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What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

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Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#481

Post by reddog »

heurist wrote: post #133
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.

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.

It will. You can bet on it. The Texas Legislature is currently in session (it only meets every other year). Maybe a quarter of them will have personally experienced this power outage and all of them will have a parent, sister, son, neighbor, friend who suffered through it. And while these people may not know much about same sex bathrooms, a lot of them know a lot about energy. When this session is out weatherpfoofing will not be "suggested" or "recommended", it will be law.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#482

Post by cavisne »

cromwellian wrote: post #455
cavisne wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hilarious to look back on this HN post and the top comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14630650 Exactly the same thing happened in South Australia in 2016 1) Renewables % of generation mix grows (wind + solar) 2) Base generation sources get pushed out by economics and regulation (coal) 3) Peak generation sources get squeezed by the economics of wind + solar over summer (lots of wind, lots of sun) and b…

Sorry, but no. A 2011 FERC report cited problems in Texas gas/coal/nuke plants for failing to weatherize. They didn't fix the problems, and gas and sensing lines froze, taking gas/coal plants offline too. 2/3rds of the power that went offline from the storm was fossil. Moreover, Texas's independent grid (not connected to the rest of the US) makes it difficult for them to import power from neighboring states. Stop try…

The heavy reliance on natural gas is not traditional. Its a side effect of 1)

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#483

Post by wavesquid »

s0rce wrote: post #313
tpmx wrote: 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…

Isn't it immensely difficult to restart an aluminum smelter? Also, my vague memory of these is that in North America most of them are in areas with abundant hydro power.

They're immensely difficult to restart once the aluminium solidifies: difficult enough that the answer is throw it out and make a new one. But there's a big enough difference between operational temperatures and solid that you can deprive them of electricity for e.g. 8 hours while you restart your other power generation infrastructure. IIRC for some aluminium smelters you can even run the reaction in reverse briefly if you need to jump start something.

(citations needed.... I'm recalling this from a story someone told me ~15 years ago about the Alcoa plant in Victoria, Australia)

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#484

Post by Animats »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #454
pault wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in Austin, without power for almost 48 hours now. There’s ice in my roommate’s bedroom. It’s my birthday tomorrow, and I’m hearing that we won’t have power until Thursday at the earliest. I’ve gone beyond furious to just horribly depressed.

Good luck, and here's some advice from a midwesterner that has dealt with cold, ice, and snow forever. If it's cold enough to start freezing things inside then make sure you have some water flowing in your pipes. Keep your kitchen sink running on a low (very tiny) dribble. Maybe even keep a shower/bathrub running at a very low rate too. You do NOT want to be dealing with frozen, broken flooding pipes on top of no pow…

That's not recommended for some areas of Texas. There's low water pressure and water has to be conserved.[1]

(Edit: Houston only.)

[1] https://www.wfaa.com/article/weather/if-dripping-faucets-sav...

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#485

Post by ip26 »

User23 wrote: post #472
ip26 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, if you think about it almost all of the heat from the fire goes right up the chimney. The brick of the firebox & chimney are generally built outside the building envelope for safety reasons, so any heat in the brick doesn't warm the house. The only heat that actually makes its way into the house is the radiant heat cast from the fire itself, which is small. The smoke is poison, and unlike a furnace, gas firepl…

The 180 year old house I grew up in has a central brick chimney for this reason. When you put the fire out before going to bed you have a column of brick radiating throughout the night. It’s still pretty chilly in the morning but it works quite well.

Right, but it turns out the mortar fails more often than you would like and you'd get smoke & carbon monoxide leaking into houses from that central chimney, which is why that went away (or so I've heard)

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#486

Post by igetspam »

jimbob45 wrote: post #118
svnpenn wrote: post #20

Dallas suburb here (Las Colinas). No power since Monday 6am. I had to get room at holiday inn. I actually got the room yesterday, but the hotel lost power after an hour, so I had to go back home and sleep in 5 degree apartment. Don't believe anything you read about "rolling outages". It's only rolling, if you define that as "out until it's not freezing anymore".

Austin here, staying at a colleague’s place who’s in an over-55 community on the hospital grid (unlikely to be taken down). Agreed that they’re misusing “rolling outages”. We got an hour of power a day for the last two days and don’t foresee getting even an hour today. I don’t know who they think they’re fooling because everyone here knows exactly that these outages aren’t rolling and is out for ERCOT blood.

That's terrible. I'm in Driftwood and a touch rural and we've had no hits. The subdivisions up the road have not been doing very well either. Bang for you buck with power probably has them focused on the higher density locations. Stay safe and stay warm. Glad you got some place better for now.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#487

Post by Tossrock »

benlivengood wrote: post #393
redisman wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it not good for heating? I'm sure resistance based electric heating is very efficient. I've lived in very cold places and the heat has almost always been electric or water heated by electric. You just need radiators. Northern European countries for example use that a lot and the temperatures are often as low as -22F. Of course they build to optimize for low temperatures unlike TX.

Boilers/furnaces are ~90% efficient now. Combined electrical/heat generation can only hit 50-80% efficiency. In theory heat pumps powered by electricity would be the most efficient option.

Though, heat pumps lose efficiency in very cold weather, and right now it's very cold in Texas.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#488

Post by epistasis »

StillBored wrote: post #441
epistasis wrote: post #43

Earlier 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…

As I got heavily downvoted a month or so ago for saying. In TX the wind backup is NG plants. The storage is really only there to cover tiny glitches, and its quite expensive. Which I why I keep pointing out that the price of wind conveniently ignores the storage costs and NG generators required to back it up. At least part of the problem here seems to be the fact that the NG plants can't start due to lack of gas beca…

The economics are changing quickly, and storage is replacing gas plants. There are now more GW of battery backup in the pipeline than gas plants, and many multiples of solar and wind GW for each new gas GW.

https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/

Texas is experiencing the interchange first because it's one off one of the few places where independent operators can connect and undercut those who have made bad long term capital investments.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#489

Post by Element_ »

reportingsjr wrote: post #301
txlpo78 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing I said in my comment is incorrect. Texas has 5 different connections with the other grids and can import/export through them. But they are irrelevant right now because the other grids do not have enough spare capacity to send to Texas. >If Texas was part of the Western grid they could be drawing excess hydroelectric power from the pacific northwest right now for example. Texas also could have contributed to h…

This does not seem to be true at all. If you look at a power outage map of Texas you can actually see exactly where the ERCOT boundaries are. Everyone else in Texas that's on the other, federal, grids, are not experiencing widespread power outages. https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/landing_pages/89373/ERCOT-I... https://poweroutage.us/area/state/oklahoma Per your comment about l…

I am not sure it's that simple, I read some where else yesterday that at least one of the non-ERCOT grids had paid to winterize their local power plants after the last ice storm so their plants have been operational throughout this storm and as a result had no outages. I have no idea how accurate that is though, I don't know anything about the electric grid...
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