How solar and wind energy are saving Texans from a record heatwave
How solar and wind energy are saving Texans from a record heatwave
The same sun that is scorching Texas is keeping the air conditioning running, no matter what certain Lone Star legislators say
JULY 4, 2023
Texas has been breaking all sorts of records, and that's mostly bad news.
As a heat dome settled over Texas in June, trapping brutal heat and humidity underneath, high temperature records were broken across the state. It was so hot in Texas, meteorologist Ben Noll noted, that the only rivals on planet Earth were "the Sahara Desert and Persian Gulf area." The National Weather Service in Houston apologized for the "potentially deadly" and "oppressive and persistent heat" smothering the state: "Sorry, y'all. We're gonna get back to our typical levels of heat someday, but not real soon. Keep up the fight against the heat!"
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Texans, obviously, cranked up the air conditioning. And that was largely responsible for a new all-time record for energy demand in the state — 80,878 megawatts on June 27 — though the state's grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), didn't expect that record to hold long.
The Texas power grid — which, uniquely, only serves Texas — has shuddered and occasionally broken in recent years under the weight of extreme weather, a growing population and aging infrastructure. But so far, the grid has held up this summer. In fact, ERCOT has only asked customers to voluntarily reduce electricity use once during the heat wave.
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And that's due in large part to another record Texas has shattered this summer: Solar and wind farms set a new high water mark for renewable energy generation — 31,468 megawatts — on June 28, helping offset the 8,000 megawatts knocked offline at ailing natural gas and coal-fired plants. "Wind and solar are giving us a big enough buffer that even when we have a handful of power plants go offline, it isn't causing disruptions," Dan Cohan at Rice University in Houston told The Washington Post.
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20 minutes of record power in an unreliable system is "saving Texas?"
When the wind doesn't blow, and the power demand peaks in the early evening, to they turn off the air conditioning, or do they burn dangerous natural gas and dump the waste directly in the planetary atmosphere, driving the need for power because the solar and wind fantasy has done nothing, zero, to address climate change.
This announcement is rather like Trump announcing he won the election, delusional.
There are record temperatures all over the planet, which is burning, because people think that brief so called "renewable records" matter and shut off their minds when this unreliable, temporary crap isn't doing a damned thing.
Here's the fuel mix as of this hour on the ERCOT grid:
One would need to be as insane as Marjorie Taylor Greene to declare burning coal and gas for more than half the power in the State is a "victory."
It isn't. It's a grotesque failure, an obscene failure.
Today's demand peak in Texas is predicted at 82,587 MW at 15:30 CST (5:30 PM CST). It's still over 80,000 MW at 19:35.
Every wind turbine in Texas will be waste within the next 25 years, as will every solar cell. Today's toddlers' generation will face, before they reach the age of 25, the waste all this crap will be with a further destroyed atmosphere, depleted mineral resources, extreme temperatures and possibly famines, worse droughts, worse fires.
Why?
Because we live in a time when grotesque failures are declared successes.
Texas should have built nuclear reactors on the Gulf; and they should still do that, perhaps high temperature reactors to reform, with supercritical desalination, the water badly damaged by the Deepwater Horizon disaster that took place while everyone on the planet was cheering for solar and wind, which killed, instantly, 10 people more people than died from radiation at the big bogeyman at Fukushima, although Deepwater Horizon killed more people than Fukushima, and promptly went down the memory hole.
In fact, if they sucked some of the eutrophic waters caused by "renewable ethanol" in, they could capture carbon and perhaps restore the now dead oyster beds.
History will not forgive us.