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Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

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Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#261

Post by namibj »

noodlenotes wrote: post #217
supernova87a wrote: post #83

Problem is that: 1) People's use of energy is relatively insensitive to price, or they don't know the price, or few people care about the price when it comes time to need it 2) When you need the energy, it's too late to make the equipment/house more efficient, and when you don't need it, people don't think it's important to make it more efficient 3) Mandating that people upgrade their equipment is unpopular, they vot…

Texas has the equipment, but it's all frozen due to an extreme weather event. 1. The extreme cold is driving up demand to heat homes which is usually done in part by natural gas but 2. The cold has frozen natural gas pipes and wells, driving up the cost of gas 33x. 3. People are trying to heat their homes with electricity but 4. Wind turbines are frozen, limiting capacity, AND those sky high gas prices are limiting w…

How do you manage to freeze natural gas pipelines? It isn't even liquid at the near-surface air low-temperature record (-89.2 C/-128.6 F).

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#263

Post by londons_explore »

Scoundreller wrote: post #201
supernova87a wrote: post #83

Problem is that: 1) People's use of energy is relatively insensitive to price, or they don't know the price, or few people care about the price when it comes time to need it 2) When you need the energy, it's too late to make the equipment/house more efficient, and when you don't need it, people don't think it's important to make it more efficient 3) Mandating that people upgrade their equipment is unpopular, they vot…

> People's use of energy is relatively insensitive to price, or they don't know the price, or few people care about the price when it comes time to need it Basically this. Few individuals pay the actual price of electricity. At best, they'll pay time-of-day rates that might change schedules 2x/year. Otherwise, everyone pays the average cost, and couldn't care less if noon-time electricity costs 10x on Monday vs. last…

The real fix here is to have more residential customers either knowing the minute by minute pricing, or paying extra for the privilege of an "unlimited plan" or something.

That could be achieved for example by instead of setting your space heater to "low heat", "Mid heat" or "high heat", you could just hit the "$1/hour of heat", "$2/hour of heat", or "$3/hour of heat" settings. The heater itself can look at the minute by minute pricing to decide how much heat to output, and the user can decide to turn it up if they want to pay.

Electronics to connect to wifi and check a server for pricing cost under a dollar now (ESP8266).

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#264

Post by namibj »

ffk wrote: post #244
ashkankiani wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stockpiling incadescent bulbs instead of spending time doing research to find LED bulbs with a better light spectrum?

LEDs tend to give off a good range over the visible light spectrum. Incandescents tend to bias towards the higher end of the spectrum (towards red). Agreed that some research can also help find a good light. There are plenty of "full spectrum" light solutions out there which may work for the original poster. Compare Incandescents (A) vs LED (D) at https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Emission-spectra-of-diff...

As an example for high-CRI LED lighting components, I'll mention Yuji.

https://www.yujiintl.com/

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#265

Post by p_l »

foepys wrote: post #161
peter_retief wrote: post #147

I am blocked from the site? Access Denied Error 16 www.ercot.com 2021-02-15 05:18:28 UTC

It seems like someone or some DDoS detection blocked either everything or all foreign IPs.

Looks like the "GDPR doesn't allow to spy on users, let's block anyone who could be covered by it" kind of block.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#267

Post by Gravityloss »

supernova87a wrote: post #83

Problem is that: 1) People's use of energy is relatively insensitive to price, or they don't know the price, or few people care about the price when it comes time to need it 2) When you need the energy, it's too late to make the equipment/house more efficient, and when you don't need it, people don't think it's important to make it more efficient 3) Mandating that people upgrade their equipment is unpopular, they vot…

So the people decide to act in a way that there will be power cuts - if it was only them, it wouldn't matter much - they would deserve it.

But since the system is shared, it affects everyone.

Insulation and heat pump equipped spot price aware water heaters etc could probably help a lot.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#268

Post by Animats »

This came close to happening in 2014.[1] They got to stage 2, but not rotating blackout stage 3.

And yes, natural gas pipelines can freeze. There's some water in natural gas. Happened in 2011.[2] Search for "freeze-offs".

[1] https://rbnenergy.com/the-night-the-lights-almost-went-out-i...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=3390

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#269

Post by jabl »

jweir wrote: post #22

ERCOT is the only energy market not to have a capacity market. Combine this with a large dependency on wind(unreliable) and you see problems. This is not the first time has happened. Summer of 2019 saw a heat wave with no wind that lasted a week. Energy prices were way up. https://cpowerenergymanagement.com/why-doesnt-texas-have-a-c... Ps - I just checked the prices for northern Hub - day ahead was over $6,500 and re…

> ERCOT is the only energy market not to have a capacity market.

Plenty of energy-only markets around, at least internationally.

ERCOT also has an ORDC. Surely they can tweak that if they want to have better insurance against black swan type events without going to a capacity market, with attendant problems.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#270

Post by jabl »

jeffbee wrote: post #130

The main difference between this and California rolling outages last August is the conspicuous lack of ten-thousand-word think-pieces about how it was the inevitable consequence of a failing one-party regime. Climate change is going to result in local excursions in heating and cooling demand. It's just stochastic bad luck.

I'm sure you'll find the usual blowhards explaining how Biden is personally responsible for this.
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