Thoughts on the recent ERCOT failure

 

Thoughts on the recent ERCOT failure

 

First, wind power. Here is a little piece showing wind installations produce a small part of their “rated” power:

https://sciencing.com/much-power-wind-turbine-generate-6917667.html

If the winds are too low, or too high, they do not work.

Much of the power generated by wind is used in the power lines and transformers before it can ever get to the rate payer.

The blades are not recyclable and will wind up in landfills. The units sometimes fail and catch on fire slinging burning oil and plastic all over the place starting wild fires, often far from fire fighting people and equipment.

When a wind farm reaches the end of its service life, the remoteness of the systems and the small amount (relatively speaking) of steel, copper and aluminum in each turbine assembly means, unless  scrap metal prices are pretty high, the things will sit and rust down.

Now look at solar power. Here is an example of a solar installation that covers 3200 acres and makes 579 MW.  https://www.energyconceptsfresno.com/blog/2019/june/how-much-energy-do-solar-farms-produce-/

A 650 MW natural gas powered plant takes about 40 acres.

Consider the acres of land that are shaded from the sun, growing nothing, to make power. When the sun shines.

When spent, the solar cells are not recyclable and are disposed of as hazardous waste. They have limited life spans due to chemical and physical breakdown. When it snows, or, a dust storm occludes the surface, they stop producing power.

Neither sun nor solar power can produce power on demand. Only when conditions are right.

Often, the highest demands occur when it is very hot and the wind drops, or, when it is very cold and the same happens. Sometimes we have hot nights and hurricanes. Wind and solar are useless at those times.

The “answer” often brought up to fix these problems are battery installations. Here is the truth about those:

I built one in Port Lavaca, TX. It cost over $10 million. It is capable of putting 9.8 MW on the grid for about an hour. At that point it is spent and must be recharged. There is not enough power in that installation to do much more than bump the frequency a bit. The things must have constant power  to them to charge the battery packs and to keep them balanced as far as charge goes. If they get too far out of balance, they can catch fire. When sitting waiting for the opportunity to discharge to the grid (sell power) the battery containers must be airconditioned 24/7 as the batteries can catch fire if they get too hot. If they do catch  fire, the smoke is deadly. When the batteries are spent, they are hazardous waste that must undergo some serious work to decommission them before placing the remains in a hazardous waste landfill. The batteries are a shock hazard, flammable, toxic, and corrosive. At best, these things are a parasitic load on the grid most of the time. Burning electricity with no benefit derived.

The units I worked on had the battery stacks made in China and the Transformers and Inverters made in Belgium. So much for jobs. Turbine blades are made in China.

Economics

Wind, solar, and battery back up systems cannot pay for themselves in a true market. They are built using tax dollars as incentives and by providing large tax credits as well. That way there is no cost of capital in the building and operating of these units.

When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, the wind and solar farms, for all intents and purposes, produce “free power”. If you will look at the ERCOT website, you will see that electrical power prices go negative. There is more power on the grid than can be used. It cannot efficiently be stored, so, it goes to waste.

While “free power” sound exciting, it is NOT real and causes some horrible market consequences. Real power plants cost a lot of money to build and operate. When conditions are nice, they cannot make any money whatsoever because of the glut of energy produced by wind and solar. However, when there are transmission disruptions, darkness, cloudiness, periods of low wind when weather conditions are extreme, there is not enough power to supply the grid and no where to get it. When one combines the market conditions with the environmental regulations, it hardly pays to build a real power plant. Many of our older plants are being shut down and razed because they cannot be run legally and economically.

Power trading is another issue. Generators have to sell at predetermined prices. In Texas, they cannot sell on the market like the arbitragers can. So, when prices sky rocket, the folks that have the money and time in real power plants cannot share in the bounty.

An interesting aside is that when I was working to build the battery facility in Port Lavaca, the company (Out of New York) that I worked for was calling itself a “power producer” to get permits to build it. Once built, they changed their designation so they could play power on the arbitrage market. Buy at $40 and sell at $9,000.

ERCOT

In my opinion, ERCOT is a boondoggle set up to let traders make billions while not ensuring a dependable supply of power to the residents of Texas. It causes market disruptions and causes major negative externalities in both the market and the production of electrical power in Texas.