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Iirc wind performed more or less as forecast (admittedly not great, but as expected) during Feb 2021 and nearly all of the shortfall came down to natural gas pl
by abathur 4y ago
Iirc wind performed more or less as forecast (admittedly not great, but as expected) during Feb 2021 and nearly all of the shortfall came down to natural gas plants and infra failing.
- rossdavidh 4y agoI'm all in favor of wind power in Texas, and want more of it, but it did do worse than expected in Feb 2021. It's just a problem to be fixed, not a reason to drop wind power (west Texas has a lot of wind), but it did actually happen.
- abathur 4y agoIt's not about who is or isn't in favor of it. The narrative has been misleading here. Check figures 2.c on page 18 and 2.o on page 34 in UT's report on this (https://energy.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/UTAustin%20%282021%29%20EventsFebruary2021TexasBlackout%2020210714.pdf https://energy.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/UTAustin%20%28...) for a sense of the scope of how unexpected capacity outages break down. Yes--a lot of wind was offline. But all of the expected wind capacity could have been met and the grid would have still needed to shed quite a bit of load. In fact, all of the expected wind, solar, coal, and nuclear could have been online and the grid would have still had to shed a meaningful amount. The scale of the natural gas outages was larger than the entire load-shed, afaict.