U.S. Midwest in danger of rotating power blackouts this summer
reuters.com
reuters.com
And the cost is eventually that area becomes uninhabitable without AC in the summer.
This seems to show that that is not the case?
Did anyone claim this?
Not random people from the internet, wow. I challenge anyone to find an opinion that has never been shared by some rando on the web.
Are you from Texas? I’m sorry that people on Reddit are being mean.
ERCOT is one of the most corrupt businesses in the state, and given what we've seen from the oil companies, and what we've seen with multiple different school shootings in the state, that's saying a hell of a lot.
Since that is intermittent, they also require lots of gas powered generators.
Since there is only so much money a utility can spend at a time, they have to make choices. They chose to build out wind power instead of hardening other infrastructure.
When the super cold weather hit, the windmills stopped functioning, and then shortly thereafter, the gas peakers stopped because they had not been cold hardened. The grid collapsed.
If you want reliable power, and also want to change to new types of power sources, then you need to actually spend at least double during the transition time, but that is going to be impossible to sell to the politicos, so they try to do it on the cheap instead.
It doesn't help when people clain that wind or solar is magically cheaper, without considering all of factors. These sources of power are inherently unreliable/intermittent, so they need to be supplemented with gas peaker plants or batteries of some sort - neither of which are practical from an economic point of view.
Private companies, especially including T. Boone Pickens, built out a lot of windmills in West Texas. That's true. But it wasn't ERCOT or the other energy companies building them out. It was private investors that wanted to take advantage of the pricing system built by ERCOT, because they felt they could build and operate windmills much cheaper than what they could charge for the electricity that was generated, and therefore they could keep an even larger amount of profit as a result.
During "Ice-mageddon", the windmills did really well. They produced way more power, even during those frigid weather conditions, than was expected. Most of them were already reasonably well winterized, and therefore were less affected.
What failed were the natural gas peaker plants. Many of them had not been properly winterized, so they froze up. Lots of the suppliers of natural gas also had not properly winterized, and so they froze up.
And then the power companies screwed up even further, because when they were trying to find businesses that they could shut off to reserve power for the critical businesses that still needed it, they didn't realize that some of the natural gas providers for the gas peaker plants were in the group of businesses that they were cutting off power to. So, some gas providers that didn't freeze up and could have provided gas to their peaker plant customers were unable to do so, because they didn't have any power to operate their systems.
This was further worsened by the fact that ERCOT chose not to operate the grid ties at their full capacity. There's not much power we could have imported from the neighbor grid, but we sure as hell could have imported a lot more than we did. And out west around El Paso, they actually disconnected from the ERCOT grid and operated through their local grid ties.
Don't let the GOP lie through their teeth and claim that it was the renewable systems that failed here. The windmills generated considerably more power than the weather conditions said they would be able to do. The solar plants also contributed as much as the weather permitted.
It was the natural gas power plants that froze and failed. But most importantly, it was ERCOT who failed to adequately ensure that all the natural gas power plans and their gas suppliers had actually been properly winterized, including local power generation systems to operate in the event that incoming power from the grid got turned off.
Grid ties have finite capacity. They are not magic, infinite energy pipes.
Interstate AC grid ties subject the grids to federal regulations, which are designed to reduce the risk for residential customers much more than Texas regulations. They are not magic, instantaneous solutions to avoid all possible problems.