Nearly half of all of Texas’ ‘green energy’ wind turbines froze in recent winter weather. This has led to massive blackouts across the state, according to authorities.
Over 2 million people were out of power as of Monday morning, according to The Associated Press. Texas gets 23% of its energy via wind energy. In fact, it claims to be the leader of wind generation in America.
It turns out that when things get below 0 degrees, they freeze. When this happens and their is moisture in the air–like rain–you get sleet.
This scientific inevitability seems to have been lost on the people who implemented the wind turbines in Texas. They appear to not have taken into account that Texas occasionally has some really cold days during winter. Who could have known (except, of course, everybody who isn’t getting a green energy kickback to remain silent)?
The Austin American-Statesman reported Sunday:
Nearly half of Texas’ installed wind power generation capacity has been offline because of frozen wind turbines in West Texas, according to Texas grid operators.
Wind farms across the state generate up to a combined 25,100 megawatts of energy. But unusually moist winter conditions in West Texas brought on by the weekend’s freezing rain and historically low temperatures have iced many of those wind turbines to a halt.
As of Sunday morning, those iced turbines comprise 12,000 megawatts of Texas’ installed wind generation capacity, although those West Texas turbines don’t typically spin to their full generation capacity this time of year.
And, while the extra wind generated from the storms generated more power in wind turbines that didn’t freeze, it still resulted in blackouts across the state for millions due to the turbines that did freeze.
The Washington Post reported:
Millions of households in Texas are suffering rolling power blackouts for the first time in a decade as an unprecedented Arctic freeze wrought chaos in U.S. energy markets.
The largest cities from Houston to San Antonio were without power for spells of up to an hour at a time as supplies in the U.S.’s second largest state fluctuated wildly”
The Wind Turbines were meant to help ‘ease the load,’ however it is clear that Texas depends on them for a bit more than just ‘easing’:
“The power crunch is being compounded by a lack of wind generation to help ease the load with output more than halving to 4.2 gigawatts from earlier. Wind turbines may freeze in bitterly cold weather, reducing efficiency and the blades can ultimately stopping spinning.”
Californians experienced this routinely throughout 2020. They experienced waves of blackouts due to a heavy reliance on renewable ‘green’ energies that simply cannot keep up with demand during periods when optimal wind and solar power was not present.
San Jose Mercury News Reported:
“Temperatures were hotter than expected, setting records in many places. Cloud cover in the desert — where the state generates the majority of its solar power — reduced solar energy production. Other Western states also suffered heat waves, meaning they had no extra power to divert to California. And it didn’t get much cooler when the sun set, so AC units ran into the night, as solar plants shut down.”
And Breitbart News reported in August 2020:
Other factors included the sudden shutdown of two conventional power plants: “Two of the state’s major power plants were not online when we needed them. A 750-megawatt plant had been out of service for several days. Another 500-megawatt plant unexpectedly shut down just as the state approached peak demand around 5 p.m. Friday.”
Rolling blackouts are more common in the Third World. In California, they are the result of poor planning, bad management, and an ideological fixation on “green” energy.
California has been rushing to replace fossil fuel energy sources with “renewables,” primarily wind and solar power, in pursuit of its own version of the “Green New Deal.”
In 2018, then-Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed a law requiring the state to obtain 100% of its energy needs from renewables by 2045, though no one could explain how the state would do that.
In 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced the Green New Deal, which aimed to achieve the same goal by 2030.
And in 2020, former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for president, adopted a version of the Green New Deal that commits the U.S. to reach 100% renewables in electricity generation by 2035.
They went on to make a very prophetic claim about green energy plans under a Biden presidency that seem to be coming true in Texas:
If Biden and the Democrats win in November, they will almost certainly implement the Green New Deal, given that Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), is a co-sponsor of the Senate version of the legislation, and has already said she supports ending the Senate filibuster to ram it through.
If that happens, the nation will be stuck with the rolling blackouts California is experiencing today.”
Ironically, it is very likely that large amounts of petroleum-based sprays are likely to be employed to de-ice the turbines.
In addition cold-weather packages are already available but were apparently not in place in Texas:
“Turbines can be equipped with packages that allow them to continue working in freezing temperatures. However the modifications are costly, according to Wind Power Engineering, and therefore seldom made in locations where they are unlikely to be needed.”
So, when your government officials discuss the overpriced pricing for wind turbines, it is very likely that they are not including such necessities in their quotes in order to make them more appealing.
Yet, all it takes is one bad weather day out of the year in order for these packages to be needed. So why wouldn’t they factor into the price, given the state-wide national-security calamity caused by not being prepared. Governor Abbot of Texas declared a state of emergency in Texas.
What makes this all the more bizarre is that technologies do exist (or are being developed) that claim to be able to de-ice aircraft wings very easily. The temperatures and conditions an airplane see at altitude should be colder with more velocity than a wind turbine. Many methods they use should conceivably be applicable in some form for wind turbines. So why does Texas find itself in rolling-blackouts?
It is easy to predict the failures of socialized energy because they are always the same: bad ideas combined with poor management and execution.
Problems with basic abilities to address natural weather conditions show that green energy is clearly not ready for anything more than supplemental power in well-planned cases. Green energy solutions like wind turbines have drawbacks and unintended consequences that are ignored as green jingoism and trillions of dollars are thrown at them. Wind turbines, for instance, require large amounts of land to operate and mutilate flocks of birds that fly through wind farms. They also cause great amounts of noise pollution, drop property values, and most people don’t want to live anywhere near them. Finally, if it is not windy, they are useless.
And, of course, there is the age-old problem of poor governmental management–especially when fevered spending is high and oversight is low.
