What to believe when there’s so much hot air about wind power
I get a lot of emails from passionate readers, eager to defend or argue against renewables or the energy transition at large. But over the past few months, one energy topic has dominated online debates in Texas: wind energy.
Our state has more wind energy installed than any other, producing 26 percent of all U.S. wind-powered electricity generation in 2021. It was the 16th year in a row the state has held the No. 1 wind-producing spot, with wind now responsible for more power than the state’s nuclear power plants and coal powered plants.
Some Republican state politicians, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, have pointed to Texas’ fleet of wind turbines as the source of many of the power grid’s troubles. During and after the February freeze, they and others wrongly blamed frozen turbines as the primary culprit of the power outages that plummeted much of the state into darkness. While some wind generation was knocked offline, it was determined that natural gas-fired power plants snuffed out by frozen pipelines, failed equipment and unscrupulous suppliers were the main reason for the deadly outages.
This summer, PUC Chairman Peter Lake and interim ERCOT CEO Brad Jones have blamed reduced wind power for tight grid conditions that have led to ERCOT issuing conservation alerts to avoid emergency conditions. For example, in announcing a conservation alert for July 11, ERCOT said in a news release that wind would only produce 8 percent of its total installed capacity.
Comparing any generation output to installed capacity is tricky because no type of generation — thermal, wind, solar or battery — can produce 100 percent of that capacity. It has never happened and will not happen: The wind can’t blow above 20 miles an hour for an entire day across the state, all thermal generators can’t be online at once without even one being down for maintenance, and some clouds are going to obstruct the sun at some location over Texas.
And though ERCOT and other officials have long known that wind is a weaker resource in the summer, power officials plan for that in their energy needs forecasts.
Jones, in a July interview with the Chronicle, admitted that wind generation is not the enemy.
“Bringing them in is an extraordinary value for Texas and for ERCOT. Texans get lower prices and ERCOT gets very reliable generation most of the time. We can predict it. We have real good sense of what it is going to do every day,” he said. “Sometimes it just has a bad day.”
The state needs more dispatchable generation — like peaker plants or utility-scale batteries — to keep the grid reliable on days when Mother Nature doesn’t cooperate, Jones said. However, power generators have been reluctant to invest in new thermal generation as they wait to see how the Public Utility Commission will redesign the state’s power market.
While thermal generation investments have been put on pause, there is a chance much more wind generation could come online in the next decade. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, announced in July that it was seeking public comments on opening up a huge swath of federal waters about 24 miles off the coast of Galveston to leases for offshore wind generation. There are still a lot of details to work out (how the turbines could affect the paths of migratory birds, whether commercial and recreational fishing will be allowed near the turbines, which grid the turbines will interconnect to, etc.), but the feds say if it’s developed as proposed, it could produce enough electricity to power about 2.3 million homes.
That would be a huge boon for ERCOT and the Houston region. Offshore wind, unlike onshore, is relatively strong during the middle of summer days. And even if only 8 percent of its capacity is churning out power, that would still be enough to power 184,000 homes. And when there’s a summer like this, with ERCOT breaking demand records nearly every week for the past two months, any bit of new generation helps.
I welcome your spirited responses to this column in my inbox. I know I’ll get a few.