Texas experienced massive state-wide power outages this week (February 2021) due to an extreme cold wave that shut down most of the state. The entire state has been declared a disaster area.
As the events have unfolded, we have seen a lot of propaganda and speculation surrounding the outages. On one side, some people are blaming wind power and others are blaming natural gas.
But if we look at the numbers a bit, we get a different story.
We lost 18,000 megawatts out of 30,000 megawatts of wind power, but we also lost 28,000 megawatts of thermal energy — gas, coal, and nuclear.
In addition to the 30,000 megawatts from wind, we have about 745 megawatts from hydroelectric dams and 3,000 megawatts from solar, and 286.5 from biomass. And we have about 54,000 megawatts from coal, ignite, and natural gas. And about 4,200 from nuclear.
I can’t find the current figures and it is hard to estimate demand during an outage, but peak demand was about 75,000 megawatts during a recent heatwave, to give you an idea of usage.
So we lost 60% of wind power during the storm, and approximately 48% of thermal sources as well. All because a storm of this nature was not anticipated by regulators and power generators, and a lack of winterization of equipment, among other things.
It should be noted that state laws and regulations actually have guidelines for winterization. We’ll have to investigate whether the regulations are not enough or whether power stations failed to comply, or both.
So while oil people blame windmills and renewable people blame natural gas, the real culprits are the people managing the grid and the power stations. They screwed up, and they screwed up big time. Don’t let this artificial debate over wind turbines vs. natural gas fool you. This was management’s fault, not the source of our power.