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Thanks for the Wind ‘Power’
In the middle of the country, it is cold.
Take a look at the Tuesday morning temperatures across the country.
This map shows just how far extremely cold temperatures have plunged into the South. pic.twitter.com/Jt7blzdlIE
— NWS Sioux Falls (@NWSSiouxFalls) February 16, 2021
If you click the link, there are a lot of places -15 to -20 degrees.
A lot of that area is controlled by the South West Power Pool, this organization runs the electric grid for this part of the country.
The good news is that there is not a lot of wind, so the “wind chill” is not making it feel colder than it is. The bad news is that there is not a lot of wind. This means that all the fancy windmills that make power are not working. Furnaces use a lot of power. The South West Power Pool has mandated rolling blackouts across their area of control. We are using more power than we are making.
When the wind doesn’t blow in the winter, we get to sit in cold, dark houses and offices for 60-90 minutes. That gives you time to reflect and really thank people for think wind power was the answer.
Published in General
It’s worse than that.
The windmills consume electricity when it’s cold to keep them from freezing up.
I’m glad somebody posted on this. And this is in Texas, the state known for its oil. Wind turbines for energy is not the way to go!
I’ve been reading these stories about the power shortages in Texas and shaking my head. Of all the states, it’s incomprehensible that Texas would be having this problem.
Wind power doesn’t work well during most of the year in most places.
The Plains have the same problem the ocean has when it comes to wind–it’s either too much or too little.
The waters off Cape Cod are some of the windiest places in the country. The wind power industry has been eyeing it for thirty years. The people who opposed the wind farm conducted a lot of research to make their case. It’s a bad deal environmentally and aesthetically. It’s the exact opposite of “sustainable.”
And what do you do with them when they need to be decommissioned?
The only true alternative to fossil fuel is nuclear energy. If it’s safe enough for submarines, it’s safe enough for most communities.
Expensive failure is almost always the result of government subsidies and socialism.
The good news is, fewer Texas birds are getting chopped up by the turbines.
Isn’t New England a hotbed of support for global climate change initiatives that incorporate wind and solar power preferences but none are visible in the New England environment? I’m making assumptions about that environment based on reports that John Kerry has kept wind power off his island.
Yeah they have a lot of “not in my backyard” thoughts about wind and solar. They want it but not where they can see it.
This is one of the things that really bothers me the most about wind turbines. Not only are they inefficient for producing energy, they do ecological damage. If you’re an environmentalist, you should be against these monstrosities.
But in their efforts to do so, they’ve built quite a pile of damning evidence. If I were the people opposed to wind power in a particular place, I’d start in that pile. :-)
Is the problem because of wind or because of downed power lines because of ice? If the power lines are down, it doesn’t matter how power is being generated.
I saw photos of what purported to be the windmills in West Texas that were frozen and inoperable.
It is wind. The local power companies were putting out numbers. There customers were using more energy then the suppliers were generating. Power from the wind mills was down to virtually nothing.
Power lines being down cause blackouts only until repairs are made. This is the power company shutting off power to places where the lines are still good.
Isn’t there some intersectional capability to transfer power supply when needed between different parts of the country?
Very true. But it can take a while (a week or more) if the number of power lines down are extensive enough and icy conditions cause further delays. I’ve lived through conditions where hurricanes have knocked out power lines for a couple of weeks. And where I live, if the weather says boo, we don’t have power in our neighborhood because of all the trees. Our neighborhood is in the middle of a forest with some houses cut in.
There are usually agreements between power companies and the companies supplying the power really like for it to cut in because they sell power at a premium – at least that’s how it is around here.
That makes sense and cents. Or $’s.
I wish this would wake people up as to the facts of wind power, but it probably won’t.
Industrial wind never makes enough energy to pay for its construction. Never. Not even in the Rocky Mountains where the wind blows essentially all of the time. Part of the reason is that they are so damn expensive to build, requiring a huge block of underground concrete to support the towers. Another big factor is turbulence. When you see pictures of rows upon rows of windmills, be aware that only the ones in the front row are generating any power; the turbulence they produce spoils the efficiency (what of it there is) of all the whirling blades behind them. That’s why we aren’t planting windmills all over buildings in New York City and Chicago; too turbulent to operate.
Here in Western New York we are fighting off Cuomo’s push to plant two or three hundred 600-foot turbines along the Lake Ontario shoreline, square in the middle of a major migratory bird flyway. Companies are signing leases with farmers to build these things. Reading one of those leases would make you sick. The companies, which make no bones about the fact that they are in the business of building wind farms, not generating power, sell the leases within five years of completing construction. Ten years later the turbine is at the end of its operational life, and the farmer isn’t dealing with the same people any more. The money set aside to decommission them is pitifully inadequate, so the leaseholder walks away. Then the EPA comes in on their twinkle toes and asks the farmer what he is going to do about that big tank of lubricants and rare earth magnets on that 600 foot tower, which is his problem because it’s on his property.
The real kicker? We’re 30 miles away from Niagara Falls, where the power plant is running at 60% capacity because of low demand. They could open some valves and generate more power than the windmills on their best day.
Yup.
NIMBY.
The Kennedys and Kerrys had a hissy fit when they proposed an offshore wind farm off Nantucket.
I know people who oh and ah when they see a bunch of windmills. I find them hideous and blight on the landscape.
And they are a nightmare to live next to.
I’ve seen reports that both wind turbines and fossil fuel generators failed in Texas this week. But I haven’t seen a precise breakdown of numbers and percentages of each. Some neighbors tell me wind turbines account for half the failures, though “only” around 20% of Texas power is gained by wind.
Per usual, questions are asked of politicians more than of technicians with direct experience and specific knowledge.
Not all Texans are on the Texas power grid. I am, but my sister just half-an-hour north is on the eastern US grid.
Not smart….
It’s not just North America.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56089815
Reason.com has a pretty decent article about what’s going down in Texas. It turns out they don’t have enough natural gas capacity to heat homes AND generate electricity, so when there’s a deep freeze home heating gets the priority.
https://reason.com/2021/02/16/renewable-energy-is-not-the-chief-cause-of-texas-power-outages/
Germany went for days without sun or wind in the winter. They learned they need adequate coal power to back up the renewables.
In Texas there is more going on than freezing windmills, although this is part of the problem. A number of power plants are offline for maintenance since this is usually the low demand time of the year, and the natural gas supply is also running short of demand. This is just worse than anyone has seen, and it’s not over yet.
But of course the vast majority of homes cannot run the furnace without electricity…
I just heard that when they freeze up, helicopters have to go up and spray them with petroleum products of some sort to de-freeze them. What does all that cost?
Also, besides the birds, there are elaborate migrations of insects that are critical to the wellbeing of us and our habitat. We don’t think about it, because they are small and generally beneath our notice. But they’re there, in the billions, in understandable patterns just like everything else, and when their natural ways are disrupted, cascades of stress and failure of ecosystems downstream begin to happen.
This is all crazy.
Windmills are wonderful technology. Very clever and an ingenious way to extract some work in the form of available electricity from simple wind blowing by. My hat is off to the engineers who came up with it.
But it is very costly and destructive of other, more subtle things. It is only beautiful, and practical, in a place where you have no other options. Like a remote farm off on the prairie in Nebraska, far from any power lines. Or a remote station in the Austrailian outback. Or the top of a mountain somewhere.
If much more efficiently-generated electrical capacity is easily available where you are, it’s ridiculous to install one of these bird-chomping eco-crucifixes. It’s like like setting up a solar water-collector when you live next door to a lake. You can do it, but why?
Running pumps or heating a milk barn with windmills, fine. Industrial scale power generation with wind “farms” is a complete scam. They wouldn’t exist without subsidies. They’re not wind farms, they are tax farms.
But only if you think it through, using facts and logic. So there’s the rub.
And not all of us even have retail natural gas available to our house. All the houses in our subdivision are all-electric.
However it only gets this cold in Texas once every few years and then doesn’t last very long, unlike say, MN. So it doesn’t make much sense to adequately ‘prepare’ for such a rare event.
So very true…500 years ago. Today not so much. We have cheaper, more reliable options available today, namely fossil fuels and nuclear. And they not only are cheaper and more reliable, they are less damaging to the environment when everything is factored in including the mining, transportation and disposal costs. So then why are they despised by Environmentalists, Hmmm?
Windmill farms are tax supported boondoggles designed to enrich well connected charlatans, nothing more, nothing less. They contribute nothing positive either to the grid or our lifestyles including the environment.