Solar Power Is Bailing Texas Out This Summer - Texas Monthly

[Caribbeans]

A solar energy farm near Fort Stockton. Pecos County, Texas

Enjoying that AC? Thank the mighty power of the sun and the renewable energy source keeping the grid afloat.

Texas Monthly By Dan Solomon | July 12, 2022

On Monday the good people of Texas, many still suffering from lingering trauma as a result of the February 2021 failure of the state’s power grid, braced for bad news. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the much-maligned entity that manages Texas’s famously independent grid, warned that the situation was dire because of “a projected reserve capacity shortage with no market solution available.” If things got worse, rolling blackouts might be needed. Not great!

Fortunately, the worst didn’t happen. There are a few reasons why. To reduce demand, many Texans turned up the thermostat by a few degrees to help save power, and ERCOT’s emergency response program paid some large energy customers to scale back usage during peak times. And significantly, solar power, which has been the star of the Texas grid so far during this interminable summer, continued to set records for energy production. If your air conditioner has been steadily running all summer long, you can thank the mighty power of the sun.

“We’ve got twice the solar we had last summer, and something like three times what we had eighteen months ago,” energy consultant Doug Lewin told me on Monday. “We actually set another solar record today, and we set one yesterday. Renewables throughout most of May and June, as we’ve been experiencing extreme heat, really were the difference between [having] a whole lot of conservation calls and potential rolling outages and not having them.”

The two key renewable energy sources contributing to the Texas power grid are solar and wind power; solar accounts for roughly 25 percent of the renewable resources on the grid, while wind represents the other three quarters, according to Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A&M...more
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/renewable-energy-texas-grid-heat-wave/

[NNadir]

1. The wind garbage was operating at 8% capacity utilization this week.

I noted this elsewhere citing the Dallas Morning News: A Heatwave Without Wind Is a Problem For the Texas Grid.

Anyone who knows anything about the power industry knows that peak demand generally takes place between 5 pm and 8 pm.

What Texas has done this week, like every other shithole system dependent on trashing wilderness for wind industrial parks, is to burn dangerous fossil fuels and dump the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere.

Typically, people who applaud the miserably failed solar and wind industry ignore the dependence of dangerous fossil fuels that the solar and wind lipstick on the pig entrenches.

If Texas was dependent on wind energy for all of its electricity, people would have died this week from extreme heat, infinitely more than died from the radiation releases big, big, big boogeyman at Fukushima that obsesses the preternaturally stupid.

Texas, of course, unlike Germany, which is funding Putin's war because it bought into the "renewable energy will save us" clap trap that led the planet to begin burning, has lots of dangerous natural gas, which they are unashamed to burn, especially if they can charge poor people lots of money for the electricity in their "free market."

And of course, even though the wind has started blowing a little bit, they're still overwhelming supplied by burning dangerous fossil fuels and dumping the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere, not that our wind/solar/gas/coal mavens give a shit about climate change. Oh, I forgot, coal/gas/petroleum/wind/solar and hydrogen mavens, you know, people who never bothered to even try to understand the laws of thermodynamics that govern the universe.

The carbon intensity of Texas, as of this writing, is 322 grams of carbon dioxide per kwh, entirely unacceptable in a sustainable world. Screw the cheering. Much of the power being generated there is being generated because of climate change, extreme temperatures resulting from the fact that 50 years of "solar and wind will save us bullshit" did nothing to address the rising rates of accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. After spending trillions of dollars on solar and wind, the first derivative of carbon dioxide concentrations is 2.45 ppm/year, up from 1.52/ppm in the year 2000, meaning that the second derivative is around 0.05 ppm/yr^2.

If this trend continues, the rate of accumulation will be 3.05 ppm in 12 years, when we will have passed carbon dioxide concentrations of 450 ppm.

I'm not much for soothsaying, having listened to Amory Lovins' bourgeois fantasies about hydrogen cars back in the 20th century, but I'll step out of my normal reluctance to do that and predict that in 2034, with climate change rates further accelerated to around 3.0ppm/year, and measurements above 450 ppm and rising rates of carbon dioxide dumping and accumulation, there will still be people posting delusional bullshit about how wind and solar are saving the day, and someday we'll all drive hydrogen cars. This crap will go on until the last molecule of CO2 is dumped. Getting to 420 ppm just ten years after we hit 400 ppm and the increase of 50 ppm in this century hasn't caused people to reconsider their dogma or stop cheering for this nonsense. 450 ppm won't either.

Faith based ignorance is pretty persistent, and in fact, is rather proud of itself.

Have a nice day tomorrow.

[Finishline42]

2. It's a known issue

July and August are typically the calmest months. As a result that's why the grid operators look for other sources - now solar.

Wind and Solar typically complement each other.

Apparently one thing Texas isn't doing is using battery storage to extend the solar contribution.

As I noted in an earlier thread

Grid-Connected PV Capacity (MW)
Year Capacity Change % Change
2007 3.2
2008 4.4 1.2 38%
2009 8.6 4.2 95%
2010 34.5 25.9 301%
2011 85.6 51.1 148%
2012 140.3 54.7 64%
2013 215.9 75.6 54%
2014 387 129 79%
2015 594 207 53%
2016 1,269 675 113%
2017 1,982 713 56%
2018 2,925 943 48%
2019 4,324.3 1,399.3 48%
2020 7,784.6 3,460.3 80%
2021 13,844.9 6,060.3 78%

[NNadir]

3. It's a readily obtainable bit of information that wind power dropped to 2,450 MW at noon today...

...in Texas. Ercot posts graphics every fucking day while assholes cheer for the unreliable industry. At noon today, the energy demand on the Ercot Grid was 67,010 MW. In the "percent talk" that anti-nukes use to obscure their indifference to climate change, the people it kills, and air pollution and the people that kills, this works out 3.7% of Texas power.

At noon today, the solar scam spread over stretches of destroyed wilderness like that pictured in the OP, 8,952 MW, near the peak for the day or in "percent talk" 13.7% of the electricity. In "percent talk" this means that 82.7% of the electricity in Texas was not supplied by solar or wind.

The Comanche Peak nuclear power plant, in two relatively small buildings, operated at 100% capacity utilization, at 2,400 MW, just about equal to all the wind turbines in Texas operating at noon, spread over thousands of square miles of destroyed wilderness, and the South Texas Project nuclear plant, producing 2,580 MW, again in two small buildings, again at 100% capacity utilization, and again more power than all the wind turbines in Texas were producing at noon, spread over thousands of square miles of destroyed wilderness.

At 4:25 PM, power demand on the Ercot grid peaked at 70,462 MW, with the wind industry producing a prodigious, 8,877 MW, or in "percent talk" 12.6% of Texas demand, and the future electronic waste solar industry was producing 7,618 MW, or 10.8% of Texas energy demand. (Solar and wind figures are reported hourly on the Ercot graphics.) This means that 76.6%, in "percent talk" was not produced by the solar and wind scam, spread over thousands of square miles of destroyed wilderness, all of it junk that will need to be hauled away and dumped in 20-25 years, by today's toddlers just as they are entering into their careers.

At midnight tonight, the temperatures in Austin, Texas will be 36°C (96°F), hot enough to kill a sleeping man or woman without air conditioning if they get dehydrated. The solar scam, spread over thousands of square miles will be producing zero MW. The demand is anticipated by Ercot to be on the order of 53,000 MW. (Happily the wind is predicted to be blowing tonight, but that doesn't mean it will blow every night.) At midnight tonight, the two nuclear plants will still be producing 4,980 MW. They will be doing so at 6:00 AM tomorrow, noon tomorrow, and every hour of every day all through the summer, independent of the weather.

Now, of course, I can fully expect some asshole to pipe in that "solar and wind are better than nothing," you know, from the sort of person who has spent 43 years whining about Three Mile Island because we might find out that someone has died because of it, while hundreds of millions people died from air pollution without a fucking peep of concern.

I don't agree. Unreliable energy is a crap shoot played with human lives as the chips on the table. A disgusting mountain of batteries the size of Guadalupe Peak will not address that lack of reliability.

I note that every time a dangerous fossil fuel plant has to restart because the wind was blowing for a few hours, and the temperature outside is 40°C or more at midnight, energy is wasted and the system is strained.


Texas has plenty of coast line and could easily construct enough reliable nuclear plants - with life times of over half a century, restore all that trashed wilderness, not depend on destabilized weather, desalinate water and perhaps, in supercritical situations with a new generation of nuclear plants - even clean some of that oily shit out of the Gulf of Mexico.

All it would take is a little bit of respect for engineering and science, and perhaps a whiff of unselfish concern for future generations.

In the meantime, the amount of dangerous fossil fuel waste that Texas dumps into the planetary atmosphere will be at the mercy of the wind blowing. That is, in any conversation I would consider rational, - and let's face it, one can not expect rationality from people willing to bet human lives on the wind - unacceptable.

Have a nice day tomorrow.

[Finishline42]

4. Just as easily found are the yearly totals broken down by month

and July and August are the weakest winds in Texas. It was expected.

Now back to our previously scheduled programming...

Amazing how fast they are building solar in Texas. I wonder how pissed those land owners are at the income from having solar farms on their land?

[NNadir]

5. Averages have nothing to do with reliability. During Hurricane Sandy...

...when my power was out for over a week, the average power provided to my home had zero relationship to the fact I had to throw away all the food in my refrigerator and pay to replace it when the power was restored.

One of the things that characterizes antinukes is their absolute contempt for the poor. It's fine for these bourgeois assholes to carry on about their putative Tesla power walls manufactured using cobalt dug by child slaves in the Congo River basin, but not on their agenda to afford what should be a basic human right, access to reliable power.

I'm not sure that Texans would enjoy what German "Green" Vice Chancellor Habeck recommends for Germans now that the war monger Putin, who Germany financed in service to the antinuke mentality, is threatening their access to dangerous fossil fuels, short and infrequent showers.

It's clear that antinuke indifference to poverty matches their studied and increasingly obvious indifference to climate change and their ill studied indifference to human health.

The excuses they make for the failure of wind and solar gets more and more tortured minute to minute.