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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?

#221

Post by jojobas »

spamizbad wrote: post #152
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.

If you invest in winterizing and the winter doesn't come till the next election your opposition will have you voted out.

Yes governing is hard.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#222

Post by dv_dt »

worik wrote: post #210
da_big_ghey wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is a valid point of view. It may be true in a lot of places that we should step back from 100% coverage as the cost is just too high, and it is better (cheaper) to put the resilience in housholds than in utilities. But your anecdote is just that - a anecdote. We need to carefully weigh those options. Elected politicians have a bad reputation for making these trade offs sensibly. I have heard it said (by a fictiona…

Really it means that many many people end up paying for safety measures individually - if they can afford them. The total social cost is likely higher than building adequate infrastructure in centralized places.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#223

Post by jshevek »

enraged_camel wrote: post #192
da_big_ghey wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your perspective is very self-centered. People die when power goes out for extended periods like this. Especially if the weather is exceptionally hot or cold.

The parent stated their experience (one day without power) and the willingness to pay more for a specific change, they didn't say anything about longer time frames. If a single day of power outage will cause a person to die, such as those with certain medical issues, you must make preparations for backup power. I hope you can agree at the extreme that treating the entire power grid as if it were a hospital's internal power network would be absurd.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#224

Post by teraflop »

txlpo78 wrote: post #209
aardvarkr wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, that’s correct. Texas has 5 ties to the western/eastern US interconnections as well as with the Mexico grid. But none of that matters right now because those grids don’t have excess capacity to send to Texas anyway.

It's not really a matter of whether the grids have capacity; the ties themselves can only handle a limited amount of power.

As per ERCOT's status page, both of the high-voltage DC ties between Texas are currently operating at >99% of their rated capacity, and they have been every time I've checked since yesterday. They're not being limited by the availability of power from the other side.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#225

Post by notatoad »

sokoloff wrote: post #17
masklinn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What is "proper winterizing" for a state where the 99th percentile design temperature is mostly 25-30ºF? Properly sized heating systems should run 24 hours a day when the temps are well below the design temp. If almost all of those systems are electric (because they are simple and cheap to install and don't get a ton of use), you get a lot of constant demand for electricity. Smart load-shedding (to dump large 240VAC…

as long as they're an independent grid, optimizing for the 99th percentile isn't really acceptable. that's only two nines.

if you have a contingency plan for winter storms, then it makes sense to skip the winterization. but it appears their plan for a winter storm was just to fail.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#226

Post by ghaff »

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.

The real issue is frozen pipes which can be pretty expensive/catastrophic. As someone in New England, if it weren't for that, I wouldn't find a power outage all that big a deal--at least for a couple days. But frozen pipes can lead to $10K's of damage.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#227

Post by nickthemagicman »

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.

Thank you for having a sane reasoned look at this.

People use extremely low probably exceptions to attempt to radically rewrite the way things are done.

Bad shit happens very rarely. Sometime the best action can be just to do nothing.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#228

Post by jwolfe »

bluedino wrote: post #211
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.

Wind farms have been freezing up in texas

Yes. That's their point. So have solar farms. And gas plants. And a nuclear reactor.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#229

Post by txlpo78 »

teraflop wrote: post #224
txlpo78 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that’s correct. Texas has 5 ties to the western/eastern US interconnections as well as with the Mexico grid. But none of that matters right now because those grids don’t have excess capacity to send to Texas anyway.

It's not really a matter of whether the grids have capacity; the ties themselves can only handle a limited amount of power. As per ERCOT's status page, both of the high-voltage DC ties between Texas are currently operating at >99% of their rated capacity, and they have been every time I've checked since yesterday. They're not being limited by the availability of power from the other side.

You’re missing the point. Even if the ties had more capacity, the supply of power on the other side of the ties is not there. It’s a two-pronged issue, and you won’t solve the problem by only focusing on one of the prongs.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#230

Post by com2kid »

lurquer wrote: post #214
cvhashim wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you people for real? What did people with children, elderly, and pets do 150 years ago? If your house is 25f, put on a couple sweaters and a coat and have a beer. It’s not the end of the world. As far as the kids go, they’re outside building snowforts. In short, you make do. It astounds me that the typical HN poster can whip up a C++ compiler, pontificate about solutions to every social-ill, purport to speak inte…

> If your house is 25f, put on a couple sweaters and a coat and have a beer. It’s not the end of the world.

Houses were designed very differently 150 years ago.

Lower roofs, fewer windows, huge thick drapes or tapestries on the walls, animal skins or carpets on the floors.

9 ft windows (double pane or not) on all walls is going to leak out a lot of heat.

Most importantly, fireplaces. Houses had fireplaces, and rooms were designed around a central fireplace to keep everyone warm.

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