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Comment by kasey_junk | Hacker News Reader

The question this leaves me with is does Texas rely more heavily on natural gas power due to their usage of wind/solar power sources?

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Texas relies heavily on natural gas power because the price of natural gas went very low in the past decade [1], and Texas has historically favored low average electricity prices over other electrical system attributes. Modern gas generating plants are cheaper to build and cheaper to run than modern coal plants. Coal-generated electricity used to dominate over natural gas in the US and Texas because coal was so much cheaper as a fuel that it was worth building more expensive, maintenance-intensive plants to use it. But that's no longer the case. Every coal plant in the continental US is a legacy plant whose construction started before natural gas prices reached the low levels of recent years.

The same price forces caused Texas to install a lot of wind and (more recently) solar. The federal production tax credit makes wind-generated electricity very cheap for Texans, if somewhat less cheap for all Americans.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44337

There are other historical factors for methane utilization in TX.

By the early 1970s, the artificially low price set by the federal government had created a shortage, but only of interstate gas. Gas consumed within the state where it was produced was plentiful, but more expensive

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

Nuclear can perform fine even in very cold weather, but one of Texas's reactors went offline due to freezing water:

https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/counties/matagorda_county/n...

So it's not clear that relying on other electricity sources would have been better, if those other sources also failed to plan for operating in prolonged cold weather.

The US tests many of it's reactors in Idaho Falls, Idaho (fairly cold).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_National_Laboratory#Nucl...

Presumably nat gas and coal can perform fine in cold weather as they are major sources of electricity in northern climes that get much worse weather much more often.

I was more commenting on the gap in the articles logic that suggested wind/solar was off the hook because nat gas went down worse. I really don’t know the systems well enough to fill that gap on my own.

Russia operates this thing in an area that gets to -50C. It's not like it's not doable.

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

It has been shut down and replaced by a floating nuclear power barge that is docked near the coast - one advantage is that the sea will never freeze bar some Hollywood climate apocalypse.

Wind can perform fine in cold weather too. Wind actually outperformed what it was projected to, Coal and Natural gas plants did not meet their design goals.

But this isn't about wind vs. coal vs. gas, it was about weatherized vs. not weatherized.

ERCOT's current output page[0] shows 3643 MW of Total Wind Output, but total installed capacity is over 25000 MW [1]. Current wind output is less than 7% of installed capacity. ERCOT was previously able to generate 17541 MW of wind power[2] in February 2018, when it had only 21190 MW of wind capacity.

PVGR Output (solar) is currently 0 MW, with over 3000 MW of installed capacity. That's 0%.

Nuclear is apparently doing best, outputting 75% capacity (with a capacity of around 5000 MW). I'm not sure on the exact numbers for coal, gas, etc., but they are clearly supplying the bulk of the 49089 MW demand.

> Wind actually outperformed what it was projected to

If you read the full quote from the article, this is so heavily qualified that it seems designed to be quoted out-of-context. As in, they couldn't say that wind generation performed well in any meaningful sense without outright lying, so they came up with this quotable take instead, knowing that the extremely heavy qualification would not make it into the quotations. If I project wind power to generate 5% of its capacity, and it actually generates 10%, I can say that wind power "exceeded expectations" in exactly the way the fact "checkers" mean it. But this ignores the fact that most of the wind capacity failed to produce anything, which is what people actually care about.

If the projections had been made a month ahead of time, then "exceeding projections" might have some useful meaning. But the projections referred to are only made 24 hours in advance, meaning that the expectations being exceeded were incredibly low and easy to "exceed". I'm sure ERCOT does projections more than 24 hours in advance as well. Why doesn't PolitiFact reference those, or compare this February's output to previous Februarys, or do anything other than cherry-pick a single set of numbers that just so happens to support their political agenda?

> But this isn't about wind vs. coal vs. gas, it was about weatherized vs. not weatherized.

This seems to be spot on. Many of the issues could have been avoided if the systems had been built to sustain cold weather.

[0] http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi... [1] http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/219848/Capacity_Chang... [2] http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/144926/ERCOT_Quick_Fa...

I made a silly mistake: Current wind output was below 15% of installed capacity, not 7%. It's picked up a bit now, and is about 21%. Still far, far below nuclear and fossil generation.

Consider developing a plan for the removal of dead fish at plant’s intake structure in case low lake temperatures cause massive fish kill.

From ERCOT’s winter weather best practices:

http://www.ercot.com/content/meetings/other/keydocs/2011/201...

Yes typically Gas generation are used in combination with wind power as their up and down cycle are fast compared to other sources. Secondly, Texas is overflowing with natural gas due to fracking.

Maybe, but only in a sense that doesn't really mesh with the right wing criticism. The adoption of wind and solar isn't because it is green, it's because it is cheaper. And then natural gas is the cheapest make up for when those fall short (or really, it's profitable to build capacity that can come online when energy prices rise).

In any case, the current generation mix isn't particularly dependent on wind/solar (a couple percent of predicted winter generation).

http://www.ercot.com/news/releases/show/216844

I guess my main point is that this article doesn’t do a good job of arguing one way or another for _weather adjusted_ results for energy production. Effectively all of the energy sources in Texas were impacted by this weather event.

The article takes one position (weakly) that renewables weren’t to blame. The Texas governor for instance has taken a very strong position that renewables are to blame. It seems likely that the real answer is between (and on the side of this articles position) these points. But to just arbitrarily judge based on what solar did vs “expectations” compared to what nat gas did, ignores the idea that solar demands more nat gas than other energy sources.

I’m good with the answer “we’d have adopted solar/wind/nat gas mix in the same proportion given the same risk modeling we had for this sort of event in comparison to coal/nat gas/etc”

But that’s not what the article actually argues.

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