Unlike Texas, Tennessee has been blessed to largely keep the electricity on during the winter storms, with Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) crediting its diverse generation assets.
Although thousands of homes throughout the Tennessee Valley have lost power at different times thanks to issues like trees falling on transmission lines, electric generation in the Volunteer State has held up despite the high demands from below-freezing temperatures.
Nearly half of the wind turbines located in Texas froze in the winter weather, Breitbart reported. Millions of customers across Texas suffered blackouts, partly due to the turbine problems.
Meanwhile, the TVA has kept up with electric demand, The Tennessean reported. TVA generates 40 percent of its capacity through its nuclear power plants. Most of those plants were at full capacity on Monday and Tuesday.
Aaron Paul Melda, transmission and power supply senior vice president, told the newspaper, “We have an underlying philosophy of not putting all our eggs in one basket.”
Melda told WKMS that although energy use is up for this time of year, the roughly 28,000 megawatts being consumed falls within the authority’s capacity of 33,727 megawatts.
Once the snow and ice melts, the runoff could help produce more hydroelectric power, Melda said.
Even as TVA touts the diversity of its generation sources, it too is pursuing a greater use of solar power.
Earlier this month, TVA announced a 60 percent increase in contracted solar capacity since October 2020.
On Wednesday, on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed panelist Crom Carmichael. They discussed the Texas wind farm situation and outages. A transcript is here.
Carmichael: And they get a larger percentage. It’s kind of interesting because here you are in the oil and natural gas capital of the United States at least I guess it used to be. I still think it is. And they turned more toward wind energy and the ice storms have frozen up the turbines. So they’ve got this huge shortage. And that points out one of the weaknesses of wind turbines.
The conversation turned to the growing use of wind turbines in Texas.
Leahy: Yeah. We got a lot of craziness going on here from the political elite and left-wing social justice warriors. I’m looking Crom at The Wall Street Journal article and it says what types of electricity are generated in Texas? And here are the facts. Natural gas-fired power plants generated 40 percent of Texas’s electricity and in 2020 according to ERCOT.
That’s the electric Electricity Reliability Council of Texas. Now talk about an oxymoron. The largest single source wind turbines were second at 23 percent followed by coal at 18 percent and nuclear at 11 percent. In recent years coal has been declining on the Texas grid and renewable sources such as wind and solar have been increasing. Hmmm. They forgot to do their analysis of what happens when the wind turbines freeze.
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Jason M. Reynolds has more than 20 years’ experience as a journalist at outlets of all sizes.
Photo “Tennessee Valley Authority Power Lines” by Tennessee Valley Authority.
Nothing scares the left more than common sense and critical thinking.
al gore git filty rich spreading these climate warming theory. the planet has been warming since the last ice age. with exploding populations and developing countries no one has a solution. especially the idiots like aoc and bernie.
thanks tva for what you do. alliced up but warm and toasty.
Craziness runs rampant throughout the TVA when it comes to “green” energy production. I for one am not interested in investing in costly wind and solar power that is unreliable. Nuclear and hydro generation are both clean and reliable. Stop this merry-go-round. I want to get off before something bad happens like what has crippled Texas.
‘all green’ energy generation is a liberal fantasy. and the results were the texas disaster
hydro + nuclear.
Germany had the same issues a few years back when they got away from nuclear and coal. How soon people forget…