Revisited: Wind power output in Texas is trending down even as wind generation capacity increases

Winds in the U.S. have declined in recent years.

Three of my eagle-eyed readers, including my favorite Substack writer and friend, Robert Bryce, pointed out that the data included in my article posted on February 16, 2024, which were taken from a Reuters article, were incorrectly stated as megawatts when they should have been stated as megawatt-hours. They are correct, and I apologize for overlooking the error in Reuters. That error did not change the conclusion that wind-generated electricity on the ERCOT grid has declined even as wind-generation capacity has increased.

This error is especially problematic because Reuters, one of the world’s most respected financial publications, made this fundamental error with data provided by their “Official Data Partner,” LSEG. Reuters describes LSEG as “the sole provider of Reuters News to the global financial marketplace.” In other words, Reuters’ internal organization, which collects and interprets data that the reporters use at Reuters to write articles, does not understand the energy data they are collecting and disseminating. That is troubling.

The fundamental error that Reuters does not seem to understand is the distinction between energy and power. In his book “Power Hungry,” Robert Bryce says this:

We don’t give a damn about energy. What we want is power.

Energy is the ability or capacity to do work; power is the rate at which work gets done.

In this case, the capacity of power plants to generate electricity is measured in megawatts (MW). The electricity power plants generate over time is measured in megawatt-hours (MWh). Reuters incorrectly labeled wind generation over time as megawatts instead of megawatt-hours.

To check the validity of the conclusions in the Reuters article, I recreated their chart by going directly to ERCOT databases, which report electricity generation data in gigawatt-hours (GWh). The results are shown in the graph below. (The data for January 2024 overlay the January 2022 data and, unfortunately, are not visible).

This chart is a duplicate of the chart in the Reuters article, except the Y axis in my graph is in gigawatt-hours. In contrast, the Reuters article incorrectly presented the data in megawatts. Reuters did not explain what “seasonally” means.

With this clarification in the definition of the data, the facts are still clear: the massive, subsidized expenditures for more and more wind generation capacity are not resulting in proportional increases in wind generation.

Wind generation in the ERCOT grid declined from 2022 to 2023, and the downward trend continued into January 2024, with wind generation at 2022 levels. ERCOT data shows that wind generation averaged 8,938.6 GWh in 2022 and declined to 8,469.9 GWh in 2023, a decrease of 5.2%. This occurred even though wind generation capacity increased by 7.8% from 35,000 MW in 2022 to 37,725 MW in 2023. The year 2024 is off to a slow start, with wind generation at January 2022 levels.

The question is why wind generation in Texas is declining. Perhaps the prime areas for wind power in Texas have already been developed so that new wind generation will continue to be less and less efficient. A more ominous explanation is that the Texas experience is consistent with the declining winds in the U.S., which declined all over the U.S. in 2023. A recent report said that all wind power in the U.S. declined between December 2022 and December 2023:

U.S. utility-scale renewable electricity generation fell in 2023 due to weather patterns that reduced output from wind farms and drought that affected hydropower. Data released by the Energy Information Administration shows a decrease of 0.8 percent compared to the prior year.

This is a stunning result, considering that utility-scale renewables have been a fast-growing part of the electricity mix and are a crucial resource for the country’s transition away from fossil fuels.

My take: Everyone knows that wind and solar are intermittent sources of electricity generation because they are weather-dependent, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that ERCOT and other power grids are experiencing high levels of variability in their performance. However, the decline in wind generation in ERCOT and the U.S. has shaken wind power advocates, and they are scrambling for excuses because the declines occurred even as massive amounts of new wind capacity were added due to the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act. The assumption that “the wind will always be blowing somewhere” has proven incorrect.

This should be a wake-up call that it is time to stop wasting taxpayer money to subsidize more and more wind and solar generation capacity. Unfortunately, the response will more likely be to double down on subsidies and continue destabilizing U.S. power grids, pushing them closer and closer to failure, which will be the ultimate wake-up call.

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