The Texas 2021 Valentine's Day Power Emergency

Much of the central United States has been in the grip of a Canadian artic blast that an unusual jetstream movement carried deep into the heart of Texas. Temperatures plunged 40-60 F below normal putting much of the state into negative temperatures for the first time in the memory of most people. Houston had more than eight inches of snow.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) overseas the electric power generation and transmission from over 700 generation units in the state. In recent years, rapid population and economic growth has put the electric system under strain but usually in the hot summer months.

By my reading of ERCOT reports, they have access to nearly 108 GW of nameplate generation capacity including nearly 29 GW of nameplate wind power generation capacity. Dispatchable power generation provides 69 percent of this total while wind and ground solar provide just over 30 percent.

For the 2020-2021 winter capacity/demand forecast, a total of about 83 GW of generation capacity was expected--including just over 7 GW of wind and ground solar--before further capacity adjustments. With the derated wind and solar generation capacity, dispatchable generation would provide 91 percent while variable wind and ground solar would provide the balancing 9 percent. This is for expected average winter weather conditions with a planning "normal weather" peak demand of about 58 GW.

ERCOT planners then, as a worst case condition, factored in expected maintenance outages, forced outages at thermal plants (nuclear, fossil, biomass), and extremely low wind output. This reduced the available capacity to 68.6 GW. For this condition, a worst case demand of 67.2 GW was possible. This would leave a capacity margin of only 1.4 GW--about 2 percent.

As the weather turned exceptionally cold, news reports indicate that coal plants went offline probably because frozen coal could not be used. The above image shows the rapid fall-off in generation capacity. As capacity fell, demand had to be reduced to apparently prevent total system collapse. The red circles show the multiple times that the system came close to this critical situation.

The above chart shows the fall-off in wind-electricity. The starting generation was around the normal expected value for winter. By hour 19, this had fallen to only 700 MW - only 3 percent of the nameplate capacity. This clearly shows that wind power is not a dispatchable power source.

The intention of the Green New Deal is to replace fossil-generated electrical power generation with variable wind and ground solar. This does not appear to be a reasonable approach which is why I focus on space solar power-generated astroelectricity as America's best choice for transitioning--in an orderly, non-disruptive manner--to sustainable energy this century.