Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid • Hacker News Board

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#131

Post by boringg » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 5:46 PM UTC

felbane wrote: post #122

boringg wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Connecting your grid to other markets for the premise of cheaper energy also puts you in a situation where you no longer control your own destiny. My expectation is that the presumed gains of some cheaper power don't balance the risk on reliability and control. I don't necessarily buy the argument but I am fairly certain that a big chunk of it.

As someone who very nearly lost a family member due to the state's complete inability to implement and enforce preparedness regulations, and due to ERCOT's herculean effort to do just barely not enough to keep the grid online... respectfully, fuck that argument. We live in a time where functional electric service is a necessity for life. We also live in a time where extreme weather patterns are getting more frequent…

You should also remember that actually having a more connected grid makes it susceptible to reliability issues as well. If you look back to 1999 when the entire northeast electrical grid was crippled for a couple weeks as a function of that connectivity.

I'm not letting Texas off the hook -- not winterizing your natural gas pipelines and trying to blame renewables for the grid catastrophically failing is definitely a regulators issue and a return a much money as possible to the investor shareholders without concern to the citizens is the key feature of their system.

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#132

Post by boringg » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 5:47 PM UTC

Rastonbury wrote: post #128

boringg wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Connecting your grid to other markets for the premise of cheaper energy also puts you in a situation where you no longer control your own destiny. My expectation is that the presumed gains of some cheaper power don't balance the risk on reliability and control. I don't necessarily buy the argument but I am fairly certain that a big chunk of it.

Forgive my ignorance but doesn't connecting to other grid allow them to buy energy when prices are low and still allow them to generate their own when the national grid prices are high? It would also allow them to sell excess no?

Depends on the needs of the market and their own generating supply. Arbitrage opportunities would surely exist in the short run while long run pushes the price to a natural equilibrium.

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#133

Post by gre » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 6:06 PM UTC

gre wrote: post #32

486sx33 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just connect the wires manually To turn on the fan and AC, you'd connect R and Y (or R, G, and Y on systems where the thermostat controls the fan).

You can change the temperature after rush hour starts. I'm talking about turning off the rush hour crap entirely.

They got back to me and wanted to do a phone call to unenroll me. I told them they could do it without speaking to me since I don't have any power in the process, so we got to skip the phone call. I'm officially out of rush hour.

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#134

Post by Salgat » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 6:14 PM UTC

chgs wrote: post #89

Salgat wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Texas has a lot of gas plants (51%) that we want to idle when possible. Just because it's cheaper power doesn't mean we should be generating it when the only customer is cryptocoins.

If the cost of gas isn’t covering the actual impact then the cost should be higher, doesn’t matter if the kWh is used by a bitcoin miner or someone with their AC at 70, it’s still the same externality.

I'd argue that burning energy for bitcoin is far more frivolous than for air conditioning.

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#135

Post by Salgat » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 6:34 PM UTC

herewego wrote: post #120

infecto wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regressive in what manner? Historically a lot of solar buy-back programs were incredibly inflated. Residential solar can be great for the resident but is usually not great for the grid. Paying resi. solar producers greater than market rates always felt foolish to me.

Regressive in that solar programs are not inflated, but do require distribution upgrades to realize their efficiency advantages over centralized power transmission. These distribution upgrades are costly to IOUs because they cut into their margins when the efficiency of distributed generation is considered. Paying distributed generation export at retail rates or higher (DR, etc) makes plenty of sense because there ar…

The only change needed for solar users is a different meter swapped at the house that supports bidirectional metering. Solar power at the residential level only lowers overall demand in the neighborhood and on the grid, and in the very rare case where the net solar production exceeds the entire neighborhood's demand, PEC could choose to simply not use that excess (curtailment) and the meter at each person's house would accurately reflect that with no upgrades needed (Texan power utilities are not required to buy back excess solar). So the added cost to PEC is entirely optional. At its worst PEC was only crediting almost half of the power they were reselling from solar users (from originally a simple net credit), although they've thankfully been starting to backpeddle on that.

Honestly, I would prefer they simply charged the cost of swapping meters and adjusted the flat infrastructure fee for solar users (when necessary) for cases where upgrades are needed in neighborhoods with excess solar generation. Instead, PEC is able to resell solar power for a very significant profit with their current rates.

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#136

Post by Salgat » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 6:43 PM UTC

infecto wrote: post #107

Salgat wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here just north of Austin, PEC implemented one of the most regressive solar programs in the country. Their argument in their study was that they make less money off solar since they can't sell as much power.

Regressive in what manner? Historically a lot of solar buy-back programs were incredibly inflated. Residential solar can be great for the resident but is usually not great for the grid. Paying resi. solar producers greater than market rates always felt foolish to me.

PEC never paid greater than market rates, they simply gave a net credit since solar was only reducing load at the service drop for a neighborhood. The cost to them was swapping the meter for a bidirectional one. Now at some point if enough people started using solar, they have the option of either curtailment (which would be automatically reflected in the existing meters), which at that point would justify an increase in fees, but their study was specific that they lowered solar compensation due to being able to sell less power to solar users (not for infrastructure reasons), which makes no sense why they are singling out solar since they offer incentives for other efficiency measures such as more efficient AC units to lower power consumption.

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#137

Post by chgs » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 7:45 PM UTC

Salgat wrote: post #134

chgs wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the cost of gas isn’t covering the actual impact then the cost should be higher, doesn’t matter if the kWh is used by a bitcoin miner or someone with their AC at 70, it’s still the same externality.

I'd argue that burning energy for bitcoin is far more frivolous than for air conditioning.

Thus people will spend less on bitcoin than aircon

Or is the market broken? In which case in which way? And why not tackle that brokenness directly.

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#138

Post by sschueller » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 8:16 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #123

shawabawa3 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a massive cost to starting and stopping gas plants that you are also not accounting for It's my understanding that basically the entire point of gas power plants is that they are very cheap to stop and start (as opposed to e.g. coal or nuclear), at least, that's the case in the UK - are these plants different in the US?

It's still expensive relative to batteries. If you think about it, a steam turbine has a lot of water that needs to be heated before you actually get any steam and a lot of heavy, moving parts that need to start spinning. Once all that is up and running it's fine and you just expend fuel to maintain the steam pressure. But this takes a while. And to heat things up faster, you simply burn a massive amount of fuel; whi…

Pumped water storage or hydroplant can go from zero to 100 within tens of seconds. No degradation in storage capacity. Also greener than digging up all these rare earth metals although it still has an initial impact on the local eco system when you store water where it previously wasn't.

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#139

Post by reaperman » Thu, Aug 22, 2024, 11:40 PM UTC

zdragnar wrote: post #70

dylan604 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, that is far from the definition of "great". I would say fortunate to not have those string of triple digits, but man, it's not great at all. 100°+ is still miserable, but it's amazing how different 98° feels from 105°. I get Texas hyperbole, but even my feet are firmly planted in reality to not accept "great" in this meaning. Bless your heart! ;-)

I think I prefer 100+ degree heat to -40. Where I live we often get both in the same year (though we didn't hit 100 this particular summer). At least with the heat, you aren't worrying that your plumbing might freeze and burst a pipe in your walls if the power goes out.

Everywhere I’ve lived where it actually does get to -40, none of the pipes burst if you lose power for extended periods. First, they’re buried well below the frost line, and secondly, there’s usually an pressurized air inlet nozzle somewhere so you can open a faucet and blow all the water out if you’ll be gone for a long time.

Fun fact, -40 is the same in F and C so it’s fine to omit the units for once!

Re: Breaking down a record-setting day on the Texas grid

#140

Post by npoc » Fri, Aug 23, 2024, 3:05 AM UTC

Salgat wrote: post #134

chgs wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the cost of gas isn’t covering the actual impact then the cost should be higher, doesn’t matter if the kWh is used by a bitcoin miner or someone with their AC at 70, it’s still the same externality.

I'd argue that burning energy for bitcoin is far more frivolous than for air conditioning.

That's because you don't know enough to understand why bitcoin is far more useful to humanity than air conditioning. In fact it's not even comparable.