California and Texas Greenouts: Renewables aren’t reliable to power the grid | Hacker News Reader

California and Texas Greenouts: Renewables aren’t reliable to power the grid

wsj.com

18 pointsBostonian15 comments

This is a complete mischaracterization of why these things occurred.

It has nothing to do with renewables - it has everything to do with aging infrastructure:

* In California, we haven't kept up with climate change and made the grid safe for the new normal of high heat, high wind, and dangerous fire conditions.

* In Texas, they didn't keep up with climate change and crazy events like the winter storm they had this year. They also have a screwed up operational model but that is a side point.

This will get worse and worse as the climate changes and also as we attempt to electrify everything to try to address it.

This is why investing in infrastructure right now is so important.

This isn't WSJ news, this is a WSJ editorial, which is generally pretty useless.

The only renewable power source that fluctuated, according to this report, was wind. Nuclear and solar remained steady.

It doesn't take a genius to understand that wind isn't very reliable. (Sometimes it blows. Sometimes it doesn't. Shocking.)

What IS surprising to me is how little solar fluctuated. I would have expected to see peaks and valleys there. As a non-Texan, does Texas just not get clouds?

They also apparently don't do hydro-electric dams in Texas, which is also a completely renewable and reliable source of energy.

So if the point of this article was to say "we need to burn more goal and gas", I reach a completely different conclusion.

(Before anyone says it: I'm well aware the nuclear and hydro-electric come with their own controversies. But they're plentiful and/or renewable, and don't increase air pollution. They just have bad PR.)

Texas is big. There are parts of Texas due to whatever reason it is sunny all the time especially west Texas.

https://www.kxan.com/weather/weather-blog/sunniest-cities-in...

>But green groups want the grid to run completely on solar, wind and batteries.

I'm pretty sure "green groups" are not homogeneous and don't care (much) as long as it doesn't emit CO2 (and in some circles, radioactive waste). Ex. Hydro and geothermal. Some love the idea of nuclear. This article seems to build up a strawman and attack it.

With Texas' current power issues during this heat wave, only like 10-20% of the power generation deficit could be directly attributed to wind being offline. Why do people attack the renewable when there's so many other generators offline?

It has been a number of years since I researched this, but it's interesting to note that a lot of hydro didn't count as green (ex: dams). Only a subset of hydro counted as green (ex: run of river).

Dams are good from an AGW perspective but ttendto produce widescale environmental destruction of other types, so while they provide clean energy, there's dispute about how much it is “green” energy.

By "The Editorial Board"?

Is that collective responsibility, or individual deniability?

Many newspapers have editorial boards that are collectively responsible for the editorials. They may have named opinion pieces.

I can picture the scene. The owner demands a certain story or angle. Nobody wants to take the glory individually, so they decide on 'by the editorial board'.

Isn't that a tautology? They aren't 24/7 sources and we don't have the battery technology to power modern industrial society. In addition to renewables we need nuclear energy; a constant source of safe(1) clean power, compact, little waste.

1) https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

ungated: https://archive.is/7RyAS . It's a Wall Street Journal editorial.

EDIT: This comment is licensed in the public domain if you'd like to steal it for a blog post call the WSJ editorial board out on their lies.

How strange to blame renewables versus collective planning failures at CASIO (CA grid operator) [1] [2] [3] and policy failures at ERCOT (TX grid operator) [4] [5]. I'm almost of the mind that they're not arguing in good faith! For the WSJ, this does not surprise me.

> ERCOT officials said the power plant outages were unexpected — and could not provide details as to what could be causing them.

> “I don’t have any potential reasons [for the plant outages] that I can share at this time,” said Warren Lasher, ERCOT senior director of systems planning, during a Monday call with media. “It is not consistent with fleet performance that we have seen over the last few summers.”

> The number of plants that were forced offline today is “very concerning,” Lasher said.

> “We operate the grid with the resources that we have available,” he said. “It’s the responsibility of the generators to make sure their plants are available when demand is high.” [5]

ERCOT also chooses not to have a capacity market, so they don't pay for generators to be ready to generate, with predictable results.

Sidenote: Texas has ~$20B/15GW in renewables in the deployment pipeline. [6] I don't have solid number on storage, but even without capacity contracts, battery operators are deploying to Texas. Tesla is building a black start battery system [Gambit Energy Storage LLC] outside of Houston to capture revenue for ancillary service [7] [8], and it was scheduled to enter commercial operations on June 1st.

[1] https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/uploadedFiles/CPUCWebsite/Content/Ne... (CASIO letter to Gov Newsom)

[2] https://www.seia.org/blog/renewables-didnt-cause-california-... (Renewables Didn't Cause California Blackouts, Experts Correct the Record)

[3] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/energysource/californi... (California’s blackouts and renewable energy: Culprit or imperative?)

[4] https://electrek.co/2021/06/15/texas-is-sweltering-and-major... (Texas is sweltering, and majority of power plants down produce natural gas)

[5] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/06/14/texas-power-grid-con... (Texas grid operator urges electricity conservation as many power generators are unexpectedly offline and temperatures rise)

[6] https://ieefa.org/texas-top-u-s-electricity-producer-has-20b... (Texas, top U.S. electricity producer, has $20B in renewables pipeline)

[7] https://ieefa.org/tesla-subsidiary-building-100mw-battery-st... (Tesla subsidiary building 100MW battery storage project in Texas)

[8] https://web.archive.org/web/20210328130730/http://angleton.t... (Angleton, TX planning department FAQ on Tesla's Gambit Energy Storage Facility)

Something you don’t agree with? Better flag it so nobody else can decide for themselves! GG HN

You could probably get away with just using nuclear power and avoid all the industrial waste produced by manufacturing the vastly inferior renewable energy equipment. That seems like the real big brain strategy. A big problem is that it's not politically correct to say renewable methods are just not going to work but if we could get over that hump then we'd find ourselves on a much better path.

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