The infrastructure failures in Texas are quite literally what happens when you *don’t* pursue a Green New Deal.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 17, 2021
This is not science, this is religion.
All the things she wants are exactly what is causing the disaster in Texas right now, which as of yesterday was over four million people without power.
This issue is both technical and logistical.
Texas has more wind turbines and more wind-generated megawatts than any other state, which under normal circumstances isn’t a problem.
When a “once in a century” winter storm hits Texas the way this storm is hitting Texas, it does a few things:
One: Wind turbines freeze, coated with ice they lose efficiency and stop. They may also be stopped (braked) to keep from failing from rotating under the ice load on the blades. This reduces generation.
Two: Battery storage loses efficiency in the cold, so stored capacity is lost.
Three: Demand skyrockets as people turn on heaters. In an interview I saw with the Governor of Texas, the demand on the grid right now for heat is as high or higher than the demand during the hottest days of the summer for A/C.
Like all catastrophic failures, this isn’t caused by one thing but several things stacking up all at once.
But wait, you say. Texas is an oil and gas state. It is the quintessential oil and gas state. How are they stuck like this?
Money. Money and environmentalists. Federal subsidies boosted power generation for wind but not upgrades to coal and natural gas power generation systems. It’s very hard to convince people to spend money for redundancy, so when a “once in a century” storm comes through that shuts down wind energy, the supply of power from fossil fuels is choked and can’t ramp up to meet demand.
This isn’t unique to Texas. Germany right now is freezing their arsches off because their wind and solar are blanketed in snow. The French, on the other hand, are splitting uranium and are exporting power.
Congressman Dan “McCain Jr.” Crenshaw actually did a half-decent job trying to explain this:
Summary:
A mix of over-subsidized wind energy and under-investment in gas power means we didn’t have enough base load energy for a massive spike in demand.
Also, Texas infrastructure isn’t designed for once-in-a-century freezes.
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) February 16, 2021
#1 – Frozen Wind Turbines:
West Texas had wind turbines that had to be de-iced. The little energy that power regulators planned on being supplied from wind was now gone.
We have almost 31GW of wind installed on the grid, but on Monday we couldn’t even depend on 6 GW working.
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) February 16, 2021
This raises the obvious question: can we ever rely on renewables to power the grid during extreme weather?
No, you need gas or nuclear.
And subsidizing investment in wind has pushed gas and nuclear out.
Now we live with the consequences.
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) February 16, 2021
What happened in Texas is not terribly unlike what happens in California every summer.
A sudden spike in demand and loss of some generating capacity results in a cascade failure in which the grid cannot adjust and fix itself resulting in massive power loss.
In California, it is a high demand for A/C combined with power line going down from wildfires or power lines being shut off due to the threat of fire.
In Texas, it is a high demand for heat combined with frozen wind turbines and choked fossil fuel flow.
In both cases the root cause is that renewables are not scalable – you can’t just crank up a dial and generate more power – and the focus on renewables prevented other more reliable systems from being upgraded and improved to make sure they could meet demand in case of emergencies.
Applying the Green New Deal to this situation only means more frozen wind turbines and more solar panels blanketed in snow and more loss of power when disaster strikes.
The lesson here is that any power grid needs to have 100% capacity (plus a margin of safety) based on robust systems that are less affected by extreme conditions.
Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez’s plan won’t help Texans, it will get more of them killed in the next arctic blast.
“Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez’s plan won’t help Texans, it will get more of them killed in the next arctic blast.”
Isn’t that part of the plan?
I think my *favorite* part of this whole thing is watching people say that this one freak incident proves that Texas doesn’t know what it is doing regarding power infrastructure, and that Texas should adopt more of California’s policies–the state where this literally happens every summer.
In fact, it’s happening in Califorinia right now
If there’s one thing I know I’m going to be downvoted for on GFZ, it’s any clarification on or defense of alternative energy, but here goes:
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-frozen/
There are plenty of other sources for this. AOC being an idiot is no reason for ad hominems against wind power.
I don’t think that article says what you think it says. I don’t even think it says what the author thinks it says.
Wind generation accounts for 7% of the available energy to the Texas grid but is responsible for 35% of the loss in power generation.
That’s an epic failure of renewables.
Maybe the Tribune is right. Maybe not.
For example, what does it mean for pipelines to be “frozen” given that natural gas remains a gas even at sub-arctic temperatures? Perhaps the answer is the one given in Holman Jenkins’s op-ed in today’s WSJ. He points out that pipeline compressors used to run on natural gas, which makes sense. But Federal law (Clean air act) required them to switch to electric power, so that a power failure causes the gas to stop flowing. Guess what fuels the power plants? By and large, natural gas. Oops.
The other issue is that it isn’t just a question of which flavor of electric power source is the biggest; the question is what the system margins are. If you put a significant part of the system capacity on unreliable sources, you can only get away with that if the overall system has plenty of margin. If you have 5% margin and lose just 10%, you have an issue.
It’s not just during a “Once-a-century” freeze.” Renewable power is inherently unreliable. Wind power, even in windy areas, is not steady. The modern high efficiency wind turbines have a fairly narrow range of optimum wind speed. the uncertainty of weather means that if the wind doesn’t blow strong enough you don’t have any power, if the wind blows too hard you have to shutdown the turbines to prevent damage. Maintenance costs and maintenance outage rates for wind are extremely high, due to having precision rotating machinery located outside in a relatively hostile environment.
Even people on our side fall into the trap of referring to “installed capacity” implying that for example Texas has 31GW of wind power available at all times. In fact, even during normal periods, the 31GW is never attainable. It’s been a while since I’ve looked into this, but the useable power delivery from wind turbines was about 50% of installed capacity, and the fundamentals governing that haven’t changed so I expect that the useable capacity hasn’t changed much.
Another issue is reserve power. In the past, most utilities had a reserve capacity of around 10% to quickly be able to replace the power lost if a base-load generator unexpectedly shutdown for whatever reason. Now, due the demands of “Public Utilities Consumer Activists” reserve capacity has been cut to less than 3% in many areas. I think Texas is around 1.7%. AOC’s “Green Raw Deal” will exacerbate the problems everywhere, not just during a “once-in-a-century” storm in Texas.
“Germany right now is freezing their arsches off because their wind and solar are blanketed in snow.”
Haha, no. We are not. Of course our energy grid and our “green” energy networks sucks BUT we don’t freeze just because the “Rotationsspargel” doesn’t spin.
We don’t heat with electricity, we use either long-distance heat , oil or natural gas. Gas covers nearly half of our heating, oil a quarter, long-distance heat an eighth and the rest is everything else.
We are highly gas dependent, both for electricity and heating, but at least we don’t freeze when it’s cold 😀
I’ve even written a blog post about our “energymixture” as it is called.
http://bobtodate.de/?p=49
But it’s in german.
Where’s your gas coming from, though?
Because last I heard, it came with Russian accents.
Mighty brave of you to be dependent on outside sources for heating.
I think it used to come from Holland, but these days mostly from Russia. Good luck with that. Especially because politicians and well-paid ex-politician lobbyists are working hard to increase that communist dependency.
seriously, I want something like this to happen to NYC.
24 hours after the lights go out, that place will start to warm up nicely… as people set fire to everything in sight.
From what I heard they took half a dozen coal plants offline as well. One of the more reasonable explanations was that they take stuff offline for maintenance here in the winter when the load is low.
There’s also been gross incompetence managing the grid. Cycling the power as they’ve done took out whole neighborhoods, as well as the normal damage to lines Ice wreaks. I know old timers whose power has been out since Sunday.
But they appear to be planned neighborhoods that appear to manage their own distribution.
Had my house been damaged by this I’d be lawyering up. I had one fitting freeze and break, but I caught it the second it happened and killed the water.
One thing for sure – I’ll be buying a generator.
Spring storm season is coming. I’ll be buying whatever I need since I can’t count on these fools.
I saw a comment somewhere about power plants being off-line because the cooling water inlets had frozen. That would bother pretty much any thermal plant.
It’s a bit hard to see how this could be real, though. For one thing, the cold snap has only been a few days, and ice doesn’t get very thick all that quickly. Especially not if there’s a significant flow, as there would be at a cooling intake. And how high is the intake? Several feet? It’s not plausible, this side of an ice age, that rivers or lakes in Texas would have several feet of ice on them.
The last time the Ohio River froze enough for people to walk on was 1977. That’s much farther north of Texas, and the Ohio hasn’t frozen to that extent this year.
AOC: The infrastructure failures in Texas are quite literally what happens when you *don’t* pursue a Green New Deal.
There’s a lot to unpack here….
Once again, she has it exactly backwards. The failures in Texas are quite literally what happens when you *push* a “Green New Deal” … to the detriment of reliable, established methods of generating electricity.
She seems to think “renewable” means “unlimited”. In one sense she’s correct — the source is effectively unlimited; the sun won’t stop shining and the wind won’t stop blowing any time soon — but “unlimited over time” is not at all the same as “unlimited on-demand”. The on-demand capacity — IOW, what’s available right now — is extremely limited, which is true for ALL current “green power” technologies.
(And that’s not even getting into the issue of, “We can get ‘X’ GW when conditions are perfect, but conditions are never perfect and the actual output is maybe 50% of that,” which is also true for ALL current “green power” tech.)
And unlike national debt spending, you can’t just borrow un-generated power from the grid now and generate it back later. That’s not how real-world systems work.
If I am not mistaken, the power grid in Texas is completely separate from the rest of the US. We got some heavy hitters with the financing, skills and background to fix this. DC be damned. Build, baby, build
https://www.naturalgasintel.com/no-easy-answers-as-texas-power-grid-natural-gas-market-rocked-by-unprecedented-cold-snap/
It’s a fairly complicated situation all in all. The wind turbines were a very small part of the whole situation. I mean, they’re not great, but they’re not nearly why the whole state is in the situation it’s in now.
I never said it was. My point was taking more carbon/thermal systems off line and replacing the with wind (remember the goal of the GND is total energy generation from renewables) will make things worse, not better.