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Comment by kodah | Hacker News Reader

No, because that's exactly what happened in Texas during their winter storm crisis.

That was only part of the Texas issue. Many Nat Gas plants were also offline. For nearly the whole time Nat Gas outages were 2x wind outages according to ERCOT.

Here is their own report: https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2021/04/28/ERCOT_Winter_Sto...

Correct, they were, which reinforces the point.

Buuuut... the problem is that they didn't weather proof their system even though they were informend about the problems this could cause in winter storm scenarios.

The weatherproofed windpower plants as well als gas plants function very well in Germany, Norway, etc. even though it is often a lot colder.

Do weatherproofed wind turbines consume electricity? A common complaint around here is that they need to keep the blades heated to avoid frost and ice buildup, even when the wind is not blowing (we do have a lot of still days in winter).

In bad conditions, if that is still the case, having wind turbines connected to the grid might be worse than having none.

In bad conditions this is the case foe every power plant.

The good thing is, that wind turbines are highly distributed, so the chance for every single one being in bad conditions is slim.

This is factually incorrect. The winter issue in Texas was almost exclusively lack of winterization of thermal plants as well as a market setup that was unable to predict and react to the weather. Wind generated more electricity during the event than what was committed in the market, and as such had no negative influence.

This is factually incorrect. Winterization is about half of the issues faced. Page 4 highlights the causes pretty well.

https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2021/04/28/ERCOT_Winter_Sto...

Page 16 is quite clear: the vast majority of missing generation capacity was natural gas. The lost wind capacity was comparable to lost coal capacity. Whether the cause is categorized as equipment failure, weather, or fuel availability, the most affected generation category was natural gas.

The point of my comment was that the supply chain issue was significant, sorenbs is saying winterization is the exclusive cause. The ERCOT report doesn't support what they had to say. Winterization accounts for ~12-15 GW while supply chain is responsible for ~5-8 GW. (Page 23-25)

The comment I originally responded to said:

> Isn't it a bit naive to assume the planers of these expansions didn't at one point or another had that exact thought themselves?

The answer is no, it is not naive to assume that they didn't think about these things, because even in a state like Texas where energy is king it was not fully thought out.

Edit:

Also to be clear, I'm not ragging on Texas. I love the people of Texas and I miss being there, but I think the state has some important lessons to pay attention to and learn from.

What isn’t fully thought out?

The categories in the report are weather related, equipment failure, and fuel supply issues. These are considered in the report mutually exclusive. But they aren’t, it is just a useful categorization.

You are simply wrong to think that they don’t consider intermittent resources as part of their planning. Wind stops blowing all the time, this is known. The fact that many natural gas generators iced over, fuel was too expensive, fuel wasn’t available, or they couldn’t maintain their equipment when needed was the principal source of lost capacity.

ERCOT sets the price of electricity. There is no 'market' in the traditional sense, unless you count a government price fixing scheme as a market.

In this case the price was set at the absolute maximum as allowed by the system. If the 'market' couldn't react to that absolute maximum price then the market cannot be the problem at hand.

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