The State of Texas has just experienced an extreme winter storm that and wind turbines were partially responsible for some of the outages.
One would think that during a winter storm wind turbines would be generating a ton of energy and they probably were until they froze.
The Austin American-Statesman reported:
Nearly half of Texas’ installed wind power generation capacity has been offline because of frozen wind turbines in West Texas, according to Texas grid operators.
Wind farms across the state generate up to a combined 25,100 megawatts of energy. But unusually moist winter conditions in West Texas brought on by the weekend’s freezing rain and historically low temperatures have iced many of those wind turbines to a halt.
As of Sunday morning, those iced turbines comprise 12,000 megawatts of Texas’ installed wind generation capacity, although those West Texas turbines don’t typically spin to their full generation capacity this time of year.
Even the Washington Post admitted green energy was to blame for the blackouts:
Millions of households in Texas are suffering rolling power blackouts for the first time in a decade as an unprecedented Arctic freeze wrought chaos in U.S. energy markets.
The largest cities from Houston to San Antonio were without power for spells of up to an hour at a time as supplies in the U.S.’s second-largest state fluctuated wildly.
The power crunch is being compounded by a lack of wind generation to help ease the load with output more than halving to 4.2 gigawatts from earlier. Wind turbines may freeze in bitterly cold weather, reducing efficiency and the blades can ultimately stop spinning.
What happened in Texas also happened early last fall in California. The state was suffering through an intense heatwave and the power grid couldn’t handle the load. A lack of wind and overcast skies produced little energy and caused rolling blackouts. Gov. Newsom admitted that California is going to have to do a better job diversifying its energy sources to make sure its power grid can handle intense loads.
