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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?

#571

Post by mikeytown2 »

bdamm wrote: post #253
ip26 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas furnaces need power for the circuitry & blower. My experience with fireplaces is that the house winds up net-colder, but you can warm yourself with radiant heat while it burns. Freestanding wood stoves on the other hand are very capable of warming a large space.

A tight wood stove in the hands of an experienced user is a remarkable thing. The amount of heat that can be extracted from a large oak log is nothing short of remarkable. Sadly, most wood stoves are not tight, nor are most users experienced.

Best fireplace in terms of efficiency is a rocket mass heater. It burns the wood gas in a secondary burn chamber and then routes the exhaust through a lot of thermal mass. One 2 hour fire a day will usually heat 2000 sq feet of house. 3m video explains the concept; longer videos will better explain it https://youtu.be/fwCz8Ris79g

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#572

Post by ineedasername »

ip26 wrote: post #242
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…

Gas furnaces need power for the circuitry & blower. My experience with fireplaces is that the house winds up net-colder, but you can warm yourself with radiant heat while it burns. Freestanding wood stoves on the other hand are very capable of warming a large space.

Seems like they should divert a small part of their output to keeping a small battery backup just in case of emergencies. Then in an emergency the battery could reignite the system and run the blowers with the furnace again diverting some output to keeping things charged.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#573

Post by chasd00 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #274
JonathonW wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big issue isn't just the control board-- most forced-air furnaces (at least, of the type used in the southern US) use an electric blower to actually distribute hot air to the rest of the house. End result's the same, though-- no electricity = no heat, regardless of natural gas supply. (But, at least in this case, a relatively small generator can provide enough power to get the furnace up and running and heat the…

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 has a valve mounted flush with the floor. You use a special key-like wrench to turn it on.

Even with the valve barely open you have maybe 3 to 5 seconds to get it lit in a normal fashion. Heh mess around too long and you’re in for a big woosh and plenty of singed arm hair.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#574

Post by StillBored »

epistasis wrote: post #488
StillBored wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So, remind me again how much storage it takes to keep a grid going for a week? And please don't confuse GW for GWh.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#575

Post by gregimba »

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.

Currently running a generator to run the wood stoves fan, its not ideal but not amazing.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#576

Post by sn9 »

lurquer wrote: post #273
com2kid wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You clearly haven't been in many 150 year old West Texas houses. Good lord... The spread of AC in the 1930s resulted in everything in Texas being insulated out the wazoo. Your typical suburban home in Texas -- with no electricity -- is perfectly habitable without power. Its an inconvenience, to be sure. But, all this handwringing over a freak -- and fun -- event is laughable. Want to fret? Fret about floods, tornadoe…

Millions of people don't live in suburban homes with grills.

They live in apartments that don't allow grilling so they never thought to buy one. And it being the winter, not many people who do grill in the summer have charcoal for winter grilling.

So when the power goes out, they can't cook anything on their electric ranges. If the water shuts off, that's even worse. Frozen food is useless if you can't even thaw it, let alone cook it.

Initially the weather reports I read said the winter storm warning only extended to Monday afternoon and now it's to Thursday, so lots of people didn't think to extend their emergency supplies to Thursday, and most probably didn't think they'd be without water and power.

I'm really lucky in that I have both water and power, but many are not. You really should not be judging people according to what the most privileged suburbanites can adapt to.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#577

Post by tharkun__ »

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…

This seems to be a problem specifically with whole house furnaces. I don't quite get why but I'm guessing cheap companies. Our gas fireplace has no such problems. Piezo electric knob to start the pilot (like your Coleman camping stove but it actually works - ask me how I know) and the pilot generates the electricity needed to actually let the gas flow. If the pilot isn't able to generate the electricity to open the gas valve then no gas ever enters the burn chamber. Again ask me how I know - yes those things gunk up and then can't supply the current you need to open the valve. Easy fix tho. Zero electricity needed and the upstairs stays warm. Also no cold air sucked into the house. The whole system is closed off towards the house. Love this thing!

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#578

Post by StillBored »

refurb wrote: post #569
StillBored wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently its not, there was one in the 1940's that was worse. So its the usual "ignore any outlier we don't like" attitude that seems common in so many things. Plus, its not like this is unusual. The random unexpected heat wave in oct -> rolling blackouts. Unexpected storm during hurricane season -> power goes out for a week due to unmaintained power lines, etc. Its why you need engineers running your grid, not som…

Your most recent example is 80 years ago? And yeah, politics is involved. Unless the engineers want to work for free and fundraise for infrastructure, they need to compete for limited resources.

Power is different. You get to pay the price it takes to produce and distribute even if it happens to be slightly inefficient. Its only when short term MBA/Politics get involved do the engineers who size capacity, maintenance, etc get overruled to save money. Or you can go the free market route, and just let everyone race to the bottom, which means cheap service that fails when it gets cold, hot, traders decide to screw people, or a storm blows through.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#579

Post by zozin »

texasbigdata wrote: post #550
pier25 wrote: post #541

Because of what happened in Texas, the higher demand of gas affected electricity generation in Northern Mexico which has been without electricity too. As as I understand it, not only the price of Gas wet up 5,000% but also there were shortages. The federal government has started doing electricity cuts in most Mexico to control the gas reserves and distribute energy to the Northern states. Edit: Here is an article abo…

One of my smartest Austin friends predicted the outages by watching nat gas spot prices as early as last friday. Weird world

Sounds like traders predicted the outages.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#580

Post by lghh »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #240
bjacobt wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were at 0 F today morning north of Dallas.

Wow, I had no idea it had gotten _that_ cold down there. I've never seen it that cold here in the PNW - west of the Cascades, anyway.

We hit -14 F yesterday in OKC.
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