⭐ Merited by philipma1957 (1)
Phil was talking about consumption,so let's go on with the bad news, Texas has a net capacity of 148,900 MW!
You want to be very careful when interpreting power generation data, Texas does not have a net capacity of 148,900MW, that's just the maximum total capacity when all conditions are perfectly met which probably doesn't go past a few minutes, it would be when it's sunny enough to generate 20,809 MW from solar, windy enough to generate 38,695 from wind, rivers flowing fast enough to generate 600MW and so on.
So when you average that out throughout the year, you would get the realistic numbers that look just like so:
source : https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/economic-data/energy/2023/ercot.php#:~:text=The%20Texas%20Interconnection%20supplies%20electricity,254%20counties%20(Exhibit%201).
If you would follow live data of Texas power generation you would see Solar go from 30k to 0, then back to 5, then maybe 10, then maybe 2 for a few months, and so on, besides, most power plants can't do 100% of their capacity 24/7/365 that's just not possible, so the most accurate figure to look at would be the annual Watt-Hour which is a perfect representation of the actual generation capacity.
The numbers that I have soo far are in the 600,000 GWh range, you would divide that by 365, then again by 24 and that would give you 68GW or 68,000MW
Again, we talking about generation capacity and not end-use available power, a huge portion of that power is going to be lost in transmission and to prove to you even further that "no" Texas can't just magically generate a dozen ten megawatts is to go back to the very near history of 2022 when they had to ask miners to shut down to avoid blackouts in the summer, you know how much power they saved from all that shutdown ? a whooping 1,000 MW , and they had to pay miners a lot of $$ to get them to shut down, if they had anything near 140,000MW capacity they wouldn't hassle for 1,000MW
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The points you have raised would be valid if the plants weren't here
They are not there, that's the problem, the current power plants are good enough to supply the current demand with some surplus, it's not just a switch button that would make power magically appear from some stand-by power plants, you might want to have a look at the list of all power plants in Texas here.