a discussion about wind

[busker]

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.

The power rating of a wind turbine is just a mathematical abstraction that relates to a theoretical design speed. The power output can be varied by adjusting the hub height and of course placing the turbine is a windy area.
The power output of a natural has power plant is essentially a function of a design burn rate of the gas. The low capacity factor of a wind turbine does not mean that it is sitting idle the rest of the time eg we often hear “34%” as the capacity factor. It doesn’t mean that the turbine is sitting idle 66% of the time. In fact, it could be running 90% of the time, but at lower-than-design wind speeds. The trade off is between this lower output and the zero cost of wind compared to natural gas.
Wind turbines have a very low maintenance cost compared to natural gas so not sure where you’re getting your information from. The wear and tear on Gas turbine blades impinged upon by the products of Gas combustion at high temperature and pressure leads to 3x the O&M cost of wind turbines. The cost of having an electrician go out and fix something occasionally is small beer compared to the maintenance cost of a Gas turbine or even a CCGT plant

Finally, wind turbines are in fact viable without subsidies - just check the Lazard LCOE numbers (or you can work them out yourself given the time). But subsidising them does help accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels, which is a great thing.