02-16-2021, 02:50 PM
bobinmurphy wrote:
There are a couple of things going on that have contributed to the problem in Texas. One is that a lot of natural gas is being diverted from power plants to supply home heating. (We need more pipelines to deliver a reliable gas supply to power plants.) The other big one though is the problem with the West Texas windmill farm. Originally it wasn't tied into the Texas power grid so a deal was struck to sell all that wind generated energy to the cities of San Antonio and Houston. A special high-line was built along I-10 to do just that. But with this winter storm about half of the windmills are frozen up and not generating anything, and the remainder are not running at full potential. (What people don't realize about windmills is they require a fair amount of wind to reach cut-in speed, more wind to reach maximum output and they shut down in high winds for damage control. What people only see though is the maximum possible energy that might be produced.) Anyway, the windmill farm right now is only supplying about 1/4 to 1/3 of the maximum energy it could produce under the right conditions - and the two hardest hit areas for power shortages right now are San Antonio and Houston. For the rest of us a lot of power is being diverted to help the hardest hit areas.
Windmill farms supply very little energy in Texas. They are not the cause of widespread outages.
The big majority of the plants that are not working well now are powered by coal, oil and gas.