It goes without saying that, just because Fox News is saying it doesn’t mean it’s right. Partisan bickering in either direction isn’t a good way to educate yourself on the issues.
Renewable power throws a wrench in how Texas does grid planning. In every other ISO, there is both a capacity market, which pays providers to commit to making certain generating capacity available, and a generation market, which pays for actual electrical production: https://cpowerenergymanagement.com/why-doesnt-texas-have-a-c.... In Texas, there is just a generation market.
Ordinarily that isn’t a big deal. Generators build adequate capacity so they can be in a position to receive payments for generation at times of peak demand.
Renewables break this down. They undercut traditional generation sources in the summer, but can’t be counted on to be there at times of peak winter demand. So last winter renewables didn’t fail in the sense that nobody was expecting them to generate much power begin with. But the natural gas plants that are irreplaceable for dealing with winter demand are dealing with reduced revenue because renewable sources are underbidding them in peak summer months.
It sounds like a free market working as expected. Maybe something important like this needs regulation to prevent optimization based on only one parameter ($).
The things is there really isn't partisan bickering on both sides of this issue in the first place. There is non-partisan reality where poor planning by non-partisan entity predictable led to service disruption. Even the failure of legislators is itself a non-partisan failure. Ordinary incompetence.
The only partisan bickering is the attempt to incorrectly blame renewables for the lack of capacity when in fact planned downtime, ordinary logistical failures, and failure to winterize are in fact to blame.
Everybody ought to have expected them to need that much power. Not every day and not every winter but everyone ought to have expected another bad winter to come round because they had bad winters in 1957 1960 1973 1985 2015 2017 2021. This includes 3 years out of the last 6.
They weren't prepared because they were short sighted, greedy, and stupid not because solar took so much of the profits and not because insufficient capacity had been built out for lack of such profits. Capacity existed and it sat unused or broke when it was most needed.
The Texas grid isn't run by stupid hippies who overbuilt solar plants forgetting they don't work in winter. It's run by "libertarians" who think that winterization standards are useless, and that's why nuclear plants, coal plants, and natural gas plants all failed when there was a freeze. This wasn't due to "reduced revenue" it's because the capacity planning didn't require winterization.
On top of that, when attempting to do rolling blackouts critical gas infrastructure froze and so gas supply plummeted. The gas plants weren't able to generate their capacity because there wasn't enough gas to burn.
So, I wouldn't know, because I haven't watched Fox News in many years. The best low-emotion, technically informed analysis of "Snowpocalypse" is probably this one from "Practical Engineering", made by a San Antonio-based engineer:
The outages were not from any one "main cause", except perhaps "Texas doesn't get cold that often and wasn't ready". But, wind icing up was certainly one of several major causes, along with natural gas pressure dropping so that natgas-powered electrical plants could not keep operating.
The most recent issues for which the Texas electrical grid was in the news for, the near-blackouts earlier this month, were specifically because of unpredictably low wind speeds in west Texas which reduced Texas's expected wind generation from ~20 GW to under 2 GW during the periods of peak demand. For context, peak demand in Texas is around 80 GW. Taking 18+ GW off the table is a huge blow. 18 GW is more than the entire electrical demand of most US states.
Fox news has nothing to do with it. Generation capacity being reduced by nearly 25% due to unpredictably low wind speeds is physics. It's a huge problem being faced, and sticking your head in the sand and crying "fake news" isn't helpful.
https://www.ercot.com/ gives you some idea of what's going on in TX at any given time. One neat thing about summer is that peak demand also tends to be because of AC use which also correlates with sunshine. Works for the summer at least.
It's actually not a meaningful factor AT ALL. Where renewables failed it wasn't because the nature of the technology but because of failure to winterize.
Renweable energy was not the "main cause" because it reliably fails to generate adequate amounts of power at that time of year and so the grid was entirely reliant on other generation (mostly natural gas) to fill in the gap. Basically, it wasn't the fault of renewable energy because everyone knew it was useless anyway.
rayiner|3 years ago
Renewable power throws a wrench in how Texas does grid planning. In every other ISO, there is both a capacity market, which pays providers to commit to making certain generating capacity available, and a generation market, which pays for actual electrical production: https://cpowerenergymanagement.com/why-doesnt-texas-have-a-c.... In Texas, there is just a generation market.
Ordinarily that isn’t a big deal. Generators build adequate capacity so they can be in a position to receive payments for generation at times of peak demand.
Renewables break this down. They undercut traditional generation sources in the summer, but can’t be counted on to be there at times of peak winter demand. So last winter renewables didn’t fail in the sense that nobody was expecting them to generate much power begin with. But the natural gas plants that are irreplaceable for dealing with winter demand are dealing with reduced revenue because renewable sources are underbidding them in peak summer months.
mortenlarsen|3 years ago
konschubert|3 years ago
Which might be right! But are the externalities all correctly priced in here?
michaelmrose|3 years ago
The only partisan bickering is the attempt to incorrectly blame renewables for the lack of capacity when in fact planned downtime, ordinary logistical failures, and failure to winterize are in fact to blame.
Everybody ought to have expected them to need that much power. Not every day and not every winter but everyone ought to have expected another bad winter to come round because they had bad winters in 1957 1960 1973 1985 2015 2017 2021. This includes 3 years out of the last 6.
They weren't prepared because they were short sighted, greedy, and stupid not because solar took so much of the profits and not because insufficient capacity had been built out for lack of such profits. Capacity existed and it sat unused or broke when it was most needed.
lukeschlather|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
vel0city|3 years ago
rossdavidh|3 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mwXICY4JM
The outages were not from any one "main cause", except perhaps "Texas doesn't get cold that often and wasn't ready". But, wind icing up was certainly one of several major causes, along with natural gas pressure dropping so that natgas-powered electrical plants could not keep operating.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
hadleybelter|3 years ago
Fox news has nothing to do with it. Generation capacity being reduced by nearly 25% due to unpredictably low wind speeds is physics. It's a huge problem being faced, and sticking your head in the sand and crying "fake news" isn't helpful.
reddog|3 years ago
hotpotamus|3 years ago
pclmulqdq|3 years ago
Events like the Texas blackouts rarely have one sole cause. Reliance on renewables was clearly one factor out of many.
michaelmrose|3 years ago
makomk|3 years ago