How's that reliable solar and wind working out for ya?
Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
331–340 of 597 posts
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#33259.774Hz? That's a huge frequency error. I saw 59.6 go by. 29.5 seconds behind. Those are load-shedding levels. Unusually cold weather and heat pumps. Ouch. Back up to 60.080. They'll run a little fast if they can to make the remaining synchronous clocks catch up.
Up to 30 seconds behind again, was as low as 10 just recently. 800MW of reserve remains.
I wonder what "Current System Inertia" is.
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Rotating outages primarily affect residential neighborhoods and small businesses and are typically limited to 10 to 45 minutes before being rotated to another location." I don't understand. Here they shut down a couple large factories (that have agreed beforehand to emergency shutdowns) when there are capacity problems. Those eat so much power that it usually solves the problem. They don't shut down power to resid…
They've already done that - that is EEA 1 and 2 (1 being voluntary shutdown, 2 being involuntary shutdown). They've asked everyone who CAN go to backup generators (think: hospitals, datacenters) to do so. If short-term shedding of residential load doesn't work, the next step is to blackout commercial players - think Walmart, etc. Those usually occur for longer periods of time and have security risks involved. Natural…
> the next step is to blackout commercial players
Yeah, my point is they have the order wrong. They're shutting down residential first with the associated health risks instead of shutting down commercial which will just send people home for a day or three.
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because there’s a difference between - the poor are freezing to death while the rich have plenty - we have you over a barrel, how much is it worth not to die? - the poor might have to run their dishwasher at a different time if they want t-shirt and shorts temperature indoors in the coldest winter in 40 years
Why are you assuming that the poor are demanding t-shirt and shorts temperatures? Please stop making up strawmen. And when did dishwashers come into this? Are you really expecting that poor people should be buying brand new 'smart' dishwashers that will pick the right time to run to save some cents? I'm sure they've got the cash for that purchase just sitting around in the bank.
Because that’s what the discussed 68F temperature is, I didn’t make up 68F as a straw man, it was suggested by parent comments as an unreasonably cold that it’s in humane to leave poor people to experience unassisted.
Dishwashers come into it when the parent poster arguing in favour of markets-fix-everything said their plan was not for poor people to become human icicles, but for everyone to be pushed by prices to adjust non-essential power use such as washing to other times. Such a plan doesn’t depend on a smart anything - ERCOT twitter feed is suggesting people don’t do laundry on Valentine’s Day to reduce power use, the suggested price influence is that people don’t do laundry by their own choice because it costs more.
Pricing isn’t demand based, so everyone does laundry and uses heat, then the grid collapses - do you think the rich and poor are equally affected by rolling blackouts? That they’re more egalitarian? I suspect not, as rich people will have more and fancier clothing, more money for impromptu propane purchases, more insulated houses, more luxurious vehicles and more money for gas, etc.
There is no current way to provide enough electricity to keep people alive while not providing any for rich people’s luxuries. If demand-based pricing can reduce overall use so the grid doesn’t collapse and there isn’t a huge price surge and people can afford to survive, isn’t that better?
Fixing wealth inequality or assisting the poor could come outside this system - UK has a winter fuel payment for the elderly and poor, for example: https://www.gov.uk/winter-fuel-payment
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#335NOW LEVEL 3 https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO/status/1361215084010352644?s=2...
THere is no EEA 4 but I assume as demand continues to increase and supply can't keep up they just have to keep shedding more and more loads. I expect a state of emergency to be declared if it hasn't already.
Luckily today is a bit of a holiday.
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#336FWIW: I have a Powerwall and solar. My electric company offers no incentive for me to use my powerwall, or to feed into the grid during high demand.
The incentive comes during an EEA 3 when they simply cut power to your house for 30-45 minutes.
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#337Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 minut…
The real fix here is to have more residential customers either knowing the minute by minute pricing This is insane. Do you really believe that individuals are going to be monitoring the energy prices like a rabid day-trader, making 'rational' decisions between "oh good, power is cheap now" and "power is expensive, I guess I'll just freeze"?
They could have automated systems to react to prices. Or they could be simpler (like on a fixed daily schedule).
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just to add some numbers; we(Texas) have over 31,000MW of installed wind energy capacity. No other state comes close. Probably a lot of things people find shocking about Texas when compared to its reputation lol.
Texas is the state with the most wind energy in the US? 42,933km2 Denmark has 6GW wind energy capacity and 695,662km2 Texas has 31GW. That doesn't sound very impressive.
Why are you comparing figures like that? Is the land itself using the energy generated from those turbines?
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
Devices can offer functionality to take the decisionmaking burden from the user. For example a dishwasher could have a setting where you tell it what time the washing must be done by, and it schedules the wash cycle to be when it thinks electricity will be cheapest.
don't know about you but my dishwasher's shortest program is ~30 minutes - if price of electricity changed every minute, i just wouldn't care because it'd be pointless.
Most of the energy a wash cycle uses is for heating the water it just took in. The part where it splashes the water around uses next to nothing.
Waiting a bit to start heating that water if there's a high consumption peak right now is hard to transfer to any significant benefit for the consumer, because electricity is just that cheap. But it might make sense from the grid point of view to have higher demand elasticity.