GridWatch 2025 is becalmed

A beautiful mid-summer day in Minnesota. But where is the wind?

3:00 p.m., 84 degrees, low humidity and no wind in my neck of the woods, so I thought it would be a great time to check in on the mid-continent’s energy grid:

You will recall that the local electric grid covers a tall, but narrow, swath of the continent, from the Hudson Bay and Manitoba down to the Gulf Coast and Louisiana. Minnesota is just a small part in the middle.

Typical of a mid-summer weekday, natural gas and coal power are carrying the bulk of the load, with solar and nuclear making up most of the rest. Wind power is all but absent from the grid, mid-afternoon.

Here’s an overview of the grid’s average fuel mix:

At the moment, solar is punching above its weight, while comprising only 9 percent of the grid’s capacity, solar is supplying 10 percent of the current energy. That share, of course, will drop to zero after sunset.

Wind, on the other hand, is supplying only 1.5 percent of requirements, less than 1/10 of its assumed capacity. It stands at only half the output of “Other.”

We always hear how wind and solar are the cheapest forms of energy, a completely false claim. More than 90 percent of wind is AWOL, coal and natural gas plants had to be ramped up this afternoon to fill the gap created by the absent wind generation.

In the bizarre world of utility accounting, that makes coal and natural gas more expensive and wind cheaper, because wind is not supplying any energy. The costs of transmitting energy this afternoon are being assigned to the power sources currently supplying the grid, which are mostly coal and gas. Wind power is avoiding any cost assignment, as it doesn’t exist this afternoon.

To repeat: coal and gas are extra expensive today because wind power isn’t available. So that’s sending the price signal that we need more of the resource (wind) that’s not available for use today.

In a rational world, costs should be assigned to the resource not pulling its weight and causing other resources to ramp up.

But that would make sense.