The problem at the moment is that none of the sources for Texas was prepared for a cold winter, renewable or otherwise.
Quebec is 99% renewable[0] (95% hydro, 4% wind) and runs through the coldest of winter just fine!
> With over 40 853 MW of installed capacity, hydroelectric stations generate about 95% of Quebec’s electricity.
> Wind is the 2nd largest source of electricity generation in Quebec. In 2018, wind capacity reached 4 096 MW and accounted for 4% of the province’s generating capacity
[0] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...
Hydro has huge impacts on the environment and can only be built if you have mountains and large amounts of water.
Oh, and it’s one of the dealiest sources of energy. The Banqiao dam disaster in 1975 killed as much as 250.000 people while there are less than 50 deaths attributed to Chernobyl according to UNSCEAR/WHO.
If you think about the danger of renewable sources of energy, know that there is not alternative because we have no alternative planet.
Betwwwn 250,000 accidental deaths and billions of suffering people, I choose the former.
1. Chernobyl was an old, unsafe design, and the disaster was human error. There are better safer designs.
2. The true toll of Chernobyl is the hundreds of thousands of people killed due to pollution from coal plants (52000 per year in US alone). Lives that could be saved if countries had shifted to Nuclear more aggressively.
I don't know why you think billions are suffering from Nuclear plants. About 20% of total power generation in US is from Nuclear. Can you tell me how many millions are suffering from it?
Those were your words, so I'm asking you about the billions.
Comparing hydro to wind and solar is unreasonable.
Hydro is a battery, wind and solar are not.
Hydro is easily comparable with wind/solar assuming the scheme has a steady inflow (river, rain, snow etc)
Russia built a floating nuclear power plant in the remote city of Pevek in the polar circle where hardly any wind turbine or solar panel will be able to generate sufficient amounts of electricity.
The issue isn't about the type of fuel, it's planning for cold weather events.
Wind and Solar is pulling above planned generation right now.
If you believe your logic, time to go all-in on wind + solar.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/EEbf5lM.png (screenshot from EIA, original data here: https://www.eia.gov/beta/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/e...)
Your first statement is partially true. The ERCOT "planners" expected their gas capacity to basically always be there, and the fact that 30 GW of thermal capacity is offline for various weather-related reasons is the primary reason the power is out.
But the remaining gas is pulling almost all the weight keeping people alive so we shouldn't neglect that.
Like it's pulling a lot of weight because it's 80% of the capacity if nothing's going wrong! If it was 100% then maybe 40 GW of thermal capacity would _also_ be offline.
ERCOT assumed 0% from Wind. Instead we're getting 25% They assumed 100% from gas. Instead we're getting 50% (or 70% or whatever). You look at that and tell me gas is what's performing well here, and the segment that should be expanded. (EDIT: Sorry, I think your original thing was "all in nuclear." I think I read nuclear was also having some issues but it's at least not the "more gas is the solution for a situation where gas is failing" narrative)
I get that wind + solar can't cover everything, but right now what we're seeing is massive failures from gas. In a universe where we had more wind + solar, there could likely be more energy going around right now.
Go to here: https://www.eia.gov/beta/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-vi... , select "daily" view and put in 60 days to get a more representative sample.
on 12/19/2020 -- looks to be a fairly typical Texas winter day
natural gas production was 331660 megawatthours
wind was 191415 megawatthours
for a ratio of 1.73 gas/wind
this appears to be fairly typical numbers on a daily basis over the winter -- actually on a number of days wind surpasses gas
on 2/16/2021
natural gas 692091
wind 90087
for a ratio of 7.68 gas/wind
natural gas 2/16 vs natural gas 12/19 is ratio 2.09
wind 2/16 vs wind 12/19 is ratio 0.47
so as expected during an inclement weather event natural gas ramped up and wind ramped down. natural gas just didn't ramp up enough to pick up all the slack from increased demand and ramped down renewables.
"I get that wind + solar can't cover everything, but right now what we're seeing is massive failures from gas. In a universe where we had more wind + solar, there could likely be more energy going around right now." -- Wind is failing much worse than gas from an objective power generation standpoint. All wind has going for it is the tyranny of low expectations.
> https://twitter.com/Beazy_Rampezy/status/1362043827800977414
I think wind can play a huge role in fixing this. Check out: https://www.windy.com/?37.539,-94.134,4
And you've got plenty of massive offshore wind resources on both sides of the continent that are blowing right now (Feb 17th 7:49pm PDT) if we had installed capacity.
We need to keep our nuclear fleet (20% of electrical generation) and invest in a TON of transmission.
If we had this electrical grid, we'd be doing far better: https://twitter.com/Sammy_Roth/status/1356442256866037766
https://www.vnews.com/northern-pass-eversource-hydroquebec-2...
I do like the idea (from the linked tweet) of underground transmission lines (underground alongside railroads is probably mitigates the NIMBY objections):
https://www.volts.wtf/p/transmission-fortnight-burying-power
Best way to do it is to go: 1. All underground transmission. 2. Expand the natural gas pipeline permitting process (which is controlled at the Federal level and already overrides state's jurisdiction) to include underground electrical transmission.
So my logic is go Nuclear, like France. Keep the natural gas for heating (since it's relatively efficient and cleaner than other fossil fuels). Supplement with solar/wind where & when available.
North East US is running about 28% nuclear at the time I viewed the fuel mix chart.
And the blame doesn’t lie on natural gas but on the idea of shutting down baseload-capable sources like nuclear in favor of renewables.
As Princeton engineering professor Jesse Jenkins points out, the real primary culprit was the mass failure of nuclear, coal, and natural gas (or "thermal") power plants. At the peak of the blackout something like 27,000 megawatts of thermal capacity were offline — or nearly 40 percent of Texas's entire thermal capacity.
https://theweek.com/articles/967062/what-texas-blackout-reve...
What nuclear has been shut down in Texas?
As long as we need peakers or other dispatchable powers supply, I like solar and wind over nuclear to provide the main quantity of generation vs nuclear. I don't see nuclear catching up to renewables on cost terms at this point.
You need electricity produced at the right time as well as the right place. I don't understand how people can get that producing electricity in the middle of the Sahara is useless, but producing it at 12pm on June 15th when you need it today isn't.
Though it wouldn't surprise me if deaths+birth defects+other health problems was still a lot lower for nuclear than for coal and oil.
If the patents are to be believed, then Lockheed-Martin's Skunkworks has developed a portable fusion reactor the size of an intermodal shipping container. I'd like to see those scaled up significantly for usage around the world, for a variety of reasons... extraordinarily cheap power for one, but far more manageable nuclear waste storage for another, and more important, reason.
Source?
And https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion...
I admit I myself am highly skeptical of this project... but I welcome it with open arms if its true.
Most of those places are not affected by blackouts being a regular thing. I can't remember the last one in Germany, which has lots of wind. I can't remember a single power outage lasting more than a few minutes/seconds, ever. I'm 46 and I only experienced only a handful of those. Just not a thing in Northern Europe. We have interconnected grids and coal/nuclear are basically disappearing rapidly. I believe the UK had an interesting cascading failure on its grid last year and that was big news because it is so unusual. That only lasted for a few hours.
If you look at the economics, it's pretty straightforward. Texas was an early adopter of wind because it's a cheap option for generating power and it takes power to produce power. So a lot of that Texan wind power is actually used for oil and gas production and was installed primarily for that purpose and payed for by very much for profit oil companies. Probably with the help of a lot of tax money because big oil basically owns the local politicians.
Ironically, the thing that's currently driving up the prices of gas in the US, is basically oil and gas production being affected by the sudden demand for gas for heating. As demand spiked, gas production capacity started dropping because the electrical grid got disrupted (which is of course about 50% powered by gas plants in Texas). Probably Texas is more reliant on gas now than in the past, which is probably a big reason for the current issues.
Yes, some older wind turbines are not capable of dealing with cold weather. Texas of course has lots of those as it was an early adopter and is not commonly affected by cold weather like this.
But there are lots of regions with extreme weather that have large deployments of wind turbines that reliably produce power through very extreme conditions. E.g. Antarctica has wind power. So does Iceland, Norway, or Alaska. Ice proof wind turbines is a high tech business and a fairly recent development. So, wind is basically part of the solution here and not part of the problem.
In this current Texas disaster those base line thermal generators like coal, gas and nuclear have also fallen victim to these low temperatures.
http://www.ceem.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/files/uploads/publ...
A 10GW solar farm is already in the pipeline for northern Australia:
Take a look at France:
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
They generated 71% of their 582 TWh in 2018 from Nuclear, with the bulk of the remainder coming from Hydro (12%) Natural Gas (5%), Wind (5%) ... (solar was only 2%, same as coal).
They are a net exporter of power and that generates about €3 billion/year of revenue.
The source (ii) should be able to be ramped up and shut down quickly, which is a requirement where nuclear flat out fails.
The baseline concept of a power source that is steady and cannot be quickly shut down or ramped up (i.e., nuclear or coal) really does not make sense in a world where you have access to very cheap but somewhat unpredictable sources of energy.
Ideally, source (ii) would be electricity storage. This is not available now at the necessary scale (but it is getting closer and closer to reality). So the other alternatives are hydro (ideal if available in your environment, but not always available) and gas.
Nuclear doesn't enter into it. Starting up and stopping nuclear reactors is a difficult time consuming process that cannot be done on demand.
And yes Gas is falling on its face right now, but that is not due to any fundamental limitations of gas. It is because a lot of the US nat gas is mined and transported in Texas and the Texans did not winterize their equipment.
I expect renewables will keep increasing in combination with gas, until power storage becomes available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
But at the end of the day, it uses more energy than it generates due to the inefficiencies of pumping water up to the top of the mountain (basically, it's playing arbitrage with spot electricity pricing & demand).
Also, it is very good for intermittent generation, because when you stop it, you can fill up the water in the reservoir and give yourself potential energy for the next time you start it up. It does in a way store energy, it stores the energy of rivers, not of electricity.
Of course whether you can access it depends on your environment. You have to have convenient rivers to dam up, and you have to have no water shortages. In a case of water shortage the decision to let water out or not is usually made based on water needs, not electricity needs.
Hydro only plays a large role world-wide in countries with low population densities such as Norway.
That’s a lie spread by the renewables lobby.
Of course, there is always a certain level of electricity generation that is needed as most people like to use their fridges, AC and computers 24/7.
And then you have things like traffic infrastructure, hospitals, gas stations which operate 24/7.
I don’t know about the US, but in Germany only 25% of the electricity is consumed by private households, 75% by industry, traffic and businesses.
The result is that in Germany the demand never goes below 50 GW and normally peaks at around 75-80 GW. The demand function pretty much oscillates like a sine function.
This is true but let me summarise my understanding which might be incorrect, and is based off this article and similar ones. I'd like to know where it's wrong?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-10-12/renewable-ene...
Basically, there is a minimum amount of power a traditional power plant can generate before needing to turn off, which is slow and costly.
"Base load" is this minimum amount that is generated onto the grid and it is priced accordingly at off-peak times so demand will increase and consume it without power stations losing money by burning fuel to waste power, or having to turn off.
With renewables in the picture, they eat into this base load demand. Now when demand is lower, renewables might still be outputting power at little to no marginal cost, and homes are not pulling from the grid. The traditional plants are burning fuel but they have to sell it at a loss or dump the power (maybe batteries can help them here).
This means that, as we get more and more renewable sources online, traditional plants are actually bad for base load (in the modern use of the term) generation. A lot of the time they can't come online fast enough to fill a slump if renewables drop, which means they are idling and losing money the rest of the time when renewables are flourishing. This means we need rapid response sources, like batteries (seconds) or gas (tens of minutes) rather than the traditional sources (coal) which take hours.
This way a traditional fossil fueled power station get paid to maintain capacity regardless of current demand, and the response time is kept low in case of changing weather.
From the perspective of the government, they are simply paying for a reliable power grid. From the perspective of renewable energy plants, they can sell energy at a lower price than fossil fueled power plants with smaller investment. From the perspective of the fossil fueled power plant they get paid twice, once for being backup and then any power they then happen to sell when the price goes up because of the weather. From the perspective of capacity, both renewable and fossil fueled power plants tries to have capacity close to 100% of demand and thus get invested and built accordingly.
From my own perspective I am not sure this is the cleanest, most stable or cheapest way to run a power grid.
Hydro power is a great alternative, but we are already at peak utilization. We actually need to tear down some in order to save red listed species and restore the environment for animals that need to have unobstructed rivers to reproduce. As the capacity has been increasing, hydro power has been mostly static in term of growth.
There is nuclear and the political situation of that. The government and the green party (who is part of the current government constellation) are promoting the "on call" as a favorable strategy over nuclear. Their main political argument is that everything is good as long we produce more green energy over the whole year than we consume coal energy during the winter. Historically the political right has been pro-fossil fuels, but given the current situation there has been some movement now where some parties is looking to move into opposition.
And last we got battery technology. So far the only installations that I know globally that operate by generating solar energy and putting them into battery is Tesla. I don't know how economical that system has been. There exist to my knowledge no wind park operating through Tesla batteries, and I do not know why that is.
So that leaves Nuclear. But we just need to get it right this time -- i.e. don't build them near earthquake/tsunami zones, don't play games with the control rods and these days we've gotten pretty good at control systems. I think it's about time to look at it again.