Isn't it a bit naive to assume the planers of these expansions didn't at one point or another had that exact thought themselves? I mean it is certainly not the most far out there idea when it comes to wind power..

As a German electrical engineer that knows the rigour with which the whole electrical industry works here I am confident this will not be an issue in Germany. Cold winters are not a new thing here.

No, because that's exactly what happened in Texas during their winter storm crisis.

That was only part of the Texas issue. Many Nat Gas plants were also offline. For nearly the whole time Nat Gas outages were 2x wind outages according to ERCOT.

Here is their own report: https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2021/04/28/ERCOT_Winter_Sto...

Correct, they were, which reinforces the point.

Buuuut... the problem is that they didn't weather proof their system even though they were informend about the problems this could cause in winter storm scenarios.

The weatherproofed windpower plants as well als gas plants function very well in Germany, Norway, etc. even though it is often a lot colder.

Do weatherproofed wind turbines consume electricity? A common complaint around here is that they need to keep the blades heated to avoid frost and ice buildup, even when the wind is not blowing (we do have a lot of still days in winter).

In bad conditions, if that is still the case, having wind turbines connected to the grid might be worse than having none.

In bad conditions this is the case foe every power plant.

The good thing is, that wind turbines are highly distributed, so the chance for every single one being in bad conditions is slim.

This is factually incorrect. The winter issue in Texas was almost exclusively lack of winterization of thermal plants as well as a market setup that was unable to predict and react to the weather. Wind generated more electricity during the event than what was committed in the market, and as such had no negative influence.

This is factually incorrect. Winterization is about half of the issues faced. Page 4 highlights the causes pretty well.

https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2021/04/28/ERCOT_Winter_Sto...

Page 16 is quite clear: the vast majority of missing generation capacity was natural gas. The lost wind capacity was comparable to lost coal capacity. Whether the cause is categorized as equipment failure, weather, or fuel availability, the most affected generation category was natural gas.

The point of my comment was that the supply chain issue was significant, sorenbs is saying winterization is the exclusive cause. The ERCOT report doesn't support what they had to say. Winterization accounts for ~12-15 GW while supply chain is responsible for ~5-8 GW. (Page 23-25)

The comment I originally responded to said:

> Isn't it a bit naive to assume the planers of these expansions didn't at one point or another had that exact thought themselves?

The answer is no, it is not naive to assume that they didn't think about these things, because even in a state like Texas where energy is king it was not fully thought out.

Edit:

Also to be clear, I'm not ragging on Texas. I love the people of Texas and I miss being there, but I think the state has some important lessons to pay attention to and learn from.

What isn’t fully thought out?

The categories in the report are weather related, equipment failure, and fuel supply issues. These are considered in the report mutually exclusive. But they aren’t, it is just a useful categorization.

You are simply wrong to think that they don’t consider intermittent resources as part of their planning. Wind stops blowing all the time, this is known. The fact that many natural gas generators iced over, fuel was too expensive, fuel wasn’t available, or they couldn’t maintain their equipment when needed was the principal source of lost capacity.

ERCOT sets the price of electricity. There is no 'market' in the traditional sense, unless you count a government price fixing scheme as a market.

In this case the price was set at the absolute maximum as allowed by the system. If the 'market' couldn't react to that absolute maximum price then the market cannot be the problem at hand.

Most of western Europe has an electricity grid to distribute power. When the wind is blowing it covers domestic needs or exports, when it's not blowing it imports nuclear power, or Solar etc.

Denmark (~1% of the world population) has been doing quite well with it's 2GW of wind, powered by "modest average wind speeds in the range of 4.9–5.6 m/s measured at 10 m height." With a mean January temp of 1.5 °C (34.7 °F), wind covered 47% of yearly electric in 2019. (71% yesterday). Plans on 84% by 2035. It also has 1GW of solar. They got started early, and it shows. Too bad for heel-dragging Texans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Denmark

https://en.winddenmark.dk/wind-in-denmark/current-energy-pro...

Is this a joke? Throttling gas plants is much easier than throttling coal plants. If the wind blows you consume less gas. With coal you have to turn the wind plant off.

Also, fossil fuels appear to be highly unreliable. The moment there’s no gas you have no electricity, it’s not a good energy source.

That’s why energy storage is important.

... and batteries are not the solution at scale to that problem. The current global installed capacity of batteries can barely deliver a handful of gigawatt hours of energy. a medium scale grid like the Netherlands will use that amount in a handful of minutes.

Grid-scale batteries are not the solution. Residential solar combined with residential storage either through dedicated batteries (which can be repurposed old EV battery packs or tailor-made residential storage batteries) or electric cars which can feed power back into the home can help more here by limiting peak consumption when people come home from work/school and - given large enough batteries - when they get up and prepare to go to work/school. In the more northern regions the effect will be limited in the winter months due to the limited amount of daylight, the opposite is true in the summer months.

First sentence: I don't think these things are mutually exclusive. Agreed on the rest though!

One of the main advantages of battery storage, apart from decoupling production and consumption, is that it enables delocalization (and portability) of energy sources.

Therefore they will use stored hydrogen in the gas plants. The hydrogen will be electrolyzed using renewable energy when it's too much.

“current capacity” is indeed insufficient, but we’re talking about what ought to be in the future, not about what is in the present.

The technology to do that at reasonable cost does not exist and likely won't be developed in the near future.

The technology does exist. The bottleneck is how fast we can ramp up mining and production of key metals.

Extraction of key metals from batteries (ie.: recycling) does need to be developed further, but in terms of total capacity, that is a bigger future concern than a present one.

What's a reasonable cost? Wind and solar are pretty cheap, and you can spend quite a bit on technology that you only need a couple of weeks of the year without doubling the average price.

Lakes make for good batteries. Geography provided.