Renewable are not to blame for the blackouts in Texas

A lot of people on Twitter are posting this chart to somehow pin responsibility for the Texas outages on a lack of wind power

But this chart does not mean what they think it means. Natural gas generation is ramping up to meet the cold snap, as it is supposed to do

The thing is, there is not enough thermal power because cold weather is terrible for coal and natural gas

You have to dig but you can find out how much Texas power capacity is offline at http://mis.ercot.com/misapp/GetReports.do?reportTypeId=13103&reportTitle=Hourly%20Resource%20Outage%20Capacity&showHTMLView=&mimicKey

Open the first spreadsheet. “TotalResourceMW” tells you how much power is out right now. “TotalIRRResourcesMW” is the amount of renewable power capacity that is not producing and “TotalNewEquipResourceMW” shows supplies being spun up but not yet injecting power into the grid

THIRTY GIGAWATTS OF THERMAL IS OUT RIGHT NOW

That would be 17 gigawatts more than a week ago, because IT'S TOO DAMN COLD

That is something like ten nuclear power plants

Natural gas wells and pipelines are freezing up. Coal plants that are operating are going round-the-clock, but others cannot come on line because the coal piles freeze up

You need to put antifreeze on lignite and have bulldozers ready to mash up frozen anthracite

Renewables aren't doing as well as you would like, with only 6.5 GW online. But ERCOT -- the Texan grid operator -- only expects 6.1 GW in the depth of winter so it is outperforming (low) expectations

What Texas needs right now is a capacity market, including incentives to winterize wind farms (which can be done)

And in the long-term, we need really cheap storage to have the capacity to deal with the Great Blizzard of 2054

But right now the problem is simply that Texas isn't ready for cold weather. Heck, it handled an equally intense heat wave this summer with aplomb:

But the summer didn't knock gas wells by icing 'em up

A hypothetical coal-powered Evil Texas (tm) would have done just as badly as real Texas in this sort of weather

So stop snarking at renewables. You know who you are. I won't tweet at you. But you know who you are and you should know better

But I will call out the government of Mexico, which is up to its usual evil and trying to build new coal plants, while blaming the winter on solar power

More detail here: https://noelmaurer.typepad.com/aab/2021/02/renewables-are-not-causing-blackouts-in-texas.html

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