a discussion about wind

[dukealien]

Don’t just swallow whatever Fox News dishes out for you

Not just Fox, of course.  There's blame to go around, but the main missing quantity is wind.  Blame attaches to decommissioning the other sources as if wind was reliable (it's 100% unreliable - when the wind doesn't blow, nothing).  Also not planning for a hundred-year cold wave, but that's when engineers start trotting out probabilities... which, when there are bodies, always fail to convince.

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@Mark - Sorry about hijacking your thread.

Now you’re delving into irrelevancies.
Wind IS intermittent and therefore unreliable at a given point in time. 
The current event has nothing to do with that. The modelled availability of wind by ERCOT was 8 GW, of which 4 GW is offline. The modelled availability of nuclear and thermal was 75 GW, of which anywhere between 14 GW and 30 GW is offline.
Because valves and equipment are frozen - affecting gas.
Just read the ERCOT news releases and check out the capacity projections from Dec 2019 for this winter  go straight to the source.

I understand it's not just valves (for natural gas) - they're also being priced out by home heating gas, demand for which went nuts due to the hundred-year statewide cold wave. The tail of the distribution curve is wicked.

The other thing (and I'm just blue-skying here) is that with wind turbines, if one breaks (or, in this case, freezes) someone has to go to it and fix it. The same nominal capacity is a fraction of one conventional generating plant. This means wind turbines are labor- and time-intensive to maintain (and it's always outdoor work, in whatever weather's going). And after the ice melts, some will still be broken (including by the ice). I won't say wind power is a fashion accessory - that's harsh. But it's definitely not ready for prime time, particularly since it only looks competitive with gross and perverse government subsidies.