The same price forces caused Texas to install a lot of wind and (more recently) solar. The federal production tax credit makes wind-generated electricity very cheap for Texans, if somewhat less cheap for all Americans.
By the early 1970s, the artificially low price set by the federal government had created a shortage, but only of interstate gas. Gas consumed within the state where it was produced was plentiful, but more expensive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_in_the_United_Stat...
https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/counties/matagorda_county/n...
So it's not clear that relying on other electricity sources would have been better, if those other sources also failed to plan for operating in prolonged cold weather.
I was more commenting on the gap in the articles logic that suggested wind/solar was off the hook because nat gas went down worse. I really don’t know the systems well enough to fill that gap on my own.
But this isn't about wind vs. coal vs. gas, it was about weatherized vs. not weatherized.
PVGR Output (solar) is currently 0 MW, with over 3000 MW of installed capacity. That's 0%.
Nuclear is apparently doing best, outputting 75% capacity (with a capacity of around 5000 MW). I'm not sure on the exact numbers for coal, gas, etc., but they are clearly supplying the bulk of the 49089 MW demand.
> Wind actually outperformed what it was projected to
If you read the full quote from the article, this is so heavily qualified that it seems designed to be quoted out-of-context. As in, they couldn't say that wind generation performed well in any meaningful sense without outright lying, so they came up with this quotable take instead, knowing that the extremely heavy qualification would not make it into the quotations. If I project wind power to generate 5% of its capacity, and it actually generates 10%, I can say that wind power "exceeded expectations" in exactly the way the fact "checkers" mean it. But this ignores the fact that most of the wind capacity failed to produce anything, which is what people actually care about.
If the projections had been made a month ahead of time, then "exceeding projections" might have some useful meaning. But the projections referred to are only made 24 hours in advance, meaning that the expectations being exceeded were incredibly low and easy to "exceed". I'm sure ERCOT does projections more than 24 hours in advance as well. Why doesn't PolitiFact reference those, or compare this February's output to previous Februarys, or do anything other than cherry-pick a single set of numbers that just so happens to support their political agenda?
> But this isn't about wind vs. coal vs. gas, it was about weatherized vs. not weatherized.
This seems to be spot on. Many of the issues could have been avoided if the systems had been built to sustain cold weather.
[0] http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi... [1] http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/219848/Capacity_Chang... [2] http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/144926/ERCOT_Quick_Fa...
From ERCOT’s winter weather best practices:
http://www.ercot.com/content/meetings/other/keydocs/2011/201...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_National_Laboratory#Nucl...
In any case, the current generation mix isn't particularly dependent on wind/solar (a couple percent of predicted winter generation).
The article takes one position (weakly) that renewables weren’t to blame. The Texas governor for instance has taken a very strong position that renewables are to blame. It seems likely that the real answer is between (and on the side of this articles position) these points. But to just arbitrarily judge based on what solar did vs “expectations” compared to what nat gas did, ignores the idea that solar demands more nat gas than other energy sources.
I’m good with the answer “we’d have adopted solar/wind/nat gas mix in the same proportion given the same risk modeling we had for this sort of event in comparison to coal/nat gas/etc”
But that’s not what the article actually argues.