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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?

#381
post #96

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.

Rolling outages work when you need to shed 1% of your load, not when you need to shed 80% of it. If Austin is down to critical loads only (hospitals or whatever) there may not be anything left to rotate.

There are non-critical loads all over that were never interrupted (my neighborhood, north edge of ATX). It's pretty arbitrary.

Even worse: for about the first 24h there were (largely uninhabited!) commercial buildings all over the place that were fully lit up. We're talking skyscrapers. Even some unfinished skyscrapers. I think they've finally begun to address those. The charitable interpretation is that it was simply a massive failure of coordination.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#382
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can we, private citizens with entrepreneurial skill and talent, do to combat this partisan schadenfreude?

Stop giving cover to politicians that think government always sucks and private business is always better? I think that's true most of the time, but not when it comes to things like this. Preparing for a once in decades event is something private business has a hard time doing without getting eaten by more aggressive competitors. The only way to get this kind of preparedness is to have it be part of the level playing…

What can we do with our unique skills that every other American cannot?

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#383
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gas furnaces do not have batteries.

That's a failing of gas furnaces. I don't know why you'd design a system without them except to breed dependency.

We're talking about forced air furnaces here, I think. Something has to force the air. A big blower motor that takes hundreds of watts.

Forced air heat is not great in terms of comfort, but in Texas you already have all the ductwork and the blower motor and so on for AC, so it's simplest just to add a gas burner to that.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one reason why a gas fireplace is a great thing - even without electricity, you can at least heat half a room.

My gas fireplace still requires electricity to run. I know I can start it with a match if needed (and it has a pilot of course) but I'm not 100% sure if I can manually override the gas valve to open. It opens when I flip an electric switch.

Try it. I was confused the first time I used ours when the power was out. That switch still worked.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#385

The Texas-only grid was definitely part of it, and should be a lesson to people who thought the lesson from Covid is "do more locally." No, having stronger, longer distance connections is what makes you more resilient, at least when there are local problems.

On the flip side, the fact that we're talking about a Texas-specific outage means that the system actually worked as designed, in a degraded state.

We generally try to incorporate redundancy and decentralization in systems design for the purpose of antifragility and graceful degradation. If something bad happens, best to isolate it so that it doesn't afflict everyone globally.

At the time of this writing, every State in the contiguous US except Georgia, Alabama, Florida are covered in snow; for many of those States, the snow is catastrophic and generally unplanned. The fact that, in the face of that black swan event, it was "just" Texas that had degradation means that, collectively, the US is better off. Obviously we should learn from this and improve Texas's grid to be resilient to such a failure in the future, and that's exactly how a healthy system that "localizes" implementations should function over time.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#386
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik, the way abnormal situations like these are handled in northern Europe is that the grid suppliers have agreements with the very large industrial consumers (think aluminium smelters) who agree to shut down immediately when the grid frequency goes below a certain trigger level. The way I understand it, this is useful both in time-critical emergencies (like keeping the grid at 50 Hz when a nuclear plant suddenly g…

The bitcoin mining farms claimed to shut down, so some industrial load shedding seems to be in play in Texas.

I guess my point is that if there had been sufficient contracts for industrial shutdown, there wouldn't be rolling outages in residential areas.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#387
post #312
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My companies office volunteered to power off so we got to all work from our homes. That was only good for those of us still with power, though.

I'm just surprised every time I hear of someone working in an office!

This was two or three years ago before it was totally acceptable.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#388
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't invest in the weatherproofing needed for these extreme events. It wasn't worth the expense for them to ensure that people would have heat if we had a record-breaking cold snap (only have to go back 30 years to match the one we are in now). I wonder if that equation will change once the state is back up and running again.

I wonder if that equation will change... It seems like there is no shortage of scapegoats, so my money says "no".

Seriously, there are already disinformation agents hard at work across the internet, at least one in this thread. By November this cold snap will be tied to Benghazi and a pedo ring run out of a pizza joint.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#389

It is surprising that windfarms are freezing. Here in Quebec, we have windfarms that have more than 6 months a year of snow and temperatures much below the freezing point. How can they freeze? they dont use water or gaz or oil. It is only a fan and dynamo. Did water seep inside and freeze it?

I've read that ice can build up on the blades and impede function, just like on airplane wings, and that de-icing mechanisms exist but it's likely they simply didn't spend the money on them because nobody thought they'd ever be needed in Texas.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#390
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give me a break. Actually, the whole reason for this series of outages is because Texas took the bait and installed a bunch of solar and wind instead of taking the safe route and doubling down on coal. Peak energy consumption in Texas is almost always in summer when there's a lot of AC units running -- which just happens to be when solar and wind work best. They gambled on green, paid the price in the past few days,…

…but the primary reason for the current outages is that fossil fuel plants failed. Wind power etc has also failed but is a rounding error in terms of lost production. > if Texas invested in coal instead of making the large investments they made in solar and wind, this never would have happened. If they invested that money in coal and failed to winterise it in the same way they failed to winterise the other plants the…

Of course it sounds patronizing, it's extremely patronizing. Did you make a real effort to understand my argument?

This is probably going to also sound patronizing, but have you considered that you're wrong and I'm right?

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