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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?

#331

Post by Baeocystin »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #175
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.

I had my wood fireplace going for the first time this weekend when the daytime temperatures were around -12F. It can easily raise the temperature of my living room, dining room & kitchen (one open space) to 80+ but that's with electricity to power the circulation fan. How are you keeping the whole house warm if you can't circulate the air? I'm genuinely curious.

From personal experience, a heat-powered fan helps a lot. I used one when I lived in a Franklin-stove-heated cabin in Montana, and while you wouldn't mistake its power for an electric fan, it more than did the job.

https://www.amazon.com/heat-powered-stove-fan/s?k=heat+power...

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#332

Post by TheJoeMan »

gregw2 wrote: post #117

What went wrong is that the Texas legislature which owns Texas-specific grid process to avoid interference from the Feds didn't figure out how to also ensure Texas generator companies got compensated for weatherizing (and ensuring it was done). How many of the 24+6 recommendations from the NERC/FERC review of last time this happened in Texas (hint:2011) were taken up by the legislature or those at ERCOT they delegate…

Yes I agree state's legislatures did not prepare. But maybe that shows why a body of politicians is not prepped for engineering nuances. Maybe they should have adequately applied leverage to the power companies to "push" them to better practices rather than trying to fine and inspect and regulate which is an inherently "pulling" option which the companies will always try to weasel out of.

This argument to incentivize rather than punish applies to many issues with legislative bodies across all complex industries like Big Tech and other Engineering fields. You pass a law that drinking water cannot have over 10ppm of XXX carcinogen? There is most likely going to be 9.99ppm because that's the bare minimum.

We really need to move from stick to carrot.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#333

Post by mythrwy »

tw04 wrote: post #232
gregw2 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote: All 7 developers in my Houston team (semi-geographically scattered in the city) lost power; half for >24 hrs (it's 10-25 degrees F here for the last 2-3 days). Most lost water for some stretch of time and some still don't have it. I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work t…

>I don't think any lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well. I'm curious how they didn't lose heat. Any furnace built in the last 30 years, even gas, has an electronic control board in order to ensure it doesn't accidentally turn on the gas without a functioning pilot light and/or heating element (whi…

"No electricity = no heat, regardless of natural gas supply."

For the furnace yes.

The gas fireplace and gas ovens/stoves though probably don't need electricity.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#334

Post by lurquer »

Me1000 wrote: post #275
lurquer wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha. I love how ‘global warming’ transmogrifies into ‘climate change’ to suit the argument. Not everything is as big of a crisis as your Facebook posts make out. A few days without power... big woop. The power goes down longer in most coastal cities every summer during hurricane season. Not to mention the usual outages of a day or two due to tornados and ordinary storms. And the cold? Who cares? Kids are playing in th…

Climate change _is_ a result of global warming. It's not that complicated, so let me try and explain: climate patterns will change as the earth warms up. Jet streams change, hurricanes get more powerful and occur more frequently, etc. As for "no big deal", I don't know what else to say other than 15 people have already died. When it's below freezing and people are without heat, they will freeze to death. Not to menti…

>Climate change _is_ a result of global warming.

You mean the cold weather is a result of global warming.

Yeah. Whatever.

As far as the rest of your comment, the warmth of your virtue and sensitivty has raised my room's temperature by a degree and I thank you. I am tearing up as I write this; your comment struck me to the core. Oh, the children... the poor freezing people on covid-ventilators... the 15 who have -- sob -- died. I am going to save the salt from my tears and use them on my driveway. Someday I hope to be as thoughtful as you. Thank you for being such a good role-model to the rest of us.

If only we Texans had the foresight to realize that -- sob -- instead of a single day of freezing weather in February, we'd have -- sob -- three days. In a row, no less! How could we have been so foolish?

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#335

Post by falcolas »

maxerickson wrote: post #62
falcolas wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which confuses me, as it follows a statement about how energy has been deregulated. Of course, deregulation would also reduce some of the incentives for maintaining preparation for "100 year winter" storms. Much like how hospitals reduced the number of beds based on their average case loads, not the uncommon-but-not-unheard-of peaks.

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).

TIL. That's... it makes sense in one fashion (keep health care cost reasonable (reasonable health care costs in the US… kek)), but it utterly defies the idea of being ready for disasters.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#336

Post by reportingsjr »

hangonhn wrote: post #102
pkulak wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The Tres Amigas Super Station is, ironically, being built in TX. If it was done, it could help the situation a lot. 30 GW of capacity! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation

Nit: IF this gets built (big if), it will be in New Mexico, not Texas.

It's also very unlikely that it would be near 30GW of transmission capacity.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#337

Post by oivey »

dhritzkiv wrote: post #314
goat_whisperer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article clearly states that many natural gas plants were knocked out due to the cold. So why aren't you asking "maybe having more nuclear instead of natural gas would have helped?" Since nuclear uses water, which freezes, the reason why the gas plants were knocked out, maybe the problem isn't the power source itself but the lack of weatherization?!

> Since nuclear uses water, which freezes I suspect that the water involved in the steam generation (heavy water or otherwise) wouldn't freeze since it's inside/near the core, and constantly temperature regulated. The water used for cooling would go through heat exchanging and would also not freeze, especially if it's underground, or deep in a lake somewhere.

This isn’t theoretical. A nuclear plant was knocked out of service due to water freezing at the current temperatures.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#338

Post by falcolas »

com2kid wrote: post #230
lurquer wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I imagine plumbing contractors in Texas are rubbing their hands together in glee. Frozen, broken pipes everywhere.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#339

Post by newacct583 »

TheJoeMan wrote: post #332
gregw2 wrote: post #117

What went wrong is that the Texas legislature which owns Texas-specific grid process to avoid interference from the Feds didn't figure out how to also ensure Texas generator companies got compensated for weatherizing (and ensuring it was done). How many of the 24+6 recommendations from the NERC/FERC review of last time this happened in Texas (hint:2011) were taken up by the legislature or those at ERCOT they delegate…

Yes I agree state's legislatures did not prepare. But maybe that shows why a body of politicians is not prepped for engineering nuances. Maybe they should have adequately applied leverage to the power companies to "push" them to better practices rather than trying to fine and inspect and regulate which is an inherently "pulling" option which the companies will always try to weasel out of. This argument to incentivize…

> Yes I agree state's legislatures did not prepare. But maybe that shows why a body of politicians is not prepped for engineering nuances.

The problem is that Texas is an outlier. Other governments, broadly, get this right. Those FERC recommendations mentioned upthread? They're the work of the government (hell, NERC is even a multinational globalist thing). That argues less that "governments are bad" than it does for "THIS government was bad".

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#340

Post by dv_dt »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #266
dv_dt wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In southern california too, once So Cal Edison discovered the risk of liability for fires, power has been shut down more and more for frequent high wind events.

I don't know what people expected. You provide an entity with certain incentives and it will tend to follow those incentives to their logical conclusion. If you make fires much more expensive for power providers, and you prevent them from charging any more money for the service they provide, they are going to have to reduce risk elsewherre. They'll do this either by cutting service when fire risk is the highest or by…

It's a matter of externalized costs - the company could have taken slightly less profits - accounted for the known coming of climate crisis weather shifts in the decades they've had and made the proper decisions. By deciding the way they have, they bring higher regulation on themselves.

I expected the correct maintenance costs to be taken on to maintain a better than third-world power grid availability.

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