texas has destroyed its electricity grid, blacked out during frigid freeze

A power grid is just that, a grid of wires and transformers that transports power from where it is generated to where it is used. The grid must be designed for SOME maximum load and it is very expensive to carry excess capacity that remains unused. So designing a system for double the average load means that you have to pay for generators that are unused most of the time (but still cost almost as much as if they were running). Then you need to double the cost of all of the wires to transport the power from the generator to the users. You will also double the cost of all of the transformers that now need to handle a larger peak load. Since people don’t want to be near larger power generation plants, you will probably also increase the distance that the wires must run to transport the power. Who wants to pay for electricity that you are not using so that the power grid will have extra “just in case”.

That just represents the normal variation in use based on time of day or month of the year. The Power company has no choice but to accept these inefficiencies as part of the cost of doing business. Wind is great, but they need a backup for when the wind is not blowing. Solar is great, but they need a backup for cloudy days. Those backups cost money even if they are not being used.

Now let an extraordinary event enter the picture ... like a record cold across the center of the country. Suddenly there is a record demand for power use. In a normal “local” crisis, they would respond by purchasing surplus power from other grids (like neighboring states) and transport it over the high voltage lines into the area having a local shortage. In this case, EVERYONE was having a shortage. They can increase the output on the generators, but that quickly runs into limits of what the lines can carry. Attempt to push too much power through the lines and you risk a large scale blackout.

So do you really want to double the price of electricity to upsize the Texas power grid to accommodate a once-in-a-century event and build generators that will be only be needed every hundred years or so?

There are things that Green Energy does well and things that it does not do well. The trick is to match the technology to the task and avoid the “one solution fits all problems” trap. Solar is great for the variable loads because it is distributed (minimizing wire sizes) and its generation curve approximates the variable daily demand curve. Nuclear and Coal are both good for efficiently and reliably generating the base load at low cost.

 

A common sense post, ‘cept some people (libs, dems, progs etc.) have a difficult time using a commodity that they are totally unfamiliar with!

 

“Some people” are more about NIMBY (not in my back yard) as the source of their problems. California is a case where they didn’t want nuclear power, so they shut down the nuclear power plants. Then they didn’t want pollution from gas or coal or oil near them, so they legislated the fossil fuel power plants into unprofitability (shutting them down). The solution was to import electricity from states to the east of California ... which leaves them vulnerable to the limits of their transmission lines and the surpluses of another utility not under their control. Even if California builds enough Solar and Wind power generation to meet their peak demand, they will still need a source to replace it if there is no wind on a cloudy day. SOMEBODY will need to pay to build and maintain that generation capacity (or there will be rolling blackouts from time to time).