One of the tragedies of our age is that, no matter what happens, people with partisan agendas feel duty-bound to recast the story to back their side. When we can make a disease political, is there anything we can deal with on the basis of objective facts?
Certainly not a power outage. That absolutely must be spun to suit partisan narratives, and so it is with the blackouts that are now in their third day in Texas.
The Associated Press is breathlessly reporting, lest you think anything to the contrary, that the blackout is totally the failure of gas, coal and nuclear power – and that it has absolutely nothing to do with wind-power. That’s absurd when you consider that wind turbines froze and wind-power production plummeted by 80 percent literally overnight.
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But AP stands for Always Propaganda, so here we are:
“It’s really natural gas and coal and nuclear that are providing the bulk of the electricity and that’s the bulk of the cause of the blackouts,” Jacobson told The Associated Press. ERCOT said Tuesday that of the 45,000 total megawatts of power that were offline statewide, about 30,000 consisted of thermal sources — gas, coal and nuclear plants — and 16,000 came from renewable sources.
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On top of that, while Texas has ramped up wind energy in recent years, the state still relies on wind power for only about 25% of its total electricity, according to ERCOT data.
That sounds like it was written by an AP reporter who wrote down the numbers he or she was given, but had no real understanding of what they meant. The key lies in the distinction between capacity and actual power generation, which the Wall Street Journal did a much better job of explaining:
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Texas has about 30,000 MW of wind capacity, but winds aren’t constant or predictable. Winds this past month have generated between about 600 and 22,500 MW. Regulators don’t count on wind to provide much more than 10% or so of the grid’s total capacity since they can’t command turbines to increase power like they can coal and gas plants.
Wind turbines at times this month have generated more than half of the Texas power generation, though this is only about a quarter of the system’s power capacity. Last week wind generation plunged as demand surged. Fossil-fuel generation increased and covered the supply gap. Thus between the mornings of Feb. 7 and Feb. 11, wind as a share of the state’s electricity fell to 8% from 42%, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Gas-fired plants produced 43,800 MW of power Sunday night and coal plants chipped in 10,800 MW—about two to three times what they usually generate at their peak on any given winter day—after wind power had largely vanished. In other words, gas and coal plants held up in the frosty conditions far better than wind turbines did.
The gas and coal plants overperformed until temperatures dropped close to zero and they started to have trouble meeting the demand. Until then, gas and coal were going gangbusters to make up for the shortfall caused by the frozen wind turbines.
Some of the rhetoric on the right has been overbaked here, and it’s given the media an excuse to declare things “false” that are really just exaggerations. It makes no sense to say, as Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller did, “We should never build another wind turbine in Texas.”
Wind turbines are not inherently problematic. The problem is when you structure your grid to generate too little baseload power from gas, coal and nuclear because you’re trying to make some sort of an environmental point by relying so heavily on wind.
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Wind can be a useful supplement to the grid when the turbines are producing, but because their performance is so hard to predict from one day to the next, it’s insane to put wind in the lead position while you tell coal, gas and nuclear to pull back unless they’re needed.
A lot of things had to go wrong in Texas for things to get where they are today. It’s foolishly simplistic to look at it in ideological terms and try to pretend: The energy sources I like did great, while the energy sources you like sucked!
And I will never understand why cheerleaders for wind-power think they are helping to develop it by pretending its shortcomings don’t exist.
