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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?

#161

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#162

Post by HenryKissinger »

da_big_ghey wrote: post #149
danans wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> every thirty years

Climate change says hi.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#163

Post by sudosysgen »

judgemcjudgy wrote: post #108
jussij wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's only a "just so" story.

There were reports over a decade ago that such destabilizing events would happen.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#164

Post by gred »

gregimba wrote: post #48

Currently in ATX we haven't had power for over 24 hours, wood fireplace is saving the house from completely freezing but the whole city of Austin needs to evaluate how they setup their critical infrastructure to allow for rolling blackouts instead of having parts of the city with power and parts without for the entirety of an outage.

ATX?

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#165

Post by [deleted] »

masklinn wrote: post #8
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.

> Maybe having more nuclear power plants instead of wind would have helped? No. Most of the missing production was not wind, and several nukes went out (unclear whether that was because the grid was dying though). What would have helped was proper standards (avoiding emergency being much of the reason why Texas still has its own grid) and properly winterising. The wind thing is just a bullshit excuse, the vast majori…

[deleted]

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#167

Post by thehappypm »

gred wrote: post #164
gregimba wrote: post #48

Currently in ATX we haven't had power for over 24 hours, wood fireplace is saving the house from completely freezing but the whole city of Austin needs to evaluate how they setup their critical infrastructure to allow for rolling blackouts instead of having parts of the city with power and parts without for the entirety of an outage.

ATX?

Austin Totally Xtreme?

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#168

Post by throwaway667555 »

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…

No, we shouldn't rethink independence. We should build back better.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#169

Post by bitbearr »

da_big_ghey wrote: post #149
danans wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Glad you are doing so well. There are a lot of people out there who are not.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#170

Post by joe_the_user »

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…

If California is a guide, the "optimization" is for share holder dividends. PG&E in particular, in the last twenty years in particular, gutted needed repairs, a gutting which has lead to periodic shutdown due to different bad weather (high winds). I don't know the exact situation of Texas but if this is a similar situation, I would be unsurprised.

All of this is somewhat conditioned by advancing global warming, which known to lead to more severe weather conditions (more specifically, with the slowing of the jetstream, the polar vortex migrates South, has been doing so for the last few years).

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