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https://www.naturalgasintel.com/weekly-natural-gas-prices-so...
If you're not used to their bizarre units of volume the key takaway is this: Quantities of gas that usually sell for ~ $3 were selling for over $300 on Friday/Saturday.
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 agreed).
(3) Reserves below 1,375 MW: order transmission companies to reduce demand (i.e. rolling blackouts).
The reserves are shown on their main page (http://www.ercot.com/), and when I've checked today, it has been roughly 3,500-4000 MW. So that sort of sounds promising, but the graphs on the same page (projected capacity and demand) don't look as promising.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Natural gas rose to a record $600 per million British thermal units in Oklahoma. And as much as half a million barrels a day of oil output in West Texas may be impacted by well shutdowns that began on Thursday because of the extreme cold ." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-14/deep-free... Energy planners didn't account for extreme weather, regardless of source.
They do, but they are planning on the common experience of extremes. Texas' weather is colder now than in the past 40 years.
Yes. Thus "Extreme" weather.
I was going to suggest it is likely due to climate change, but that is largely conjecture.
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…
Texas is shockingly green when it comes to power. The windmills have frozen and it is the winter when there isn't as much sun. Most people are on a contract with fixed pricing, but some startups like Griddy are hurting people's wallets. We will likely see some retail electric company bankrupcies. Some of the electric providers are paying customers to move to someone else on Monday. The Joke is all the Californians wh…
Texan here. I tried, on Thursday, to buy a space heater; not only was the hardware store out, they told me a list of other places around town that were also out. Most homes use natural gas for heat, but I think a lot of space heaters are probably turned on right now. I also have to wonder how an everyone-videoconference-from-home society changes electricity usage? Not saying it has a significant impact, just wonderin…
Several articles have said that only 40% of homes in Texas use natural gas for heat. https://climatecrocks.com/2021/02/14/the-eyes-of-texas-are-o...
Texas is shockingly green when it comes to power. The windmills have frozen and it is the winter when there isn't as much sun. Most people are on a contract with fixed pricing, but some startups like Griddy are hurting people's wallets. We will likely see some retail electric company bankrupcies. Some of the electric providers are paying customers to move to someone else on Monday. The Joke is all the Californians wh…
Griddy literally emailed every customer yesterday and told them to switch providers asap.
It frustrates me how most analysis of wind and solar cost-effectiveness fail to take into account the need to have tons of backup infrastructure that lays fallow most of the time. You need to decide between poor grid reliability or drastically increased capital expenditures. Hopefully storage tech will get better and this will cease to be such a problem.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-set-sights-on-st...
The nature of the weather is that it is always windy somewhere - if you have a wide enough grid with enough overbuild, it doesn't have to be a problem. And when there's excess energy, people will find uses for it.