For those of you watching the blackouts and brownouts happening across Texas and the Midwest, you are watching the foundation of the next major attack on green energy. This is from the ERCOT website:
we are dealing with higher-than-normal generation outages due to frozen wind turbines ... (here)
The opponents will omit the rest of the sentence:
and limited natural gas supplies available to generating units.
The reality is that Texas was not designed for a winter load demand that exceeds its maximum ever summer load. Texas plants schedule their maintenance and downtime in the winter because it is less risky, But it happened today.
What did happen to the wind generation is a fluke combination of weather — cold rain followed by, in some cases, sub zero weather caused the wind turbines to freeze up. Wind turbines can operate in these conditions — there are wind turbines in North Dakota. But you design to the expected conditions.
But that won’t keep climate deniers from clamoring for more coal plants to “keep people from dying”. And since coal plants are expensive now, they will want them subsidized with guaranteed contracts.
I am just setting the table — now is the time to gather facts and to research why Texas built wind the way and where they did. Because there will be howls in Congress (especially form the Texas delegation) that this shows the Green New Deal is flawed, wrong headed, and dangerous. They will hold yesterday’s and today’s events in Texas a indisputable proof. It will be easy to point to the headlines — what needs to be done is to prepare now to point out the logical flaws one by one as they are raised. Faux News won’t show the rebuttal but it needs to be made.
Note: BTW, it was noted that the offshore wind turbines in Texas are actually overproducing today and helping to mitigate the natural gas plant outages due to lack of natural gas.