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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?

#731

Post by trulyme »

sizzle wrote: post #692
kelnos wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1996 (or thereabouts), I lived in Maryland, and my family lost power for 6 days due to a snow/ice storm that took out a ton of power lines (water froze on them and the added weight pulled them down). We had no natural gas service, and our running water was provided by a well in the backyard that had an electric pump. So no electricity, heat, or running water for 6 days in ~20-30°F weather. (Fortunately we'd prepar…

Is there no CO2 danger from sleeping with gas stove on? Don’t people die from carbon monoxide poisoning from sleeping with open flames?

Nitpick: CO.

Otherwise - no, if there is enough oxygen coming in. When fireplace is done properly it is not a problem.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#732

Post by angry_octet »

newacct583 wrote: post #567
cavisne wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

backup generation (gas) is not working. As mentioned. When your only on-demand source of generation is only profitable in peak periods its a recipe for disaster.

Texas gas plants aren't "backup generation". Those are always available, almost always on, full-time-operated facilities.

Yes in Texas gas is used for base load.

Strangely the rules under which some of them operate involve them paying for gas at spot prices (or at least during peak demand), and with spot gas prices being so high (due to pipeline failures limiting supply, and gas for heating having precedence) they had the option to stop generating...

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#733

Post by pixl97 »

bob1029 wrote: post #554
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…

Gigawatt scale nukes would need to go down in an unreliable grid. They have virtually no demand response compared to LNG and other fossil fuels. Frequency stability is the ultimate constraint. I think a really good question to ask: Why was there missing generation in the LNG and other fossil fuel plants? Was it because they all froze over at the same time, or was it because the price of LNG went to the moon on Sunday…

Almost all nat gas storage in Texas is very short term when demand is high. Texas already had 3 days of cold weather before this even and stored supplies where low. This means most gas will come straight from the field or from wet storage, this is having a high water content, so it needs dewatering before burning.

A number of years ago I was helping a relative attempt to restart one of these wells/dewatering units because it froze in at somewhere between 10-15F. And that was the next day when the temps had warmed up to around 25.

It's been far colder than that in the last two days so these units are staying frozen and its icy so techs cant get to them easy. I've not seen wells in colder climates, I guess they equip them so they dont freeze.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#734

Post by conductr »

falcolas wrote: post #338
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…

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

It’s going to take months to get to everyone too. Contractors here are busy enough as it is.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#735

Post by GiorgioG »

The incompetence of the Texas ERCOT is mind blowing. A relative works in a semiconductor fab in the Austin area. Apparently the utility gave the fabs an entire hour of warning that their power was going to be shut off. These plants can't shut down properly in an hour.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#736

Post by lpmusix »

HNfriend234 wrote: post #612
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".

I'm in Dallas too. What we did was pull out our generator that runs on propane then run an extension cord from the garage to inside the house connected to an electric heater. Close the bedroom door. We were about 75 degrees. You are crazy to not have a backup generator! It is an essential item to have!

I hope I'm reading that wrong and you're not saying you actually have the generator in the garage (unless that garage isn't connected to the house), that's a good way to kill your entire family.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#737

Post by pixl97 »

8note wrote: post #654
ranrotx wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, this is the thing no one is talking about. Dallas has easily added 10k apartment units in the past 5 years. Almost all of them are all electric (no gas heating). Considering it’s more energy efficient to cool with Air Conditioning on the hottest summer days than it is to heat with electricity in the winter, it’s no wonder the grid collapsed when the region was below freezing for several days and some generating…

Resistive electricity will be close to 100% efficient, and heat pumps even higher depending on the outdoor temperature. What kinda of air conditioners beat that for efficiency? I don't think we covered those in heat engines

In addition to the other comments your missing the heat delta.

We commonly cool from 100 to 70F, or 30 degrees.

Yesterday we were warming from 0 to 65, or a 65 degrees delta.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#738

Post by skmurphy »

caf wrote: post #698
qbasic_forever wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why don't pipes in areas prone to this sort of thing have some of cheaply replaceable burst disc relief valve, given how catastrophic an uncontrolled failure of the pipework is?

Water expands about 9% when it freezes. It's not a question of pressure relief, it's a question of the pipe bursting in multiple locations as it freezes end to end if you have lost heat in the house. The pipes don't leak until the ice melts.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#739

Post by JamesBarney »

martinald wrote: post #148
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?

TX grid is connected via HVDC, but keep in mind that even if it was "fully" connected there is no hope in hell it would be much better. There wouldn't be enough transmission to transfer 40GW+ from the East or West coast grids to TX. It's an enormous amount of power to go offline. I don't think California for instance has more than 10GW of transmission north to south. Basically, no amount of grid infrastructure can re…

If your gap is 40GW, and you could get another 8GW. That's enough to give everyone an extra hour of electricity every 5 which would be game changing. The different between a 33 and 45 degree house is enormous.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#740

Post by 0xy »

pixl97 wrote: post #721
cbmuser wrote: post #705

The blame doesn’t lie on the power grid but on the power sources. Texas has only four nuclear reactors, it should have many more as only nuclear is able to deliver power under virtually all weather conditions (yes, I know that South Texas 1 tripped but that was due to a false alarm). It’s because of renewables and gas power plants that electricity became scarse. Many wind turbines in particular froze because of the l…

Renewables had nothing to do with this and performed better than expected. A nuke plant tripped off and natural gas production and de-watering froze starving the plants. The vast majority of capacity loss was nat gas.

Natural gas follows all rollouts of renewables, though. In fact I'm not even sure you can separate the two. Grids with renewables would absolutely collapse without natural gas.

The only thing capable of replacing natural gas is batteries, which are extremely expensive and aren't exactly renewable, either.

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