Texas sets single-day wind power record | Hacker News Reader

Texas sets single-day wind power record

blogs.scientificamerican.com

88 pointsmatt200056 comments

For those who do not know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection

Texas is the only state that has it's own power grid, owned by the state. The stuff they are working on right now, including massive distributed battery systems, solar, more wind, etc. will be the one of the most advanced renewable systems in the world given the amount of power and consumption.

It's awesome to see how as 'relatively' small grid, operating on their own, can make progress without all the bullshit. (See Nevada...that solar situation is so fucked up.).

I'm actually both shocked and surprised how quickly Texas is transitioning to renewables with their, ahem, political climate, but happy nonetheless!

Warren Buffet should be ashamed of Berkshire Hathaway's role in strongarming the PUC in Nevada in NV Energy's favor.

Except for some pockets around Austin, and some Retail Energy Providers and co-ops, Texas does not have net-metering for distributed solar.

It's true that oil & gas are powerful political interests, but there are others as well. In this case, I don't think it's so much out of a desire to be "green" as out of a desire to develop what's seen as a big potential energy resource. West Texas has a lot of pretty steady wind, so it's seen as a valuable economic resource to develop. Wind energy also has its own state-level political clout and lobbying, because large landowners in West Texas see it as a way of improving monetization of their large holdings of ranchland, and large West Texas landowners are a well-organized interest group. Heck, even small farmers have similar hopes of increasing their income by renting out turbine rights, which adds to the political pressure to enable wind development.

Warren Buffet should be ashamed of Berkshire Hathaway's role in a lot of things.

Texas is a great example of what happens in an almost uncontrolled free market. With renewables becoming far cheaper, it makes sense that markets that work off basic free market economics will adopt them. Texas is pragmatic that way and often provides a very simple model for what it takes to get things adopted without strong regulations forcing the matter.

It's a weird state only insomuch that it isn't like everywhere else and is still fairly successful as a territory.

I'm not sure I'd describe it as an "almost uncontrolled free market", probably something closer to a "state-organized market". There are definitely market mechanisms at work in the Texas energy sector, but also quite a bit of central planning, especially on infrastructure, and especially with wind power. The state has been heavily involved in building out transmission lines to make wind turbine construction in remote areas more attractive, because building a wind turbine nowhere near major transmission lines is obviously not economical, and there are big coordination and right-of-way problems getting all the people who hold land and might want to build turbines to figure out, purely in the private sector, how to get together to finance and build transmission lines.

The specific solution Texas has used is to create something called "Competitive Renewable Energy Zones" (CREZs), where the state identifies promising areas and invests heavily in infrastructure to try to jumpstart production, with a plan of recovering the infrastructure spending from tax on that production (once it materializes). About $7 billion in tax money has been spent on that project so far, so the central-planning part of the story isn't exactly small change. Not sure where to link for a good overview, but this article has some information: http://www.texastribune.org/2013/10/14/7-billion-crez-projec...

Before we get too voluntary here, let's remember that wind power was developed through heavy subsidies from many governments over the years.

That's kind of the point. The heavy subsidies brought renewables into competition with traditional energy markets in Texas, and voila, Texans (a state not normally associated with renewables) started buying them up.

One thing that's not discussed too frequently about renewables is that the operating costs are less variable than fossil fuel based systems. You have a pretty good idea what the costs are going to be over the lifetime of an installation and this helps with planning and deployment. Fossil fuel prices are variable enough over 20 years that you can't plan more than a few months out, or you need to have enough cash reserves in place to weather out price spikes.

Why should ratepayers subsidize people who put solar panels on their homes? What is wrong with paying people the wholesale rate for the electricity they generate?

This has nothing to do with Texas being forward thinking, but more with the huge subsidies dealing with wind power in the US. Private companies are building turbines and farms all over as Washington is fronting much of the bill for awhile. This is all about profit. It just so happens we get something good out of it, and yes ERCOT has some great engineers.

Here is an interesting insight on this issue.

http://apps.texastribune.org/perry-legacy/energy/

It's not so much Washington fronting the bill as making an investment. And the cumulative effect of those investments globally is working. LCOE of wind is now $83/megawatt hour compared to $82 for natural gas(1).

1 - http://fortune.com/2015/10/06/wind-cheap-coal-gas/

You have to be careful comparing the cost of wind to the cost of nat gas and other reliable sources of generation. You can't count on wind. That makes it much less valuable than natural gas. But don't take my word for it, here is the Energy Information Adminstration making that point. https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm

This wind build out really is driven by subsidies such as the wind production tax credit. The credit is large enough that wind producers can pay the electric grid to take their electricity and still make money.

Actually, you can count on wind. You can use weather prediction to know when it can and can't be there.

I heard the following quote recently, "I know what the price of fuel for wind will be for the next 20 years. I know what the price of natural gas was yesterday."

To us, it sounds like wind is intermittent. But that's fine; the wind is always blowing and the sun always shining somewhere (its transmission that needs to catch up). Non-renewable fuel coasts will always be unpredictable.

So nobody in the bay area that drives a Nissan leaf is forward thinking then either because they are heavily subsidized. Am I correct in understanding your reasoning?

Just because something has a subsidy doesn't mean the supporters are automatically profit hungry morons.

Well if energy companies can make profit they cant run sustainably; which means others dependent on them cant grow either. Since when do people on HN started thinking of profit as opposite of "forward thinking" is beyond me.

Of course I wont count government subsidies as profit because after all the poor Americans who end up paying tax aren't paying for that energy willingly. Arguments for massive government subsidies such as $8K for rich people's car Tesla is that this might speed up the economy of scale for these businesses and that it will eventually be affordable for ordinary people. ( Of course also the dubious claim that this all might help reduce some environmental problems.)

I am worried that specific government subsidies for say Wind or Solar might be hurting some innovation in radically different directions.

Not strictly related to wind power in Texas, but reminded me how at the same time in Finland a few authorities recommended consumers to actually limit their use of eletricity "for the common good".

The main cause was increase in wind power capacity in the last few years (as there was practically no wind that day), coupled with very low temperatures and problems with buying electricity from Russia.

It's kinda scary how a developed, modern country is suddenly close to rationing the use of electricity.

You don't have to limit your power "for the common good" (not that there's anything wrong with that), but then you have blackouts unless you're going to subsidize building out my generation capacity.

It amazes me how well the stuff works most of the time, considering that it's a ridiculously just-in-time system where production must match consumption on a second-by-second basis. No other industry is like this. I think we badly need good storage solutions to decouple the two sides.

The lack of storage isn't a problem when you are using reliable sources of generation such as nukes, coal, nat gas, and hydro. He problem is integrating wind and solar into a system that is designed for reliable generation.

It's still a problem, because it means you need to size generating capacity to match peak demand, not average demand. It's a problem that can be (and is) solved, but the solution is expensive, and when you misjudge the peak you get brownouts or blackouts.

The right way to do deal with this is to have variable, minute by minute pricing. Fixed prices don't make much sense when the supply varies dramatically.

You can buy electricity with pricing like that in Finland, it's generally cheaper if you're using significant amounts of electricity. (Although I'm not completely sure if it's minute by minute or hourly rates).

I find it interesting how big of a no-go that idea still is. Countries seem to be prepared to pay a very high price instead.

Doesn't seem much worse than where I am now.

California has been recommending people to limit use of water for more than a year, and water is arguably a more basic necessity than electricity.

According to WP Finland produces just 1.4% of electricity with wind power on average, pretty surprising if they managed to still get into trouble with that.

I drove from Austin to Denver once. From Abilene to Texline it's pretty much nothing but wind turbines...and that is a very long drive. It's pretty cool that such an oil-driven state has a large amount of renewable energy.

I used to drive from my hometown around Austin to Lubbock for school. The wide open country pocked with turbines was my favorite part of the six hour drive.

You can actually see it. Driving country (state) highways, from ,say, just west of Ft Worth, up to the border, hundreds of turbines. There's also a factory in between Ft Worth and Denton where, I believe, some pieces of the turbines are built and (I know) the larger section of the turbines are assembled. It makes sense as well, especially to the west, where wind is a near constant and there is nothing. Scrub from the central hill country to the border with New Mexico.

That is one of the reasons why Facebook Data Center is in Ft.Worth, easier access to Wind power.

Didn't know that and I tend to follow these things pretty close. Born and partially raised in DFW. Thanks for the reply.

Wind power.. and tens of millions in tax credits.. It's crazy how much money localities are dishing out to get a few dozen jobs. I get the competitive aspect (if we don't, someone else will) but forum shopping is gross in just about every manifestation.

The charts further down the page give one a more realistic sense of how much wind contributes as a whole. Natural gas dominates with 48% of power generated while wind is around 12%. It's tough to beat heat sources driving turbines.

I wonder if a growing industry will ever again set a single day power generation record. Seems rather likely.

It might be more interesting to report when a new record is not set on the expected schedule.

Its good to hear this from TX. I want to see wind installations grown, given how affordable land is.

In Denmark, it was 42% for all of 2015; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Denmark

That's 42% of electricity only, though.

In 2013 (the last year for which the table in Wikipedia has data) they consumed ~30 TWh of electricity --- but 200 TWh of fossil fuels. This'll be heating and transport.

Heating and transport always dominates energy consumption. Yes, generating that much electricity via renewables is a very good thing. But electricity is just a small slice of a much larger pie.

How much of a dent it will make remains to be seen, but Denmark does have an active plan to shift away from fossil fuels for heating. Installation of new oil and natural-gas furnaces was recently banned, partly as part of the push away from fossil fuels, and partly because of fears of Russian dominance over gas supplies. In urban areas the goal is to get everyone on the district-heating grid, which is fueled mostly by a mix of trash incinerators and cogeneration with electric power plants. There's a medium-term plan to opportunistically produce more of the heat from excess wind power, with hopes that doing so will produce a "win-win" for electric-grid management by giving grid managers an easy place to dump energy to smooth out short-term variations in electric production.

Transport is another story. Lots of fossil fuels there, and probably not going away soon.

Wind gets even better going northward from the Texas panhandle up to Canada. But there's no big load anywhere near there.

What, ahem, political climate would that be?

Y'all think this state is full of idiots. Y'all are only half-wrong, and it's still probably better than your state.

I live in Texas and I'm as surprised as the parent. It's not that I think the state is "full of idiots" as you say, but because the oil and gas industry has the state by the balls.

edit: judging by the downvotes, apparently this is a controversial statement. weird.

I don't think you deserve downvotes for this comment.

But surly you'd be aware this is what the rest of the world thinks?

The first thing the world thinks of when they think of Texas is racist, backwards, ultra religious people.

I'm surprised you'd be surprised of this?

People tend to be surprised when confronted with stereotypes about themselves, especially when those stereotypes are untrue.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10960114 and marked it off-topic.

It's all those refried beans and smoked meats...

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