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What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

houstonchronicle.com

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Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#141

Post by bsder »

barbacoa wrote: post #110
bsder wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewable wasn't the issue. The renewables are outperforming what was expected. However, renewables are like 4% of the total energy generation. ERCOT lost about 40% of its total generation capacity. Almost all of the ERCOT shortfall was loss of thermal generating capacity--mostly natural gas. The natural gas was shunted to heating because those contracts are fixed and higher priority (market failure). Also, some of t…

>renewables are like 4% of the total energy generation. Wind power is close to 25% of ercot grid.

Under normal conditions because everything backs off.

Under high-load conditions this is very definitely not true.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#142

Post by BurningFrog »

ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #127

A social political decline is what happened and continues to happen. When California encountered power issues, it was easier for Texas politicians (and many of their followers) to espouse malicious soundbites about Commifornia than to empathize, offer support and self reflect on what lessons can be learned and applied locally. Now that Texas is reaping its own fruits of decades of anti-"other side" politics and polit…

As a Californian, it is also very easy to espouse malicious soundbites about our self inflicted dysfunction...

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#143

Post by mzs »

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 can have very wide synced AC grids and even couple them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPS/UPS#Interconnections_with_...

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#144

Post by jeffbee »

ianai wrote: post #26
gambiting wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly does it show that? From my understanding Texas has an awful(below 20%) percentage of renewable sources.

TFA says it’s grid is mostly natural gas and wind. There seems to be lots of misconceptions in this thread and not a lot of information. Nuclear would have been fine throughout this.

I think it's fair to say that their top two energy sources are natural gas and coal, although "mostly natural gas and nuclear" would also be fair, in its own way.

https://www.utilitydive.com/user_media/diveimage/ercotmix.pn...

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#145

Post by aardvarkr »

txlpo78 wrote: post #115
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…

This current problems wouldn’t be fixed if Texas wasn’t on its own grid. The Texas grid does have connections to the other grids, and even right now is importing power from both the East and West interconnections. The problem is that this is a truly regional event and not just isolated to Texas. The entire central US is struggling right now. The SPP (which manages electricity for Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arkansas, and oth…

FYI the Texas grid runs on a different frequency than the other two grids and as a result incurs MASSIVE efficiency penalties for that hubris. If I recall correctly it has to be converted from AC to DC then back to Texas’ AC.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#146

Post by ausbah »

ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #127

A social political decline is what happened and continues to happen. When California encountered power issues, it was easier for Texas politicians (and many of their followers) to espouse malicious soundbites about Commifornia than to empathize, offer support and self reflect on what lessons can be learned and applied locally. Now that Texas is reaping its own fruits of decades of anti-"other side" politics and polit…

the weather patterns induced by climate change are novel though

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#147

Post by gshubert17 »

gitgreen wrote: post #64
roywiggins wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long-range interconnects probably would help, the rest of the US isn't having this problem, just Texas's mini-grid.

The regional grid above TX is also instituting rolling blackouts due to this weather.

Yes, that's the Southwest Power Pool, which covers 14 states. Here's some news from them,

https://www.ozarksfirst.com/local-news/local-news-local-news...

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#148

Post by martinald »

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?

TX grid is connected via HVDC, but keep in mind that even if it was "fully" connected there is no hope in hell it would be much better. There wouldn't be enough transmission to transfer 40GW+ from the East or West coast grids to TX. It's an enormous amount of power to go offline. I don't think California for instance has more than 10GW of transmission north to south.

Basically, no amount of grid infrastructure can really help you much when you lose 50%+ of generation capacity on your highest demand days in history.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#149

Post by da_big_ghey »

danans wrote: post #128
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.

> All of these technologies can and do work well in very cold climates. The technologies can work, but only if measures are taken to make them work that way, and those measures are expensive. Texas' grid, like most of the nation's grid, is optimized to keep prices low for consumers and profits steady for generators and distributors, and it's worked amazingly well at that. But "running lean" is great and everyone wins…

I've had power out for over a day and am fine. I would not pay any more money to avoid this once every thirty years, or even once a decade, for a few days. Mostly because paying the cost to prepare for one of these is reasonable, but preparing for all of them would be very expensive and I will trade cheap power for the occasional inconvenience.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#150

Post by beckingz »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #73
nickysielicki wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give me a break. Actually, the whole reason for this series of outages is because Texas took the bait and installed a bunch of solar and wind instead of taking the safe route and doubling down on coal. Peak energy consumption in Texas is almost always in summer when there's a lot of AC units running -- which just happens to be when solar and wind work best. They gambled on green, paid the price in the past few days,…

Most of the capacity lost was fossil fuel based. In fact solar generated more than expected. So how exactly are renewables the problem here? Even nuclear went down due to frozen pumps. And how is more coal the solution when these kinds of event will just become more common with global climate change? Should we not push for changes which halts the ongoing climate change?

Wind was supplying more power than forecast right as total capacity plummeted...
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