Texas Suffers a Solar and Wind Power ‘Drought’
Triple-digit temperatures aren’t unusual during Texas summers, but power shortages coupled with urgent orders to conserve electricity are now routine. While Texans barely averted blackouts Wednesday evening, the state’s energy ordeals are a flickering warning to the rest of the country.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (Ercot) called a Stage 2 emergency on Wednesday evening, one step from rolling blackouts. “High demand, lower wind generation, and the declining solar generation during sunset led to lower operating reserves on the grid and eventually contributed to lower frequency,” the grid operator’s CEO said.
Businesses that use large amounts of power were directed to curb their energy consumption—i.e., scale back operations. Utilities urged Texans to unplug electric vehicles, turn off pool filters, and prepare backup plans for medical equipment in case the power goes out. In other words, double check that backyard emergency generator.
Texans conserved enough power Wednesday to prevent blackouts, but they were asked again Thursday to use less power in the evening—when many come home from work and want to crank up the AC. Last month Ercot issued eight emergency alerts to conserve power.
Ercot says Texas set a new September record for peak demand on Wednesday, which follows 10 records this summer. Don’t blame a warming climate. The problem is that Texas’s booming population and economy have caused electricity demand to grow faster than the reliable supply—emphasis on the reliable.
The state’s refineries, manufacturing plants and data centers need huge amounts of power. Texas produces 10 times as much solar power as it did five years ago. An estimated 7.7 gigawatts of solar power capacity will be installed this year—about 9% of the state’s peak demand on Wednesday. Renewables at times can generate 40% of the state’s power.
But neither solar nor wind provides reliable power around the clock. Solar predictably wanes during the late afternoon, and the state doesn’t have anywhere close to enough large-scale batteries to make up the shortfall. So as usual Texas on Wednesday leaned on natural-gas plants to ramp up, though this still wasn’t enough.
The Legislature is asking voters in November to approve a special fund to issue low-interest loans and grants for building more backup power sources—namely, gas plants. So now Texas taxpayers are being asked to subsidize gas power to back up solar and wind that are heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.
The Texas power shortages are a harbinger of what’s to come for Americans amid the Biden Administration’s force-fed green energy transition. California has avoided rolling blackouts this summer because last winter’s storms replenished reservoirs and hydropower, though population and business flight is also working in the state’s favor on energy.
The North American Electric Reliability Corp. (Nerc) last month for the first time deemed “energy policy” among the biggest risks to grid reliability. “The resource mix is increasingly characterized as one that is sensitive to extreme, widespread, and long duration temperatures as well as wind and solar droughts,” Nerc said.
Unlike actual droughts, power shortages are caused by, and can be prevented by, government.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-energy-blackouts-ercot-solar-power-f3476ad9
**********************************************Climate change goals emerge as sticking point in G20 Sherpa meet, sources say
After division over Russia's war in Ukraine, differences about climate change goals have emerged as another stumbling block for G20 leaders to iron out at their two-day meeting in New Delhi, six Indian sources said.
The bloc is divided on commitments to phasing down fossil-fuel use, increasing renewable energy targets and reducing green house gas emissions, five of the officials cited above said.
The disagreements resurfaced during the last two days of sherpa level meetings ahead of the Sept 9-10 summit. The phrase on the war on Ukraine still remains the core concern for India, which is trying to convince all the 20 countries to agree on a joint statement known as Leaders' Declaration.
The bloc had failed to reach consensus during concluding ministerial meetings on environment and energy in the last week of July.
"The issue on climate is stuck mostly on one line or two lines, related to phasing out fossil fuels and tripling renewable energy capacity," one of the Indian officials, present in the Sherpa level meetings, said.
Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and India have opposed a proposal by Western countries to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030 and cut green house gas emissions by 60% by 2035, three officials said.
The fossil fuel producing and developing countries are also opposing G7 nations' push to reach net zero commitments faster, one official said.
United Arab Emirates is set to host the next round of climate change discussions at the COP28 meeting in November and December and countries want to discuss the issue there, one official said.
"Nobody wants to make a commitment now, as then you will have a problem at your hands because you can get tied down to what you agree at this summit," another Indian official said.
None of the officials wanted to be named as they are not allowed to speak to media. Indian government did not immediately reply to emails seeking comments.
Indian power minister R K Singh has on several occasions said the country's average per person emissions are among the lowest in the world and it would not compromise on its energy needs by committing to cut coal use.
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Heat pumps show how hard decarbonisation will be
Twelve European countries plan to phase fossil fuels out of the heating of buildings, and air-source heat pumps have emerged as the best alternative. These extract ambient heat from the outside air, even when it is below freezing, and concentrate it to warm inside spaces. Heat pumps are far more efficient than boilers, in terms of the amount of energy used per unit of heat generated. Lately, however, they have become a symbol of the obstacles that await as countries try to decarbonise. Until recently, green policies had seldom required private citizens to roll up their sleeves and make big, disruptive changes to their lives. Now they are starting to, and many people do not like it.
The annoying thing about heat pumps is that you cannot simply swap a gas boiler for one—at least not yet. Heat pumps are larger than gas boilers, require outside space and, for the 60% of European properties that are old and leaky, their installation must come with extra insulation.
In Britain, knowing whom to trust on the best green heating design for your home is hard enough to discourage all but the most determined and wealthy eco-warriors. Owners of older houses face difficult choices, such as whether to lift up their floorboards and line their inside walls with thick insulation, or wrap their homes in a much thicker layer of external insulation, which may not be allowed by local planning rules. All this can quickly become costly, disruptive—and politically toxic. A plan in Germany to ban gas- and oil-boiler installations as early as next year, for instance, was abandoned after a public outcry.
What to do? Heat pumps that are an easy swap for boilers are likely to come onto the market eventually. But even then households cannot be entirely spared from disruption. The least governments can do is make adoption as easy as possible. Although grants covering part of the cost are available in some countries, their administration is often sluggish and should be speeded up. A target cannot be enforced if there are not enough skilled workers to retrofit homes; more will need to be trained. The clash between planning regulations and green rules, which makes householders feel helpless, must somehow be resolved.
Germany’s watered-down rules, which are due to be passed in parliament later this week, wisely give households more time, and also ask local authorities to be involved in their administration. They will give large and small municipalities until 2026 or 2028, respectively, to draw up transition plans, which can allow for greener heating that does not involve single-home heat pumps. Municipalities know their local housing stock better than central governments do, and they make the planning decisions that often collide with the demands of retrofitting. They must start favouring the planet more and nimbys less.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/09/06/heat-pumps-show-how-hard-decarbonisation-will-be
*************************************************Fear the wind droughts
Matthew Warren knows as much about the energy industry as anyone and his book Blackout (2019) is a very good overview of the system.
In the Financial Review on the weekend, he called for a contest of ideas and not a rigid central plan because the timetable for decarbonisation that AEMO provided for the government in the so-called Integrated System Plan is purely aspirational and it is not really a plan at all.
As a former chief executive officer of the Australian Energy Council and a veteran of the Energy Supply Association and the Clean Energy Council, some may argue Warren is too embedded in the parallel universe to fully challenge the decarbonisation narrative.
In my view, the story will not have a happy ending and the time has come for a new energy narrative based on realism and concern for the welfare of people and the planet. Let’s be energy realists and responsible stewards of the environment at the same time.
On that basis we can move forward using conventional power, including nuclear, to generate cheap, relatively clean and reliable energy, as we did two decades ago.
It has been acknowledged that building a power system driven by intermittent energy only is a radical and unproven venture, but the Western world is betting the farm on it. Given this, it is already admitted that we will have to adjust to unforeseen difficulties.
Wind droughts were not anticipated and they have emerged as the fundamental problem, a fatal flaw in the system, the Achilles heel of Net Zero the program… The official wind-watchers and meteorologists did not warn us.
It was left to others, notably the world-leading wind-watchers Anton Lang and Paul Miskelly, who documented our wind droughts over a decade ago. Now everyone can see them in the public records from AEMO, displayed at Aneroid Energy.
You can also look at the Nemwatch Widget at breakfast and dinnertime and see how often you will sit down to a hot meal on the back of wind power!
The time has come to face the facts about wind droughts and the futility of the three strategies, the ‘Holy Trinity’: transmission lines, pumped hydro, and batteries that are supposed to keep the lights on through windless nights.
When the wind is low across the whole of the NEM, there is no spare wind power for the interstate connectors to carry. As for pumped hydro, where in the world are large pumped hydro schemes powered by intermittent energy? And batteries! Do the arithmetic and see the puny capacity of even the largest ‘big batteries’ compared with the demands of the grid on a windless night.
As Mark Mills explains, the so-called energy transition is not happening worldwide. Trillions of dollars of expenditure over two decades have hardly moved the needle from fossil fuels to green energy.
What is more, there is no way that it can happen, considering the amount of rocks that have to be dug up and transported and then converted into a myriad of products using highly energy-intensive processes.
The AEMO data dashboard has a tab for Renewable Penetration which gives the impression that we are making steady progress with the green transition. The high point is approaching 70 per cent, and the average was up to 36 per cent last month. That is the metric of choice in the parallel ‘Net Zero’ universe.
In the real world, the critical indicator is the amount of wind and solar power generated in the worst case, the night with little or no wind. That is next to nothing and increasing the installed capacity by a factor of 5 or even 10 (if you can imagine that) will not help because 5 or 10 times next to nothing is still next to nothing.
Do not dismiss that argument as unfair or misleading cherry-picking. It is due diligence to see if the equipment is fit for purpose. So we put our weight on the rungs of the ladder before we use it, maintenance workers look for defective parts in aero engines, we check the low point of the flood levy, the gap in the fence around the stock, and the weak link in the chain.
The tipping point in warming was a bogey invented by climate alarmists and now we are approaching a very real tipping point in the power supply.
This is a highly simplified picture of the way we are approaching a critical tipping point in the power supply as conventional power capacity (mostly coal) has run down since the turn of the century.
We expect that coal will continue to exit the system until it falls below the level of peak demand at dinner times. Then the first shocks of wind droughts will be felt. Eventually, the supply of conventional power will fall below the base load that is required day and night. Then there will be rolling blackouts every night when the wind power falls away to a point where it cannot make up the difference between the downward-sloping line of conventional power and the horizontal line representing demand.
The Renewable Energy enthusiasts expect that increasing the capacity of wind and solar will ensure that the gap is closed but on windless nights there nothing to fill the gap. Heroic load shedding, and widespread rolling blackouts, will be required to avoid a system-wide blackout.
All the states and nations on the road to Net Zero by wind and solar power will arrive at the tipping point sooner or later. Britain and Germany have arrived there but their collapse is cushioned by power imported from other places. We are on the brink and we don’t have any extension cords.
Lately, there has been a flurry of alarm about this potentially catastrophic situation but it should not come as a surprise. Since early 2020 the Energy Realists of Australia sent a series of briefing notes to all state and federal MPs and many journalists to raise concern about wind droughts, lack of storage and cognate matters. However, the major parties all pressed on with aggressive policies to eliminate coal (surely the biggest public policy blunder in our history) and they all share the responsibility for the impending crisis.
Moreover, the press corps neglected to inform the general public about the issues and voters sleep-walked into the last election without understanding the energy policy issues that are at stake. Echoing Paul Keating’s pronouncement on his recession, you could say that this is the energy crisis that we had to have!
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/09/end-the-net-zero-nightmare/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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