TPT November 2011

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74 November 2011 ›
Global Marketplace
Energy
A prolonged drought in Texas puts
proponents of the state’s ambitious wind
energy initiative on the defensive
“The drought that grips Texas is a natural disaster in slow motion.
Life itself slows down, falters and begins to fade. Out here, in the low
hills west of Austin, the ground under my boots is split and cracked,
the creek below the house bone-white and dry. Even the Blanco
River’s usually cool, spring-fed water is warm and still.”
Richard Parker, a Texas-based journalist with McClatchy-Tribune
Information Services, was writing on 13 August – high summer in the
worst single drought year on record in the state. But he pointed out
that Texas has a long unofficial history of megadroughts: events that
can last 30, even 40 years.Applying the science of dendrochronology,
researchers from Texas and Arkansas sampled nearly 300 trunk-
core samples, creating a record of tree rings stretching back to
before the arrival of Columbus in the Americas. One tree, still living,
was a sapling in 1426, and its testimony is irrefutable. As bad as this
year’s drought is, things could get much worse.
Later in the month another journalist who makes his home in Austin
reported having endured 70 days with temperatures over 100
degrees Fahrenheit, and with no relief in sight. But conspicuously
absent from his account was the elegiac tone of Mr Parker’s lament
for a parched land. Writing in the conservative journal National
Review, Robert Bryce was angry, and not at nature. “On nearly every
one of those hot days,” he wrote, “ERCOT’s wind capacity has been
AWOL.”
ERCOT, the energy grid operator Electric Reliability Council of Texas,
had on the afternoon of 24 August declared a power emergency
as some of the state’s generation units faltered under the soaring
demand for electricity. As detailed by Mr Bryce, power usage hit
66,552mW, about 1,700mW shy of the record set on 3 August. In
his view, as record heat and drought continued to punish the state,
“the inanity of the state’s multi-billion-dollar spending spree on wind
energy [was becoming] ever more apparent.” (“Texas Wind Energy
Fails, Again,” 29 August)
Mr Bryce provided the information that Texas has 10,135mW of
installed wind-generation capacity – nearly three times that of any
other US state. But on 24 August, with electricity badly needed, all
of the state’s wind turbines together mustered just 880mW of power.
Put another way, he wrote, even though wind turbines account for
about 10 per cent of the Lone Star State’s 103,000mW of summer
electricity-generation capacity, wind energy was able to provide just
1.3 per cent of the juice needed on that afternoon to keep the air
conditioners running.
Wind vs natural gas
An acknowledged proponent of energy from natural gas, Mr Bryce
developed his indictment of ERCOT at some length. But his main
points are simply stated. As the temperature soars and electricity
demand rises, the wind dies down. As a response to an overstrained
Texas grid, wind energy is inadequate and overpriced. Mr Bryce
reported that, over the few weeks before his article appeared,
electricity prices had risen as high as $3,000 per megawatt-hour on
the local wholesale market. Large industrial users in Texas had been
forced to curtail consumption to avoid blackouts.
“And yet,” he wrote, “the state is spending billions on projects
that focus on wind energy rather than on conventional generation
capacity.”
Particularly galling to Mr Bryce is the prospect that consumers will
soon be paying for new transmission lines being built solely so that
“the subsidy-dependent wind-energy profiteers” can move electricity
from their distant wind projects to urban areas. He quoted Kate
Galbraith of the Texas Tribune: “The cost of building thousands
of miles of transmission lines to carry wind power across Texas is
now estimated at $6.79bn, a 38 per cent increase from the initial
projection three years ago.”
The irate Mr Bryce invited his readers to imagine what the state’s
grid might look like if Texas, which produces about 30 per cent of
America’s natural gas, spent its money on gas-fired electricity instead
of wind. He cited data from the US Energy Information Administration
showing that wind-generated electricity costs about 50 per cent
more than that produced by natural-gas-fired generators. With gas,
he wrote, not only would Texas consumers be saving money on their
electric bills; the state government would be earning more royalties
from gas produced and consumed in the state.
› A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative
think tank, and author of the book Power Hungry: The Myths
of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future, Robert Bryce
is hardly an impartial judge of these matters. And someone who
excoriates “apologists for the wind industry” is making too little
allowance for the fact that wind energy – like all the “green” energy
sciences – is still in its infancy. But it is worth noting that he is sharply
critical of Governor Rick Perry of Texas, who recently has developed
ambitions beyond his drought-stricken state. In Mr Bryce’s view, Mr
Perry – a contender for the Republican Party nomination to succeed
President Barack Obama, a Democrat – has compiled an abysmal
record on energy.
In 2005, Gov Perry mandated that Texas have at least 6,000mW
of renewable energy capacity by 2015. Mr Bryce wrote, “[His]
support has been so strong that a wind-energy lobbyist recently
told the New York Times that the governor “has been a stalwart
in defense of wind energy in this state, no question about it.”
Senator John Cornyn – another Texas Republican and one of
the Senate’s most conservative members – also drew Mr Bryce’s