New Forbes, 3 podcasts, Power Brief, & Chickadees can expand their hippocampi
New Forbes piece on ERCOT, three new podcasts, new Power Brief, and Black-capped Chickadees
A year ago, Texas was hit by a winter storm and blackouts that left about 700 people dead and caused billions of dollars in damage. And while the blackouts were disastrous, they could have been much worse. Indeed, as I explained in this August 1, 2021 piece in the Dallas Morning News, Texas narrowly escaped a total grid meltdown. Lorin and I spent 45 hours without electricity. I remember the blackout vividly and what we had to do to keep warm. In the 12 months since the blackout, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what happened and why. Those issues are the focus of much of this week’s “news” letter.
I started the week in Dallas, where I attended the rosary and funeral for my beloved uncle, Charley Brandt. He was a gentle man and a gentleman. He and my aunt, Phyllis (who was my father’s youngest sister) had one of the great romances I have ever known. While I will miss him, he lived a long (95 years) and full life. He was the last surviving member of my father’s generation. After the funeral Mass on Tuesday morning, I drove back to Austin to participate in a panel discussion at the Austin Convention Center that was sponsored by the Austin Chamber of Commerce titled “A Resilient Austin.” You can read one media account of that event here. Since Tuesday, things have been a blur. Without further ado, four items this week:
Forbes: ERCOT facing avalanche of new solar and wind
New Power Brief on Society of Civil Engineers’ report on ERCOT
Black-capped Chickadees can expand their hippocampi!
The photo of the Black-capped Chickadee above was taken in Canada in 2005.
On Thursday morning, I posted a piece on Forbes about the amount of wind and solar that is expected to be added to the ERCOT grid by the end of next year. I began:
Many lessons have been learned in the year since the deadly winter storm and blackouts that left about 700 Texans dead and caused billions of dollars in damage. Perhaps the most important lesson is this: during extreme weather events, weather-dependent renewables cannot deliver electricity when it is needed the most. Despite that fact, the state’s grid operator, ERCOT, is expecting an avalanche of new wind and solar capacity to be added to the Texas grid by the end of next year which will make managing the state’s wobbly grid even more difficult.
As I have previously reported, between 2006 and 2020, about $66 billion was spent building wind and solar capacity in Texas. Over that same period, according to a report published last year by Bill Peacock of The Energy Alliance, Big Wind and Big Solar collected roughly $22 billion in subsidies of one kind or another, including state tax breaks and federal tax credits. But when the ERCOT grid was on the brink of collapse on February 15, 2021, that $66 billion was worth next to nothing. Indeed, nearly all of that wind and solar capacity went to Cancun to hang out with Ted Cruz.
At about 1:50 am on the 15th, when ERCOT began shutting off millions of Texans to avert a grid collapse, there was no solar production, and of the 31,000 megawatts of wind capacity in ERCOT, only about 5,400 megawatts, or roughly 17% of that capacity, was available. Later on February 15, wind output in Texas dropped to about 1,000 megawatts, or roughly 3% of installed capacity.
I then cited a December 3 analysis of the blackouts done by Ed Crooks from the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie. In an article titled “Learning the right lessons from the Texas crisis,” Crooks underscored the problem with renewables and their role in the blackout. He wrote:
“The worst of the problems hit during an extended ‘wind drought,’ with low wind speeds and power output across a vast area of the U.S., covering the ERCOT, MISO, PJM, and SPP regions for 12 days. That is a period much longer than can be managed by most standard demand response programs, or lithium-ion battery storage systems that have durations typically lasting up to four hours. As the share of wind power on the grid rises, and the shares of coal and gas decline, managing the grid to maintain electricity supplies through these wind droughts is going to become increasingly important... The story of the Texas power crisis encapsulates the central challenge of the transition to lower-carbon energy. Companies and regulators need to manage the transition to new energy sources in the medium to long term, while ensuring that the old sources can still provide reliable supplies in the short term.”
I concluded the piece:
Therein lies the challenge. The “old” sources (read: thermal power plants) are needed to supply reliable juice on the ERCOT grid when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, but the structure of ERCOT’s “energy-only” market means that generators do not get paid unless they are producing and selling watt-hours. The huge influx of weather-dependent renewables on the ERCOT grid means that thermal power plants, and in particular gas-fired plants, are going to be at an even bigger disadvantage in the market. As more wind and solar get added to the grid, gas-fired plants will operate less, sell less energy into the market, and make less money. If the gas plants aren’t profitable, they go out of business. Or, they don’t get built in the first place. Or, regulators have to pay them to stay online, which means ratepayers have to pay more.
Texas regulators can’t stop the surge in new renewables on the ERCOT grid because they cannot control the federal tax credits that are driving the growth of wind and solar. But that’s not the only problem. Much of the fault lies with what Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston calls “ERCOT’s idiotic market design,” a design that rewards volatility, not reliability.
In short, a year after the near-meltdown of the ERCOT grid, Texas policymakers are still not doing enough to assure the reliability of the state’s electricity system. And the surge in new wind and solar capacity will make that job even harder.
Again, here’s a link. Please share it.
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Meredith Angwin on why on-site fuel is important and the grid as "an orchestra"
Thanks to the hard work of my colleague, Tyson Culver, (who just moved into a new house) we released three episodes of the Power Hungry Podcast this week. We led off with Meredith Angwin, the author of Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid, who is making her fourth appearance on the podcast. (She was on June 22, 2021, right after the blackouts on February 17, 2021, and on November 3, 2020.) As you can probably tell, I’m a big fan. The reasons for my fandom are many, including her long experience watching the RTOs and her dedication to learning and understanding and explaining what is happening to our electric grid and why it is happening. Plus, I think she’s adorable.
In this episode, Meredith explains why entities like ERCOT and other regional transmission organizations are “fatally flawed,” why Texas regulators should be incentivizing power plants to have onsite fuel, why offshore wind is “a tremendous waste of money,” the problems with trying to electrify everything, and why we should be thinking about the electric grid as an “orchestra.” Again, here’s a link. And here’s the video of the interview on YouTube.
Brent Bennett on why ERCOT is "broken," batteries, Moore's Law, and the energy transition
Our second guest this week was Brent Bennett, the policy director for Life:Powered, an initiative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. In this episode, Bennett explains why the ERCOT market is “broken,” how it is being distorted by federal subsidies for wind and solar, why there’s no Moore’s law for batteries, and why there is an “oversupply of capital” being directed toward alternative energy sources. Brent has written several good reports on the ERCOT grid, including this one from October, in which he explained that the “Texas model of socializing transmission and reliability costs among ratepayers provides generators with an implicit subsidy and favors generators that impose more transmission and reliability costs on the system.”
In addition, given that Donald Sadoway was on the podcast last week talking about batteries and battery chemistry, I wanted to get Brent’s take on electricity storage. Brent has a doctorate in materials science from UT-Austin, and he has worked for a battery startup. As he explained, when it comes to batteries, it’s not a “problem with technology, it’s one of scale.” He also mimicked one of the lines from another recent guest on the podcast, Irina Slav. (See her appearance on January 19, 2022.) Toward the end of our conversation, he said, “this energy transition that’s supposedly going to happen, no one really understands how long and how difficult it’s going to be, if it happens at all.” Again, here’s a link.
And here’s the video on YouTube.
Roger Pielke Jr. talks about Texas, Germany, disasters, and the Iron Law of Climate
Our third guest was Roger Pielke Jr., who I first interviewed back in 2009. This is the third time Roger has been on the podcast. See here for the August 17, 2021 episode and here for the July 21, 2020 episode. I have admired Roger’s work for a long time because he is an original thinker who is not afraid of bucking the orthodoxy. In this episode, he talks about why policymakers should not commit to decarbonization targets before they have realistic plans to meet them, Germany’s energy mess, a new “taxonomy” for thinking about disasters, doping at the Winter Olympics, and why we may have some good news on climate change. I liked what he had to say about Germany and how it relates to his Iron Law of Climate. He said, “there are trade-offs to be made among energy sources, but the one trade-off that is not going to be made is to turn the lights out. That’s not an option. And so what we see is that if the choice is between unreliable energy and carbon dioxide emissions, will get carbon dioxide emissions if it’s between unreliable energy and reliance on a geopolitical foe like Russia, [they] will rely on the geopolitical foe.”
Again, here’s a link. Here’s the video of the interview on YouTube.
Power Brief on new report from TX Section of American Society of Civil Engineers
I just posted a five-minute Power Brief on YouTube about the report, which says that the design of ERCOT's energy-only market, "influenced by federal and state subsidization of intermittent resources, fails to adequately pay for reliable dispatchable generation." The full report is here.
Black-capped Chickadees can expand their hippocampi
We see Black-capped Chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) all the time in the yard and at our birdbaths and feeders. In fact, one landed at the birdbath on the porch of my office just a few minutes ago. They are small, lightning-quick fliers and are easily distinguishable because of their prominent markings. In looking them up, I learned that the collective noun for the Black-capped Chickadee is a “banditry” or “dissimulation.”
The Kern Audubon Society (the source of the photo immediately above) has this remarkable bit about the bird:
Black-capped Chickadees are able to increase their memory capacity each fall by adding new brain cells to the hippocampus, the part of the brain that supports spatial memory. During this time, the chickadee’s hippocampus actually expands in volume by around 30 percent! In the spring, when feats of memory are needed less, its hippocampus shrinks back to normal size. This phenomenon also occurs in other food-storing songbirds, including jays, nutcrackers, and nuthatches. This remarkable plasticity is related to hormonal changes in the birds’ brains. Scientists are studying this ability in the hopes of eventually helping humans suffering from memory loss.
Wikipedia says the Black-capped Chickadee is
a small, nonmigratory, North American songbird that lives in deciduous and mixed forests. It is a passerine bird in the tit family, the Paridae. It is the state bird of Massachusetts and Maine in the United States, and the provincial bird of New Brunswick in Canada. It is well known for its ability to lower its body temperature during cold winter nights, its good spatial memory to relocate the caches where it stores food, and its boldness near humans (sometimes feeding from the hand)... During the winter, chickadees often flock together. Many other species of birds – including titmice, nuthatches, and warblers – can often be found foraging in these flocks. Mixed flocks stay together because the chickadees call out whenever they find a good source of food. This calling-out forms cohesion for the group, allowing the other birds to find food more efficiently. When flocking, black-capped chickadees soon establish a rigid social hierarchy. In such hierarchies, males usually rank over females, and older birds over juveniles. Black-capped chickadees sleep in thick vegetation or in cavities, usually singly, though they may occasionally roost clumped together. Their sleeping posture is with the beak tucked under the scapular (shoulder) feathers. Their flight is slightly undulating with rapid wing beats. Flight speed is about 20 km/h (12 mph).
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