Month: February 2021

Expert’s Expert on What Caused Texas Catastrophe

Zeke Hausfather is known as the energy expert’s expert.
I interviewed him in San Francisco in 2019, and he spoke about wind energy and Texas.

Zeke Hausfather on Twitter:

There has been a lot of confusion over the drivers of the Texas blackouts. While more will become clear in the coming days, neither renewables nor insufficient gas capacity were the culprits. Rather, it was the lack of resiliency of to extreme cold conditions.

Texas has seen an explosion of cheap wind power in recent years. Wind now produces around 20% of Texas’ electricity. However, at the same time Texas has also been building a lot of gas capacity; gas generally works well with wind, able to quickly ramp up to fill in gaps.

Because it is intermittent, the grid manager @ERCOT_ISO does not rely much on wind to meet extreme demand events such as the one we are experiencing right now. Rather, they have enough gas (and nuclear/coal) capacity on standby just in case high demand coincides with low wind. 

As such, adding more wind to the grid would not have that big an effect on the amount of gas capacity needed for peak demand events. The narrative that the current blackouts are due to over-investment in wind and underinvestment in gas miss this important dynamic.

Texas has plenty of gas capacity to meet current demand. The problem is that around 40% of it went offline, due to a combination of frozen equipment and insufficient gas supply. Supply was low due to lower production (frozen wells) and extreme home heating demand.

Building more gas capacity would not really solve this problem. Rather, what is needed is more resilient gas supplies to ensure that similar shortages do not occur in the future.

Similarly, while frozen wind turbines are a problem (due to not installing deicing technology in Texas wind farms due to infrequency of extreme cold events), intermittent renewables at times over-performed and at times underperformed the (conservative) @ERCOT_ISO assumptions.

So what should we learn from this? Texas needs to make its energy system more resilient to extreme cold events. Its not about building more gas or more wind to solve the problem, its about making sure both technologies (as well as coal and nuclear) don’t fail in extreme cold.

While extreme cold events will likely become less common at the world warms, as we see this year they are still far from impossible. And the jury is still out whether a warming world may lead to the polar vortex occasionally reaching further south.

More below from Zeke, on “What’s Killing Coal?”

Continue reading “Expert’s Expert on What Caused Texas Catastrophe”

Outside the Texas Grid, Few Outages

If you live in Texas, but outside the boundaries of the unregulated ERCOT system, you probably still have service.

Texas Ignored Warnings on Grid

Bloomberg:

Federal regulators warned Texas that its power plants couldn’t be counted on to reliably churn out electricity in bitterly cold conditions a decade ago, when the last deep freeze plunged 4 million people into the dark.

They recommended that utilities use more insulation, heat pipes and take other steps to winterize plants — strategies commonly observed in cooler climates but not in normally balmy Texas.

“Where did those recommendations go, and how were they implemented?” said Jeff Dennis, managing director of Advanced Energy Economy, an association of clean energy businesses. “Those are going to be some pretty key questions.”

As investigators probe the current power crisis in Texas, which has left millions of people without power or a promise of when it will be restored, questions are sure to be raised about how the state responded to the urgings from the 2011 analysis, issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North America Electric Reliability Corporation, which sets reliability standards.

The February 2011 incident occurred when an Arctic cold front descended on the Southwest, sending temperatures below freezing for four days in a row. The result was disastrous. Equipment and instruments froze, forcing the shutdown of power plants and rolling blackouts, according to the report.

Moreover, some of the same equipment, the report noted, had failed during previous cold snaps. One in December 1989 prompted the state’s grid operator to resort to system-wide rolling blackouts for the first time.

“Many generators failed to adequately apply and institutionalize knowledge and recommendations from previous severe winter weather events, especially as to winterization of generation and plant auxiliary equipment,” the 2011 report said.

Narrative Starts to Shift: Texas’ Crisis is Clean Energy Opportunity

Fossil fuel mouthpieces everywhere desperate to bend events toward the dirty energy narrative, but as facts roll out, reasonable people on all sides will more and more be pushed to some common conclusions.
Grid connectivity is inadequate, extreme events are going to continue to come, and renewable energy plus storage can help.

Politico:

The extreme weather that forced power outages from North Dakota to Texas on Tuesday triggered a bout of the usual finger-pointing about the causes. But it could also deliver a boost to President Joe Biden’s efforts to upgrade infrastructure, counter climate change and expand the reach of renewable energy.

As millions of Texans shivered in the dark, supporters of the fossil fuel industries turned their ire on the state’s massive — and frozen — wind farms, even as Republican Gov. Greg Abbott acknowledged that the extreme cold had shut down all types of power plants, including those that burn coal. Data showed that the freeze hit the state’s natural gas power plants the hardest.

What most experts saw was the Texas grid’s vulnerability to harsh weather — and a warning that climate change-induced disasters could devastate the nation’s leading energy producer.

The resulting crisis could be a boon to Biden’s proposal to spend huge sums of money to harden the nation’s electric grid as it connects giant wind and solar power plants to cities and states thousands of miles away. That’s an essential step if the U.S. is to make a major turn toward relying on solar, wind and other renewable energy to keep the lights on.

“When supply doesn’t show up, legislative or regulatory intervention begins,” said Kevin Book, managing director at the consulting firm ClearView Energy Partners. “The reactivity to a supply shock is one of the few things you can rely on.”

Freezing temperatures sent energy demand soaring in Texas to levels that eclipsed even the hottest summer days. Grid operators there and across the Midwest implemented rolling blackouts to prevent further damage to the grid, but in Texas alone 4 million customers have been without power since Monday.

Investigations of the causes are just beginning, but data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s electric grid, showed that at least 30 gigawatts of power fueled by natural gas, coal and nuclear went off line Monday, along with 16 gigawatts of renewable power.

National Republicans — and those with national aspirations — seized on pictures of frozen wind turbines to hammer Washington’s green energy agenda, even though Texas operates a grid outside of federal oversight and has spent decades making its own energy decisions.

Continue reading “Narrative Starts to Shift: Texas’ Crisis is Clean Energy Opportunity”

South Texas Nuclear Project Failure Described

Image result for south texas nuclear plant offline

Atomic Insights:

On Monday, Feb. 15, 2021, at 0537, an automatic reactor trip occurred at South Texas Project in Unit 1. The trip resulted from a loss of feedwater attributed to a cold weather-related failure of a pressure sensing lines to the feedwater pumps, causing a false signal, which in turn, caused the feedwater pump to trip. This event occurred in the secondary side of the plant (non-nuclear part of the unit). The reactor trip was a result of the feedwater pump trips. The primary side of the plant (nuclear side) is safe and secured.  

Wall St. Journal:

At the peak, about 45 gigawatts of power were offline due to the cold. Two-thirds of this generation was from gas- and coal-burning power plants and one nuclear power plant. The other third came from wind turbines that iced up and were taken out of service.

Rick Perry: Texans Would Rather have Blackouts than Regulation

Houston Chronicle:

WASHINGTON – Former Texas governor Rick Perry suggests that going days without power is a sacrifice Texans should be willing to make if it means keeping federal regulators out of the state’s power grid.

In a blog posted on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s website, Perry is quoted responding to the claim that “those watching on the left may see the situation in Texas as an opportunity to expand their top-down, radical proposals.”

Republicanleader.gov:

The freezing cold weather hitting Texas knocked out several of the power grid’s sectors, especially the natural gas power plants (40% of Texas’ electricity), but also wind (23%), and even nuclear (11%). Since the winter months are typically off-peak for a state like Texas, power producers plan to have generation offline for repairs during that season. This, in theory, makes sense, but not if the infrastructure hasn’t been weatherized to ensure all of the remaining generation is up and running in case of an emergency.

Offline power sources, cold weather freezing gas pipelines that hadn’t been weatherized, renewables that can’t provide baseload power, paired with a demand never before seen in the state’s history? That results in millions of people freezing without power and little guidance on when it will be back.

“The frozen turbines out in West Texas is a freakish event. But that’s what the government is supposed to think about – what are the freakish events that can occur that could cost people their lives, and to protect against that,” Gov. Perry said.

A lot of the anger is aimed at Texas’ power-grid operator, called the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). Current Gov. Greg Abbott has called for an investigation into the operator and the grid’s failure. And while it’s understandable that Texas didn’t insulate pipelines to operate in record-low temperatures, grid operators are waking up to needed contingencies at the state and local level. ERCOT anticipated the state’s wind would only provide 7% of the power demand in the winter months, but it didn’t anticipate the catastrophic loss of baseload power as pipelines froze and natural gas production came to a halt.
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Those watching on the left may see the situation in Texas as an opportunity to expand their top-down, radical proposals. Two phrases come to mind: don’t mess with Texas, and don’t let a crisis go to waste.

“Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” Gov. Perry said, partly rhetorically. “Try not to let whatever the crisis of the day is take your eye off of having a resilient grid that keeps America safe personally, economically, and strategically.”

Houston Chronicle again:

Texas’s power grid, run by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, occupies a unique distinction in the United States in that it is not under the oversight of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission because it does not cross state lines.

That has long been a point of pride with Texas politicians who in the 1990s chose to deregulate the state’s power market and allow power companies, not state regulators determine when and how to build and maintain power plants.

That system has fallen under scrutiny in recent days as millions of Texans are left without power following an unusual cold snap. Following a near identical episode a decade ago, federal regulators warned Texas it needed to take steps to better insulate its power plants.

Continue reading “Rick Perry: Texans Would Rather have Blackouts than Regulation”

Beto O’Rourke: It’s Worse than You’ve Been Hearing

“The energy capital of North America can not provide the energy needed to warm and power to warm people’s homes in this great state… we are nearing a failed state in Texas..”

Bogus Texas “Wind Turbine” Story Comes Undone

Power:

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has said reforming the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is an emergency item for state legislators in the current session, as power outages continue across the state for another day due to record cold temperatures as part of a massive winter storm.

The governor on Feb. 16 said he wants lawmakers to investigate ERCOT, which operates much of the state’s electric grid and manages its deregulated power market, even as he said it would have been impossible to prepare “for this type of event, because the last time we had this type of weather was more than 100 years ago.”
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ERCOT said it lost about 34 GW of power supply as the cold temperatures forced both coal-fired and natural gas-fired plants offline. The cold also reduced the supply of natural gas to power plants, and caused wind turbines to freeze. Wind supplies the second-most amount of power to Texas customers, behind natural gas, and the turbines in Texas are not equipped with cold weather packages that would enable them to operate in extreme cold.

Governor Abbott telling the story two different ways depending on the audience. Here on Fox News he blames “the Green New Deal”

While below, he admits Houston blackout largely due to failure of a large nuclear plant.

One reason Abbott is playing both sides, he knows that this is the kind of event that causes Governors to lose their jobs.
Beto O’Rourke is nipping at his heels, and, perhaps, smelling blood.

Continue reading “Bogus Texas “Wind Turbine” Story Comes Undone”