Texas Grid Update - Sunday Evening: Natural Gas Keeps Texans Safe and Warm as Renewables Fail

ERCOT #TexasGrid Sunday Evening Update: Renewable outages spike as #naturalgas system keeps Texans safe and warm

Because I know #wind and #solar advocates and their media cheerleaders will misreport this as a matter of course, I will focus on the orange line on the “Generation Outages” chart on the left below.

That line shows the rapid spike in wind and solar outages that took place as the winter storm blew into Texas on January 23/24. The light blue line above it shows dispatchable outages, which have remained static and actually fallen slightly during the course of the storm.

The contrast is stark and highly predictable: The one predictable aspect of wind and solar is that they will fail you when they are needed the most, i.e., during major weather events.

As I’ve pointed out in my two previous updates on this storm, Wind has actually done fairly well despite the outages, providing between 10%-15% of total generation online throughout the storm.

But solar has failed miserably, providing almost no generation on Saturday and pitching in ~10% or so for several hours once the cloud cover began to clear on Sunday. Power storage, the darling of the legacy media outlets, has been a non-factor throughout.

As you can see from the right-hand chart, gas remains the workhorse keeping Texans safe and warm, providing a whopping 65% of total generation on the grid as of 6:00 p.m. CT Sunday. Gas, #coal, and #nuclear combined account for a total of 86.4%.

Plus, at the same time, ERCOT grid managers enjoyed a capacity margin of ~14,000 MW, most of which is dispatchable natural gas.

Next time you see them, thank your local roughneck, roustabout, miner, plant operator, and lineman for keep you and your family safe during this major winter storm.

That is all.