Texans Asked To Cut Electricity Use, As Wind Power Drops Off
August 18, 2023
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dave Ward
What a surprise!!
https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO/status/1692212135005237465
Fortunately Texas still has plenty of gas generation:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/balancing_authority/ERCO
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Any Texan with more than three brain cells will have seen this coming at least three years ago.
Texas – the heartland of oil and gas – whet a joke
Okay, you there…..what happened to “Don’t mess with Texas?” You are being messed with bigly.
The fascists who left California brought it with them to Texas.
Except Austin. It’s been socialist for many years.
Flee bonkers California due to ruinous Left-wing policies.
Move to Right-wing Texas…..vote for Left-wing party and wreck Texas!
That’s it, Mr Red.
The California refugees believe in strong, autocratic, central government. The all powerful state. They are fascists. Regular Californians. Their beef with California is they don’t like what the state was doing with the power. They are fine with government having total power, they just didn’t like certain policy decisions.
So they get to Texas, or worse, South Carolina, and they vote to give more power to the state, to make decisions they won’t like. Dragging us down with them.
Their solution to bad government is more government.
When you’ve got the word ‘reliability’ in your business title you become a hostage to fortune when you’ve also got wind and solar in your product mix. It would be better if the word was prefixed with: un.
Texas used to be one of the sensible states but also seems to have been infiltrated by eco-terrorists and their obsessions with forcing unreliable, weather-dependent wind and solar
I think we need to experience in the UK some electricity cutbacks and even blackouts, with tragically a few deaths from cold, before politicians will come to their senses (if they have any) and start to question the absurd and unachievable rush to net zero.
Around 15,000 people die from cold every year in formerly Great Britain.
There will be even more if the ridiculous bans of gas and oil boilers happen.
>>Around 15,000 people die from cold every year in formerly Great Britain.
They should crank everything up and crash the grid to teach ERCOT a lesson. At least it is safer to do it now than in the winter when their grid failure killed over 500 people – this true figure includes those who died because hospitals were shutdown.
Meanwhile in Germany, Senec storage battery maker is having problems with their batteries catching fire. There are tens of thousands installed across the country and Senec is remotely controlling their charging to try to reduce fires. These batteries have cost between 10,000 and 15,000 Euros. It could be bad news for the company if owners start to sue for their money back if their batteries are being throttled back.
In June Labour proposed to make energy “cheap and secure” with “zero carbon electricity by 2030” by quadrupling offshore wind, doubling onshore wind and tripling solar. Using these proposals I have attempted to analyse and compare the energy and power generated with demand by downloading the variable demand, wind and solar data for 2022 from the Gridwatch website into an Excel file as the basis for the calculations.
I also calculate the additional renewable capacity required, together with some costings, to achieve a dispatchable (supply matching demand) system using either hydrogen or battery storage.
If anyone is interested in a copy of this analysis please contact me at jbxcagwnz@gmail.com
The UK is supposed to be about the best place in the world for wind energy .
But this paper shows just how intermittent it can be .http://www.iesisenergy.org/agp/Aris-Wind-paper.pdf
It shows that the total output will only be over 80% of the rating for about 1 week of the year , and below 20% of its rating for over half of the year .
So nobody with any sense should be using energy that is that unreliable to try to keep a grid working .
There is the problem. Politicians have no sense at all; apart from how to feather their own nests.
Back to why windmills were replaced by steam engines in the 19th century!
Notice the phase difference between the gas and wind production, with the peaks of gas aligned with the troughs of wind which is to be expected but I didn’t think the nuclear power would be cycled so much since it is normally base load.
I misread coal for nuclear. My mistake.
Chris I think you may be misinterpreting the colour coding. Isn’t the straight line across the nuclear output?
I drafted a couple of comments over the graph, then realized I had misread it, too.
Though there may be a few things of interest.
They show significant solar production for 10 hours a day. I assumed it would be no more than 6.
I assume the variability in the gas production line is reaction to demand, whereas wind/solar is reaction to supply (of weather supplied energy).
I also noticed significant intraday variability of wind power. For 3 days, it varies by 50% (!) – 10k to 20k mWh. It is expected of solar, but I hadn’t realized it should also be expected of wind. Makes sense, though, as the breeze around here is usually strongest in late afternoon.
To get a grip on the issues in Texas, one needs to understand that Texas had T. Boone Pickens of oil, water, and a leading advocate for wind energy. Find his Wikipedia page and search for “wind”.
Follow the money.
Following the money is a retrospective exercise and by necessity when implemented is legally already in the malefactors hands, said malefactors being lawmakers who write the enabling small print in legislation.
There was a time in my eighty four years when the inherent shame at their actions ameliorated their worst excesses but the current incumbents of both Westminster houses are the most egregious and rapacious this country has seen since the Robber Barons of centuries ago.
So sad, but very true
I met T Boone in 1986. He was visiting London to piece together what was driving the falling oil market. He was running a very large short position on NYMEX at the time. It was really the foundation of his more serious fortune. He did have a nose for following the money.
Energy suppliers are under the cosh from national Governments (in the West) to go full on climate alarmist nut zero
They are stuck between a rock and an hard place because, as Engineers, they know what works and what doesn’t – they know the inherent poor capabilities of weather dependent, unreliable wind & solar, but, they have to be seen to be supporting its grid inclusion
Government regulators (Ofgem in the UK) are also eco warriors in suits and are full sign ups to the silly nut zero connery, thereby applying another layer of renewables biased energy bureaucracy and pressure to suppliers and grid operators
The latest fad from regulators, as they are increasingly aware wind & solar just won’t power a nation without unaffordable, unresourceable storage systems, is to push consumer DSR – forcing (eventually) consumers to reduce energy consumption at peak times, to protect the grid from collapse when the over installed (at the sacrifice of reliable fossil fuel & nuclear generation sources) wind & solar power sources do not generate (what the Germans call dunkelflaute), dark, windless days / weeks
In my opinion, it will take a long, hard, cold, dunkleflaute winter, with subsequent power outages, to bring common sense and engineering competence, back to the energy debate
The problem for Texas in Feb 2021 was they didn’t have enough dispatchable capacity when the wind dropped. That led to a cascading trip of multiple power stations when they ran out of reserve which took days to recover from.
It seems they still suffer from the same problem of a shortage if dispatchable capacity. Demand has grown, and the new reliability market hasn’t had time to take full effect.
The main problem was to have the gas supply infrastructure powered by the same grid that failed so that the flow of gas to the power stations also stopped. Blame some dodgy bloke with big ears and a Nobel prize for why the independence from the grid was removed.
That didn’t help, but it was only a secondary problem. It wasn’t the gas supply that caused the cascading trip: rather, the trip helped interrupt the gas supply. It happened while they still had about 5GW of wind, which later fell to 649MW at what would have been peak demand. They were always going to run out of dispatchable capacity.
And the spot price for electricity in Texas has risen by 6000% On Wednesday it was $75 mwh but by Thursday it was $4750!!! Unreliable energy, the gift that just keeps given.
A liitle pedantic, as it doesn’t alter the graph, but as the base line is time, the vertical scale should just be megawatts.
Good morning, we are threatened here on the Isle of Man with windfarms despoiling our pristine hills. In addition to the usual technical and environmental issues, we would like to prove that the influence on CO2 is minimal bearing in mind its heathland and the machines will probably be made in China. Are there any verifiable reports that show that manufacturing, transport and installation offsets any CO2 saving? Many thanks John