I think the public hand-wringing over wind misses the point. Gas is dispatchable, wind is intermittent. When we really need a lot more generation at a moment's notice, you can have every available gas turbine running full tilt (unless, due difficult circumstances and human error, a bunch of them break) while wind will just give you whatever it's going to give you. You can't command the wind. The intermittent nature of wind generation means more volatility, more difficulty in planning and in maintaining control of the grid, and more ancillary services (and costs) to make sure you can balance supply with demand all the time. If we're going to have a very large wind presence in our generation stack, we need to think very carefully about all the ancillary service needs that will create and what capacity reserve margin we're going to need (I suspect a much higher one given the volatility). And we really need diversity in our generation mix. In this disaster, we were exposed to flaws in our over-reliance on the gas supply chain. As we increasingly increase our reliance on wind, the next disaster might be from a heat wave in which the wind doesn't blow.
wind sun thermal nuclear super grid at some point down the road, gas should be nothing more than emergency reserve
I'd throw in hydro, batteries, demand response, energy efficiency, sequestration, hydrogen. That's the dream. But the utility industry is a battleship. It takes a long time to turn.
lots of inertia especially when industry “management” is part of gov I heard Buffet group proposed 5 emergency reserve gas power plants strategically spread over texas
I believe Buffet proposes 10 reserve plants. Another company had a similar proposal for 11. Buffett owns regulated utilities in the west and is fighting efforts to restructure his markets to allow competition, so he'd like nothing better than to throw a big cherry bomb into a competitive market that works. In my view, the biggest thing that holds the industry back from swifter and more radical transformation is the dominance of regulated utilities. But liberals reflexively oppose restructuring, foolishly support the dinosaurs at the investor-owned utilities (easier to implement socialist policy that way - not that there's anything wrong with that), and actually get in the way of the energy transformation that they badly want. Ok, off my soap box now.
At what point does this self-defeating, dangerous pride start impacting all of the things that Abbott likes to tout (companies relocating here, people moving here, etc.)? Would large international corporations think twice about moving here if they can't be guaranteed steady electricity?
Republicans don't care about people dying. 151 dead from power outages, 600k dead from covid. Those are all the price of "freedom"
@MojoMan do you have any political cartoons that discuss where Ted Cruz will be vacationing when then power goes out again? I have $5 on Iceland.
I’m afraid Republican politicians might not consider a warming trend and stick to old models. It’s not just heat but extreme weather patterns getting more regular. We will likely be again unprepared for the next predictable extreme events.
I don't hear California begging for reduce power usage on in mid-June, not the dog days of August. Maybe they know what they are doing. How about Abbott fix ERCOT, instead of focusing on voter suppression.
They'll guarantee corporations power even if they need to shutdown every residential supply. That's why companies are moving here, preferred status.
I had a forced outage or whatever in North Austin. Austin Energy sent me an email as fortunately I was driving back from Houston so I missed it.