Because renewables weren’t the cause of the blackouts in Texas
The cold has hit the Texas electricity grid. Here because
The cold wave in Texas, in the United States, with temperatures as low as 16 degrees below zero, has put the local electricity grid in crisis, which has found itself unprepared to respond to the sharp increase in the demand for electricity for heating.
The operator of the system, ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas), had to proceed with rolling blackouts, leaving millions of people without electricity for days in a time of great need.
THE ATTACKS OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
Steve Daines, Republican Party Senator for the state of Montana, tweeted that the situation in Texas is "a perfect example of the need for reliable energy sources, such as natural gas and coal."
He was not alone among conservative commentators to express similar thoughts: Daines and others argue that the fault of the power outages in Texas is due to renewable sources such as wind and solar, which are intermittent in generation. – their output depends on external factors – and therefore unable to guarantee stability and flexibility to the electricity grid.
HOW WEIGHED RENEWABLES IN TEXAS
It is a thought, however, not supported by the facts. It is true that the cold and ice have rendered several of the state's wind turbines unusable. But natural gas, coal and nuclear power plants have had far more problems: according to the local operator, all of these plants have been responsible for nearly double the supply disruptions compared to wind turbines and frozen solar panels.
ERCOT said that of a total of 45 gigawatts of electricity not available statewide on Tuesday, about 30 GW came from coal, gas and nuclear power; another 16 GW came from renewable sources.
The Texan energy mix mainly depends on natural gas. In the winter months, wind is worth about 7 percent of the state's total capacity; on the other hand, gas, coal and nuclear power represent 80 percent .
BECAUSE THE GREEN NEW DEAL DOES NOT MATTER
Lauren Boebert, a Republican Party MP with extremist positions, wrote on Twitter that the United States needs "reliable energy sources" and that the "Green New Deal has proved unsustainable, and renewables are clearly unreliable."
Mentioning the Green New Deal – the energy and climate plan promoted by the Democratic Party left, and in particular by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – makes no sense, the Associated Press explains: there is no version of the Green New Deal in force neither at the Texan nor at the federal level. The program of new president Joe Biden , who is also ambitious about renewable capacity and decarbonisation, is different.
HOW THE TEXAS ELECTRICITY NETWORK IS MADE
The problem of the supply crisis is rather an infrastructural and ideological question. The Texas electricity grid is in fact, by choice, a grid in itself , separate from the systems that serve the other American states. It is independent in the sense that it is not under the control of federal authorities and is almost autonomous in resources. But it is also isolated, because it has no connections with the electric grids of neighboring states and cannot import energy when needed.
Unlike other American systems, there is no capacity market in Texas: it is a mechanism that allows the grid operator, ERCOT, to procure electricity capacity through contracts with other operators, assigned through auctions.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/texas-blackout-rinnovabili/ on Sat, 20 Feb 2021 07:00:02 +0000.