Nobody. Wind turbines blades can be locked to prevent damage in very high winds [1]. Many offshore turbines are already designed to withstand very high winds (like in the North Sea) and still operate.
Practically speaking a few solar panels might be damaged in a hurricane but not likely the entire array. The damaged panels can be easily replaced.
1. https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/wind-turbines-extreme-w...
So many low intelligence likely astroturfing comments in this thread.
Thing is, you know wind solar is winning the war because irrational AstroTurfing is all that can be parroted in response.
About 1/3 of the electricity consumed in the state as I write this is being generated by renewables. That's with mild temperatures and lower than average wind generation. On a day like today with more typical winds it would probably be about half from renewables.
http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...
Power lines are more likely to be a single point of failure, but that's the same for all power distribution.
The question of "what fuel do I want for power tools after a natural disaster" is entirely distinct from "what mix of sources should we use to power the grid?" Babelthuap is deliberately muddying the water here.
And, yeah, Babel, I live in Houston, and except for college have spent all of my 53 years within an hour or so drive of the gulf coast. I know about hurricanes, even big ones. That's a dumb objection to including renewable energy in a grid plan.
Of course it will.
You might want to check on data before making smug and condescending false assertions.
I'm for solar and wind but fossil fuels are still needed as a backup plan (another basket of eggs). Gotta have it. I survived the hard freeze in Houston with no electrical power with stored gasoline and a couple of generators for 5 days no problem. I just fueled up the other day. With additives the fuels last several years. Good to go for a freeze or a major storm for a couple weeks.
It is more accurate to say that the real problem was the failure of ERCOT & etc to winterize any part of the grid, which led to failures of transmission and/or generation across the board, for every source type.
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/02/15/texas-power-grid-win...
Gas is the biggest source of power in Texas. While all power sources were poorly winterized, the failure to prepare the fossil fuel infrastructure hurt the most because gas provides more power than wind or solar in the Texas grid.
And, of course, almost NOTHING has been done about this failure despite how close the state came to a weeks-long power grid failure, and virtual no one has been held responsible.
In parts of the country where we plan for cold weather, our natural gas flows and our wind turbines spin in the winter.
And for people or small communities with battery storage on their solar, they are back online before everyone else. Solar panels also work absolutely great in freezes, without requiring due supply.
And since a grid built on renewables has far more battery storage on it, and is used to shifting power sources frequently due to the intermittency of renewables, a renewable grid will have fewer single points of failure and be more resilient when there are large weather events that take out large generators.
McMurdo station in freakin Antarctica uses wind turbines. They run just fine in the cold. Texas utilities just didn't want to pay for proper weather proofing.
Backups are backups. They can be fossil fuel based, it's fine and I don't know who is arguing that it's not ok.
We can't optimize for natural disasters at the expense of all the other times there isn't a natural disaster.
[1] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/typ...
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/02/us/solar-babcock-ranch-florid...
Wind farms are designed to survive hurricanes anyway. See https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-31/harvey-pu...
There's some evidence that large off-shore wind farms reduce the severity of hurricanes too:
> A large array of offshore wind farms can have significant impacts on precipitation during a hurricane. This claim is proven through a series of simulation cases, with different layout configurations, inter-turbine spacings, and wind farm parameterizations. Precipitation is found to be reduced inland and increased offshore in all the wind farm simulations. However, the amount of precipitation reduction varies in the different cases. The location of the wind farm also matters.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad245#...
This is completely untrue. Even outside the exclusion areas there are signs of the damage the disaster has caused.
The Japanese government has raised the acceptable radiation limit for people living in the area from 1 to 20 milliSieverts per year. No-where else is this amount considered acceptable.
Even with this increase it's still dramatically below the measured amounts, which is up to 0.04 microSieverts per hour.
> doctors have left the area because the government refuses to reimburse them when they list radiation sickness as the cause for nose bleeds, spontaneous abortions, and other ailments resulting from ionizing radiation. (The only acceptable diagnoses are so-called “radiophobia,” nervousness, and stress.) The spike in thyroid cancer among children in Fukushima is dismissed as a survey error, produced by examining too many children.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/03/fukushima-today-im-glad-that...
are there storms that cover the entire US at the same time?
or are there no interconnecting power cables between wind/ solar farms from different states? (ie other states farms still continue to function whilst one area is not)
Of course, that means when there is a natural disaster in Texas (with the existing, largely-fossil-fuel-powered grid!), they...can't really get help from anyone else. (My hazy understanding is that there are a few limited-duty linkages that can be activated, or something, but it's woefully inadequate to serve the whole state.)
IIRC, the last time this happened, the only parts of Texas that were still getting power were a few that had wind & solar plants going. Because those were still operating just fine.
Just one more thing for ERCOT to add to their todo list after they shut down the gas power plants.
But on a serious note, this is the most diverse the grid has ever been.
are you trying to do some sort of propaganda thing implying green energy is fragile?
fwiw - they're not, they're designed to a seriously stronge even in hurrican weather, but never let your personal opinions get in the way of your misinformation or story