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Texas resident here. Texas has a few advantages with wind and solar: 1) most years (with notable exceptions), peak electricity happens when the sun is shining
by rossdavidh 2y ago
Texas resident here. Texas has a few advantages with wind and solar:
1) most years (with notable exceptions), peak electricity happens when the sun is shining
2) west Texas is very windy
One of the reasons that TX was caught flat-footed a few years ago in a cold snap, was that in a decade we went from oil-and-coal power generation to mostly natgas (which froze up), wind (which froze up, albeit not as much as the natgas), and solar (not working at night). It was the first very hard freeze under the new power mix. Not so long ago TX was talking about "clean coal"; now it is natgas, wind, and solar.
- vel0city 2y ago> wind (which froze up, albeit not as much as the natgas) Just a note about how much wind froze up in Texas: wind outperformed projected supply for the cold snap.
- Animats 2y agoTexas energy wasn't prepared for severe freezes. You can buy the gear to run natural gas pipelines and wind turbines in arctic conditions. Natural gas has to be dried out near the source in cold climates.[1] It's water mixed with the gas that's the problem. Wind turbines with blade heaters run fine in Norway. It's a factory option. (The turbine itself provides the power to run heaters. One source says about 1/7 of output power is needed for blade heating in icing conditions.) [1] https://idc-online.com/technical_references/pdfs/electronic_engineering/057.pdf https://idc-online.com/technical_references/pdfs/electronic_...
- dralley 2y agoIIRC they also had problems with the water intake at one of the nuclear power plants freezing up, so that had to shut down too. There's no magic source of power that is immune from needing to prepare for exceptional weather conditions.
- rossdavidh 2y agoTrue; it was nuclear power's turn to shine, and it, uh, didn't.
- jwsteigerwalt 2y agoThere were many true arguments that were twisted into political narratives: “the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow”. What they left out is “the natural gas does not always flow”…
- jeffbee 2y agoAnother advantage is that Texas renewable assets are west of Texas population centers, which blunts the "duck curve" problem of evening peak load. California, unfortunately, does not enjoy that geographic advantage.
- rossdavidh 2y agoInteresting point, hadn't heard that one before.
- Gibbon1 2y agoMy take is the accounting economics has shifted to solar and wind. As a result panicked fossil fuel companies and petrostates are spewing a lot of agitprop to gaslight schmucks into continuing to use fossil fuels. But that's not going to slow down the accountants.