Funny, everyone was happy about how Texas scrapped so many coal plants and built so many windmills until it reached a cascade failure point and then the narrative shifted to "OMG, look at all the deregulation!"
Texas had no power because they forgot everything they learnt the hard way from their "once-in-a-decade snow storm" they had 2011.
Coal piles freezing solid because there is no roof, gas valves impossible to operate because nobody would put a box around them, no water too cool reactor cores because the pipes froze: these are not failures somehow cascading from the fact they build some windmills.
When I learnt that turbines on Texas nuclear plants stay under the open sky I was REALLY surprised. It was the reason behind the single failure, otherwise nuclear plants have weathered this crisis perfectly.
I guess the lesson is that not even Texans think nuclear is so safe it doesn't need weather protection, or maybe it's some pesky federal regulation that says that at least the reactor needs to be protected...
The failure point was a repeat of previous cold events -- it wasn't really a cascade event, of course, given wind turbines provide only 20% of power on the ECOT mini-grid.
Given there are similar capacity wind turbines running happily in Antarctica, and the heads-up from the 2011 & 2019 events to winterise the Texas fleet, it's difficult to see how this is a 'windmill problem'.
I wouldn't frame the blackouts as a "windmill problem" as they're primarily a "winterization problem", but having so much capacity invested in unreliable wind generation was a very significant contributor to the blackouts that should not be ignored. ERCOT is a world leader in wind production, and that was pretty punishing when its 25GW of wind capacity was producing 0. We invested billions into a generation source that at one point produced 0 and eventually "exceeded projections" by producing slightly more than 0. We could have invested those billions in basically any other source and had significantly more electricity available. Winterization would have helped somewhat with less turbines freezing, but it doesn't help at all when the wind stops blowing.
I see you've made many sweeping comments in this thread, some of which I can't confirm the veracity of.
> ... but having so much capacity invested in unreliable wind generation was a very significant contributor to the blackouts that should not be ignored.
Has that grid suffered lots of blackouts at times other than big freezes?
If it hasn't, then that would suggest that the designers / operators of the grid factored in the unreliability of wind, and have the baseload well covered by gas, nuclear, etc.
> ERCOT is a world leader in wind production, and that was pretty punishing when its 25GW of wind capacity was producing 0.
And yet:
"About half of the state’s wind capacity was offline Sunday because of turbines that had frozen in west Texas, according to the Austin American-Statesman, but high winds from the winter storm were spinning coastal turbines faster and generating more power to offset those losses." [1]
> Winterization would have helped somewhat with less turbines freezing, but it doesn't help at all when the wind stops blowing.
'fewer'
I'm not sure where you're getting information that the wind stopped blowing, or why that's a reason to not use wind turbines as part of an overall power generation strategy, or indeed why you seem to be surprised that if ECOT prepared wind turbines, as well as gas & nuclear (which both lost a fair chunk of capacity) then the outcome wouldn't have been so appalling.
You're reading a lot into my comments. You seem to think that I'm against using wind power, which is absolutely not true, as I've commented in the past. I'm against the current narrative's misinformation which cherry-picks stats to push a political agenda. I would like ERCOT to continue to "use wind turbines as part of an overall power generation strategy", but in order to do this intelligently it is necessary to understand the strengths and weaknesses of different generation sources. The fashionable anti-nuclear, pro-wind propaganda is not helping anyone to understand reality.
All of my information about the output of different sources comes from personally digging through ERCOT's minutely detailed reports[0]. I haven't seen a nice, neat fact-checking propaganda piece that deals with the relevant data, but I haven't really searched that hard because all the data is right there, straight from the source.
The "Fuel Mix Report" lists the output of each generation type in 15 minute intervals[1]. There are over 25000 GW of wind capacity, so we would expect to see a maximum of a bit less than 6250 GWh of wind output in the best 15 minute periods ("a bit less" is taking into account that we don't expect 100% output even in the best circumstances). The data matches this, as we see peaks reaching about 5600 GWh. The values are conveniently totaled for each day, and with a theoretical ceiling of 600,000 GWh capacity per day we see that the most actually produced on any day in Jan or Feb 2021 was 458,000 GWh on January 6th, 76% of capacity.
If we look at February 15, 16, and 17, wind output was 225,000 GWh for all three days combined, or a whopping 12.5% of capacity. This matches the pitiful performance that I was seeing in real time in ERCOT's feed.
None of the 15 minute periods report 0 GWh, the lowest being 149 GWh on Feb 15th. So either the granularity is not fine enough or I was just wrong to say that wind dropped to zero, and I would like to revise my position to say that wind output dropped to 2% of capacity.
Hopefully you can understand how I can both support intelligent use of wind power while being dismayed by fact-checking pieces that turn "only 25%" of our capacity being 87.5% offline into vague terms like "exceeded projections" and "wind wasn't a problem", as if 15,000-20,000 GW of capacity being offline was not a significant factor. (87.5% of 25,000 GW is 21,875 GW, but again I am not expecting wind to be able to produce at 100%).
> indeed why you seem to be surprised that if ECOT prepared wind turbines, as well as gas & nuclear (which both lost a fair chunk of capacity) then the outcome wouldn't have been so appalling.
This comes off like you're just making things up to troll me. I've specifically mentioned winterization many times. It's also very telling that, like the fact-checkers, you have to stick to vague terms like "lost a fair chunk of capacity" without getting into the actual numbers which would show how massive that disparity really is.
Well, you conceded that it's primarily a winterisation problem, but then immediately say:
> ... but having so much capacity invested in unreliable wind generation was a very significant contributor to the blackouts that should not be ignored.
The word 'unreliable' is ambiguous here -- clearly world+dog understands that power generated by wind is highly variable, and ERCOT (as for any ISO, and similar orgs in other countries) maintains and improves their forecasts around this variability.
This is factored into the overall grid provisioning and maintenance of power to consumers. It's why I asked about the effect of this variability outside of major cold events. Evidently not so much?
So, using the word 'unreliable' in a way that sounds like wind turbines can't be trusted seems disingenuous, since there's no surprises with the way they operate, and the variability in the power they can generate.
Your comment that billions should have been invested in anything except wind, and this would have guaranteed significantly more electricity available - isn't supported by the facts. Nuclear, gas, and coal all failed in various but predictable ways.
So you're kind of conceding that winterisation would have helped, but only in the context of fewer wind turbines being taken out. The fact coal, gas, and nuclear failed, because they hadn't been properly protected against cold weather, you seem to be discounting.
I haven't stared at the ERCOT numbers, and am disinclined to do so -- the fact that much of the state was without power for several days, and early reports suggested the grid was some minutes away from catastrophic cascading failure, suggests to me that concise numbers aren't the important thing here.
What's clear is that despite the 2011 heads-up, and the audit two years ago that highlighted the continued lack of preparedness, it was way more than the predictable freezing of some wind turbines. The history and political motivation for this highly isolated ISO further highlights the problems of poor planning and poor regulation. Were they not so intentionally disconnected, power could have easily been sourced from elsewhere in the country.
I did find an interesting 'actual number' that their lack of maintenance for their wind turbines was a major contributory factor:
"Though frozen wind turbines were a contributing factor, wind shutdowns accounted for less than 13% of the outages, Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations for ERCOT, told Bloomberg." [0]
Further in that article:
"According to a report from ERCOT, solar accounts for only 3.8% of the state's power capacity throughout the year. Wind energy accounts for 10% of Texas's winter energy capacity and throughout the entire year it is able to provide 24.8%, the second-largest source of energy in the state under natural gas, which accounts for 51%."
Which suggests your 25% figure is misleading, as that's a yearly average - it's 10% (about the same as nuclear) during that time of year.
> I haven't stared at the ERCOT numbers, and am disinclined to do so -- the fact that much of the state was without power for several days, and early reports suggested the grid was some minutes away from catastrophic cascading failure, suggests to me that concise numbers aren't the important thing here.
I gave references to the exact locations which would take at most a minute or two to find. If we're just going off journalists' opinion pieces, then we're not ever going to get any further than the cherry-picked stats that they choose to provide. If you don't think my numbers are worth taking into account because they come from the source data and not someone's propaganda, then I don't know what to tell you. You're happy enough to cite numbers when they fit into your argument.
> This is factored into the overall grid provisioning and maintenance of power to consumers. It's why I asked about the effect of this variability outside of major cold events. Evidently not so much?
The recent events indicate precisely that this planning had some serious flaws. We cannot make that assumption. Although you have pointed out that wind power normally varies between 10% and 25% of the supply, so the normal variability is apparently very large.
> Were they not so intentionally disconnected, power could have easily been sourced from elsewhere in the country.
The adjacent regions also suffered rolling blackouts. There was a little power to source, but not much. This argument is not supported by the "concise numbers".
Re my personal opinion on wind use: My original position was that wind can be very good despite some issues, but as I've gotten into these discussions and dug through the data, I see significant reasons that wind might be a bad fit for Texas without some major improvements beyond just winterization. I'm open to those improvements but I don't know what they could be, so my opinions here are not really made up yet.
I'm not really interested in advancing any particular policy prescription. I'm mostly pushing back against the widespread misinformation (especially avoidance of actual numbers in favor of vague terms) around this topic, in order to give some space for a real discussion. I'm not trying to show that so much wind generation is a problem, I'm trying to show that it could be a problem and that possibility needs to be accounted for. Wind shouldn't be assumed to have "exceeded projections" because some partisan "fact-checker" said so without specifying how absurdly low those 24-hour projections were. That's why I've repeatedly said that winterization could improve the situation, but I also point out the flaws in thinking that winterization will magically solve all the issues, since wind is so variable even without any freezing.
You've thrown lots of numbers around, while claiming other people are wrong and/or incautious:
> I'm against the current narrative's misinformation which cherry-picks stats to push a political agenda.
and
> If we're just going off journalists' opinion pieces, then we're not ever going to get any further than the cherry-picked stats that they choose to provide. If you don't think my numbers are worth taking into account because they come from the source data and not someone's propaganda, then I don't know what to tell you. You're happy enough to cite numbers when they fit into your argument.
However, all your figures push the narrative that wind is / should be 25% of the total state capacity all the time:
> There are over 25000 GW of wind capacity, so we would expect to see a maximum of a bit less than 6250 GWh of wind output in the best 15 minute periods ...
and
> ... being dismayed by fact-checking pieces that turn "only 25%" of our capacity being 87.5%
Despite, as I quoted earlier:
"Wind energy accounts for 10% of Texas's winter energy capacity and throughout the entire year it is able to provide 24.8%"
So your 25% ratio, and all the GwH figures you keep extrapolating from that, are not what ERCOT projects or expects to obtain in winter. (EDIT: Indeed, this implies the average for the whole of winter is 10%, with an understanding it will dip well below that figure through those months.)
Are you cherry-picking yearly average figures and inappropriately applying them here to push a narrative?
> Are you cherry-picking yearly average figures and inappropriately applying them here to push a narrative?
I am neither cherry-picking nor using yearly average figures. The one yearly figure of "over 25000 GW" is for ERCOT's installed wind capacity, which is consistent year-round apart from a small growth as new capacity comes online. My other figures are for specific dates or months, the dates being when black outs were happening.
As for why wind's low output compared to capacity matters so much, I am dealing with the inescapable facts of the Texas climate and how it relates to the energy market. The capacity in Texas is driven by summer-time demand. Yet, very rarely, there are winters in which the demand can briefly exceed summer-time capacity. It's obvious that the current market is unable to consistently meet the demand in these rare winter events.
The root problem is having capacity which can perform in summer but not in winter, whether due to not being winterized, being down for maintenance, or any other reason. Focusing solely on winterization is being used as a diversion from the problem that Texans actually care about, which is simply having power in their homes during extreme winters.
By refusing to look at the data, you are missing the fact that wind actually does produce quite a lot of power on many winter days. In fact, ERCOT's all-time record for wind production was set in February 2018. But on some winter days, wind produces very little. It should be obvious that wind significantly reduces the average profits for other generation sources in winter, and thus has a negative effect on the market for more reliable generation capacity. Wind's high variability does contribute to a lack of output during extreme weather.
The "wind performed excellently" side is just ignoring all of this, but it's all highly relevant and should be part of the discussion. I am not saying that it should lead to a "wind is bad" conclusion in the final analysis. I am saying that there are significant problems with wind generation that should be part of the analysis, not swept under the rug. Saying "just winterize" is extremely hand-wavey, as it does not account for how the high costs of winterization can result in less installed capacity, and it completely fails to consider other issues like certain generation sources being highly inconsistent even when there is no freezing. Saying "all sources had problems" is a way to avoid recognizing that nuclear dramatically outperformed every other generation source even without winterizing. Performing at 75% of capacity is completely different from performing at 12.5%.
There are some more detailed analyses in the articles at [0] and [1]. [0] deals with the claim that deregulation was the culprit, showing that the relevant Texan regulations are actually more strict and better-enforced than the national regulations (due to previous freezing issues), while other national regulations do apply to Texas (like some dealing with gas). [1] goes into detail on how capacity planning fell short, by someone who was actually responsible for capacity planning in a region of ERCOT. The main point is that Texas has no capacity market, and this is what has allowed it to become a world leader in wind generation but has led to failures in having enough capacity available. "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." "Incentives and responsibility need to be paired. Doing a post-mortem on the Texas situation ignoring incentives and responsibility is inappropriate and incomplete."
With all this taken into account, I think that I favor a system of primarily nuclear power providing baseload needs (with some basic winterization please), and a mixture of other sources that can economically and consistently meet variable demand. This leaves wind a solid place where it is economically efficient, as in some windy regions of Texas. I haven't completely made up my mind though.
> The one yearly figure of "over 25000 GW" is for ERCOT's installed wind capacity ...
That figure informs an earlier calculation, which got you to here:
> [nuclear fission] Performing at 75% of capacity is completely different from [wind] performing at 12.5%.
Which is why I'm alerting you to your seemingly intentional misuse of the numbers coming out of ECOT.
AIUI their own reports indicate wind in winter accounts for 10% of the state's power.
Because the yearly average is 24.8% indicates that through the other times of the year ERCOT budgets / forecasts something > 24.8%. (Which in turn indicates that your 25000GW figure can not equate to 25% - there's clearly fluctuations on the constituent power sources through the year.)
So if everyone expects wind to provide ~10% that time of year -- with a good deal of hour/day variability -- then your earlier mathematical wrangling:
> ... 25000 GW of wind capacity .. we would expect to see ... 6250 GWh of wind output in the best 15 minute periods.
> The data matches this, as we see peaks reaching about 5600 GWh.
> ... a theoretical ceiling of 600,000 GWh capacity per day ... the most actually produced on any day in Jan or Feb 2021 was 458,000 GWh on January 6th, 76% of capacity.
> ... February 15, 16, and 17, output was 225,000 GWh for all three days combined, or a whopping 12.5% of capacity.
-- where you've taken the yearly average of state supply (24.8%), incorrectly applied it to winter (whereas ERCOT anticipates an average of 10% during those months), and are complaining you're seeing 12.5% of a total that's out by a factor of 2.5 (ie. it'd be 31% expected capacity for that time of year).
And that's all ignoring the fact that ERCOT failed in their duty of care so ~half the fleet was inoperable.
This is why I think you're being disingenuous with your calculations.
As to your other points:
> Focusing solely on winterization is being used as a diversion from the problem that Texans actually care about, which is simply having power in their homes during extreme winters.
I don't live there, but my understanding is there was a strong movement to decomm coal power plants to reduce pollution & improve air quality, so 'power in homes in extreme winters' is doubtless on the list, but isn't the list.
It's reasonable that the good people of Texas assumed all would be fine, anyway.
The people running this system said, in January:
"We studied a range of potential risks under both normal and extreme conditions," Pete Warnken, ERCOT's manager of resource adequacy, said in its Seasonal Assessment for Resource Adequacy prepared in November, "and believe there is sufficient generation to adequately serve our customers."
and in February:
"Bill Magness, president and chief executive officer of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, spoke briefly about the winter weather during his report to the board at the Feb. 9 meeting, the only mention of the incoming storm during the public portion of the virtual meeting, which spanned two hours, 28 minutes.
"Magness spoke about the approaching cold front for about 40 seconds:
" “It is actually going to be winter here pretty soon. As those of you in Texas know, we do have a cold front coming this way. We’ll probably see our winter peak later this week or in the very early part of next week. And Operations has issued an operating condition notice just to make sure everyone is up to speed with their winterization and we’re ready for the several days of pretty frigid temperatures to come our way."
Given the claims immediately fired off when things went titsup, blaming legislation that hadn't been enacted yet, wind turbines, solar, everything other than poor management and poor preparation - it's unsurprising that much of the FUD stuck.
> By refusing to look at the data, you are missing the fact that wind actually does produce quite a lot of power on many winter days.
I'm very much not missing that.
I understand wind is highly variable.
Hence you support it (today) with gas plants that can spin up in under 10 minutes, and insert a buffer (batteries, say) in between.
> It should be obvious that wind significantly reduces the average profits for other generation sources in winter, and thus has a negative effect on the market for more reliable generation capacity.
I really don't get how that might work. Whoever's selling the power sets the price (as we've seen to some ludicrous extent this year). If wind power generation wasn't profitable, it presumably wouldn't be so popular. Especially the case in a exuberantly commercial landscape such as Texas / ERCOT.
> Wind's high variability does contribute to a lack of output during extreme weather.
I'm not sure if that's false, a truism, or a blend.
If you're saying that variable sources of power will contribute to variable power generation - yeah, sure.
OTOH if you're asserting that small-term (hours, days) variability -- that can be forecast reasonably accurately over short-term periods (weeks, months) -- means less power than you were expecting, then that makes no sense at all, unless your forecasting is consistently appalling, in which case .. you know .. the problem's not with your plant.
> With all this taken into account, I think that I favor a system of primarily nuclear power providing baseload needs ...
If you mean nuclear fission, then I suspect you're going to be disappointed.
I've asked twice already - has there previously been comparable blackouts there where the root cause wasn't a lack of winterisation?
Looking to the rest of the world could be informative, as I don't think we see this kind of event in countries with comparable power generation breakdown and similar climates. But I haven't done any deep research there.
> Installed capacity is installed capacity. It does not "fluctuate" throughout the year.
7 days ago I had a new array of 12kW of solar panels plugged into the grid.
So far I've had one properly sunny day - that generated about 53kwH.
Because we're in autumn, two weeks away from the equinox, I know that this is going to be 'about average', but through the year there'll be seasonal variations.
In 3 months from now, f.e., at the winter solstice, I may hit 30kwH on a clear day, but averaging probably 20kwH per day. Some days, if it's raining, or very overcast, of course, it'll be less.
Thinking that my 'installed capacity' is the maximum available in the middle of summer, on a cloudless day, would be an unhelpful way to think of it. Rather, I'd consider 'over the year, I'll get x amount of power generated', and then divide that by 365 for an average daily amount.
Similar to how the ERCOT team has said 'over the year, our wind turbines will generate x amount of power' - but they've also gone into seasonal sub-divisions.
So, if you want to make a point about wind turbines not fulfilling the theoretical maximum output in the wrong half of the year while half the fleet is frozen, I can see why you'd want to assume it's mid-summer all year around.
Every power source had some failures, but the only power sources that dropped all the way to 0 were solar and wind. Nuclear operated at 75% of capacity, while fossil generation seems to have been around 60%. Wind recovered slightly and "exceeded projections" by producing in the 15-30% range, but closer to 15% at night when it's coldest.
All sources were notoriously un-winterized, but wind generation had the additional problem of not working when there wasn't enough wind, which is why it dropped to 0 at one point. Suggesting that wind would perform adequately if it were only winterized is simply inaccurate. It's common knowledge among non-zealots that wind and solar are far too unreliable to supply baseload generation needs, and that unreliability led to a missing 15-20 GW of generation when we needed it. Base load must be supplied by something else, like perhaps nuclear which performed pretty well despite not being winterized.
> Wind ran at about 50% of capacity and that was because it wasn't winterized.
That's bullshit. I was watching the ERCOT feed [0] during the blackouts, and I never saw it exceed 30%. I posted about it here extensively during the event, and no one reported seeing higher numbers. Right now wind is 5727 MW (23% of installed wind capacity), which is actually a little higher than the average generation I was seeing during the blackouts. PolitiFact very suspiciously doesn't want to say which sources are supposed to support which claims, but I can't find any support for their figures in their ERCOT links, which are the only actual sources provided.
Edit: I did a little more digging, and found that it's your claim that "wind ran at about 50% of capacity" that is completely false. The truth is that only half of the capacity was frozen, but that does not mean that the other half was producing. About half of the unfrozen capacity was not producing for other reasons. The truth is that wind output was 15-30% of capacity due to a combination of factors, including turbines freezing, batteries losing capacity and plain lack of wind. PolitiFact is not outright lying, they're just being as misleading as they possibly can be by cherry-picking stats like "50% was unfrozen" but omitting highly relevant data like "70-85% was offline". That's propaganda, not fact-checking.
I think you have your terms mixed up. Capacity refers to the maximum output. "Normal capacity" isn't a thing. You could say "normal output" or "expected output".
Yes. The big secret is they're hybrid windmills ;) The grain mills are separated from the wind turbines by electrical lines, unlike their mechanically-linked Dutch grain mill predecessors. Any excess electricity goes into BitFlour, a cryptocurrency that's "milled" instead of "mined".
(For those who missed it, the parent is asserting that "windmill" should be reserved for wind-powered mills.)
It was also... amusing watching capacity payments suddenly cease to be an evil subsidy to big coal and become an essential part of competent grid operations that Texas stupidly didn't have because they're right-wing libertarian nutjobs that think the free market solves everything. And by amusing I mean we're all fucked.
Texas has demonstrated that you can have blackouts and expensive at the same time if only you cut enough regulations.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/how-and-why...