Energy Musings - July 30, 2024
The EIA showed a graph of natural gas generated electricity since 2019. July 9 set a record as heat spread across the country but also because wind power failed to produce due to weak winds.
Natural Gas Saves The Grid When Wind Fails
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) must have forgotten it was to kowtow to the Biden wind energy agenda. It posted a chart of daily natural gas electricity generation in the U.S. for the past five and half years. On July 9, natural gas electricity generation set a record. The record came because of the heat across the U.S. and the absence of wind power. OMG! The EIA has pulled back the curtain on the Wizard of Grid Uncertainty – Joe Biden. Wind is supposed to carry the water in the fight against climate change.
The EIA’s graph exposed the problem of wind power’s intermittency and the need for dispatchable power from fuels such as natural gas.
From day one of his presidency, Joe Biden declared his administration would do everything in its power to cripple the development of hydrocarbon energy and promote clean energy – wind and solar. (Funny – Biden and presumptive Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris are taking credit for record oil production. You can’t make that up.)
The key to the clean energy agenda was Biden’s 30-by-30 plan – to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. It was all predicated on the climate crisis mandating abandoning hydrocarbons and building renewable energy instead. The plan envisioned creating tens of thousands of “good-paying, union jobs” (44,000 jobs by 2030 and 77,000 by 2050).
The Biden administration threw nearly $4 billion in loans and infrastructure investments at the offshore wind industry. Laughingly, it offered a measly $1 million in grant funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for studies “to improve understanding of offshore renewable energy for the benefit of a diversity of stakeholders, including fishing and coastal communities.” Those are the people most at risk from offshore wind farms.
Giving 4,000 times more money to wind companies – primarily foreign corporations – rather than people trying to avoid harm from offshore wind development is unconscionable. And that is only the money for studies and not remedies. Has anyone seen a study of the harm disintegrating wind turbine blades might cause to marine life and humans encountering the debris? How about studies of offshore wind construction noise on endangered marine mammals? Or maybe an analysis of the impact of perpetual turbine noise on fish populations.
The Biden administration has worked with the federal bureaucracy to promote the installation of industrial-scale solar projects and towering wind turbines across the country and in coastal waters. In some states, it worked with state officials to override local control over siting these projects. Should locals object to having these projects next to their homes, that’s too bad.
The ability to control power generated in a world of 100% renewable power is overlooked. Wind and solar power are generated when the wind blows and the sun shines. We call it part-time energy. That doesn’t matter because wind and solar are favored energy sources. They have been assigned magical powers to cure the climate crisis, therefore governments must support the developers of these energy sources because they cannot stand on their own financially. We only learned about the financial problems when the era of low inflation and low interest rates ended. Throw money at the developers and keep doing it as long as they produce the part-time power. Given all these problems, we were amazed that the EIA showcased Wind’s part-time performance.
We examined the latest hourly data for U.S. electricity generation by fuel for July 21-July 28. The chart below shows the relative contribution of wind and natural gas to the grid’s electricity supply for that week.
The grid needed the electricity produced from natural gas.
Natural gas supplied roughly 50% of the grid’s electricity for the first half of the week before declining in the second half. That contribution was because wind’s share was near zero but rose to around 10%.
According to an article from Reuters which studied EIA data, so far this year six of the 10 lowest wind electricity generation days occurred in July. However, July is not over. Interestingly, Reuters found only two of the 10 lowest wind power days occurred in July 2023. That is not a surprise because we know summer is usually when we see the lowest wind output.
It isn’t just the U.S. that experiences low wind in summer. Below is a chart of the daily onshore and offshore wind output in Europe and its combined share of electricity generation since the beginning of the year. In the first four months, wind power output was roughly twice the average output in the following months. For grid operators, planning a system to operate 100% on wind power would mean not only overbuilding the average capacity of wind turbines but also having to overbuild for the much lower output during summer months. Such overbuilding will result in much higher electricity bills.
The seasonality of wind power in Europe is clear - strong in the winter and weak in the summer.
Back in the U.S., we plotted the megawatt-hours of power generated by wind, solar, and natural gas for the July week. The data confirms our earlier chart showing how wind and natural gas electricity generation shares shifted during the week.
Two interesting observations from the chart are that solar power output was negative periodically. Secondly, it was clear in the early days of the week that without the increase in natural gas-generated electricity, the grid would have suffered from potential blackouts as wind and solar output were low. Gas generation output trended lower as renewable energy output rose.
We see how the grid needed natural gas-generated electricity because the wind disappointed early in the week.
Earlier, the EIA reported that 2023 marked the first year since the mid-1990s that wind output declined despite the industry adding meaningful new capacity. In 2023, wind capacity grew by 6.2 gigawatts (GW), an increase of 4%. The agency noted that wind capacity more than tripled between 2010 and 2023, and so did wind generation. However, with stillness last year, the wind fleet’s average capacity factor fell to an eight-year low of 33.5% compared to 35.9% in 2022, an all-time high. This was a boom-to-bust transition.
Gird operators can depend on natural gas-generated electricity.
The impact of wind stillness showed up in the July week’s data. The chart above shows the daily output of wind and natural gas as a percentage of each fuel’s 2023 installed generating capacity. The 2023 capacity data came from the American Public Power Association. Grid operators know they can rely on natural gas electricity generation, and not wind and solar power. This data explains why we were surprised the EIA showed a spotlight on the poor performance of renewable energy.