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No outage would have occurred if a fraction of the total Texas wind capacity had instead been a combination of properly winterized natural gas turbines and nuclear plants. //
Eventually, forensics rather than finger-pointing will likely confirm what we know now: the Texas grid almost collapsed because of a domino of events. It began with a near-total loss of output from that state’s mighty wind farms. At the center of the debate about how to prevent a next time — with natural disasters, there is always a next time – we find a simple truism: For critical infrastructures, the hallmark of reserve capabilities is “available when needed.” //
for decades now, policy discussions and spending allocations for electric grids have been framed in terms of producing more green kilowatt-hours rather than more reliability and resiliency. //
Indeed, if nuclear fission were just now discovered, it would be hailed as the magical solution for producing electricity using a trivial amount of land and material. One pound of nuclear fuel matches 60,000 pounds of oil, 100,000 pounds of coal, or 1 million pounds of Tesla batteries. Consequently, nuclear machines can run day and night with refueling needed once every couple of years. //
So, here we are, with barely 10 percent of the world’s electricity derived from splitting atoms on this 65th anniversary of Calder Hall, the world’s first commercial nuclear plant, inaugurated in 1956 by Queen Elizabeth II. Instead of a massive push to find cheaper solutions for inherently reliable nuclear technology, we see a monomaniacal preoccupation with deploying inherently unreliable wind (and solar) technologies.
Yes, we know some Texas nuclear capacity was tripped offline during the Great Blackout. There was a failure to include cold-weather protection for “feedwater.” Weatherizing is an avoidable glitch, one that’s far easier to fix than the vicissitudes of wind and sunlight.
To fix green unreliability, proponents are pushing grid-scale batteries. For perspective, however, consider what would be required for the Texas grid to handle predictable occurrences of several days without wind or sunlight. The quantity of batteries needed equals a decade’s worth of the entire world’s production, at a cost well north of $400 billion, an amount of money that could build enough nuclear plants to power the entire Texas grid for the next century, not just a few days.