This is what happened...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evjMjpd4PNM
What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
181–190 of 1001 posts
Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Solar panels don't work well under a foot of snow.
Live in MN. We have a lot of solar and wind here. In fact solar gets a boost from ground cover snow based on the reflective property. Do panels lose out on snowy days or some accumulation? Yes, but there's a solar farm a mile from my house that covers probably 40 acres with solar - and I've never seen the panels covered. As for the wind turbines - they work fine in cold weather. It's just that with ice build up on th…
Huh. Hadn't thought of the snow-reflection boost.
But yeah, cleaning off solar panels is a totally doable bit of maintenance in snowy conditions, or even just tilting and coating them so snow falls off. A human with a broom could make rover solar panels work for decades on Mars, we can do it in Minnesota.
Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
#183Not 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.
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Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's probably not that clear cut. What happens in a cascading blackout scenario? If you are part of a larger pool are you more exposed to have a service disruption now when there is a problem in another part of the grid of the pool that you don't directly control?
You can isolate yourself from cascading blackouts while still being able to share power. This is why they may cross several states, but never hit nationwide.
Yes and no :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003#Seq...
I really like this minute by minute play.
> Estimated total affected people 55,000,000
Now this is not supposed to be a "NA vs. Europe" thing. So here we go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout#Timelin...
Funny how this was actually caused by a planned shutdown of a specific line to let a ship pass. Something that had been done before :)
> In total, over 10 million people in northern Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, and Spain lost power or were affected by the blackout
It's especially funny how while this was less total people affected, it spread much more so to speak. I would tend to believe that this is actually due to the fact that Europe's power grid is way more interconnected, meaning that they could power more people more quickly again by just routing electricity differently than they would usually do.
Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
#185This 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…
Hydro doesn’t really suffer in the cold
Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
#186A 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
They make weather extremes more common, but those weather extremes have always existed.
Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
#187Earlier 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.
We had two hours without power due to rolling blackouts
Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
#188Earlier 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…
At worst wind provided only 2% of its capacity, 40GWh would be gone in minutes, please count on TWh.
It was just an offhand number, there's already 17GW of storage in ERCOT's interconnection queue for the next few years, which is 40GWh - 70GWh. By 2035, the soonest we could expect to see a new nuclear reactor powering on, we will have many multiples of 70GWh. Not sure if TWh will every be needed for a grid that only peaks at 80GW. The cheapest solution will be a tradeoff between excess renewables capacity and storage, it will be interesting to see what the market picks for Texas.
Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
#189Lots 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.
i have solar panels in texas, snow slid right off.
Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> These all complement each other, not sure why you pulled out only wind from that.
I wasn't trying to call out wind. I just should have said "intermittent'
17GW seems like a strange unit for storage. That should be GWh I think. So my question would be for the demand that exists right now in Texas, how long would those batteries been successful in providing power to delay the rolling blackouts?
My understanding is that batteries are mainly used in grids to react to short term demand changes and not to continuously feed energy into the grid.
Totally willing to be educated on this though. I'm not an expert.