How much renewable power is too much?

Earlier this month, Texas suffered two energy blows. Neither had anything to do with hydrocarbons but they had everything to do with renewables. To be honest, as I read the headlines, I got a feeling I was reading Newsthump or another satire website.

A heat wave without wind is a problem for the Texas grid, Bloomberg reported on July 10th, subheading this extra-deep insight with the actual news: “Wind speeds have fallen to extremely low levels, and that means the state’s fleet of turbines is at just 8% of their potential output.”

But that wasn’t where the state’s energy woes ended, not at all. Just three days later after ERCOT called for voluntary electricity conservation amid the wind drought, it issued another call, this time because, per this ABC News report, “clouds threaten access to essential solar power.”

Now, I’m sure there are people would would sincerely attribute this unpleasantness to extreme weather because it seems all weather is now extreme, even if it’s heat during the summer or cold during the winter.

Yet the ABC News report accurately notes that the combination of heat and low wind speeds is a common occurrence in the Lone Star State. Clouds in the summer, on the other hand, seem to be not so common an occurrence. And this makes them a problem.

Clouds, however, are a common occurrence during other seasons, if not in Texas, then in other parts of the world that rely increasingly heavily on solar and wind, which, I hear, also often dies down during the winter.

As I pondered this fascinating phenomenon, I came across another news headline: Feds want to help build massive wind farm larger than the City of Houston off the coast of Galveston.

One can’t help but feel a certain admiration for the perseverance of the “If it doesn’t work do more of it” crowd. They remain unfazed by the inherent and fundamentally unfixable drawbacks of wind and solar energy.

Instead of letting these discourage them, the IIDWDMOI crowd doubles down on that same wind and solar energy, quite likely with the somewhat logical assumption that the more capacity there is, the more output there will be while the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.

As for when it’s cloudy, night, or windless, well, there’s always battery storage. Rather, there will be, once the cost of storage falls enough to not make a MWh of electricity as expensive as an ounce of gold, which is, incidentally, what pretty much happened during the Texas Freeze.

Because at home we talk about our work, I shared the news about the latest offshore wind idea with my excessively rational husband. And he hit me between the eyes with a question that hadn’t occurred to me, which I am embarrassed to admit but I was raised to be honest, so I’m admitting it.

“Didn’t they have hurricanes in the Gulf Coast?” the excessively rational individual asked.

A quick check with the internet told me that, indeed, Galveston has not been immune from hurricane damage. It doesn’t have it as bad as the Florida Panhandle but it’s not exactly completely isolated, either.

A further check with the internet introduced me to this study, in which researchers estimate, using a probabilistic model, that “In the most vulnerable areas now being actively considered by developers, nearly half the turbines in a farm are likely to be destroyed in a 20-y period.”

Of course, as any self-respecting researcher would do these days, they add that “Reasonable mitigation measures—increasing the design reference wind load, ensuring that the nacelle can be turned into rapidly changing winds, and building most wind plants in the areas with lower risk—can greatly enhance the probability that offshore wind can help to meet the United States’ electricity needs.”

But, I then thought, since rationality may at least partially be an STD, aren’t we being told that climate change is leading to more extreme weather, meaning more severe storms and, as far as I understand, more hurricanes? How far, I couldn’t help but wonder, would “reasonable mitigating measures” go towards preventing the destruction of turbines?

I know there are those among you who argue that historical weather data shows the weather is not becoming more extreme but I also know you can trust the weather about as much as you can trust a cat to save you from drowning, so the possibility of a turbine-bending hurricanes is always there.

In all fairness, this is not a certainty the way night is but if a government is planning for complete reliance on wind and solar, that government must plan for both night an the prospect of turbine-bending hurricanes, I strongly believe.

The good news, however dubious its “good” nature may be, is that we might end up not needing all those solar panels and wind turbines because the World Economic Forum believes blotting the Sun could solve all our climate problems.

All it would take would be a Brazil-sized blot make of bubbles, made by robots in space. Whatever could go wrong, right?

By way of answering this question, I leave you with one of my favourite Pratchett quotes.

“Any true wizard, faced with a sign like 'Do not open this door. Really. We mean it. We're not kidding. Opening this door will mean the end of the universe,' would automatically open the door in order to see what all the fuss is about. This made signs rather a waste of time, but at least it meant that when you handed what was left of the wizard to his grieving relatives you could say, as they grasped the jar, 'We told him not to.”