761–770 of 1001 posts
I've lived through years of load-shedding. The biggest difference was we were entirely decoupled from the system - well/handpump, gas cylinder, overhead tank to store water, ..etc. It's not by choice - we just can't rely on any of the city provided services. Even today, homes are built with an overhead tank and anyone who can afford it has a UPS capable of powering the home for a few hours under load or a few days if…
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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 simpl…
Do grid operators really have controls at that level? In California they can shut off a substation or not, and that's as low as they can go except in the special case of industrial customers with demand-responsive equipment installed. If those empty skyscrapers were on the same local circuits as a hospital, perhaps it simply wasn't possible for the electric company to turn them off.
(Commercial lighting runs at 277v, so it's all on separate circuits from wall outlets. You can shut off the lights in a building without killing the servers, for example)
We had remote-controlled breakers, so doing that was a couple clicks of the mouse. But if nobody had picked up the phone, they would have needed cops to break into the electrical room on each floor and start flipping breakers by hand.
Not much discussion here of the fundamental problem: why is Texas so energy intensive? In the last decade ERCOT energy generation has expanded 20%, which is much faster than the population of Texas has grown. Why? Just gigantic, detached houses for everybody? I think this is why people say the California housing crisis is such a calamity for the environment. A person in Texas consumes 150% more energy.
Wow, that surprised me. Current demand is 45GW in Texas vs. 24GW in California. Over double per capita.
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Agree on the point about Texas extreme stance on having their own power grid. I don’t known if there’s enough micro grids in Texas to determine how well, or not, they worked in these conditions.
It's not that extreme. Texas is huge. Having it's own grid is not some support of excessively-local craziness.
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> just a result of certain design/engineering choices I think this is the point. Things are engineered for the environment which they are expected to operate, and to be optimized for those environments[0]. I would not expect a wind turbine that operates (and is designed to operate) in Antartica to not fail (potentially catestrophically) when operating in 100 degree Texas heat, [0] One could (and should) argue that th…
Cars operate across a spectrum of climates... no reason your power plant should not.
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…
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…
American fireplaces in general are a joke. You are just spending way too much energy and not really storing it anywhere except the air around it. They are built to look good, not to actually heat anything properly.
Check any Nordic country, we don't have gas fireplaces nor do we have the silly tiny iron things you have. What we do have is stone fireplaces. [1]
How it works is this: You heat the multi-hundred kg stone mass using any material you want, for us it's usually wood in some form. After the stone is hot enough, you stop wasting wood and close the chimney when the fire has burned out to prevent heat from escaping.
The stone mass will store heat and distribute it slowly and evenly over many hours, keeping everyone warm without electricity. If you want to distribute it, there are fans that operate on the radiant heat coming from the fireplace. A properly installed fireplace (central to the house) will keep a normal home toasty warm for a day or two with one proper heating cycle depending on how cold it's outside.
Maybe its time for people to stop treating electricity like essentially an unlimited cheap resource and instead something they consciously try not to waste. I've been working in an off-grid office where I am limited by solar and battery capacity and it really puts into perspective what really needs to be plugged in all the time and how much running a large appliance affects capacity. Maybe electricity should be sold…
I think most would rather pay an e.g. +10% premium for the plants to handle more extreme conditions once a decade than think about what has to be plugged in all day every day.
It needs to be mandated so all power producers incur costs to handle the weather.
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Man, what are people with children, elderly, or pets doing.
The most ugrent concern is probably for homeless people.
Morbid, yes, but you guys should really get into housing-first for taking care of homelessness.
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 wondering how rolling outages on the proposed schedules were supposed to work in this situation. If they gave everyone power 50% of the time, everyone would crank everything they have to the max during those periods to get some heat into their buildings. Unless their total ability to consume energy is less than 2x their average consumption, it's not going to help. To have any effect on overall power consumption,…
Don't they have any kind of smart meter in Texas? Maybe reprogramming them is a slow operation that cannot be done to almost every meter in a short timespan?
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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…