Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

houstonchronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

961–970 of 1001 posts

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#961

Post by Broken_Hippo »

moooo99 wrote: post #852
dgellow wrote: post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note to readers: If you're not from the US and confused about the 20 degrees (I was), note that it is Farhenheit and not Celsius! So around -6°C, which is of course very cold! (edit: when you're on the internet, better to specify which unit you use, your audience is international)

I mean -6°C isn't very cold either. Its not every year you see temperatures like that, but its also not exactly uncommon. We had -17°C (1.4 °F) and lower here in Germany. We had some problems here and there, especially the railway, but afaik there were no major problems regarding power outages and heating. But obviously we're much more prepared for temperatures like this here.

Sure, it isn't that cold when you have heat and proper clothing.

The power is out - there is no heat. For a lot of folks, this is more akin to camping without proper gear, during the winter, and without a fire.

There isn't much infrastructure to deal with snow and ice, either, nor are most folks going to be prepared to deal with frozen pipes.

The folks in Texas don't have the same sort of house insulation either: Since it doesn't get that cold, but it does get hot, the houses are designed to keep the house cool. And since this cold is very rare, folks aren't likely to have actual winter coats. What makes the cold tolerable for me - in Norway - is that I'm fairly prepared for it. They aren't.

-6 is really darn cold for the unprepared.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#962

Post by fuzzfactor »

redisman wrote: post #359
slfnflctd wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why power demand is up in TX generally, but I do know that right now a big reason for the demand is because a lot of residences have electric resistance heat only-- which is great for electric blankets, but not so much for heating all the air in your home when it's extremely cold.

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.

It takes enough natual gas to heat three homes in order to generate the electricity to heat one home.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#963

Post by epistasis »

StillBored wrote: post #574
epistasis wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is nobody who is saying "let's fix the grid and design a system that will be reliable" in Texas. It's just people raising money to build projects that they think can make money.

Right now, there's more and more people thinking they can make money with batteries, and fewer and fewer people thinking that gas can make money on the grid.

Which, if we are to believe the hypothesis that markets make good capital allocations decisions, says that they future of the grid is battery backup, and no more gas backup.

This is a process of transition, so pointing at the current amount and saying "that's not enough" is going to be obvious.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#964

Post by epistasis »

snowwindwaves wrote: post #589
epistasis wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was just an offhand number, there's already 17GW of storage in ERCOT's interconnection queue for the next few years, which is 40GWh - 70GWh. By 2035, the soonest we could expect to see a new nuclear reactor powering on, we will have many multiples of 70GWh. Not sure if TWh will every be needed for a grid that only peaks at 80GW. The cheapest solution will be a tradeoff between excess renewables capacity and storag…

70 GWh of battery storage would have kept the lights on for an extra 2 hours during this event - assuming the batteries themselves aren't affected by temperature. While battery storage might be nice to increase the capacity factor of a solar or wind farm it isn't going to make a difference in an event like this where a weather system moves in for a week.

The current grid took a looot longer than 2-4 years to build, and that 17GW/50GWh is just 2-4 years of replacement equipment at the very beginning of a transition. So I'm not sure why this amount of batteries needs to power the entire grid, or how that's a helpful or even interesting comparison.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#965

Post by benlivengood »

8note wrote: post #673
benlivengood wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Theory would require some magical fluid to do the heat transfer, and we're limited to real coolants that don't have horrid environment impacts

Or geothermal heat pumps for very cold and hot environments.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#966

Post by fuzzfactor »

gego wrote: post #709

I am always amazed how well the "market" regulates resilience... when, for example, regulators used the Wienerberger winter-proof brick with much better isolation as standard for building regulations in some regions of Europe with cold seasons, businesses and builders sued. Two years later, the same regulation helped people come through a cold winter... I fear it needs regulations for infrastructure resilience...

The market for home backup generators and batteries in Texas sure has been booming like never before.

It might be worth following the money to see if there are decision-makers heavily invested in this type of thing.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#967

Post by fuzzfactor »

geoduck14 wrote: post #467
newbie789 wrote: post #415

Can somebody explain as if I were a kindergartner why exactly natural gas is down by such a large amount in the state? Did the pipes freeze? Does natural gas not burn efficiently in snowy conditions? How will raising the spot price dramatically help with these physical conditions of the pipelines/other power production/distribution apparatus in such a way that providing power becomes available more quickly (if at all…

Texan here! This weather is CRAZY, I've NEVER seen something quite like this. I've seen it dip down to the teens, before, but I haven't seen: sub 20, with snow, for more than 2 days... across the entire state. I'm not entirely certain why we are sucking hard at making electricity, but here is what I've heard: Nat Gas pipelines "close to the well" are "freezing" because they have a lot of impurities (like water) that…

This is how I put it 2 days ago, right before the failure here:

>Crude natural gas is usually saturated with water downhole at warm temperatures and high pressures, some of which condenses as it is produced at the surface.

>At many points in a pipeline further water removal can be essential too.

>Even when not liquefied like LPG, when passing through a restriction valve or orifice, there is still additional cooling due to the product acting a bit like a refigerant.

>The water content may be small but the quantity of cold gas passing through a narrow point which is well below 0C eventually can build up kilos of ice and block the flow until the ambient temperature rises enough to open it back up.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#968

Post by mercurysmessage »

ehvatum wrote: post #910
IOT_Apprentice wrote: post #900

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This country politicizes everything, rather than dealing with it, because you have some people who have financial interests that make money off the existing situation. For many, it is part of a belief system, rather than dealing with it from policy and engineering perspectives. We don't deal with school shooting massacres here right after they occur. We don't deal with them after they happen. What stopped school shoo…

The right to protest should be important to you, regardless of your political persuasion. 2020 saw a very great many more violent protests, including the construction of autonomous zones that rejected the authority of all elected United States government. To say that a person’s voice should not be heard because they are dangerous to your beliefs is itself the most dangerous thing.

What happened at the Capitol was way past the point of simple protesting. It's unfortunately people who have been sucked into a cult. They reject reality and got violent because of it.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#969

Post by fuzzfactor »

putzdown wrote: post #855

Please help me understand this. Why is deregulation causing suppliers to be unable to charge enough to cover their costs? I should think that would be the opposite. “ Ed Hirs, an energy fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, blamed the failures on the state’s deregulated power system, which doesn’t provide power generators with the returns needed to invest in maintaining and improving pow…

When HL&P owned the power plants, distribution infrastructure, and customer accounts there was concentrated incentive for better reliability and that's what we had.

Now many deregulated retail providers hold the customer accounts, and depend on Centerpoint (now sole owner of power & gas lines only) to deliver from their third-party wholesale provider, who contracts with one or more generators for ultimate supply. Plus of course ERCOT is involved and has been intentionally configured to take blame for things like this so there's another entity to participate in the finger-pointing.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#970

Post by lightgreen »

pas wrote: post #812
Johnny555 wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power is nearly the most expensive source of power if you include the cost of decommissioning and liability insurance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

Yes, but no. Nuclear power plants are extremely costly because they lack prefabrication-level standardization. This is the main cost driver. And this is simply because there's no economies of scale. Because we're not building enough. Classic vicious cycle. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> because they lack prefabrication-level standardization

It is not the only reason. Another reason is too many regulations and unpredictable government. As a private investor, you get lower ROI because you'd need spend several years fighting bureaucracy with no predictable outcome, and after the project started, it can be shut down in a couple years.

Post reply on HN