Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

houstonchronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 1001 posts

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#81

Post by HALtheWise »

jdkee wrote: post #69
i_am_proteus wrote: post #63

Lots of folks in these comments seem to want to use this event to litigate wind vs. solar vs. gas vs. nuclear vs. coal, but it seems like, across the board, power generation facilities in Texas were simply unprepared to operate in such low temperatures. All of these technologies can and do work well in very cold climates.

Solar panels don't work well under a foot of snow.

In cold climates, solar panels will have builtin heaters that makes the snow slide off, but it seems likely that they didn't bother to install that for a solar plant in Texas.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#82

Post by WorkingDead »

What a horrible article. First, Texas has its own independent grid as a matter of physics. Electricty travels at the speed of light so a continuous grid from coast to coast would get out of sync on phases just by travel distance. Texas just happens to be physically in the middle and large enough to have trouble by being supplied by either east or west grid. Second, ERCOT manages when utilizes can take assets out of commission to do maintenance. Texas peak demand is in the summer so if you have to take a power plant off line you do it in the winter. So there are a lot of utility assets under maintenance outages right now. One top of that reduced capacity, not all equipment is prepared for ice storms because it doesn't really happen here. Several gas pipelines in the state are having freezing issues causing the gas price to spike. ERCOT controls rates so if gas prices spike and utilities are forced to sell power for less than it costs to make, they would rather shut down and did until ERCOT stepped back in and let them charge real rates. People on variable rate power contracts are now basically screwed this month. And finally, the wind farms are not handling the ice well. Somee have frozen or iced up enough to be out of commission and the rest are operating at severely reduced capacity. So basically a varatiy of these went wrong and everything will be back to normal in a few days, but ERCOT has some work to do to make sure this doesn't happen again.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#83

Post by teraflop »

pkulak wrote: post #44
magnawave wrote: post #18

The result was "an electrical island in the United States," Bill Magness, CEO of ERCOT, said. "That independence has been jealously guarded, I think both by policy makers and the industry." https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/16/texas-power-... Maybe it’s time to rethink that. HaI has an interesting take on something similar: Japan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo88zA5nq4Q Running your own grid seems cool…

How hard can it be to have your own grid, but also have inputs on the edges to draw from? Or would that no longer be independent?

Texas does have connections to other grids. But the problem is that since the grid frequencies aren't synchronized, you can't just plug one into the other.

Transferring energy between grids requires either converting it from AC to high-voltage DC and back using solid-state electronics, or converting it via mechanical energy using a variable-frequency transformer. With either approach, you need bulky and expensive equipment in proportion to how much power you want to handle. These connections are designed to smooth out (and profit from) short-term capacity fluctuations, not to power the entire state.

Currently, the Texas grid has two DC ties operating at full capacity and drawing about 800MW from the Southwest Power Pool. But that's a drop in the bucket compared to the ~45GW of current demand, or the estimated 70-80GW of demand that would be likely if it weren't for the outages.

http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#85

Post by ckemere »

u678u wrote: post #74

Not many people are talking about home solar but its a real problem. Its nice to have your own solar power and then use the grid only when you need it. However that means you need idle power plants and transmission 90% of the year just for those cold un-sunny days. If power prices are regulated its a mugs game. I see bans on home solar coming. Maybe if you can disconnect from the grid with batteries it solves the pro…

Home solar saving the day for my neighbors in Houston today, actually.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#86

Post by jussij »

disgrunt wrote: post #40
kbar13 wrote: post #10

is this the wakeup call that texans need to acknowledge that climate change isn't a coastal elite type thing, and that it affects us all and requires investment from all of us? imo texas is in a great spot to capitalize on the shift to green tech. they have strong engineering talent, large investments from the energy sector. car manufacturers are already clamoring to be the next to go fully electric. get your leaders…

Weather isn't climate... or something..

The reason this might be 'climate change' related is because the warming Arctic is impacting on the jet stream, which then leads to these unexpected hot/cold events:

https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/03/07/climate-change-may-...

The slowing of the jet stream, therefore, could cause weather patterns to remain in place for longer, resulting in prolonged heat waves or cold snaps.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#87

Post by mullen »

ashtonkem wrote: post #23
the_duke wrote: post #14

This whole episode also reminds us how far we are from going 100% renewable. In winter all renewables are inhibited and at risk. Wind: frozen/disabled turbines. Water: low water levels, small hydro plants often have to shut down. Solar is obvious. I'm not a fan of nuclear - externalities that last thousands of years are horrible. But until fusion arrives (if ever), nuclear and gas sadly are the baseline providers we…

I find it really weird that everyone is jumping to blame wind here, but totally ignoring all the natural gas plants that are turned off.

Right Wingers don't care about solutions, just their narrative. So windmills are to blame and the gas plants are okay.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#88

Post by gwright »

epistasis wrote: post #43
vondur wrote: post #4

Maybe having more nuclear power plants instead of wind would have helped? It sounds unrealistic for the energy generators to sell electricity at a loss over a 10 year period. It would be nice to see some of the data that the professor is referring to.

Nuclear tripped too, just like gas, because of a pump failure in the cold. In the 2011 cold snap, the problem was all about frozen lines like the pressure sensing line that caused a problem yesterday for the nuclear reactor. Likely similar things are causing problems for natural gas. The answer is weatherization of all these sources. Wind turbines work great in other settings with icing wind, you just have to have th…

Adding more wind capacity doesn't help because you still need a substitute for when it isn't windy.

As far as I can tell we still don't have reasonable grid-scale power storage and until we do increasing the ratio of intermittent generation capacity (wind, solar) to non-intermittent generation (hydro/gas/coal/nuclear) will increase the probability of not being able to meet demand at times (all other things remaining unchanged).

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#89

Post by wizzwizz4 »

WorkingDead wrote: post #82

What a horrible article. First, Texas has its own independent grid as a matter of physics. Electricty travels at the speed of light so a continuous grid from coast to coast would get out of sync on phases just by travel distance. Texas just happens to be physically in the middle and large enough to have trouble by being supplied by either east or west grid. Second, ERCOT manages when utilizes can take assets out of c…

You know you can shift AC phase, right? That “out of sync” article doesn't seem right.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#90

Post by u678u »

ckemere wrote: post #85
u678u wrote: post #74

Not many people are talking about home solar but its a real problem. Its nice to have your own solar power and then use the grid only when you need it. However that means you need idle power plants and transmission 90% of the year just for those cold un-sunny days. If power prices are regulated its a mugs game. I see bans on home solar coming. Maybe if you can disconnect from the grid with batteries it solves the pro…

Home solar saving the day for my neighbors in Houston today, actually.

I'm not saying its bad for the people with solar, I'm saying everyone else suffers because of the people with solar.
Post reply on HN