How did Tejas (Texas for gringos) the energy capital of the United States run out of power?
Well, in West Texas, where most of the wind energy is focused, frozen wind turbines that had to be de-iced. The little energy that power regulators planned on wind to supply was now nada. Because batteries were losing 60% of their energy in the cold, existing storage was gone-buh-bye!
The Nuclear plant near Houston, one of the two reactors at the plant turned off – due to a precaution because a safety sensor froze. The plant was operational, but the sensor could not say so. Safety measure??
Low Supply of Natural Gas. ERCOT planned on 67GW from natural gas/coal, but could only get 43GW of it online. Texas ran out of the ability to get natural gas. Pipelines in Texas don’t use cold insulation – so things were freezing. Almost every natural gas plant—that wasn’t already down for maintenance was online generating power. Gov. Abbott diverted all natural gas to home heating fuel and then electricity for homes. Gas and coal brought a stable supply of energy, albeit not really enough.
Basically, a base of fossil fuels saved the day and took up the slack from unreliable renewable power grids that got hosed during extreme weather. A further reliance on wind and solar would have made things much worse.
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