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> What is the minimum capacity that renewables are guaranteed to provide? Zero... same as any other technology. ie: Texas lost around 25GW of needed NatGas cap

> What is the minimum capacity that renewables are guaranteed to provide? Zero... same as any other technology. ie: Texas lost around 25GW of needed NatGas capacity in Feb 2021, not to mention the failed coal, wind, and nuclear that also occurred during that event. (Texas had similar shortages in 2011 and 1989.) > That's the number that matters. You need to take a portfolio view when thinking about energy supply issues... reality is both your number and their number matter. What 97% does mean, is less consumption of two finite resources, namely the ability of the atmosphere to absorb carbon and the amount of carbon we have available to us to burn. Of course, it also means there's a need to either scale the rest of the generation in the ISO down to 3% or export the excess to a neighboring market. Larger base load plants, particularly nuclear, are very bad at lowering their output (Which is why sometimes wholesale electricity prices are negative. These are generators willing to pay people to take their power so they don't have to shut down or otherwise reduce output.)

tomohawk 4y ago
So we can't make engineering calculations because black swan events throw all that out the window? That doesn't seem like a winning strategy. Power grids require serious engineering, not magical thinking, if they are to be economical and reliable. If windmills do not provide base load power, then what will? Something will, and that something will need to be built, and that something will cost money, and that something will have a level of reliability. It is not peak capacity that is important in engineering these things, and it isn't average capacity either. Engineering based on those will give you a very unreliable power grid, kind of like what California has now.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  > that something will need to be built If renewables (and batteries) are deployed at a scale where they produce enough electricity except during black swan events, then we can just keep the gas power stations around and use them a couple of days a year. The rest of the year we can run atmospheric carbon capture facilities (or just try to capture the CO2 from the gas power stations).
- mschaef 4y ago
  Agreed
- outworlder 4y ago
  > It is not peak capacity that is important in engineering these things, and it isn't average capacity either. Engineering based on those will give you a very unreliable power grid, kind of like what California has now. Not all of California is served by PG&E. My power is cheap, reliable, and carbon free. https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/svp-and-community/about-svp/faqs/carbon-free-faq https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/svp-and-community/about-s...
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  No, we can make engineering calculations, however those calculations don't support the strawman you're promoting. What happened in Texas was a direct and utterly predictable result of market policy that did not value resiliency vs spot price. Let's just pause to take into full scale the failure of the TX energy market during that emergency: gas turbine producers, facing the highest spot rates they will likely ever see, couldn't produce into the grid because the grid was designed &()*(&)BN dumb. End of story from the technology side for all this sophomoric lazy lassie faire libertarian blather. California has its issues, but compared to the scale of demand is a very effective power grid. I grew up in KS. If the institutions there had even 1% of the exogenous problems faced by CA providers they'd turn into a clown circus on fire real fast.
  - mschaef 4y ago
    > What happened in Texas was a direct and utterly predictable result of market policy that did not value resiliency vs spot price. There's a lot to this notion that the state deliberately traded off reliability for lower wholesale prices attractive to large scale industrial consumers. It's not like it's unknown how to make a power system reliable in cold weather, but when it happens every ten or twenty years (1989, 2011, 2021), it can be difficult to justify the expense of that sort of preparation. Of course, the costs of this choice are dramatically socialized across the entire state in these extreme weather events. The refinery might get cheaper power, but part of the cost of that cheapness is borne by the homeowner who loses power due to a lack cold weather capacity in the grid, can't heat their home, and their pipes burst or worse. But the issues in TX were not confined to just the electric part of the energy infrastructure - natgas supply failed also. Some of this was due to things like wellheads freezing (wells very often produce water in addition to hydrocarbons). Some of it was due to bureaucratic snafus. For environmental reasons, many of the natgas pipeline pumping stations have been switched from running on their own gas supply to electrical power. These pumping stations have the ability to request treatment as critical infrastructure for which the power should never be deliberately cut. To do this requires filing paperwork with the state that many or most did not. The consequence of this is that as the electric utilities shed load to keep the grid up, they often cut off their own fuel supply and made the problem worse.

tomohawk 4y ago

So we can't make engineering calculations because black swan events throw all that out the window? That doesn't seem like a winning strategy. Power grids require serious engineering, not magical thinking, if they are to be economical and reliable. If windmills do not provide base load power, then what will? Something will, and that something will need to be built, and that something will cost money, and that something will have a level of reliability. It is not peak capacity that is important in engineering these things, and it isn't average capacity either. Engineering based on those will give you a very unreliable power grid, kind of like what California has now.

dane-pgp 4y ago
> that something will need to be built If renewables (and batteries) are deployed at a scale where they produce enough electricity except during black swan events, then we can just keep the gas power stations around and use them a couple of days a year. The rest of the year we can run atmospheric carbon capture facilities (or just try to capture the CO2 from the gas power stations).
mschaef 4y ago
Agreed
outworlder 4y ago
> It is not peak capacity that is important in engineering these things, and it isn't average capacity either. Engineering based on those will give you a very unreliable power grid, kind of like what California has now. Not all of California is served by PG&E. My power is cheap, reliable, and carbon free. https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/svp-and-community/about-svp/faqs/carbon-free-faq https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/svp-and-community/about-s...
jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
No, we can make engineering calculations, however those calculations don't support the strawman you're promoting. What happened in Texas was a direct and utterly predictable result of market policy that did not value resiliency vs spot price. Let's just pause to take into full scale the failure of the TX energy market during that emergency: gas turbine producers, facing the highest spot rates they will likely ever see, couldn't produce into the grid because the grid was designed &()*(&)BN dumb. End of story from the technology side for all this sophomoric lazy lassie faire libertarian blather. California has its issues, but compared to the scale of demand is a very effective power grid. I grew up in KS. If the institutions there had even 1% of the exogenous problems faced by CA providers they'd turn into a clown circus on fire real fast.
- mschaef 4y ago
  > What happened in Texas was a direct and utterly predictable result of market policy that did not value resiliency vs spot price. There's a lot to this notion that the state deliberately traded off reliability for lower wholesale prices attractive to large scale industrial consumers. It's not like it's unknown how to make a power system reliable in cold weather, but when it happens every ten or twenty years (1989, 2011, 2021), it can be difficult to justify the expense of that sort of preparation. Of course, the costs of this choice are dramatically socialized across the entire state in these extreme weather events. The refinery might get cheaper power, but part of the cost of that cheapness is borne by the homeowner who loses power due to a lack cold weather capacity in the grid, can't heat their home, and their pipes burst or worse. But the issues in TX were not confined to just the electric part of the energy infrastructure - natgas supply failed also. Some of this was due to things like wellheads freezing (wells very often produce water in addition to hydrocarbons). Some of it was due to bureaucratic snafus. For environmental reasons, many of the natgas pipeline pumping stations have been switched from running on their own gas supply to electrical power. These pumping stations have the ability to request treatment as critical infrastructure for which the power should never be deliberately cut. To do this requires filing paperwork with the state that many or most did not. The consequence of this is that as the electric utilities shed load to keep the grid up, they often cut off their own fuel supply and made the problem worse.