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The Department of the Interior announced last week that it will hold its first offshore wind energy lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico. Two of the areas are offshore of Galveston, Texas: one totaling 102,480 acres and the other 96,786 acres.
In announcing the sale, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland said that the wind energy lease sale “marks another historic step in the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to create a clean energy future. By catalyzing the offshore wind energy potential of the Gulf of Mexico, we can tackle the climate crisis, lower energy costs for families and create good-paying jobs."
However, introducing more wind into the U.S. or Texas grids will make it even harder to maintain reliability. Grid regulators are already struggling to maintain reliability in Texas on a grid that is becoming overwhelmed by wind.
The simple truth is that the more wind generation we have in Texas, the less reliable our grid will be. Generation of electricity from both wind and solar is highly intermittent and cannot be counted on during periods of extreme weather, the only time those resources might be needed; Texas has more than enough electricity from natural gas, coal, and nuclear generation most of the year.
This problem has become obvious this summer as wind and wind generation has taken a dip in Texas and across the country. In May, electricity generated from wind in ERCOT, the grid that covers most of Texas, was down about 40% from a year earlier. This trend continued into June, with wind generation down 45% from the same period last year.
This same problem spread across much of the U.S. According to the Climate Impact Company, "the month of June 2023 produced another month of below normal wind speeds … across most of the wind power generation zones of the Central U.S."
Wind's unreliability has continued into July. For instance, at 3 p.m. on July 20, as temperatures across the state topped 100 degrees, wind generation in Texas totaled only 6,602 megawatts. This was far below its potential contribution to the grid based on its installed capacity of 38,695 megawatts. And even almost 40 percent below its expected summer capacity of 10,427 megawatts.
The problem with wind's intermittency has been with us for 15 years, but took on more importance this year. For the first time this year, ERCOT forecast the amount of generation needed to address periods of extreme heat was greater than the amount of electricity available from traditional generation sources. Thus, if wind or solar fail to come through at these times—as they have in the past, the ability of the Texas grid to maintain service across the state could be in jeopardy.
Texans might reasonably question how our grid has come to be so unreliable. The reason is straightforward. Wind has moved into such a pivotal role primarily because of federal subsidies, along with state and local subsidies. Which brings us back to the recently announced lease sales for wind generation in the Gulf.
The last thing Texans and the Texas grid Texas need is for the federal government to make it harder to maintain a reliable grid by introducing more wind into Texas. And while it is unclear at this point whether the electricity from these leases would flow into ERCOT, wherever it goes, it will lead to reliability problems.
The struggles of the U.S. and Texas grids, however, do not seem to be slowing down the Biden Administration's efforts. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which will conduct the auction of the leases off the Texas coast on August 29, expects "to review at least 16 Construction and Operations Plans of commercial, offshore wind energy facilities by 2025."
Climate alarmism and the renewable energy lobby have made it nearly impossible for politicians to adopt policies that promote grid reliability. Perhaps in this case, Texas may avoid the consequences of these policies if the offshore electricity heads to another state. But even so, this will not be the last time Texas will have to deal with the federal assault on the reliability of its grid.