What went wrong with the Texas power grid? • Hacker News Board

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#781

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:35 AM UTC

yellowait44 wrote: post #566

tharkun__ wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cold climate here (Quebec) and we heat with electricity usually. Many people have an electric furnace (forced air) or even baseboard (what I have for example). We also have a heat pump (heats the upstairs very well until about -15C and provides awesome AC for the entire house in summer). For Power outages and also coz its just awesomely warm: propane fireplace. All the benefits of a wood fireplace with none of the do…

LPG or Propane is awesome down until -42 celsius. Then it’s basically useless as it won’t vaporize. Live in Quebec too and my backup is a dual fuel generator. Propane and then regular fuel if it’s too cold or I’m out of propane. Never too careful!

It doesn't have to be useless. It could have a way to keep the tank warm.

Edit: Downvote? I really want to know why you disagree, please respond! What am I missing?

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#782

Post by roenxi » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:39 AM UTC

gregw2 wrote: post #117

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…

It is annoying when this sort of event happens and everyone starts deciding what they believe to be truth within 48 hours of the outage. It makes more sense to be talking about the 2011 outages in terms of what went wrong than the 2021 ones - because we have actual information on 2011 instead of "things went wrong!" now.

I want to thank you personally for injecting a PDF into the discussion, but also positively assert that it is not obvious what just happened this week. We don't yet know how many of the recommendations were ignored, what happened in the last decade regulator-wise or whether this round of failures are for the same or different reasons.

Speculation is much less useful than waiting a few months for the actual investigations. Emergencies are urgent, engineering (and political) decisions and assessments are never emergencies.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#783

Post by NegativeLatency » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:41 AM UTC

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?

PEX handles freezing pretty well

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#784

Post by URSpider94 » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:46 AM UTC

gorgoiler wrote: post #658

throwanem wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a good place to learn the art, do you know? I'm not in Texas, but I have two woodstoves now, and my one experiment with them thus far has taught me only that I have a lot to learn.

Wood stoves are charcoal breeder reactors powered by their own vaporized wood gas. The re-radiated heat from the ironwork is what gives them their extreme warmth. They are like many other fuel burners — stage one vaporizes the fuel and stage two burns the vapor — it’s just that both stages are in the same iron firebox. When you start a fire you want to quickly get the stove up to temperature. Use small split logs and…

Exactly this. Wood stoves operated in this manner are extremely efficient, and generate particulate emissions comparable to an oil-fired furnace, maybe 100x less than an open-hearth fireplace.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#785

Post by jacobajit » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:51 AM UTC

axaxs wrote: post #747

sizzle wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, due to ventilation. Even an indoor fireplace for example is -always- vented, so the gasses can escape via the chimney. If you close the damper with a fire blazing, you'll not have a good time. Outdoor fires well, are outdoors, so there's plenty of oxygen. People die nearly every year in the brutal cold from getting desperate and bringing grills and such indoors to light, which is a big no no.

Not all indoor fireplaces are ventilated in the US, actually. (Source: have one unventilated fireplace that is probably mostly for aesthetics and not to be used for extended perios of time)

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#786

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:54 AM UTC

theshrike79 wrote: post #766

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 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 that well. 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 Nord…

[deleted]

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#787

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:56 AM UTC

kccqzy wrote: post #400

mythrwy wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No electricity = no heat, regardless of natural gas supply." For the furnace yes. The gas fireplace and gas ovens/stoves though probably don't need electricity.

I haven't seen a gas oven that can work without electricity. A gas stove, yes, you can simply turn on the gas and quickly use a kitchen lighter to ignite the gas manually and hope not too much poisonous gas escaped the stove. But ovens? How?

It's not poisonous.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#788

Post by KSteffensen » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:57 AM UTC

kevinmchugh wrote: post #702

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…

Interior or central chimneys make more sense to me than ones against an exterior wall, and they seem common enough in houses of a certain vintage at least. If your chimney is on an outer wall, doesn't it radiate heat to the outdoors?

Chimneys on outer walls are worse on every measure compared to internal ones.

They loose heat to the outdoors as you say and since they cool down a lot faster than the internal chimneys it is also generally harder to get the fire going when re-lighting. The chimney on my house is on an outer wall and when it's below 0C I have to light a fire every day or it becomes too much of a hassle to get it going.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#789

Post by masklinn » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:01 AM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #733

bob1029 wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

I’ve read that the tussle between opec and Russia dropping the prices of fossil fuels also lead to many producers halting production, which in turn led to difficulties filling up reserves, so Texas didn’t / doesn’t have much headroom there.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#790

Post by judgemcjudgy » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:03 AM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #163

judgemcjudgy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only a "just so" story.

There were reports over a decade ago that such destabilizing events would happen.

Predicting occasional extreme weather events doesn't prove anything. There have always been occasional extreme weather events.

Also in what sense is it supposed to be a "destabilizing event"? I predict it will get warm again.