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Texas Electricity Crisis Caused Due to Small Contribution of Wind Power

According to an updated report by experts at the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas, lost Wind Power production was just a small part of the massive losses in electric generation that plunged most of the state into darkness during the extreme cold weather in February.

Texas Republicans were fast to blame renewable energy during the storm. A recently updated study on the causes of generator outages during the week of Feb. 14 shows that natural gas plants shutting down or decreasing electricity output due to cold weather, equipment failures, and natural gas shortages were the most important causes of low power supply to the grid.

The grid operator included a chart in its first preliminary report on the causes of the power Crisis, which was released in early April, which appeared to show power generation losses from wind as only slightly smaller than natural gas generation losses that week. However, the ability of the state’s wind turbines to produce electricity was used in the study, not what the turbines would have produced if the outages had not occurred.

Wind Power feeds into the grid based on environmental conditions, and renewable energy sources usually have far higher capacity to generate electricity than what is currently generated on a daily basis; renewable energy generates a lot at times and zero or very little at other times. ERCOT estimates how much wind and solar power will be available to the grid based on detailed weather forecasts. The grid operator estimated that natural gas power losses were many times that of wind generation losses during the power crisis in an updated report presented at a Wednesday ERCOT conference.

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