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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?

#251

Post by dwohnitmok »

ip26 wrote: post #242
gregw2 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote: All 7 developers in my Houston team (semi-geographically scattered in the city) lost power; half for >24 hrs (it's 10-25 degrees F here for the last 2-3 days). Most lost water for some stretch of time and some still don't have it. I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work t…

Gas furnaces need power for the circuitry & blower. My experience with fireplaces is that the house winds up net-colder, but you can warm yourself with radiant heat while it burns. Freestanding wood stoves on the other hand are very capable of warming a large space.

> My experience with fireplaces is that the house winds up net-colder

Why is that?

EDIT: Oh are you saying that the rate of heating provided by the fire is less than the overall rate of heat leaving the entire house?

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#252

Post by monadic3 »

tw04 wrote: post #232
gregw2 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote: All 7 developers in my Houston team (semi-geographically scattered in the city) lost power; half for >24 hrs (it's 10-25 degrees F here for the last 2-3 days). Most lost water for some stretch of time and some still don't have it. I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work t…

>I don't think any lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well. I'm curious how they didn't lose heat. Any furnace built in the last 30 years, even gas, has an electronic control board in order to ensure it doesn't accidentally turn on the gas without a functioning pilot light and/or heating element (whi…

Gas heaters still require electricity for basic management.

I'd imagine heaters have batteries for specifically this case. If they don't, it's frankly a miracle if we don't lose anyone, and someone needs to get prosecuted.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#253

Post by bdamm »

ip26 wrote: post #242
gregw2 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote: All 7 developers in my Houston team (semi-geographically scattered in the city) lost power; half for >24 hrs (it's 10-25 degrees F here for the last 2-3 days). Most lost water for some stretch of time and some still don't have it. I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work t…

Gas furnaces need power for the circuitry & blower. My experience with fireplaces is that the house winds up net-colder, but you can warm yourself with radiant heat while it burns. Freestanding wood stoves on the other hand are very capable of warming a large space.

A tight wood stove in the hands of an experienced user is a remarkable thing. The amount of heat that can be extracted from a large oak log is nothing short of remarkable.

Sadly, most wood stoves are not tight, nor are most users experienced.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#254

Post by shagie »

_jal wrote: post #206
majormajor wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I wouldn't pay any more money to avoid this" is a remarkable low cost tolerance. I would love to know just how much we'd be talking about per-customer. Ten cents over ten years? A dollar over ten years? Twenty dollars? More? Without knowing that "I wouldn't pay any more" seems foolhardy.

Well, one thing you know is that poster knows no one reliant on powered medical devices.

When I was living in California (no, not a large scale event - just a suicidal squirrel and power to 8 small houses)...

The mother in law of the guy who handled the property would fuss at him about his RV. She didn't like it and would have loved to have him sell it.

And one day, there was a suicidal squirrel. Took out power for six hours. She only has two tanks (1h each) of backup oxygen... and shortly into the outage when we found out that PG&E would be awhile before repairing it he powered up his RV and plugged her oxygen into the RV.

She didn't fuss about the RV after that.

If you don't have an inverter and a long lasting source of power, an outage like this can (and probably has) kill many people who depend on the consistent power to keep their medical devices working.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#255

Post by nickysielicki »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #73
nickysielicki wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Most of the capacity lost was fossil fuel based. In fact solar generated more than expected. So how exactly are renewables the problem here? Even nuclear went down due to frozen pumps. And how is more coal the solution when these kinds of event will just become more common with global climate change? Should we not push for changes which halts the ongoing climate change?

> In fact solar generated more than expected.

This is technically true, but kind of irrelevant to the big picture. Solar beat expectations, which is great until you realize how little it was expected to produce in the first place. Solar and wind do not scale to demand as well as non-renewables.

And look, I'm not saying that Texas should have invested in coal, I'm saying that it's tone deaf to admonish them for not embracing green energy when they did embrace green energy pretty strongly, and when their lack of capacity currently is mostly about their lack of production in renewables.

The core problem is that you can almost always burn more coal or NG and get more juice out of the coal and NG plants. But you can't make the wind go faster, and you can't make the sun shine brighter or longer. Had they invested in an abundance of non-renewables, people would not be freezing in their dark homes right now. It's not Texas fault, proponents of green energy need to have a better answer for this.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#256

Post by [deleted] »

com2kid wrote: post #230
lurquer wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you people for real? What did people with children, elderly, and pets do 150 years ago? If your house is 25f, put on a couple sweaters and a coat and have a beer. It’s not the end of the world. As far as the kids go, they’re outside building snowforts. In short, you make do. It astounds me that the typical HN poster can whip up a C++ compiler, pontificate about solutions to every social-ill, purport to speak inte…

> If your house is 25f, put on a couple sweaters and a coat and have a beer. It’s not the end of the world. Houses were designed very differently 150 years ago. Lower roofs, fewer windows, huge thick drapes or tapestries on the walls, animal skins or carpets on the floors. 9 ft windows (double pane or not) on all walls is going to leak out a lot of heat. Most importantly, fireplaces. Houses had fireplaces, and rooms…

[deleted]

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#257

Post by teraflop »

roughly wrote: post #138
nickysielicki wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

It's even worse than that, because it's not even that there's no historical data to draw from! It got just as cold as this back in December 1989, resulting in power shortages and rolling blackouts, because of increased demand and reduced generation capacity.

And then it happened again in February 2011, for almost exactly the same reasons, despite the weather not being quite as severe.

https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/February%202011%20Southwest%2...

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#258

Post by evan_ »

monadic3 wrote: post #252
tw04 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't think any lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well. I'm curious how they didn't lose heat. Any furnace built in the last 30 years, even gas, has an electronic control board in order to ensure it doesn't accidentally turn on the gas without a functioning pilot light and/or heating element (whi…

Gas heaters still require electricity for basic management. I'd imagine heaters have batteries for specifically this case. If they don't, it's frankly a miracle if we don't lose anyone, and someone needs to get prosecuted.

gas furnaces do not have batteries.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#259

Post by tw04 »

spamizbad wrote: post #152
ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #127

A social political decline is what happened and continues to happen. When California encountered power issues, it was easier for Texas politicians (and many of their followers) to espouse malicious soundbites about Commifornia than to empathize, offer support and self reflect on what lessons can be learned and applied locally. Now that Texas is reaping its own fruits of decades of anti-"other side" politics and polit…

Governing is hard. Owning the libs/cons is fun and easy! Anyway seems like this storm is so bad Texas would be in trouble no matter what, but letting utilities under-invest in winterizing and not joining either of the major grid corridors just made a bad situation 100x worse. The good news is this is fixable going forward, and hopefully Texans will demand their politicians address it.

>Anyway seems like this storm is so bad Texas would be in trouble no matter what, but letting utilities under-invest in winterizing and not joining either of the major grid corridors just made a bad situation 100x worse.

The weather in Texas is in the single digits. The weather in Minnesota is in the double digit negatives.

Texas would not be in trouble "no matter what" if they had bothered to spend the money on winterizing their power plants. They chose not to, and this is the end result.

The roads shut down due to lack of snow removal is completely understandable - and quite frankly most people should be perfectly capable of surviving in their homes for a week if they have heat and water.

The lack of updating power plants so they can function in below-freezing weather is just straight incompetence. This type of weather isn't some 1,000 year storm. They have extended below freezing temperatures on a fairly regular basis.

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