Balancing electricity supply and demand is a complex task, and utility system operators are used to turning various types of power plants on or off to match demand as it rises and falls throughout the day. (below, in an earlier appearance on Fox News, Denise Bode cooly bitch slaps Stuart Varney and co. with the facts..)

Even though wind energy is variable, it varies slowly–unlike conventional power plants, which can fail instantaneously–and can be a critical component in times of need. For three straight days in the real world last week, wind made the difference between keeping the lights on and the air conditioners running, and rolling blackouts.

No power plant runs 100% of the time.



Throughout last week’s heat wave, as in February’s freeze, the Texas utility system was bedeviled by outages of conventional power plants due to extreme weather. According to an August 2 blog article by Elizabeth Souder of the Dallas Morning News , “The high temperatures also caused about 20 power plants to stop working, including at least one coal-fired plant and natural gas plants.”Souder noted that a spokesman for the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the company that manages system operations, “said such outages aren’t unusual in the hot summer…”This is fascinating, since the rap on wind is that it’s not dependable because “sometimes the wind stops blowing.”

In the real world, sometimes it also gets too hot or too cold for the supposedly dependable fueled peaking power plants to operate properly. Geographic dispersal of wind farms makes their electricity production more dependable. This is something that seems intuitively obvious–the wind is usually blowing someplace–and has been predicted by a host of studies. Last week, it became crystal clear, as the Gulf Coast wind farms, which provide some 13% of Texas’s overall wind generation, accounted for as much as 70% of the wind-generated electricity being provided during peak hours.