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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 p

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.

edbob 6y ago
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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cduzz 6y ago
  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.
  - edbob 6y ago
    > 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.
mdip 6y ago
> 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.

edbob 6y ago

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.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cduzz 6y ago
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.
- edbob 6y ago
  > 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.

mdip 6y ago

> 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.