Opinion: Wind dies and the Power Grid falls as Mother Nature triumphs

EPIC FAIL: Green Energy Collapses in Texas

It was billed as the storm of the century, with bitterly cold arctic air covering Texas, all the way into Mexico. It became a Texas standoff at the OK Corral. Mother Nature was pitted against the heroes of modern electrical production: wind and solar. Who would ultimately survive the standoff? Hint: the Texas power grid came very close to dying that day.

As with so many tales of the Old West, this was also a battle between good and evil. But the good guys are not that easy to spot in their white hats, because many of the bad guys don white hats to appear more virtuous than they are.

Record Cold

The build up to this storm started last Fall as NASA satellites spotted unmistakable cooling of the sea surface in the tropical Pacific Ocean off of Peru. We were headed for a La Nina, as the grip of the Super El Nino of 2016 was finally over. It had been a whopper, extending from early indications in 2015 all the way to 2020. In concert with that, the Global Temperature Anomaly, also measured by NASA satellites, had stayed well above normal and produced record warm years for the 40 year satellite record.

Following the unmistakable return of La Nina, the global atmosphere responded within months to produce a dramatic drop in satellite temperatures to just 0.12 degrees C above average by the end of January. Things were changing rapidly. By early February, the National Weather Service was telling us to expect low temperatures not seen since 2014. Up to that point, we had a mild winter in Oregon, while the rest of the country was already experiencing substantial cold. We tied the daily record low in Portland on February 12 of 24 F and had record daily snowfall both February 12 and 13.

When I mentioned to a friend in New Mexico that we had just experienced record cold winter conditions, he responded with the weather chart in Figure 1. From Albuquerque east into Texas, temperatures on Valentine’s Day were breaking record lows. But that was still not the main story.

Millions Without Power.

The main story was the substantial failure (and indeed near collapse) of the Texas electrical grid, the widespread electrical outages in Oregon, and essentially no power problems in New Mexico where the storm was also severe. See Figures 2 and 3. Power demand was up everywhere. Some states could cope well. Others could not. Broken power-lines were the problem in Oregon. Snow and ice took down lines directly or with the help of falling trees.

In Texas, there are not as many trees to fall, and the culprit was a badly engineered power system that depended on Green Energy to keep the lights on. No power system engineer worth his degree would do that, unless ordered to do so by politicians. Politicians of all stripes in Texas (Democrats and Republicans) thought that wind and solar energy were the answer to ‘climate change.’ This storm surely changed attitudes. Our climate is now cooling, and blackouts are the existential threat.

Managing most of the power in Texas, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), is a big fan of wind power but was willing to admit early on that problems with their enormous wind installations forced massive electricity cuts.   According to ERCOT, rolling blackouts barely saved the Texas grid from catastrophic collapse.

When they attempted to bring fossil fuel backup power online, it had its own set of problems. Figure 4 shows that wind power started to falter in the afternoon of February 14^th and went almost to zero over the next 24 hours. That left Texans 8 gigawatts (GW) short of electricity when they needed more not less. They had no hope of meeting the high, but not record, demand of 70 GW. Rolling blackouts followed, reducing the load to 44 GW, with many of the 29 million Texans experiencing power disruptions for days. The wind had to blow again. Windmill blades had to be de-iced. Quick-start backup generators had to be started. And inadequate local supplies of natural gas and other fossil fuels had to be replenished. It was a monumental problem that came very close to being much worse.

Oregon had a similar problem with failing Green Power, as windmill output dipped almost to zero in the Bonneville Power Administration system (see Figure 5). But BPA has a big advantage over Texas. The enormous dams along the Columbia River can be started quickly and are very reliable. The hidden downside is that the massive turbines wear out faster with intermittent use. And of course, Oregon Democrats are working overtime to burden the power grid with enough windmills to bring it down.

Epic Failure leads to Epic Prices and Epic Cover-up

This is not the story that Democrats and the propaganda press are promoting. They have been in damage control mode, lest the epic failure of Green Energy become widely known. Their explanation faults fossil fuel power, and says wind had nothing to do with it. Their Chief Engineer of the Preposterous, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, explained that had Texas fully implemented her Green New Deal, they would not have experienced any difficulties with the storm.

That hypothesis is easy to test. The maximum electrical demand that Texas has ever faced is 75 GW. If their installed high-quality generating capability is that plus say 20% to account for downtime of individual plants and growing demand, they need about 90 GW of reliable installed power generators.

With the largest wind installations in the United States, Texas presently has 32 GW of installed but unreliable wind capability. That has never produced more than 22 GW and more typically produces only 5 GW. During this winter storm, wind power was reduced to a single gigawatt, the typical output of a single power plant. If that is the real minimum needed for engineering a 100% Green New Deal electrical grid, Texas will need 90 times the number of windmills it currently has to avoid another winter storm blackout. Such an enormous number of windmills would cover Texas and offshore waters twice over.

That should say to everyone that Green Power has been vastly oversold, and wind schemes will never come close to expectations. It should also warn that everyone will pay sky high bills to the promoters even as the schemes falter and fail. Electricity prices during the storm soared a hundred times, as Texans were desperate for electrical generation that actually worked.

Energy prices in the United Kingdom, where Green Energy is also fashionable, are already twice the average in the USA. That has created ‘energy poverty,’ where the poor and elderly have to shiver in the winter in order to have enough money for food and rent. See Figure 6.

The famous British journalist, Matt Ridley, pointed out that wind and solar currently provide about 1% of the energy that humans consume on this planet, despite many years of building Green Energy installations. To merely keep up with increasing demand of 2% per year, the world would need to install twice as many windmills, every year, as we have already installed over decades. Such an enormous number would cover an area the size of the United Kingdom and Ireland, every year. Soon they would cover the entire planet. Then with their short 20 year life, they will need to be replaced. And despite all this effort and cost, present fossil fuel usage would not decrease.

 Most should be able to understand that renewables accomplish nothing, even at an astronomical cost for ratepayers and for the environment.

The real shootout here is not between the Texas electrical grid and Mother Nature, which Mother Nature won. It is between competent science and engineering and the vastly incompetent and corrupt political science and political engineering that brought Texas to its knees. A favorable outcome of the latter depends on the public realizing that they are being swindled.

This is the struggle between good and evil.

Gordon J. Fulks lives in Corbett and can be reached at gordonfulks@hotmail.com. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago’s Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research.