from with Solomon Texas Monthly:
On Monday, the good people of Texas, many still suffering from lingering trauma from the February 2021 failure of the state’s power grid, braced for bad news. The much-maligned Texas Electric Reliability Commission, which manages Texas’ famously independent grid, has warned of a dire situation due to “an expected shortage of reserve capacity with no market solution available.” If the situation gets worse, a rolling blackout may be required. Not very good!
Fortunately, the worst did not happen. There are several reasons. To reduce demand, many Texans turned up their thermostats a few degrees to help save power, and ERCOT’s emergency response program paid some large energy customers to curtail usage during peak hours. Notably, solar power, which has been the star of the Texas grid so far, continued to set records in energy production during this long summer. If your air conditioner is running steadily all summer, you can thank the sun for its power.
“We have twice as much solar power as we did last summer and about triple what we had 18 months ago,” energy consultant Doug Lewin told me Monday. “Actually, we set another solar record today and we set another yesterday. Renewables were in May and most of June because we’ve been experiencing extreme heat, which is really [having] Lots of protection calls and potential rolling outages without them. “
The two primary renewable energy sources that contribute to the Texas grid are solar and wind; Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Center for Climate Research at Texas A&M University, said solar accounts for about 25 percent of the grid’s renewable resources, while wind accounts for the other four. three out of three.
Here is a graph depicting the share of electricity supply by various sources in Texas by 2020.
resource: Dallas Fed.
As for the assertion that renewable energy is the cause of disaster in 2020, from Now:
According to regulators, most of the power losses in Texas come from natural gas suppliers as pipelines freeze, making it difficult for plants to get the fuel they need. Output from coal and nuclear power plants also fell. A similar phenomenon has occurred in Kansas and other states.
At its depths, gas production has dropped by nearly 50% [7], which lowers the pressure in the pipeline, making it harder for natural gas-fueled power plants to operate.Overall, the state faces 30 GW of power outages as demand hits unprecedented highs [8]. Other sources of electricity – nuclear, coal and wind – were also affected by supply disruptions, but these losses were smaller than those lost in electricity generation from gas-fired power plants.
This diagram illustrates this.
resource: Busby et al. (2021).
