Wind Power Did Cause The Texas Blackouts!

By Paul Homewood

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There has been a marked lack of data made public about last week’s blackouts in Texas, which has allowed all sorts of misinformation to fly around. I suspect this is quite deliberate.

I have however found hourly data on the US EIA website. This is what happened on those crucial couple of days:

https://www.eia.gov/beta/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-view/electric_overview/US48/US48/GenerationByEnergySource-4/edit

The chart is interactive, and below are the actual numbers from Sunday evening to Monday morning:

So, consider this.

Between 6 pm and 10 pm on the Sunday, wind power suddenly lost 2 GW, about a quarter of its load. Fortunately, gas power was quickly ramped up to fully compensate for this.

Wind power continued to be shed, with another 2 GW disappearing by 2.00 am on the Monday morning. As demand was also declining, gas power was reduced accordingly.

However, it was between 2.00 and 3.00 am that gas power too fell off the cliff.

It must be fairly evident that this had nothing to do with weather conditions, which could not possibly have had such a sudden impact. (In this respect, gas power was perfectly stable after 3 am for the rest of the day and week).

So what did cause that sudden drop in generation, something we also see with coal at exactly the same time, which dropped from 11 GW to 9 GW in that hour?

There is only one possible conclusion, and it is that the grid itself has become totally unstable, as wind power fell away. The evidence points to massive tripping out at gas and coal power stations as generation and demand got out of balance.

I would guess that just one gas plant tripping out in this fashion would have a cascading effect.

Whilst it has been evident from the start that the sudden shedding of wind power played a major part in the blackouts, the establishment media have been quick to close ranks by putting most of the blame on gas power stations, which having much greater capacity naturally suffered bigger drops in generation.

They have done so with publishing any of the detailed data, which I have done above. All they are interested in, of course, is deflecting the blame from renewable energy.

If they had done so, it would have been obvious that the real culprit was unreliable wind power.