> Who's taking down all the solar farms and wind farms before a hurricane?

Nobody. Wind turbines blades can be locked to prevent damage in very high winds [1]. Many offshore turbines are already designed to withstand very high winds (like in the North Sea) and still operate.

Practically speaking a few solar panels might be damaged in a hurricane but not likely the entire array. The damaged panels can be easily replaced.

1. https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/wind-turbines-extreme-w...

Do you think that wind farms and solar farms have not survived hurricanes?

You might want to check on data before making smug and condescending false assertions.

I know they do not because I have lived through several CAT 4/5 storms and have seen them fail. Also a brutal freeze in Houston recently where EVERYTHING failed to include wind turbines that froze solid.

I'm for solar and wind but fossil fuels are still needed as a backup plan (another basket of eggs). Gotta have it. I survived the hard freeze in Houston with no electrical power with stored gasoline and a couple of generators for 5 days no problem. I just fueled up the other day. With additives the fuels last several years. Good to go for a freeze or a major storm for a couple weeks.

You're going to need to show me a cite that wind turbines freezing was a major part of the problem during the big Texas freeze a couple years ago. Just because Abbott says it was doesn't make it so; he was outright lying (as he often does).

It is more accurate to say that the real problem was the failure of ERCOT & etc to winterize any part of the grid, which led to failures of transmission and/or generation across the board, for every source type.

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/02/15/texas-power-grid-win...

Gas is the biggest source of power in Texas. While all power sources were poorly winterized, the failure to prepare the fossil fuel infrastructure hurt the most because gas provides more power than wind or solar in the Texas grid.

And, of course, almost NOTHING has been done about this failure despite how close the state came to a weeks-long power grid failure, and virtual no one has been held responsible.

The problem you have in TX is that your utility providers haven't designed their equipment to work in cold temperatures.

In parts of the country where we plan for cold weather, our natural gas flows and our wind turbines spin in the winter.

Wind turbines need to be de-iced in cold weather. In practice, it is accomplished by spraying warm water.

If you didn’t purchase a turbine that has ice protection systems built in.

> where EVERYTHING failed to include wind turbines that froze solid.

McMurdo station in freakin Antarctica uses wind turbines. They run just fine in the cold. Texas utilities just didn't want to pay for proper weather proofing.

Backups are backups. They can be fossil fuel based, it's fine and I don't know who is arguing that it's not ok.

We can't optimize for natural disasters at the expense of all the other times there isn't a natural disaster.

For a fact is check here, I recommend that people do a quick web search. "Solar panel hurricane" or "wind turbine hurricane" will set the record straight here, that they survive hurricanes just fine.

And for people or small communities with battery storage on their solar, they are back online before everyone else. Solar panels also work absolutely great in freezes, without requiring due supply.

And since a grid built on renewables has far more battery storage on it, and is used to shifting power sources frequently due to the intermittency of renewables, a renewable grid will have fewer single points of failure and be more resilient when there are large weather events that take out large generators.

please explain "one basket" in a major storm context?

are there storms that cover the entire US at the same time?

or are there no interconnecting power cables between wind/ solar farms from different states? (ie other states farms still continue to function whilst one area is not)

Actually, Texas has made quite a big thing out of not connecting their grid to anyone else's. Because They're Real Men Who Go It Alone.

Of course, that means when there is a natural disaster in Texas (with the existing, largely-fossil-fuel-powered grid!), they...can't really get help from anyone else. (My hazy understanding is that there are a few limited-duty linkages that can be activated, or something, but it's woefully inadequate to serve the whole state.)

IIRC, the last time this happened, the only parts of Texas that were still getting power were a few that had wind & solar plants going. Because those were still operating just fine.

If anything, a single solar farm, or single wind farm is more resilient due to being more distributed. Individually damaged solar panels and wind turbines do not necessarily take all power production offline for that site.

Power lines are more likely to be a single point of failure, but that's the same for all power distribution.

Have you ever experienced a CAT 4 or 5? There won't be much left standing. It looks like a nuclear blast. This is just wind damage. I've seen water move entire homes a mile with the height of water being as high as 30ft. It can take weeks to months to restore electrical power. To clean the mess up takes heavy machinery run by fossil fuels. And what if you want to start doing repairs to your property that may not be damaged that bad? You will need a gas generator. Solar will not cut it doing heavy power tool work hours on end...meh.

Much of the time required to restore power after a major storm is grid repair. More distributed wind and solar farms would imply less need to fully-connect the grid to get people back online.

So your point is that the grid shouldn’t be powered by renewables because in a disaster you need to drive petrol powered vehicles and run a generator?

Electricity generated by coal also requires power lines.

This, children, is known as moving the goalposts.

The question of "what fuel do I want for power tools after a natural disaster" is entirely distinct from "what mix of sources should we use to power the grid?" Babelthuap is deliberately muddying the water here.

And, yeah, Babel, I live in Houston, and except for college have spent all of my 53 years within an hour or so drive of the gulf coast. I know about hurricanes, even big ones. That's a dumb objection to including renewable energy in a grid plan.

Because he's a paid astroturfed.

And that disaster recovery equipment runs on coal and/or methane?

> Solar will not cut it doing heavy power tool work hours on end

Of course it will.

I’m confused about what your point is. Coal powerplants aren’t immune from natural disasters and is quite literally putting all your eggs in a very small basket. Distributed systems such as wind/solar distribute the risk across a larger area which seems to be the exact thing you’re in favour of.

In addition, would you like home solar for the week of downed power lines after the hurricane, or not?

So many low intelligence likely astroturfing comments in this thread.

Thing is, you know wind solar is winning the war because irrational AstroTurfing is all that can be parroted in response.

Texas gets hit by hurricanes regularly yet still manages to generate a decent amount from wind and some from solar too. A lot of the turbines are near the coast--where there's more wind, and also more risk from hurricanes.

About 1/3 of the electricity consumed in the state as I write this is being generated by renewables. That's with mild temperatures and lower than average wind generation. On a day like today with more typical winds it would probably be about half from renewables.

http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...

Be pretty cool if a wind farm could be tough enough to run normally during a hurricane, though you'd need a lot of storage.

Yes. Exactly. What if they could retract into the ground? Now that would be awesome and a real advancement. Protect that bag of eggs!

what is this obsession with eggs and "green" energy

are you trying to do some sort of propaganda thing implying green energy is fragile?

fwiw - they're not, they're designed to a seriously stronge even in hurrican weather, but never let your personal opinions get in the way of your misinformation or story

I suspect wind turbines are already designed to deal with high winds, especially if you're building them in hurricane-prone areas.

And immensely strong turbines (aka expensive). We could do it, but there would be no point.

The areas on earth where Tropical Cyclones occur are pretty limited [1]. And most of it is deep ocean where you wouldn't place wind turbines (or solar panels) anyway.

[1] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/typ...

> Who's taking down all the solar farms and wind farms before a hurricane?

Just one more thing for ERCOT to add to their todo list after they shut down the gas power plants.

But on a serious note, this is the most diverse the grid has ever been.

Worth noting in this context that the second worst energy disaster of all time (Fukushima) was caused by a natural disaster. If they'd been using green energy (or to be fair gas or coal) people would have been able to return to their homes by now.

Wind farms are designed to survive hurricanes anyway. See https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-31/harvey-pu...

There's some evidence that large off-shore wind farms reduce the severity of hurricanes too:

> A large array of offshore wind farms can have significant impacts on precipitation during a hurricane. This claim is proven through a series of simulation cases, with different layout configurations, inter-turbine spacings, and wind farm parameterizations. Precipitation is found to be reduced inland and increased offshore in all the wind farm simulations. However, the amount of precipitation reduction varies in the different cases. The location of the wind farm also matters.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad245#...

There's no actual reason why Fukushima should have been evacuated (beyond flooding, electricity loss, etc. caused by the tsunami, of course). The natural background radiation of the area is low, so outside the bounds of the plant the radiation is and always was fine, knowing that the radiation would go down over time.

> There's no actual reason why Fukushima should have been evacuated

This is completely untrue. Even outside the exclusion areas there are signs of the damage the disaster has caused.

The Japanese government has raised the acceptable radiation limit for people living in the area from 1 to 20 milliSieverts per year. No-where else is this amount considered acceptable.

Even with this increase it's still dramatically below the measured amounts, which is up to 0.04 microSieverts per hour.

> doctors have left the area because the government refuses to reimburse them when they list radiation sickness as the cause for nose bleeds, spontaneous abortions, and other ailments resulting from ionizing radiation. (The only acceptable diagnoses are so-called “radiophobia,” nervousness, and stress.) The spike in thyroid cancer among children in Fukushima is dismissed as a survey error, produced by examining too many children.

https://thebulletin.org/2021/03/fukushima-today-im-glad-that...

No one has to take anything down. Babcock Ranch weathered Hurricane Ian (cat5) just fine. Didn’t even lose power. Unlike their neighbors.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/02/us/solar-babcock-ranch-florid...