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What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

houstonchronicle.com

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Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#131

Post by epage »

jeffbee wrote: post #96
gregimba wrote: post #48

Currently in ATX we haven't had power for over 24 hours, wood fireplace is saving the house from completely freezing but the whole city of Austin needs to evaluate how they setup their critical infrastructure to allow for rolling blackouts instead of having parts of the city with power and parts without for the entirety of an outage.

Rolling outages work when you need to shed 1% of your load, not when you need to shed 80% of it. If Austin is down to critical loads only (hospitals or whatever) there may not be anything left to rotate.

From what I hear, only about 40% are on non-critical circuits. There is room for improvement.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#132

Post by Retric »

ahnick wrote: post #126
worker767424 wrote: post #94

The Texas-only grid was definitely part of it, and should be a lesson to people who thought the lesson from Covid is "do more locally." No, having stronger, longer distance connections is what makes you more resilient, at least when there are local problems.

I think it's probably not that clear cut. What happens in a cascading blackout scenario? If you are part of a larger pool are you more exposed to have a service disruption now when there is a problem in another part of the grid of the pool that you don't directly control?

You can isolate yourself from cascading blackouts while still being able to share power. This is why they may cross several states, but never hit nationwide.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#133

Post by heurist »

i_am_proteus wrote: post #63

Lots of folks in these comments seem to want to use this event to litigate wind vs. solar vs. gas vs. nuclear vs. coal, but it seems like, across the board, power generation facilities in Texas were simply unprepared to operate in such low temperatures. All of these technologies can and do work well in very cold climates.

They didn't invest in the weatherproofing needed for these extreme events. It wasn't worth the expense for them to ensure that people would have heat if we had a record-breaking cold snap (only have to go back 30 years to match the one we are in now). I wonder if that equation will change once the state is back up and running again.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#134

Post by hokkos »

masklinn wrote: post #8
vondur wrote: post #4

Maybe having more nuclear power plants instead of wind would have helped? It sounds unrealistic for the energy generators to sell electricity at a loss over a 10 year period. It would be nice to see some of the data that the professor is referring to.

> Maybe having more nuclear power plants instead of wind would have helped? No. Most of the missing production was not wind, and several nukes went out (unclear whether that was because the grid was dying though). What would have helped was proper standards (avoiding emergency being much of the reason why Texas still has its own grid) and properly winterising. The wind thing is just a bullshit excuse, the vast majori…

At the worst wind only provided 0.7GW on 30GW installed, with capacity they count on during winter peaking events for wind of 6.2GW it only 11%.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#135

Post by barbacoa »

ckemere wrote: post #85
u678u wrote: post #74

Not many people are talking about home solar but its a real problem. Its nice to have your own solar power and then use the grid only when you need it. However that means you need idle power plants and transmission 90% of the year just for those cold un-sunny days. If power prices are regulated its a mugs game. I see bans on home solar coming. Maybe if you can disconnect from the grid with batteries it solves the pro…

Home solar saving the day for my neighbors in Houston today, actually.

Electrical codes require grid-tie solar inverters to shut off if the utility power fails.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#136

Post by GVIrish »

tryonenow wrote: post #67
kbar13 wrote: post #10

is this the wakeup call that texans need to acknowledge that climate change isn't a coastal elite type thing, and that it affects us all and requires investment from all of us? imo texas is in a great spot to capitalize on the shift to green tech. they have strong engineering talent, large investments from the energy sector. car manufacturers are already clamoring to be the next to go fully electric. get your leaders…

A single cold snap is no more evidence for climate change than it is against global warming. The earth is huge, climate is chaotic and oscillatory with large variance, you need many data points over, at a minimum, decades (though centuries or millennia may be more appropriate) to determine with certainty that the climate is changing.

This cold snap is due to the polar vortex destabilizing and pushing arctic air down South. Normally the polar vortex stays stable and that arctic air oscillates at higher latitudes. But with warmer temperatures in the higher latitudes that stability has been disrupted and a large part of the vortex air has been pushed South.

The arctic is warming much faster that the rest of the planet, so these events will probably become much more common. Other sorts of extreme weather events are also going to become more common with climate change

Some explainers on the polar vortex: https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-how-is-arctic-warming-linked-...

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#137

Post by lurquer »

kbar13 wrote: post #10

is this the wakeup call that texans need to acknowledge that climate change isn't a coastal elite type thing, and that it affects us all and requires investment from all of us? imo texas is in a great spot to capitalize on the shift to green tech. they have strong engineering talent, large investments from the energy sector. car manufacturers are already clamoring to be the next to go fully electric. get your leaders…

Ha. I love how ‘global warming’ transmogrifies into ‘climate change’ to suit the argument.

Not everything is as big of a crisis as your Facebook posts make out.

A few days without power... big woop. The power goes down longer in most coastal cities every summer during hurricane season. Not to mention the usual outages of a day or two due to tornados and ordinary storms. And the cold? Who cares? Kids are playing in the snow, most everyone in my neighborhood had been grilling out, if it’s been a wake-up call for anything, it would be to maybe buy a quieter diesel generator.

Jesus H... can’t we have a winter storm any more without using it as grist for ideological arguments?

It will be 70f in a few more days. All this will be forgotten.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#138

Post by roughly »

nickysielicki wrote: post #30
kbar13 wrote: post #10

is this the wakeup call that texans need to acknowledge that climate change isn't a coastal elite type thing, and that it affects us all and requires investment from all of us? imo texas is in a great spot to capitalize on the shift to green tech. they have strong engineering talent, large investments from the energy sector. car manufacturers are already clamoring to be the next to go fully electric. get your leaders…

Give me a break. Actually, the whole reason for this series of outages is because Texas took the bait and installed a bunch of solar and wind instead of taking the safe route and doubling down on coal. Peak energy consumption in Texas is almost always in summer when there's a lot of AC units running -- which just happens to be when solar and wind work best. They gambled on green, paid the price in the past few days,…

> This is a black swan event -- this is the coldest it's been in over 100 years.

While everyone else is taking you to the woodshed for the rest of the comment, I'd like to take a moment to address this, because I think it's a misunderstanding of the term and a misreading of the book.

The point of "Black Swans" was that an over-reliance on standard distributions derived from historical data generates predictions and confidence intervals that misrepresent the underlying phenomenon by assuming away "fat tails" and ignoring changing circumstances. If there's not some good reason why an event can't happen, any forecast or plan which precludes that event is necessarily flawed.

To describe this as a "black swan" event assumes nobody could've seen it coming, there was no reason to suspect it would happen, and it's unlikely to happen again. All of those are false. Every bit of climate forecasting over the last ~decades has pointed towards increased weather variability and increased likelihood of extreme weather events. Specific to this case, increasing the overall energy levels in the atmosphere increases the variability of the polar jet stream and increases the likelihood of polar vortex events like the one Texas is currently experiencing.

So, no, this wasn't a "black swan" event, this was a predictable - and predicted - outcome of climate change, which is a predictable outcome of burning as much coal and carbon-based fuels as we have over the last couple generations.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#139

Post by hokkos »

epistasis wrote: post #43
vondur wrote: post #4

Maybe having more nuclear power plants instead of wind would have helped? It sounds unrealistic for the energy generators to sell electricity at a loss over a 10 year period. It would be nice to see some of the data that the professor is referring to.

Nuclear tripped too, just like gas, because of a pump failure in the cold. In the 2011 cold snap, the problem was all about frozen lines like the pressure sensing line that caused a problem yesterday for the nuclear reactor. Likely similar things are causing problems for natural gas. The answer is weatherization of all these sources. Wind turbines work great in other settings with icing wind, you just have to have th…

At worst wind provided only 2% of its capacity, 40GWh would be gone in minutes, please count on TWh.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#140

Post by tharkun__ »

svnpenn wrote: post #105
UncleOxidant wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully that's 5C and not 5F.

Why would it be celcius? I made it very clear that I'm in Dallas, and we don't use Celcius. That's not a knock against Celcius, frankly it's just a knock on you for the dumb comment.

While you (and siblings) are all correct, I don't get the down voting of the poor guy trying to make a joke while being considerate-ish and hoping that you guys were actually warmer than you were.

That said, I've been out in the hammock in 0F here, including snow and wind chill on top and been warm (oh wait, I'll be down voted too). It's all about insulation, which actually helps in both warm and cold weather. You can see that in Spain for example, where they have very warm weather (like Texas) in summer. It's a fallacy to believe though that there's no insulation used and that there's no heating in Spain.

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