Dear Neighbor,
What’s been happening in Texas should be a huge wake-up call for those of us living in Minnesota.
Because of the unreliability of wind towers and solar arrays, electric generation came up woefully short when a huge winter storm descended south into our nation’s midsection. The actual temperature in Dallas Tuesday morning dipped to minus-1, the lowest in years in that city.
Because of that, electric generation from wind towers dropped precipitously, with nearly half the potential wind power generation off-line. At the same time, demand for power surged. It was a perfect storm, and when the system tried to adjust and bring up other sources of power, widespread outages were the result.
Yes, other issues were also in play, such as demand for natural gas that couldn’t keep up, and one of two nuclear power plants in Texas partially down, due to an issue unrelated to the cold temps and ice conditions.
But it begs the question of our seemingly straight-ahead advance toward relying solely on renewable energy in the future. At best, it should teach us that we need a variety of electric-generation sources. And it should also show us that dependable, baseload power is the best way to ensure these emergency situations don’t occur again.
After all, the weather conditions that caused all the problems in Texas could be called pretty ordinary Minnesota wintertime weather. And what happened in Texas had ripple effects all across the midsection of the country, an area where electricity transmission is managed by what’s known as the Southwestern Power Pool.
In all, 14 states were affected. It even reached all the way up into Minnesota, where rolling blackouts occurred in the southwestern part of the state, in addition to around Moorhead in northwestern Minnesota. Those first blackouts came early in the morning Tuesday around the cities of Lake Benton and Tyler and were unannounced. Residents were told to expect additional blackouts later that afternoon and again on Wednesday.
Sincerely,
Paul