On 2/16/21 8:50 AM, John Von Essen wrote:
I just assumed most people in Texas have heat pumps- AC in the summer and minimal heating in the winter when needed. When the entire state gets a deep freeze, everybody is running those heat pumps non-stop, and the generation capacity simply wasn’t there. i.e. coal or natural gas plants have some turbines offline, etc.,. in the winter because historically power use is much much less. The odd thing is its been days now, those plants should be able to ramp back up to capacity - but clearly they haven’t. Blaming this on wind turbines is BS. In fact, if it weren’t for so many people in Texas with grid-tie solar systems, the situation would be even worse.
You'd think that mid-summer Texas chews a lot more peak capacity than the middle of winter. Plus I would think a lot of Texas uses natural gas for heat rather than electricity further mitigating its effect on the grid.
Mike
