Texas electricity maximum renewables record

Yep, and natural gas was the big culprit in 2011, too. Valves froze, IIRC. But again, you couldn’t dial up solar and wind to compensate, so we had rolling blackouts.

> we need a lot more nuclear that can be dialed up to compensate for renewables going offline during certain weather conditions

If you want something to compensate for intermittency, nuclear seems like the worst option. It implies you have nuclear plants sitting offline until needed, or being ramped up and down. My understanding is that you really want to run nuclear plants 24/7 at full output.

> but we need a lot more nuclear that can be dialed up to compensate for renewables going offline

The problem wasn't the renewables going offline, they dipped in production due to not being winterized, but that was well modelled and they actually outperformed their expected output.

The problem, as mentioned in toomuchtodo's links, was the nuclear and gas plants going offline because they weren't winterized and trying to take the grid down with them. The mix was fine, but the market rewarded the cheapest preparations and the state government didn't step in to intervene.

Texas is building more grid scale battery storage than any other state:

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/chart-us...

This year EIA again expects Texas to outpace California, only now by an even wider margin than last year. The Lone Star State could build nearly 7 GW of utility-scale storage in 2025 compared to California’s 4.2 GW.

In Texas doesn't electricity use also drop during the winter? Almost everyone I know in Texas has gas heat and the winters are mild while summers are scorching. I use about 3X the electricity in summer months vs winter. I would guess nearly all residential energy use in Texas follows this pattern.

Or build more renewables. If that's the cheapest thing to do, of course.

i get what you're saying but renewable capacity does not drop during the winter. On the contrary, winter months outside the tropics have higher wind speeds.

Solar output drops during the winter, not wind.

that said, economics pose a major problem to building more renewable energy capacity. No one will build a wind farm if it is not profitable. Profitability is a major question if average electricity prices drop.

The Texas grid is deliberately cut off from other states to avoid federal regulation. If we would just interconnect, then you diversify your locations and are much less susceptible to the wild swings in price driven by weather, which in the case of 2021 also impacted natural gas plants.

Sorry if I misinterpreted your comment, but anytime I see someone railing about Texas' outage of 2021 it's always an encore of the GOP's anti-renewables crusade in favor of oil and gas.

Actual mods allowed most thought out anti-conservative posts to be flagged. (Less thought out remained.)