To All The Green Energy Screamers….
…The facts are:
In the winter the time of worst possible load for any electrical based heat system is before the sun contributes anything in the early morning and overnight hours. The lowest temperatures occur then and thus the highest heating load demand occurs then too, particularly when that "not yet helping" time overlaps when people are not sleeping. When people are sleeping many like it cooler in their house but nobody does when trying to take a shower or a dump in the morning.
Wind and solar are unreliable. It is often very cold when there is neither available. Further, high levels of wind are outside of the operating parameters of windmills too, so at a certain point they must feather and shut down lest they be destroyed. Winter always coincides the worst heating demand with no solar at all because the sun is not shining when the coldest temperatures occur, thus the solar benefit available to the grid in such circumstances is always zero and should be counted as zero in every single case when it comes to winter capacity during maximum load periods. This in turn means solar can never form the backbone of an electrical grid in the winter months and anyone who does not take this into account has no business lecturing anyone about energy and should be ejected into said -10F temperatures in their underwear with the door bolted behind them so they can suffer what they intend to and do inflict on others. When it is -10F out and blowing 40kts you damn well need heat available as every crack the wind can find in your house is going to result in a firehose of insanely-cold air coming in. Yes, you should fix those and the high power bill is an excellent incentive to do so but you're not going to be doing so with the ones you find while it is -10F out because you have to open said orifice to do it.
Natural gas, nuclear and coal all do not care about how cold it is. You might have to de-ice the augur on the coal plant to keep it operational but as long as those plants have fuel they make electricity and all three benefit from colder outside temperatures because the thermodynamic efficiency goes up; that, by the way, is defined as the difference between the high and low sides of a heat engine in Kelvin. Obviously when the heat exchanger has colder air or water to work with the low side is helped and the heat of either combustion or that produced by the nuclear reactor does not change. (Yes, nuke plants are hurt in terms of efficiency and maximum output in very high temperatures for the same reason; the cooling system has only warmer water available and thus overall efficiency goes down some.)
Nobody with two nickels to rub together engineers anything without at least a 5 or 10% buffer on maximum delivered utilization. TVA was whining that we were basically at the "historical high" and they were cutting people off on a rolling blackout basis. That's crap; where was the engineering for the addition 5 or 10% of capacity? TVA had it in the form of a crap-ton of coal-fired plants which they turned off intentionally because of all the greenie screamers. Rather than keep them in reserve, manned and available they were cold, off, with no fuel or even worse bulldozed and destroyed without replacing said nameplate capacity with something that can and will deliver the energy when it is zero degrees and dark outside, as those plants were fully capable of doing…
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=247706