in power, but an Electrical Engineer. I have seen how power to equipment and power generators work powering equipment and buildings.
I especially have seen battery storage for power generators and over time batteries will decrease in storage capabilities. This has the same affect on electric vehicles or a power grid that uses batteries for storage.
Ultimately these Green Power solutions require battery storage of some kind and they will require battery monitoring and replacement every few years.
Another effect of the move to renewables … driven also by current energy economics … is the move to replace coal and nuclear with gas-turbine prime movers which can be quickly started/stopped/controlled to cover for the intermittent character of renewables.
Those gas turbines depend, not on onsite fuel storage like coal and nuclear have, but on a just-in-time fuel-delivery system of pipelines that appears to have had problems keeping up with the spike in demand for their power, resulting from the double whammy of deep-freeze temperatures in a Sunbelt state and the loss of wind generation to supplement them.
We in the 78758 area do not have power, it’s not our job to investigate, searches and find answers due to this man made powerage. We did not go to school for this type, All we do as a customer is the pay our services.
I’m aware we has awareness and assistance when there’s a hurricane, explosion and e.t.c. There are first responders, so that being said, where’s our
First responders when there are power outages especially where minorities resides, malls that has no business ( lights on lol) let’s try to make our america great again.
Don’t bicker of whom is right or wrong, get it fixed so we can survive.
Also Texas is on its own power grid. There is one in the East. One in the west and Texas. There are a couple of thermal plants located so they can power Texas or the other grid. Not sure about moving power into the Texas grid from others as the can be out of phase
I would hold that it is precisely our job to investigate. Logic and powers of reasoning do not belong exclusively to those holding political office in Texas (some would argue those powers do not exist in our politicos ab initio, but…). The “first responders” in this case are supposed to be the grid dispatchers (ERCOT), the generating plant management and crews, and the transmission/distribution line crews. Of the three, we can deduce that at least ERCOT did not perform their Reliability (the “R” in ERCOT) function, since the grid dropped about half of its load due to a weather event forecast for weeks. We can also deduce that something went wrong for all the reported natual gas shortages and generating plant trips to have happened, and that would be at the generating plant management level, and maybe the gas transmission system managment level. The details of “why” will come out over the next few months, but in broad strokes, Chuck DeVore got it right I think. And we must ask penetrating questions to get to the real root cause, otherwise we will not know if what the press is demagoging, or the politicos bloviating about, is the correct solution. And one glaring point is clear even now. Billions spent on undispatchable wind power means billions not spent on coal, gas, nuclear, or even oil-fired dispatchable generation. Where would we be now if we had 20-30 extra GW of dispactchable generation on Monday, buring oil or Texas lignite?