Wind power was the first domino to fall, losing about 4 GW of capacity before the first gas fired plants started tripping out, and that, coupled with soaring demand, set off a much larger chain reaction that came within five minutes of a catastrophic grid collapse that would have taken weeks to black start. The wind producers knew they were unprepared for a major oncoming weather event that would take their turbines offline with no advance notice. Instead of standing aside and leaving the heavy work to generators that can do heavy work, they took advantage of the ERCOT system and flooded the market with unreliable wind power that pushed more reliable systems offline. The hard cold truth is wind power is useless to an industrialized economy without 100% backup from dispatchable fossil fuels. The harder colder truth is that when you calculate the LCOE of a reliable system that can provide reliable power 24/7/365, the LCOE is higher than the LCOE for reliable fossil fuels with no wind.

I provided full download access to the hard data I originally downloaded from the US Energy Information Administration. The suggestion that my article is based on spin rather than facts is offensive. The suggestion that big oil/coal companies sponsored the spin is laughable. Every man is entitled to his own opinion, but no man is entitled to his own facts. If you can argue a different conclusion from the facts, I offered I'd love to hear it.

Texas has good wind characteristics, favorable pricing and priorities for wind and solar power, and lots of wide-open space, so it's been a dream destination for wind developers for decades. ERCOT has no planning authority. It merely buys power from thousands of producers and sends it to hundreds of local utilities. Since wind power is treated as "more equal" than fossil-fueled power, wind producers can literally force fossil fuel plants to shut down. On a typical winter day, they expect wind to represent less than 1 GW of power supply. On Valentine's day that number was 9 GW and when the turbines started freezing all hell broke loose, or if you prefer hell froze over.

The public has been pretty tolerant of green idealism in the past. I don't expect that trend to continue after millions of us spent a long week freezing in the dark.

Wendell Brown, At 6:00 pm on Valentine's Day, wind power in Texas was 9,015 MW or 36% of nameplate capacity. By midnight on Valentine's Day, wind power had fallen to 5,450 MW or 22% of nameplate capacity. By noon on the 15th wind power had fallen to 3,185 MW or 16% of nameplate capacity. By 8:00 pm on the 15th wind power had fallen to 649 MW or 3% of nameplate capacity.

That catastrophic decline in wind power production coupled with rapidly rising demand triggered overload safety systems in all classes of power generation assets. Natural gas went down first, then coal, then nuclear.

Whether you like it or not, failures in wind kicked off a domino-effect chain reaction that damned near took down the entire ERCOT grid.

I'm sorry if my writing style does not live up to your standards, but I think the case has been made clearly and elegantly. If you disagree, please feel free to do your own research using EIA quality data sources and prove the argument you wish to make.

Thanks for the kind words, James. I was a little concerned that I might be kicking a hornet's nest with this one.

I think the ZEV Credits are a scam because the number of credits is determined by a formula that multiplies the range by.01 and adds half a credit. So an EV with a 50 mile range gets 1 credit and an EV with a 300 mile range gets 3.5 credits.

Since the average Tesla owner drives his car 32 miles per day or 11,700 miles per year, just like every other driver, a 300 mile EV offers no more environmental benefit than a 50 mile EV.

I guess nobody taught the regulators in California to think about whether their rules actually support their goals.

ZEV and GHG Credits are not "Tax Credits" and nothing in my work suggests otherwise. They're created by regulatory edict and represent an unjustified fiscal plunder of competitors who must buy credits from sellers like Tesla or pay heavy fines to regulators.

I guess one could characterize the credits as an indirect rape of the taxpayer since the regulators would collect fines if the credits were not tradable, but that's a bit of a stretch.

I think the most likely explanation is pressure from institutions that want out but can’t sell into the market without crushing the price because they own so much stock.

In a going private scenario XYZ and Musk could each say “we loved the company but our policies don’t let us own illiquid securities. So we’re reluctantly taking the cash.

In a March 2016 article I referred to the cobalt cliff as the biggest Oops in the history of supply chain management.

miningpundits.com/.../ev-batteries-and-the-cobalt-cliff-the-biggest-oops-in-the-history-of-supply-chain-management/

If its any comfort I'm baffled too.