Sweden Shows Texas How to Keep Turbines Spinning in Icy Weather

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

(Bloomberg) -- With the right gear, wind turbines can keep on generating through the harshest winter weather.

That’s the experience by researchers at an Arctic test site in Sweden, and their knowledge would have come handy thousands of miles away as ice and snow storms in Texas downed generators and triggered widespread blackouts. As much as half of the wind power capacity came offline due to the extreme cold.

The disaster underlines how vulnerable the world has become in the face of increasingly unpredictable weather brought on by climate change, and it’s raising questions about the global push to electrify everything from transportation to heating and cooling.

Keeping wind power going through extreme events isn’t impossible as researchers in Sweden have proved. Turbines in the Arctic Circle can work in temperatures as low as -30 degrees Celsius (-22 degrees Fahrenheit). And most turbine makers, from Vestas Wind Systems A/S and General Electric Co. are now able to offer versions of their units that come armed with ice mitigation systems and heating for some of the equipment.

At its site in Uljabuoda in Sweden, the utility Skelleftea Kraft AB was one of the first developers to try to build wind turbines in extreme arctic climate a decade ago.

-more-

https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/sweden-shows-texas-how-to-keep-turbines-spinning-in-icy-weather/ar-BB1dJtjT?li=BBnbfcL

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. They seem to work just fine everywhere but Texas.

They work in Minnesota, where the weather is often below zero; you don't need to go to the Arctic to find wind turbines that function in cold weather.

[Greybnk48]

3. They're all over the place here in Wisconsin too!

And no problems with the cold that I've ever heard of so far.

[4Q2u2]

4. Small Items

Sometimes stave off big problems.
There are Air-Craft oils that go from 200 degrees F to -140 F in 5 minutes. It is also about $12.00 a quart.
You think someone saved a buck.
Most people are also not up on their NGLI ratings.

[dsc]

5. To be fair, it is cold for much longer in MN and WI than Texas

I am not sure I would have spend vast amounts of money to make turbines work in sub zero weather in Dallas and Houston while I am sure I would spend it in MN and WI.

[Hortensis]

6. :) And reality and rationality intrude.

[Mister Ed]

10. Quite right. But the point, to me, is...

...that no one should use the failure of the Texas turbines to claim, "See! We told you so! Wind power is unreliable!", as I've heard that editorialists on Fox and in the Wall Street Journal have been doing already.

[BeerBarrelPolka]

20. Sadly

Sadly, the repubs of Wi and Mn would agree with Fox and WSJ just to own the Democrats.

[Stallion]

8. Someone Needs to Send a Satellite Over Texas and Compare to North Korea

....or civilized states like Oklahoma or Louisiana

[GoCubsGo]

9. Yeah, I'm calling "bullshit" on "the ones in Texas froze up."

Something tells me the accusations blaming windmills is a distraction from what are the real problems: privatization of the power grid, deregulation, and poor interconnection between networks.

[TheRickles]

11. +1!

[Politicub]

26. Me, too. It's anti-environment propaganda. The story should be how Texas

has been derelict in its duty to maintain a robust, modern power grid system.

[Delmette2.0]

28. And we all know how gas (oil) prices go up with the change from summer to winter.

It's because the refineries have to change something about the formula. Then back again winter to summer formula.
Somehow that does not apply to windmills that rely on lubrication.

[sarge43]

27. They work just fine in New England n/t

[Celerity]

2. In-depth presentation from 2008, when they started the project

http://upload.trippus.se/eventus/1069/pdf/DynaWind%20Leif%20Jonsson%20WinWinD%20Georg%20B%C3%B6hmeke.pdf

[UpInArms]

7. Working here in NW Missouri

And we have some fairly harsh weather patterns

[mezame]

12. GM vs. Norway

And now this.

Scandinavian Culture Wars coming to a theatre (ok, theater) near you!

[gab13by13]

13. I read where there is a cold weather package

available for the turbines, but Texas turned it down. I read where Siemens was the manufacturer. Sorry, don't remember where, maybe here.

[TNNurse]

14. Of course they did not think Texas needed turbines

that work in those temps, but the bigger problem may be their isolated, independent power grid. Were they thinking about seceding when they did that????

[roamer65]

19. Their isolated grid may be saving us from a larger regional outage.

The 2003 power outage in the Great Lakes region was supposedly due to some botched line work in Ohio. Took down the whole damn region.

So I do believe they should be denied major interconnects until the ERCOT grid is fully updated and weatherized.

[Clearly fogged in]

31. They could have been, it's at least 50 years now

ERCOT was formed in 1970. From wiki

In 1970, ERCOT was formed to comply with NERC requirements. Throughout the 1980s, the organization continued to take over functions from TIS and eventually became the central operating coordinator for Texas.[citation needed]

The Texas Legislature amended the Public Utility Regulatory Act in 1995 to deregulate the wholesale generation market. The PUC then began the process of expanding ERCOT’s responsibilities to enable wholesale competition and facilitate efficient use of the transmission system by all market participants.[2]

On August 21, 1996, the PUC endorsed an electric utility joint task force recommendation that ERCOT become an ISO. This ensured that an impartial, third-party organization was overseeing equitable access to the transmission system among competitive market participants. In September 1996, the change became official when the ERCOT Board of Directors initiated operations as a nonprofit ISO, the first in the United States.

[TrogL]

15. We just had some -40 weather. Turbines were fine.

[cos dem]

16. Yeah, but what about the windmill cancer?

[IronLionZion]

17. Texas natural gas pipelines and compressors froze

https://www.vox.com/2021/2/16/22284140/texas-blackout-outage-winter-storm-uri-ercot-power-grid-cold-snow-austin-houston-dallas

This happens rarely enough in Texas, they didn't want to spend the money to cold weatherize their equipment like they do in Sweden, Minnesota, etc.

[roamer65]

18. It has been cold in Michigan for the past couple of weeks.

Yet our turbines just keep on spinning.

I went past a bunch last weekend. They were perfectly fine.

[Bucky]

21. Texas GOPers blamed windmills, but the real problem was with gas powered electricity

[Botany]

22. I love Uljabuoda stories

Swedes rock.

[SpankMe]

23. With respect, this is not "Texas' fault"

It's the design that was chosen for those wind systems. No one thought TX would ever get that cold.

If I'm Dade County, FL, I'm not going to pay a premium for a system that will function down to -10-degF when the average overnight low in the dead of winter there is in the mid-50's.

If I buy something that is qualified down into the upper 30's as a margin against that once-a-century cold snap that lasts all of two days, and then something crazy happens and we get a week at zero deg - that's not a shortcoming on my part.

[Grokenstein]

24. Texas Oil Exec:

(sends crew to smash machinery with wrenches)
"Gol' damn, y'all see how easy this stuff breaks down?!"

[TomVilmer]

25. In Denmark we have 68 F and our many wind turbines are running with no problems ...

Last edited Tue Feb 16, 2021, 06:08 PM - Edit history (1)

... only our city light rail is having problems with the cold.

Wind Data (yesterday)
Wind energy covered 53.9% of the electricity consumption
Wind energy: 66.4 GWh
Offshore: 25.7 GWh
Onshore: 40.7 GWh

[tishaLA]

29. Chris Hayes tweeted that the turbine excuse is BS

and he's covering it on his show tonight.

Link to tweet

[BobTheSubgenius]

30. When Texas started their turbine program, they opted exclusively for the Rugged Individualist model

It seems a tad temperamental, as rugged individualists are wont to be.