Wind Energy Falls Short, AGAIN!

Why will it take a total catastrophe in this country to wake up the public to the fact 'green' energy is not a reliable alternative to fossil fuel at this time? Report after report have shown wind and solar can not supply even small communities with adequate power under all conditions.


And with the EPA now forcing new regulations on the coal industry that will effectively reduce the number of plants by 10% in the near future, just how do we supply our homes and industry with enough power to make our economy, and life itself, sustainable?

Just where is the common sense? Do these advocates of a dream society, where all things happen by proclamation, have some kind of disease that has affected their powers of rational thought? Are these people genetically different from the rest of us?

Is it possible to say the sun will not come up in the East and therefore it won't just because we proclaim it won't or pass some regulation saying it shouldn't?

Texas Wind Energy Fails, Again
Source: Robert Bryce, "Texas Wind Energy Fails, Again," National Review, August 29, 2011.

Last Wednesday brought yet another unspeakably hot day to Texas and, alas, it was yet another day when wind energy failed the state's consumers, says Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Texas has 10,135 megawatts of installed wind-generation capacity, which is nearly three times as much as any other state. And yet, last week, when the state's electricity demand hit 66,552 megawatts, all of the state's wind turbines mustered just 880 megawatts of power when electricity was needed the most.

Put another way, even though wind turbines account for about 10 percent of Texas' 103,000 megawatts of summer electricity-generation capacity, wind energy was able to provide just 1.3 percent of the juice the state needed last Wednesday afternoon.

None of this should be surprising.

For years, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has counted just 8.7 percent of the state's installed wind-generation capacity as "dependable capacity at peak."
What happened last week? Just 880 megawatts out of 10,135 megawatts of wind capacity -- 8.68 percent -- was actually moving electrons when consumers needed those electrons the most.
Consider what might be happening had the state kept the $6.79 billion it's now spending on wind-energy transmission lines and instead allocated it to new natural-gas-fired generators.
The latest data from the Energy Information Administration show that building a megawatt of new wind capacity costs $2.43 million -- up 21 percent over the year-earlier costs -- while a new megawatt of gas-fired capacity costs a bit less than $1 million, a drop of 3 percent from year-earlier estimates.

Under that scenario, Texas could have built 6,900 megawatts of new gas-fired capacity for what the state is now spending on wind-related transmission lines alone.