111–120 of 597 posts
Texan 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…
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$0.05 to $0.10/kWh seems like normal pricing. Average US house uses ~1100-1200 kWh (I don't actually know this, based on googling, assuming most places in Texas are standalone houses) per month. If prices are $3000-9000 per MW, then ~40 to 60 kWh/day (let's be generous, people are explicitly turning on heat for this extreme cold) for a week... Even $2/kWh (which was exceeded days ago) would demolish peoples' budgets.
Those prices are far below normal prices. Normal is 28-50 cents in places like San Diego ( https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/energy-green/s... ).
It's curious that the current tide of public opinion reckons that we're all going to be in EVs in 10-15 years, when the grid nearly collapses under the weight of everybody plugging in a heater and turning on Netflix at the same time.
Natural gas prices have been absolutely wild the past few days. https://www.naturalgasintel.com/weekly-natural-gas-prices-so... If you're not used to their bizarre units of volume the key takaway is this: Quantities of gas that usually sell for ~ $3 were selling for over $300 on Friday/Saturday.
How isolated are different natural gas networks in the US?
As you can probably tell from the wikipedia graph, the gulf is heavily plumbed. In addition to the shipping and processing in the gulf, there are also massive storage caverns [1] that can buffer most swings in demand. Different US regions have their own storage hubs [2] but the reason that lots of natural gas-related prices have "Mont Belvieu" in the name is that Mont Belvieu TX is basically the biggest storage hub and serves as the benchmark for everyone else.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_pipeline_system_in...
[1] https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2015/10/19/...
[2] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_stor_wkly_s1_w.htm
Edit: wikipedia has a pretty good overview here, but it is a little dated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_storage
Texas 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…
Griddy literally emailed every customer yesterday and told them to switch providers asap.
Weird.. you'd think with the AC demand in the summer they'd have enough capacity for winter..
IIRC air conditioning is generally less demanding because you’re ‘only’ trying to drop the temp by ~30F to get back into the 70s on a hot 100F day, whereas for heat you’re trying to increase by a much larger 50-70F on a cold 0-20F day. I’m sure wishing the house was better insulated today (Austin).
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> To fix that, you need significant overprovisioning or alternate means of generation. They have alternate means of generation... natural gas. There is a big problem with wells shutting down due to the same extremes which shut down wind. Which has caused shortages of natural gas which is doubly problematic because it's also used extensively for heating. What do you do when your backup power is vulnerable to the same…
Do such nuclear power plants exist? I was under the impression that they provided consistent, baseline levels of power in most circumstances.
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How isolated are different natural gas networks in the US?
Not a direct answer, but you can adjust the active layers on https://www.eia.gov/state/maps.php to show pipelines. It's pretty well interconnected.
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In Texas griddy exposes you to real time spot pricing. I was frequently getting paid to use electricity at night due to excess generation by wind. As an electric car owner this was fantastic as I frequently got paid to recharge my car. My average delivered rate before this week was 7c/kwh all in.
Does anyone there get a battery system, like a Tesla Powerwall, to save up negative priced night electricity to use in the daytime?