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Comment by Pulcinella | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I was going to say: > My friends on the right tend to send blame towards green energy. And they have a point! Renewables are temperamental – with too many clouds solar doesn’t do anything, and frozen blades can’t turn wind energy turbines. The impact of the storm is to shift energy supply curves to the left, and the more the grid relies on renewables, the bigger that shift is. The basic problem renewables have had is that it’s really difficult to STORE their energy for future use. If we could create really large energy reservoirs, we could store Texas’ abundant solar and wind energy for a literally-rainy day.

Renewables were literally not the problem and it’s hard to take any kind of advice from this article when it gets the basic facts wrong.

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My understanding is that renewables were one of the problems. Wind makes up just under a quarter of the energy. And, depending on who you ask, they lost half to almost all of the energy from wind. That is a problem when the demand goes up. It wasn't the only problem, but it was definitely part of the problem

Wind and solar are both currently over-producing. Not "lost half to almost all." That's an almost-certainly deliberate misrepresentation based on the fact that winter production is always lower than summer production, and comparing the total peak capacity on the best possible summer days and comparing it to now.

We had projections for both wind and solar for these last few weeks, and both wind and solar OVER-produced, exceeding those projections.

On the other hand, we had projects for coal and natural gas, and both of us failed spectacularly.

So yes, I am concerned about any article that spends time talking about wind and solar, when the ACTUAL problem that caused it to be 41ºF in my living room was natural gas and coal.

Wind capacity changes over time. While the wind turbines were producing less than their theoretical max, they were producing more than ERCOT’s own models expected.

The real issue here is that thermal plants (coal, gas, and nuclear) failed exactly as the 2011 report warned. While wind was producing more than expected, it was never going to produce enough to cover the difference as thermal plants started to shut down.

I'm having a difficult time understanding why the entire article should be dismissed due to your disagreement with the quoted statement.

First, I don't find the quoted statement to be false: (1) Wind turbines/various solar methods have numerous problems beyond that; as do all methods of providing power. (2) Both would be better at providing energy the way we consume it if we had a cheap, reliable method to store large amounts of energy[0].

I don't work in energy, but I follow enough of it to know that these statements are reliable. There are companies looking into various, exotic, methods for storing large amounts of generated electricity so that the "we don't control the fuel" problem of many renewable options is a non-issue. Not all renewables have this problem, hydro can be consistent/reliable, provide large amounts of energy and is cheap. All of these problems have technology solutions waiting to be discovered/applied. It's hard to find anyone who will complain about hydro-electric plant[2] -- electric bills go down and there's less smoke in the air. The same thing is started here with wind/solar. Complainers stop when they actually read their bill. "Oh, it doesn't cost more? ... oh,... well... ~noises in political~"

Was it that the author indicated that the Green Energy Blamers "have a point"? See, that's a nice psychological trick. I suspect you are a big supporter of renewable/environmental politics. I suspect his goal with that statement was to make a point to the blamers. Aside from the first sentence, pointing out an obvious, well-known fact about renewables than any "Green Blamer" has been screaming -- forever -- and baking in a solution[0]. And he's not advocating getting rid of anything/building up the "expensive/easy to turn on/off" technologies.

[0] What you produce has to be used or stored. That's the case with every utility -- water/gas -- things just move, and can get out of hand, a lot faster I gather.

[1] And yes, energy storage on a multi-day scale is science-fiction, AFAIK, presently. This is a hard problem.

[2] Assuming it's designed taking into account whatever new "evil" thing hydro does to the environment that I'm not yet aware of. :)

My disagreement is based on the fact that it was 41ºF in my living room due to failures with coal and natural gas, so any time spent talking about weakness of power-production methods that were exceeding expectations is beyond wasted. It's a distraction from the real issues.

If solar and wind had failed spectacularly, then I'd want to see that. But they didn't. Coal and natural gas did.

So we should be talking about how natural gas and coal failed, not some hypothetical alternate reality where solar and wind under-delivered.

  > So we should be talking about how natural gas and coal failed ...

That's a fair point, though, that wasn't really the point of the writing. It was simply to understand the enormous complexity of the situation from an economic standpoint.

It's also fair that the author might not have been up to date with the latest information. In the early days of the mess, wind was initially suspected to be the main culprit, primarily from the surprise to the general public that wind turbines and ice don't mix[0] and the general sport that northerners have of laughing at the "snow-challenged" when the rare white hell falls from the sky[1].

[0] I live near the thumb in Michigan. We like to take our kids to the wind farms. There are many, many reasons that a given generator will have brakes applied, including "too much wind". People laugh at that stuff, but it's "by design" and is part of a system.

[1] We laugh unfairly when Atlanta gets an inch of snow and more people die in two days than die in an entire winter up here, but it ignores the reality that our local governments stockpile salt/sand and have dozens of trucks/expertise to handle substantially more snow. Put us on roads with no clearance and a bunch of drivers unfamiliar with snow and we'd be just as at risk. Or toss a coastal-state problem like a tidal wave/tsunami, in the state that's laughing and they'd fare about as poorly.

Wind did fail spectularly. It was producing 15% of its installed capacity last night. It's all the way up to 30% now with more favorable conditions. Every other generation source vastly outperformed wind.

Saying that wind exceeded expectations is like saying that your QB with a broken leg exceeded expectations by making it to the bench. You should still be looking for a QB that can play.

If the argument is that wind is nearly useless in the winter by design, then that is all the more reason to promote alternatives. No one freezing right now is going to be comforted by the knowledge that our wind capacity was planned to be unavailable when it's coldest.

Solar is fine, and is a trivial amount of the installed capacity in any case.

There is a big difference between installed capacity and how much is expected for a period of time. For instance, it is not 100% failure that a solar cell outputs no power overnight; that's just the way they work.

There is plenty of wind generation going on in Canada or Sweden; one presumes the "make a wind generation system work in the cold" is a solved engineering task. Those windmills are a little more expensive.

Is this a result of poor planning or is this novel failure? This smells like a failure driven entirely by inappropriate cost optimization.

> This smells like a failure driven entirely by inappropriate cost optimization.

Exactly. Due to the nature of the Texas climate, peak capacity will track summer demand and not account for once-in-a-lifetime freezes. We need proper planning and enforcement to ensure that we can output as much in the winter as we can in the summer. Hopefully it's as straightforward as weather-proofing our existing capacity. As you said, wind generation works fine in much colder climes.

If a significant part of our capacity can't produce in cold weather, it should be phased out in favor of capacity that can. I'd love to see that be Canadian-style windmills, if that turns out to be able to produce consistently in winter (I have some doubt here because of the very low projections for our existing wind output, but perhaps more robust turbines will do much better). If wind turns out not to be able to meet that need sufficiently, then perhaps we should focus some of the subsidies on capacity that can. What we should never do is defend one preferred generation source without regard to whether it can supply what Texas actually needs, which is capacity that can produce consistent output in both summer and winter.

Do you mind pointing me to some reliable links that do highlight the actual problem?

The ArsTechnica article is a decent place to start.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/even-power-disasters...

This is still an on-going event so the “history” is still being written.

Also https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-...

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