Failure of Texas Wind Resources in March 2021 Under NERC Scrutiny
Image courtesy of Oregon Department of Agriculture under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License, resized to 700 x 391 pixels.
As you probably recall, a freak winter storm pounded Texas and compromised the state’s wind resources in March 2021 (not to be confused with Winter Storm Uri that hit Texas in February 2021). In fact, a long-term loss of power was only narrowly averted. Now, over 1 year later, NERC published a report that probes the root cause of this near miss.
How Texas’ Wind Resources Were Impacted by the Winter Storm
According to the NERC report, a combination of snow, wind and ice conspired to ice up wind turbines, resulting in 2 bulk power system faults. The situation presented an elevated risk of inverter-based performance issues, and one of the report’s main recommendations is that utility companies need to do a better job diagnosing and resolving inverter risk issues.
The NERC report linked to above contains a ton of technical details on what exactly occurred to trip the system, so if you’re into that sort of thing, I would encourage you to click on the report link. But one thing that’s not clear is why some turbines were affected but neighboring ones were not.
The report speculates that the “hit or miss” nature of the fault locations may have been due to the age of the equipment, or perhaps issues with software or firmware. To fully diagnose this, the report recommends that the turbine manufacturer check converter wiring, replace encoders, and replace converters, among other things. The report also calls on utilities to deploy or improve automated monitoring solutions to identify risks and issues in real time.
It?s a very well-written, comprehensive analysis of the situation, but unfortunately the report doesn’t have all the answers that we would need to prevent winter-season issues with wind energy in the future. More work and due diligence is necessary to understand the full scope of what happened, so stay tuned, I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this in the future.
