Texas, the leading wind power producer in the United States, survived recent blackouts thanks to wind energy which supplied between 3,500 megawatts to 4,000 MW of electricity to the state’s grid operator.
The American Wind Energy Association reported wind power accounted for 7 percent of Electric Reliability Council of Texas’s demand from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. on Wednesday last week – when the grid needed power the most. Ercot is an independent federal power system operator.
“Wind was blowing and we had often 3,500 MW of wind generation during that morning peak, which certainly helped us in this situation,” said Trip Doggett, chief executive of Ercot in an interview with the Texas Tribune.
The blackout was attributed to 50 power plants with a total capacity of 7,000 MW that broke down due to the cold weather as verified by the grid operator, according to the association.
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Two of these power plants were coal-fired and went offline because of frozen or broken pipes, while some gas-fired plants also suffered from outages caused by the cold weather.
Other gas-powered plants also failed to generate power on schedule because of insufficient pressure in natural gas pipelines brought about by high demand.
Meanwhile, an additional 12,000 MW of coal and gas-fired power plants were offline and underwent maintenance.
However, about 7,000 of Texas’s wind turbines also generated lower output due to the weather, but majority remained unaffected and kept producing reliable electricity.
Texas added 680 MW of new wind capacity in 2010, which brought its total installed capacity to 10,085 MW and accounted for one-fourth of the country’s overall installed wind capacity.
Currently, wind power supplies as high as 25 percent of Ercot’s power needs.
The association also cited data from the Midwest Independent System Operator, a power supplier to areas in 13 states in the upper Midwest, which showed wind produced an average of 5,350 MW of power and addressed about 7 percent of the region’s power needs from Wednesday to Thursday.
Wind provided an average 6,175 MW of power and met 8.25 percent of the region’s needs from Thursday to Friday.
