Initial reports from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the state’s power grid, suggested that frozen wind turbines are partly to blame. Although the ERCOT report on Sunday said that limited natural gas supply also paralyzed the power grid, many Republican officials seized frozen wind turbines and solar panels as the primary culprits behind the outages.
Greg Abbott, a Republican, told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday night that the wind and our solar power were shut down due to the weather and that together they were more than 10% of our power grid and Texas was in a situation where the country did not have power. ‘
Although frozen wind turbines were a contributing factor, wind blockages accounted for less than 13% of interruptions, Dan Woodfin, senior director of ERCOT’s systems operations, told Bloomberg.
According to ERCOT, most power outages were due to losses of coal, natural gas and nuclear energy.
ERCOT reported on Wednesday that 46,000 megawatts of generation were offline. Of these, ERCOT officials said that 28,000 megawatts come from thermal sources such as coal, gas and nuclear power plants, and 18,000 megawatts come from renewable energy, namely solar and wind.
“This is really a major failure of the natural gas system,” Michael Webber, a professor of energy resources at the University of Texas at Austin, told CNN. “This is the part that really struggled to keep up.”
Webber said it was ‘unimportant to blame the network’s fight’ on renewable energy as the state’s energy supply is dominated by fossil fuels.
According to a report by ERCOT, solar power is only 3.8% of the state’s power during the year. Wind energy accounts for 10% of Texas’ winter energy capacity and is capable of delivering 24.8% year-round, the state’s second largest source of energy under natural gas, accounting for 51%.
Webber also made it clear that “Texas * does NOT * force the grid to rely on wind” as Crenshaw claimed.
“Apart from a small mandate signed by Governor Bush in 1999 and revised in 2005 to install a few GW of renewable energy sources, we use market forces to make decisions about what to build and what to operate,” he said. Webber told CNN.
The 2005 mandate review to which Webber refers required that by 2025 the state should produce at least 10,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity, of which 500 megawatts should come from a source other than wind. According to the Energy Information Administration, Texas exceeded the 2025 target in 2009, largely due to the generating capacity of the state’s wind farms.
Prepare for the cold
On Fox, Abbott also said the failures of renewable energy sources such as wind turbines “show how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States.” He added that ‘[i]it just shows that fossil fuels are needed. ‘
Facts first: Wind turbines can function properly even in icy temperatures if properly overwintered. Furthermore, the cold weather also caused generators and other parts of Texas’ energy infrastructure to fail, and regulators had earlier warned of the lack of preparedness when a cold moment in 2011 caused power outages in the state.
Webber disagrees with Abbott’s assessment, noting: “Wind performs well in very colder climates where they prepare for it.”
Wind turbines can be equipped with various devices that heat and deis parts of the turbine, along with other measures, such as waterproof coverings, to operate it in severe cold. Some wind turbines can operate at -22 degrees Fahrenheit.
According to Webber, a lack of overwintering has affected the power supply in Texas, not just wind turbines and solar panels.
On Twitter, Crenshaw
acknowledge that the state was not prepared for such a storm, claiming that the infrastructure of Texas was not designed to freeze once in a century.
However, the state has been warned earlier about the problems in its infrastructure and what steps they can take to be better prepared for future cold weather situations.
After low temperatures hit Southwest in 2011 – leading to the loss of power for 1.3 million customers in several states and black matter for several million Texans – the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation released a report recommending preventative measures. to protect Texas’ energy infrastructure from future extreme winter storms.
The 2011 report also notes that the recommendations to better prepare energy infrastructure for such weather, remained unchanged after a similar cold in 1989.
“[T]the answer is clear that the affirmative action was not adequate, or that it was not upheld, “the report said. Generators were not required to prepare for cold weather, and efforts to do so were delayed. “
David Tuttle, a research fellow at the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, told CNN “[T]here is a reasonable critique of the fact that the Texas generator is not adequately overwintered.
“It appears that NERC has made recommendations on best practices but has not made them mandatory,” Tuttle said.
While the key questions remain about the extent to which these recommendations have been implemented across the state, at least one city in Texas has taken precautions that may have borne fruit. After the freeze of 2011, El Paso overwintered its power stations and this time the city experienced minimal interruptions compared to the rest of the state.
