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What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

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Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#151

Post by gwright »

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 think the point that was trying to be made is that wide-spread deployment of residential solar isn't a panacea.

You still need to provide sufficient grid capacity to serve the customers when there is no sun. And you have to pay for that standby grid capacity whether you are using it or not. That isn't a problem when the residential solar is a tiny percentage of the customer base but it is a problem with wide-spread deployment.

The same problem exists at the grid-level as you ramp up grid-scale wind/solar -- that doesn't mean you can decommission the other generating capacity and so total cost of the grid goes up, not down.

https://www.americanexperiment.org/2018/11/renewables-cheap-...

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#152

Post by spamizbad »

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…

Governing is hard. Owning the libs/cons is fun and easy!

Anyway seems like this storm is so bad Texas would be in trouble no matter what, but letting utilities under-invest in winterizing and not joining either of the major grid corridors just made a bad situation 100x worse.

The good news is this is fixable going forward, and hopefully Texans will demand their politicians address it.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#153

Post by cccc4alll »

Nuclear is the cheapest, cleanest, safest form of electricity generation.

Do some research into who pushed FUD propaganda about Nuclear industry, (Big oil) and who paid off the shrill environmental FUD lobby, (Bug oil).

Nuclear power is used safely in aircraft carriers and submarines for decades. It's time to build more nuclear power and build the cleaner, safer, cheaper electrical energy future.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#154

Post by epistasis »

gwright wrote: post #88
epistasis wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 60GW more of wind and solar, and 10GW/40GWh of storage

These all complement each other, not sure why you pulled out only wind from that.

We do have reasonable grid-scale power storage, last year there were 17GW of batteries in the interconnection queue for ERCOT alone, from independent investors. The major holdup from this happening, say, 5 years ago, were ERCOT regulations that made it hard to be both a generator and a consumer on the grid. But there are huge arbitrage opportunities on ERCOT because of the huge price swings, which make it a perfect place for batteries. Other energy markets, like PJM, which have capacity markets in addition to energy markets, will also see huge amounts of batteries installed since FERC order 841 forced all grid operators to allow batteries to compete.

Other regulated utilities will only install batteries when they are forced to by their regulators. As a money-saving device, it's generally bad for utilities' profits, and it also requires them to learn something new. Far more profitable to rate-base unnecessary transmission or another natural gas plant that will never be fully used.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#155

Post by nharada »

tryonenow wrote: post #67
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…

A single cold snap is no more evidence for climate change than it is against global warming. The earth is huge, climate is chaotic and oscillatory with large variance, you need many data points over, at a minimum, decades (though centuries or millennia may be more appropriate) to determine with certainty that the climate is changing.

Okay but we do have that. Nobody is saying that this is the entirety of the evidence, just that this could be the wakeup call where people realize it affects them personally and they should do something about it.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#156

Post by jeffbee »

Not much discussion here of the fundamental problem: why is Texas so energy intensive? In the last decade ERCOT energy generation has expanded 20%, which is much faster than the population of Texas has grown. Why? Just gigantic, detached houses for everybody? I think this is why people say the California housing crisis is such a calamity for the environment. A person in Texas consumes 150% more energy.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#157

Post by maxerickson »

amluto wrote: post #111
maxerickson wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, licensed hospital beds are pretty heavily regulated. https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/con-certificate-of-need... And then Medicare won't pay any old place for services (which is something that would impact many potential hospital sites).

This regulation utterly defies economic common sense. It’s like saying that, if we allow too many people to sell groceries, the cost of groceries will go up. That’s not how a functioning market works. Of course, medicine in the US is not a functioning market.

That's right.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#158

Post by mike_d »

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…

This is not correct. Because the Texas grid is isolated, the frequency is not synced with the two other major grids and cannot import electricity at any meaningful capacity. (See http://fnetpublic.utk.edu/frequencymap.html)

Frequency conversion is a costly and difficult to scale problem. If Texas was part of the Western grid they could be drawing excess hydroelectric power from the pacific northwest right now for example. Texas also could have contributed to help the California power shortages last year.

Edit: Here is a map of the grid interconnects in Texas with capacity. As of the time of this comment the total importation capacity is less than 1% of demand. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/22095643/49019079-...

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#159

Post by stephencanon »

ausbah wrote: post #146
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

Novel, but predictable (and, indeed, they were predicted decades ago, which should have given plenty of time to prepare).

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#160

Post by cvhashim »

svnpenn wrote: post #20

Dallas suburb here (Las Colinas). No power since Monday 6am. I had to get room at holiday inn. I actually got the room yesterday, but the hotel lost power after an hour, so I had to go back home and sleep in 5 degree apartment. Don't believe anything you read about "rolling outages". It's only rolling, if you define that as "out until it's not freezing anymore".

Man, what are people with children, elderly, or pets doing.
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