A Texas Electric Reliability Council official said Tuesday afternoon that 16 gigawatts of renewable energy generation, primarily wind, was offline. Nearly double that, 30 gigawatts, was lost to thermal sources, including gas, coal and nuclear power.
“Texas is a gas state,” said Michael Webber, a professor of energy resources at the University of Texas at Austin.
While Webber said all of Texas’s energy resources are to blame for the power crisis, the natural gas industry, in particular, is producing significantly less power than usual.
“Gas is failing in the most spectacular way right now,” said Webber.
Dan Woodfin, a senior executive at ERCOT, echoed that sentiment Tuesday.
“It appears that much of the generation that has gone offline today was mainly due to problems with the natural gas system,” he said during a Tuesday interview with reporters.
Still, some have put their blame on wind power.
“This is what happens when you force the grid to rely in part on wind as an energy source,” said US Representative Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston, tweeted Tuesday evening. “When the weather gets bad, like this week, there is no intermittent renewable energy like wind when you need it.”
He then noted the shutdown of a Bay City nuclear reactor due to the cold, eventually coming to what energy experts say the biggest culprit, “Low natural gas supply: ERCOT planned 67 GW from natural gas / coal, but was able to get only 43 GW from it online. We couldn’t do without natural gas, but we ran out of capacity to get natural gas. Pipelines within Texas don’t use cold insulation” , so it was freezing. ‘
Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, known for his right-wing Facebook posts spreading misinformation and reinforced conspiracy theories in the past, also posted an unvarnished view of wind power on Facebook: “We should never build another wind turbine in Texas.”
In another post, Miller was even more candid, but also misleading: “Insult added even more injury: those ugly wind turbines out there are among the main reasons we have power outages. Isn’t that ironic? … So much for the unsightly ones. and unproductive, energy-robbing Obama monuments. At least they show us where idiots live. “
While wind power skeptics have argued that the week’s freeze means wind power cannot be relied on, wind turbines – like natural gas plants – can be “winterized” or modified to operate at very low temperatures. Experts say many of Texas’s electricity generators have not made the investments necessary to prevent equipment failures as the state does not regularly face extreme winter storms.
It is estimated that of the total winter capacity of the grid about 80%, or 67 gigawatts, can be generated by natural gas, coal and some nuclear energy. Only 7% of ERCOT’s predicted winter capacity, or six gigawatts, would come from various wind energy sources in the state.
Natural gas production in the state has declined due to the freezing cold, making it difficult for power plants to get the fuel needed to run the plants. Natural gas plants don’t usually have much on-site fuel storage, experts said. Instead, the factories rely on the constant flow of natural gas from pipelines that run across the state from areas such as the oil and natural gas-producing Permian Basin in West Texas to major demand centers such as Houston and Dallas.
Gov. Greg Abbott specified that fossil fuel sources were contributing to the grid problems when he described the situation Monday afternoon.
“The power of some of the companies generating the power has been frozen. This is also true of the natural gas and coal generators,” he wrote in a statement. tweet
Heather Zichal, CEO of the industry group the American Clean Power Association, said opponents of renewable energy were trying to distract from the glitches elsewhere in the system and slow the “transition to a clean energy future.”
“ It’s a shame to see the clean energy opponents attacking it now, whether it’s raining, snowing, or the sun shining, engaging in a politically opportunistic charade that deceives Americans into promoting an agenda that nothing to do with restoring power to Texas. communities, ”she said.
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