The rolling blackouts had nothing to do with STP, and there wasn't a cooling issue at STP, which was your claim. A sensor line for a pump feeding the turbine froze, which caused the turbine to trip offline. There was nothing wrong with the unit or its cooling.
Yes, they were expected to perform poorly, and they did, with wind performing more poorly than anticipated, while solar performed a bit better. Both were minor contributors to the supply mix because they were never expected to make up the bulk, despite the massive installed capacity of wind.
Just because it's expected doesn't mean we get to hand wave away the gravity of this problem however. If you experience an extreme weather event and you require a whole other system to deal with the electrical demands present during the event, that needs to be acknowledged and understood as additional complexity in the system.
Can you specifically spell-out what regulation changes, and their impacts, resulted in the issues?
Yes, it's very easy to characterize it as a non-failure when you temper the expectations so that they specifically exclude the "green" sources from being major contributors to the supply mix under these circumstances, excepting them from being at fault when a failure to meet demand occurs.
The traditional stack of baseload + load following + peaker capacity has inherent reliability baked in because your baseload capacity doesn't cycle and your load following capacity runs regularly. Peakers run intermittently.
When you displace large portions of that stack with an intermittent resource, you increase cycling and fatigue, and this will increase O&M costs as well as frequency of outages, both planned and unplanned. This is why grids like Texas and in particular, Alberta, with relatively large amounts of wind integrated with gas and a massive reduction in baseload coal are having reliability issues during events that they would have likely weathered without issue in the past. It has always been cold in Alberta during the winter, that problem isn't new, so why is it that we are only just in the last 10 years or so, having supply issues? What changed?
