Texas has taken the lead in wind power with more wind generation capacity than any other state, about 9,700 megawatts. (That’s nearly as much installed wind capacity as India.)
On Aug. 4, at about 5 p.m., electricity demand in Texas hit a record: 63,594 megawatts. Slate e-zine wants you to know this is bad news.
Orwellian? So last millennium.
Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is another industry observer that evokes this blog’s skepticism. In a Slate article, he takes a valid criticism and biases it to the best of his Chernobyl Zombie ability.
When it gets hot in Texas—and it’s darn hot in the Lone Star State in the summer—the state’s ratepayers can’t count on that wind energy …according to the state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s wind turbines provided only about 500 megawatts of power when demand was peaking and the value of electricity was at its highest.
Put another way, only about 5 percent of the state’s installed wind capacity was available when Texans needed it most. Texans may brag about the size of their wind sector, but for all of that hot air, the wind business could only provide about 0.8 percent of the state’s electricity needs when demand was peaking.
Why does Texas get so little juice from the wind when it really needs it? Well, one of the reasons Texas gets so hot in the summer is that the wind isn’t blowing. Pressure gradients—differences in air pressure between two locations in the atmosphere—are largely responsible for the speed of the wind near the Earth’s surface. The greater the differences in pressure, the harder the wind blows. During times of extreme heat these pressure gradients often are minimal. The result: wind turbines that don’t turn.
Lest you think the generation numbers from Aug. 4 are an aberration, ERCOT has long discounted wind energy’s capabilities. In 2007, ERCOT determined that just “8.7 percent of the installed wind capability can be counted on as dependable capacity during the peak demand period for the next year.” And in 2009, the grid operator reiterated that it could depend on only 8.7 percent of Texas’ wind capacity.
We could argue how the antagonist defines dependable capacity. Instead, let’s accept the intermittent nature of wind in Texas and elsewhere and note what Bryce bludgeons with this fact. The attack is upon a surcharge that Texas residential ratepayers are now paying “…about $4 more per month on their electric bills in order to fund some 2,300 miles of new transmission lines to carry wind-generated electricity from rural areas to the state’s urban centers.”
Image credit: Good
“A tyranny of policies that protect competitors, subsidize wealthy polluters and disadvantage green entrepreneurs” constrains the development of solar power. When it is hot and where water is a valued resource, electricity from solar makes sense.
Other than a stipend and book sales what is the reason for this attack?
“remssssssss”
Well, yes, in the article Bryce is honest about his allegiance: “They [wind turbines in Texas] do not, cannot, replace coal-fired, gas-fired, or (my personal favorite) nuclear power plants.”
And, as this blog has noted before, better transmission makes renewable energy more available. We need more renewable energy sources, e.g., wind, solar thermal, etc.
Why? Well, in his attack, Bryce led with the chin. “It gets hot in Texas,” he tells us. And, it’s going to get hotter. A principle reason is human-caused, global heating. As Professor Joe tells us, you can’t go talking pressure gradients and advances in nuclear power, then turn around and deny climate change science.
In a sense that is what Bryce does when he presses the attack, arguing that monies going for better transmission are better invested in other, “more deserving and far more important to the general public” infrastructure, low-carbon items* like roads and pipelines.
” Editor’s note: Yes, the author was being facetious. Yes, he had to bite his tongue when he read the phrase, “politicians’ infatuation with wind energy.”
“At a time when America’s basic infrastructure is crumbling and in desperate need of new investment,” AG readers need no introduction to the basis for such fallacious objection to renewable energy sources. Instead, this blog wants to review an intriguing bit of information in Bryce’s Slate-published diatribe.
In June, the Government Accountability Office issued a report that said that “communities will need hundreds of billions of dollars in coming years to construct and upgrade wastewater infrastructure.”
A topic for this blog (read hand-waving) is waste streams as feedstock, specifically anaerobic digestion to produce methane and then application of this methane source to meet power demands. The infrastructure for co-digestion is substantial; and, if there is support for constructing and upgrading wastewater plants, then there is the possibility of including waste-to-energy equipment. Plus there absolutely is a need to treat waste from factory farms to reduce dead zones.
Other AG posts on the bias for nuclear power over renewable energy sources:
