The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), an international regulatory authority whose purpose is to ensure reliability of the bulk power systems in North America, has just released a study on the Reliability Impacts of Climate Change Initiatives. It provides a comprehensive review of future reliability risks including smart grid initiatives. NERC appropriately looks at a number of future time frames, or horizons, which provide perspective in its analysis – 1-10 years, 10-20 years, and 20-plus years (up to 2050).
A review of the NERC study by Environment & Energy Publishing (E&E), reproduced as an appendix to this post, noted:
“A task force on climate change formed by North American Reliability Corp. urges that policy makers not count on large amounts of renewable energy, demand reduction from smart grid systems or new storage technologies before they prove they can be worked into the grid without endangering the system’s reliability.”…
It is the irony of ironies. Taxpayer and ratepayer-forced subsidies for utility-scale windpower also subsidizes emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). The same would be true under a national renewable portfolio standard as proposed in pending federal legislation.
Such is a vivid demonstration of the perils of unintended consequences and, to borrow a phrase, “an inconvenient truth” about wind power.
My recent four-part Wind Integration Realities reviewed two new studies, based on actual experience, that show fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions areincreased, not reduced, with the introduction of wind. Their results were compared as well as to those of my fossil fuel and CO2 emissions calculator for the same conditions. The brief summary in Part IV of the series is expanded upon here for clarity of this game-changing argument.…
[Editor’s note: This is the final post in the series reviewing studies for the Netherlands, Colorado and Texas on (elevated) fossil-fuel emissions associated with firming otherwise intermittent wind power. Part I introduced the issues. Part II showed negated emission savings for the Netherlands at current wind penetration (about 3 percent). Part III extended the Netherland’s experience to the higher wind penetration in Colorado (6%) which demonstrates higher emissions. Part IV concludes with the Bentek results for Texas,which confirms those for Colorado.]
There are a number of relevant, notable characteristics of the 2008 Texas electricity production profile, 85% of which is managed by ERCOT: