No. Most of the missing production was not wind, and several nukes went out (unclear whether that was because the grid was dying though).
What would have helped was proper standards (avoiding emergency being much of the reason why Texas still has its own grid) and properly winterising.
The wind thing is just a bullshit excuse, the vast majority of the missing generation is in fossil power plants. Even with half the turbines frozen over (which still has to do with Texas’ lack of proper winterization, those things work fine in Canada, Washington State, Montana, etc…) wind performed above expectations for the period.
If almost all of those systems are electric (because they are simple and cheap to install and don't get a ton of use), you get a lot of constant demand for electricity. Smart load-shedding (to dump large 240VAC loads in rotation) would allow the grid to survive these periods, while keeping houses livable but chilly.
I agree the wind excuse is (almost entirely) BS. Some amount of production is offline all the time, at least enough that you have to design for that.
Also people miss how big the TX grid is. FL and PA are the #2 and #3 power generation states. TX produces as much as both added together.
https://www.ozarksfirst.com/local-news/local-news-local-news...
Considering it’s more energy efficient to cool with Air Conditioning on the hottest summer days than it is to heat with electricity in the winter, it’s no wonder the grid collapsed when the region was below freezing for several days and some generating capacity was lost.
What kinda of air conditioners beat that for efficiency? I don't think we covered those in heat engines
We commonly cool from 100 to 70F, or 30 degrees.
Yesterday we were warming from 0 to 65, or a 65 degrees delta.
All of them beat resistance electric.
if you have a contingency plan for winter storms, then it makes sense to skip the winterization. but it appears their plan for a winter storm was just to fail.
It doesn’t mean you design the grid to only sustain the loads 99 percent of the time. This is going to turn out to be a grid implementation problem, not an insulation or a renewables problem.
Texas’ electric mix is 75% thermal, and that’s what shat the bed, at peak 34GWe of thermal was offline. Even if wind actually accounted for 6GW missing dieting the entire event it would have accounted for a small minority of the missing production.
And more specifically Texas gas is 66% of expected winter capacity. That’s also where most of the outages are.
I think a really good question to ask: Why was there missing generation in the LNG and other fossil fuel plants? Was it because they all froze over at the same time, or was it because the price of LNG went to the moon on Sunday night? Was this price increase caused by natural supply-demand mechanics, or was there an artificial component as well?
The way I see this - LNG generation providers shutdown to avoid incredibly expensive fuel costs, which they were unable to pass onto the customer. PUCT did make a change last night to try and alleviate this market model issue. Fundamentally, the whole thing is broken. I was looking for some historical precedent for all of this, and you would probably not be surprised to know this has happened before and would certainly not be surprised to find out which company was involved:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%9301_California_ele...
Now, I am not alleging that the current situation has any sort of malicious or criminal element, but there are some direct quotes from sources in that above article that trouble me as a Houstonian going through this exact kind of hell right now:
A number of years ago I was helping a relative attempt to restart one of these wells/dewatering units because it froze in at somewhere between 10-15F. And that was the next day when the temps had warmed up to around 25.
It's been far colder than that in the last two days so these units are staying frozen and its icy so techs cant get to them easy. I've not seen wells in colder climates, I guess they equip them so they dont freeze.
In the 2011 cold snap, the problem was all about frozen lines like the pressure sensing line that caused a problem yesterday for the nuclear reactor. Likely similar things are causing problems for natural gas.
The answer is weatherization of all these sources. Wind turbines work great in other settings with icing wind, you just have to have the hardware for it. Just like you have to have the hardware to keep your pressure sensing lines from freezing.
We are likely to experince more events like this before a single nuclear plant could be built. And the idea of building 30GW of new nuclear, the amount of gas/coal/nuclear that was lost, is so daunting that not even China is trying to build that much nuclear, and they're pretty much the best at doing it of anyone out there.
Honestly, building 60GW more of wind and solar, and 10GW/40GWh of storage would be a lot easier and cheaper than building 30GW of nuclear. Solar delivered an extra GW when it wasn't expected, wind dropped 4GW from what was expected, and gas/coal/nuclear dropped 27GW.
As far as I can tell we still don't have reasonable grid-scale power storage and until we do increasing the ratio of intermittent generation capacity (wind, solar) to non-intermittent generation (hydro/gas/coal/nuclear) will increase the probability of not being able to meet demand at times (all other things remaining unchanged).
These all complement each other, not sure why you pulled out only wind from that.
We do have reasonable grid-scale power storage, last year there were 17GW of batteries in the interconnection queue for ERCOT alone, from independent investors. The major holdup from this happening, say, 5 years ago, were ERCOT regulations that made it hard to be both a generator and a consumer on the grid. But there are huge arbitrage opportunities on ERCOT because of the huge price swings, which make it a perfect place for batteries. Other energy markets, like PJM, which have capacity markets in addition to energy markets, will also see huge amounts of batteries installed since FERC order 841 forced all grid operators to allow batteries to compete.
Other regulated utilities will only install batteries when they are forced to by their regulators. As a money-saving device, it's generally bad for utilities' profits, and it also requires them to learn something new. Far more profitable to rate-base unnecessary transmission or another natural gas plant that will never be fully used.
I wasn't trying to call out wind. I just should have said "intermittent'
17GW seems like a strange unit for storage. That should be GWh I think. So my question would be for the demand that exists right now in Texas, how long would those batteries been successful in providing power to delay the rolling blackouts?
My understanding is that batteries are mainly used in grids to react to short term demand changes and not to continuously feed energy into the grid.
Totally willing to be educated on this though. I'm not an expert.
At least part of the problem here seems to be the fact that the NG plants can't start due to lack of gas because the supply is frozen.
The other problem is of course that backing up wind with NG means that its not actually "green" anymore. Its reduced the carbon footprint, but at the growth rates in TX its only slowed the increase in CO2 output, not decreased it.
https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/
Texas is experiencing the interchange first because it's one off one of the few places where independent operators can connect and undercut those who have made bad long term capital investments.
Right now, there's more and more people thinking they can make money with batteries, and fewer and fewer people thinking that gas can make money on the grid.
Which, if we are to believe the hypothesis that markets make good capital allocations decisions, says that they future of the grid is battery backup, and no more gas backup.
This is a process of transition, so pointing at the current amount and saying "that's not enough" is going to be obvious.
So why aren't you asking "maybe having more nuclear instead of natural gas would have helped?"
Since nuclear uses water, which freezes, the reason why the gas plants were knocked out, maybe the problem isn't the power source itself but the lack of weatherization?!
I suspect that the water involved in the steam generation (heavy water or otherwise) wouldn't freeze since it's inside/near the core, and constantly temperature regulated.
The water used for cooling would go through heat exchanging and would also not freeze, especially if it's underground, or deep in a lake somewhere.
Water related to the main cycle of the plant? Or something non-essential like the toilets, or some valve froze shut because water froze on the outside of it?
I had trouble finding articles detailing how the nuclear plant was brought down, but then I found this:
> On Monday, Feb. 15, 2021, at 0537, an automatic reactor trip occurred at South Texas Project in Unit 1. The trip resulted from a loss of feedwater attributed to a cold weather-related failure of a pressure sensing lines to the feedwater pumps, causing a false signal, which in turn, caused the feedwater pump to trip. This event occurred in the secondary side of the plant (non-nuclear part of the unit). The reactor trip was a result of the feedwater pump trips. The primary side of the plant (nuclear side) is safe and secured. […] We evaluated Unit 2 and have confirmed that we do not have the same issues that caused the feedwater pump trips in Unit 1.
and subsequently, an answer to my question of 'how':
> Some people have wondered how “pressure sensing lines” for a feed water pump could have been affected by cold outside air temperatures. There are no turbine halls at STP, both of steam turbines are out in the open air. I’m sure there is a design reason for this choice, but it isn’t apparent.
(from https://atomicinsights.com/south-texas-project-unit-1-trippe...)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/frozen-wi...
I imagine the person in the article is griping about the downward pressure wind and solar can put on energy prices (so maybe you lose money operating a traditional plant, but less money than you'd lose by walking away; operating at net that doesn't cover the up front investment).
There are plenty of sites that welcome new nuclear, usually any existing nuclear site would welcome more as its an economic engine for towns. The issue is it's just really poor and overly complicated technology, requiring miles of precision welds, the failure of any of which could cause big problems, and which must last for 50 years. It shouldn't be a surprise that this is hard to do well.
See Harry Reid vs Yucca Mountain
Nuclear energy is insanely efficient from a "materials that need to move around" perspective. That's why not having long term storage and just cobbling together short term on-site storage hasn't caused a crisis. The maintenance department at a plant generates more waste by volume.
Finding the space isn't the issue. Anywhere we could fit a couple container ships is fair game if you're looking for a national level solution. Politics is the problem. People are more scared of "magical glowing toxic waste" than normal toxic waste for whatever reason.
The economics of building a traditional nuclear plant right now don't work out: they are incredibly expensive to build and tear down, take a decade to plan and another decade to build. In the time until a new nuclear plant is built and has paid back the investment you could have built a wind park, made back the investment, made a profit, decommissioned it, built a new one and made back the investment for that one.
Maybe small-scale nuclear will help somewhat, but properly weather proofed wind and gas would work just fine too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_pow...
I think these kinds of applications have a lot of potential, and are the future of nuclear energy production. But using these kinds of small reactors outside the military (or Russian icebreakers) is an idea that only recently gained traction (at least since it was originally abandoned around the 60s).