Wind energy goes wanting when it is needed most

 Texas Public Policy Foundation:

Recently, there has been a wave of cities (and companies) making pledges that they are “powered by 100% renewable energy.” Some states are getting in the game, too. Two years ago Hawaii pledged that its electricity would be entirely renewable by 2045. The California Senate recently passed a bill setting the same goal, while moving up the state’s timeline to get half its electricity from renewables from 2030 to 2025. All of Colorado’s Democratic gubernatorial candidates have made a pledge for that state to be “100% renewable” by 2030. 

Many renewable energy advocates point to the Texas electricity market as a shining example of how these lofty renewable energy goals can become reality. Those same advocates fail to disclose (or maybe even recognize) two fundamental and cautionary truths of the Texas wind energy experiment. First, when Texans’ demand for energy is the greatest, in the heat of the summer days, wind energy nearly disappears from the grid. The result is that the grid depends on the continued reliability of the fuels that have powered the Texas success story—natural gas and coal. The second reality of the Texas grid is that state and federal subsidies for wind energy have eroded the Texas generation fleet of valuable baseload generation assets and the market structure for generation capacity discourages baseload investment. 

Only after all of the facts are examined can anyone fully understand how the story of wind energy in Texas proves that the “100% renewable” claim is not achievable. Sobering lessons have been learned in Texas about how the distorting effects of renewable subsidies can lay waste to the competitive marketplace and expose ratepayers to high cost and low reliability. 

Background 

The Texas grid’s size, diversity, and electrical isolation (for the 90 percent of the market in ERCOT), create a unique opportunity for the rest of the nation (and the world) to learn from the Texas experiment. To fully understand the cautionary tale of wind in Texas, there are some key background facts about the Texas electricity market that must be understood. 

As documented by the Dallas Morning News (see Figure 1), Texas generates and consumes more electricity than the next top two power consuming states combined (California and Louisiana). This is not just a function of Texas having a large population with a climate that demands air conditioning several months a year. Half of the power Texas consumes is in the industrial sector, which produces a significant component of America’s fuels, chemicals, and manufactured goods. The diverse, reliable, and affordable Texas grid drives the machinery depended upon for oil and gas exploration and the manufacture of fuels, chemicals, steel, automobiles, beverages, and semiconductors—just to name a few. Our state is a “maker” while many other states are the “takers.” Texas uses more electricity to “make things” than the next three states combined (Louisiana, California, and Pennsylvania) (see Figure 1).

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There is much more.

This piece explains why 100 percent "renewable" does not and will not work. 

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Contrary to repeated claims about wind being at “grid parity” with gas and coal, unsubsidized wind power is more expensive due to the simple fact that it is less energy-dense. Because wind requires much more material and support infrastructure to deliver the same amount of power as gas or coal, it is more capital-inefficient and delivers “less for more.” But this fact is not nearly as bad as the “intermittency problem,” discussed above, and it is why wind is not today, nor will be any time in the near future, cost-competitive with gas and coal without subsidies.

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