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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

#351

Post by da_big_ghey »

rayiner wrote: post #191
evan_ wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an incandescent bulb phase out over several years that was supposed to end in 2020, but Trump blocked it because he claimed that LED bulbs were too expensive and made him look orange.[0] You pretty much can’t buy them anymore at stores except for specialty bulbs like oven lamps, but that might vary state-to-state. 0: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/climate/trump-light-bulb-...

Typical LED bulbs have shit spectrum coverage, and have terrible flicker when used with dimmers. I’ve been stockpiling incandescents.

Worse, a bunch of them have awful coil whine. I seem to be one of the few who can hear it, but quite a lot of electronics kick off an infuriating, high-pitched ringing and I don't want one more doing that.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#352

Post by kaibee »

xvilka wrote: post #171

A perfect case for the nuclear energy.

This is like, the worst possible case for nuclear energy, because this is a random fluctuation that won't be sustained for more than week. Whereas building a nuclear power plant costs billions of dollars and takes multiple decades to pay for itself.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#353

Post by da_big_ghey »

adrianN wrote: post #209
jcranmer wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is the high tomorrow in Dallas is supposed to be about 10°F. The typical winter high for Dallas is a bit below 60°F. This means that the demand for heating is about 4-6× what it normally would be for winter.

Energy loss is strongly supralinear in the temperature gradient, so it's probably a lot more than that.

Energy usage is superlinear below a certain point. As I recall, about 25% of homes in Texas use heat pumps. but below 30-ish degrees, heat pumps don't work and they have to switch to resistance-based heating So, demand will start rising a whole lot faster.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#354

Post by makomk »

ChrisIsTaken wrote: post #231
adrianN wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Energy loss is strongly supralinear in the temperature gradient, so it's probably a lot more than that.

Energy loss through an insulator is exactly linear to temperature. The problem is that people who would have otherwise tolerated 50F temperatures without heating by putting on a sweater are pulling their old oil column heater out of the storage.

One other problem is that one of the ways people have been making their heating more efficient is by using heat pumps, and their efficiency gain drops off with lower temperatures until they become no more efficient than the resistive heaters they replaced during the kind of unusually cold weather Texas is apparently seeing. This makes the peak to average power usage problem even worse.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#355

Post by whatever1 »

londons_explore wrote: post #263
Scoundreller wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 minut…

Counter argument is that it is not my business to have to think how to consume energy to match the production pattern of my provider. It is literally their business to meet my energy demands. Invest in more generation capacity, more storage, improve the transportation grid.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#356

Post by sjwright »

joosters wrote: post #323
sjwright wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this today. My energy provider bills me based on live fluctuating rates. It’s no big deal, on most days prices fluctuate less than they would on a regular peak/off peak pricing scheme. Some days there are short periods of high demand that cause price spikes, I’m given ample warning and can choose whether to adjust my behaviour during that spike. That might mean being more gentle with AC during a heatwave, or pre…

Why does this make sense to do on an individual level? If there is ample warning of price spikes, shouldn't we be expecting the power companies to do the energy hedging? Why make thousands of people do the job instead of the one single entity? If we are trying to make the energy system smart, shouldn't the power companies be the ones trying to add smarts to the system? (e.g. better energy storage for peak usage, etc)

You make it sound like an economics problem when it's ultimately an engineering problem. Energy companies already do many things to keep the grid stable, but you can't rely entirely on supply side solutions else you are forced to over-engineer the grid to handle extreme demand, a cost that's inevitably passed onto consumers.

This is going to become more important as electric cars become mainstream—without some incentive for consumers to delay charging their vehicles during extreme peaks, we're going to be paying for some fairly hefty upgrades to keep electric grids stable.

Focusing on demand saves everyone money, because it means we can do more with existing infrastructure. In my case, if I'm willing to react to price spikes, I can reduce my annual energy cost by literally hundreds of dollars. For me, it just means occasionally delaying use of the dishwasher or dryer by an hour or so. And by occasionally I mean a handful of times every year.

It's far less onerous than the regular peak/off peak pricing I've dealt with in prior decades.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#357

Post by makomk »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #173
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…

Do you still have incandescent bulbs in the US? Its really hard to find them here in Australia. I thought they were banned but I just read that they are not, but have been phased out.

There are loopholes that allow incandescent bulbs to be sold in the US still. However, replacing incandescent bulbs would do basically nothing to help with this kind of power shortage caused by a cold spell - all their waste energy is heat, and they're as efficient at producing it as any other resistive heater. Switching to LED lighting saves people money during more normal times but makes the long-termp peak to average power usage ratio worse, and ordinary people have no reason to care about that because they pay the same amount for power during this kind of peak than they do at any other time even though it's a lot more expensive to produce.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#358

Post by genewitch »

sneak wrote: post #348
namibj wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understandable. As long as it remains available, the price hike seems to incentivize operators to expend energy on manually thawing them. I'm assuming they could rig up makeshift natural gas burners/heat lamps to keep critical sections above freezing.

I feel like this reads like the first 60 seconds of intro to one of those youtube disaster-recounting videos.

https://www.youtube.com/user/USCSB being one of said channels. I don't want to say in enjoy their videos due to the content, but for being so simple they convey a great deal of information in a way that few other media have done in decades.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#359

Post by bluGill »

jodrellblank wrote: post #289
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…

What’s the problem with incandescents here? They’re inefficient, which means they turn lots of energy into heat instead of light, which means your thermostat will turn down your heating to compensate because it needs to produce less of the desired amount of heat. In the abstract, they’re bad when you’re cooling a Texas house and they’re putting more heat into it; on a cold night a 100W resistance heater is a 100W res…

Natural gas to a powerplant is overall less energy efficient compared to natural gas to a high efficiency home furnace.

This is about Texas though where high efficiency gas furnaces. In the north natural gas is the normal way to heat. I'm not sure about Texas.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#360

Post by freetime2 »

joosters wrote: post #323
sjwright wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this today. My energy provider bills me based on live fluctuating rates. It’s no big deal, on most days prices fluctuate less than they would on a regular peak/off peak pricing scheme. Some days there are short periods of high demand that cause price spikes, I’m given ample warning and can choose whether to adjust my behaviour during that spike. That might mean being more gentle with AC during a heatwave, or pre…

Why does this make sense to do on an individual level? If there is ample warning of price spikes, shouldn't we be expecting the power companies to do the energy hedging? Why make thousands of people do the job instead of the one single entity? If we are trying to make the energy system smart, shouldn't the power companies be the ones trying to add smarts to the system? (e.g. better energy storage for peak usage, etc)

There is a large cost to building out excess capacity to handle peak demands. That cost gets passed on to customers, and everyone ends up paying more for electricity. There’s also an environmental cost, as “peaker” plants typically burn fossil fuels. Even building grid-scale storage solutions would have a fairly large environmental impact (assuming that’s even feasible at all on the scale necessary).

It makes sense to target both the supply and demand sides of energy consumption.

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