141–150 of 597 posts
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My house normally uses 70kwh/day. We have an electric heater and with this cold weather we were on track to use 150-200kwh day. At $5/kwh for 5 days of 200kwh due to the cold puts me at $5,000.
Holy cow! How in the world do you use that much? My old house in Colorado would use ~350kwh/month. Swap out that electric heater for a heat pump asap!
Here's their news release about it: http://www.ercot.com/news/releases/show/225151 That links to this PDF which describes their emergency procedures: http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/200198/EEA_OnePager_u... Basically, there are 3 levels of response: (1) Reserves below 2,300 MW: get more power, including from other grids. (2) Reserves below 1,750 MW: interrupt power to industrial customers (who've contractually…
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No, not really. As far as I'm aware HVDC links are more efficient than AC links (even with AC/DC/AC conversion).
It looks like a tradeoff. The only place in the world doing a significant amount of long distance transmission is China. Their wind and coal resources are in the west, and demand is in the east, and transporting coal by rail just further increases air quality problems in the east. Based on what they are implementing, HVDC make sense at 800km+, and AC for shorter runs. I think it comes down to HVDC requires less condu…
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That's because they lose lift though. For a turbine, that wouldn't matter (at least directly). I have to imagine it's really the overall weight or the unbalanced weight not being good for the bearings and such. Not to mention a blade flinging a piece of ice off when it starts to melt...
The wind turbine spins because of an analog of lift - without “lift” it won’t spin. There’s also the issue of balance.
Thinking about it, that does make perfect sense, but just intuitively, I would think say, making a blade that had a flat side perpendicular to the wind direction would work, because the force can still be imparted to the blade. I can also intuitively surmise why that wouldn't work for a plane though.
When dealing with a plane, you want to generate force perpendicular to the wing (i.e. up when the plane is moving horizontally), but in a turbine you want the force to be in the same direction as the blade is moving. I feel like I must be missing something.
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The insulation thing is weird because better insulation saves you in the summer too. I guess it's just the construction fixed cost. Electric heat seems like a weird compromise though considering the gulf of Mexico..
Electric heat is great if you don't use heat consistently. Relatively inexpensive up front, low maintenance, etc.
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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... ).
My power comes from, I believe, a nuclear plant in Wisconsin. $0.098 per kW-h, with $15 a month connection fee.
Access Denied Error 16 www.ercot.com 2021-02-15 05:18:28 UTC
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Correct. The summer of 2019 was no wind. Today’s problem is ice.
I'm guessing ice is such a rare problem the turbines in Texas aren't equipped to handle it. Not that turbines can't de-ice themselves, right? Surely if they can operate in the North Sea, they can operate in West and South Texas, yeah?
[1] https://energynews.us/2019/02/27/midwest/wind-turbine-shutdo...
Here's their news release about it: http://www.ercot.com/news/releases/show/225151 That links to this PDF which describes their emergency procedures: http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/200198/EEA_OnePager_u... Basically, there are 3 levels of response: (1) Reserves below 2,300 MW: get more power, including from other grids. (2) Reserves below 1,750 MW: interrupt power to industrial customers (who've contractually…
Uh, were at 1210 mw right now
It 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.