Are frozen wind turbines to blame for Texas power outages?
Trump Knows:
https://www.aroged.com/2021/02/16/texas-energy-crisis-ice-storm-stops-wind-turbines/
Texas Energy Crisis: Ice Storm Stops Wind Turbines
By a statement operators of the Texas power system, nearly half of the installed wind farms in the state have been shut down due to freezing of turbines. High humidity and a sharp drop in air temperature led to icing of the wind turbine blades. Now electricity is supplied on schedule and, moreover, often disappears, and the peak of the cold has not yet passed.
Wind farms across the state generate up to 25,100 MW of power. But extreme winter conditions in West Texas, accompanied by high humidity, freezing rain over the weekend and abnormally low temperatures, have shut down many of the region’s wind turbines. As of Sunday morning, turbines with a total capacity of 12,000 MW were iced.
According to sources, usually the winds are not strong at this time of the year, and the turbines are far from their limit. An energy catastrophe was caused by a unique combination of weather conditions that rarely happen in this region. “This is definitely more than we usually assume.”Said Dan Woodfin, senior director of systems operations for the Texas Power Reliability Council.
Wind power has been the fastest growing source of electricity in the Texas power grid. In 2015, wind power generated 11% of the Texas power grid. Wind turbines supplied 23% of electricity to the grid last year and even overtook coal as the second most important source of energy in the system after natural gas.
Cold temperatures are expected to exceed the state’s previous winter record set in January 2018 by 10,000 MW this season. And peak demand on Monday and Tuesday, according to forecasts, may even exceed the state’s absolute record, which was recorded in the summer and is 74,820 MW. The stoppage of power generation capacities in such conditions obviously leads to irreversible consequences. Winter has come unexpectedly in Texas.
At the same time, according to the profile resourcesThe electrical collapse of Texas is not the fault of green energy as such, but the economy. In Canada, for example, the blades of wind turbines are heated to operate in cold weather and coated with a material that prevents icing. There was no point in doing this in Texas, since wind generation would be more expensive and the measures taken would increase tariffs. Since such negative combinations of natural factors in Texas happen every 50 or 100 years, they decided not to take them into account. For which now we have to pay – the power grids have significantly lost in reliability.