It frustrates me how most analysis of wind and solar cost-effectiveness fail to take into account the need to have tons of backup infrastructure that lays fallow most of the time. You need to decide between poor grid reliability or drastically increased capital expenditures. Hopefully storage tech will get better and this will cease to be such a problem.
Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
11–20 of 597 posts
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#12Wind farms can't operate in icing conditions.
Source? I have personally seen one operating in Alaska during the winter.
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#13Seems like this is where a generator and appropriate hookup for powering (primarily?) a gas furnace might not be a terrible thing. Unfortunately almost all homes regardless of source will lose heat if the power goes out because of fans and furnace control.
I was just looking at natural gas powered generators because of this. I've had an accumulative 24 hours of outages in the past month. They don't seem bad, the units themselves are around $6k. Definitely worth considering!
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#14Wind farms can't operate in icing conditions.
Source? I have personally seen one operating in Alaska during the winter.
It's not the temperature per se, it's icing. I read it here
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-14/deep-free...
“When wind-turbine blades get covered with ice, they need to be shut down,” said Joshua Rhodes, a research associate at The University of Texas at Austin who focuses on energy.
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#15Wind farms can't operate in icing conditions.
Source? I have personally seen one operating in Alaska during the winter.
“We are experiencing record-breaking electric demand due to the extreme cold temperatures that have gripped Texas," Bill Magness, ERCOT President and CEO, said in a press release on Sunday. "At the same time, we are dealing with higher-than-normal generation outages due to frozen wind turbines and limited natural gas supplies available to generating units. We are asking Texans to take some simple, safe steps to lower their energy use during this time."
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#16Texas is shockingly green when it comes to power. The windmills have frozen and it is the winter when there isn't as much sun. Most people are on a contract with fixed pricing, but some startups like Griddy are hurting people's wallets. We will likely see some retail electric company bankrupcies. Some of the electric providers are paying customers to move to someone else on Monday. The Joke is all the Californians wh…
>We will likely see some retail electric company bankrupcies.
REP's go bankrupt all the time, especially when the weather gets funny. As WallStreetsBets says, "Sir, this is a casino".
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#17Texan here. I tried, on Thursday, to buy a space heater; not only was the hardware store out, they told me a list of other places around town that were also out. Most homes use natural gas for heat, but I think a lot of space heaters are probably turned on right now. I also have to wonder how an everyone-videoconference-from-home society changes electricity usage? Not saying it has a significant impact, just wonderin…
Several articles have said that only 40% of homes in Texas use natural gas for heat. https://climatecrocks.com/2021/02/14/the-eyes-of-texas-are-o...
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#18It is kind of weird and worrisome that such a large entity doesn't use https Look at the weird error message... https://www.ercot.com/ The rest of the site appears to be http only What's funny is that they do have a valid certificate for their error message page.
There's a cloudflare-like MITM in the middle that is serving https.
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#19It frustrates me how most analysis of wind and solar cost-effectiveness fail to take into account the need to have tons of backup infrastructure that lays fallow most of the time. You need to decide between poor grid reliability or drastically increased capital expenditures. Hopefully storage tech will get better and this will cease to be such a problem.
You're right but you're getting downvoted by people who believe anything Big Green tells them.
It's just like Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, etc.: all the suckers bought the religion and won't know they're suckers for 40 years. By that time a new, equally unsuspecting generation will mock us while swallowing the next Big Industry talking points uncritically.