Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid • Hacker News Board

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#361

Post by genewitch » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 11:42 AM UTC

jusssi wrote: post #340

baq wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 elasticit…

> from: GE to: end user

> Subject: Missed payment on warranty program, features disabled

>

> Hello due to missing your yearly warranty payment, your GE dishwasher's peak pricing avoidance has been disabled.

> In order to save money, please send us money.

> P.S. if you haven't paid up within a month, your dishwasher will only heat water when the cost of electricity is higher than the 24 hour rolling average peak.

> thank you for your consideration.

>

> Mike at GE

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#362

Post by oezi » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 11:47 AM UTC

shiftpgdn wrote: post #62

slater wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$5k?!?!? How?!

My house normally uses 70kwh/day. We have an electric heater and with this cold weather we were on track to use 150-200kwh day. At $5/kwh for 5 days of 200kwh due to the cold puts me at $5,000.

Wow! European here. Family of 5 and we are at 8kwh per day. Total yearly electricity bill is < 1000 EUR.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#363

Post by bluGill » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 11:47 AM UTC

Rapzid wrote: post #89

mimikatz wrote: post #6

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…

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.

Iowa comes close. Sure it is a third, but on vastly less land area.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#364

Post by tpowell » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 11:49 AM UTC

AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #75

sjg007 wrote: post #55

Weird.. you'd think with the AC demand in the summer they'd have enough capacity for winter..

IIRC air conditioning is generally less demanding because you’re ‘only’ trying to drop the temp by ~30F to get back into the 70s on a hot 100F day, whereas for heat you’re trying to increase by a much larger 50-70F on a cold 0-20F day. I’m sure wishing the house was better insulated today (Austin).

As an FYI I’ve really enjoyed (Austin-based) Matt Risinger’s home building channel on YouTube [1] recently. He often discusses efficient building trends and materials. You think about your R-value much harder when it’s 9°F outside... [1] https://youtu.be/Ro3Tg9-PqFc

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#365

Post by bluGill » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 11:53 AM UTC

selimthegrim wrote: post #186

pilom wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy cow! How in the world do you use that much? My old house in Colorado would use ~350kwh/month. Swap out that electric heater for a heat pump asap!

Have you seen how houses are insulated in TX/LA?

New construction is actually pretty good in Texas. But most houses are not new and have little.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#366

Post by bluGill » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 11:54 AM UTC

happosai wrote: post #259

dzhiurgis wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern ones and designed for purpose go to -20C.

I bet absolutely nobody in texas asked "how efficent is the heatpump at -20c" when buying them. Same reason why all the windmills froze: "would like this wind mill model that produces eletricity at -20, or this cheaper one that freezes at 0c?"

No, but those who make heat pumps know that to sell in the north people care so they try to make one model that works anywhere.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#367

Post by jayelbe » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 11:57 AM UTC

NickNameNick wrote: post #317

walrus01 wrote: post #8

It is kind of weird and worrisome that such a large entity doesn't use https Look at the weird error message... https://www.ercot.com/ The rest of the site appears to be http only What's funny is that they do have a valid certificate for their error message page.

I can't even access it. "Error code: 16 > This request was blocked by the security rules" No idea why. Maybe they don't feel the need to serve thier website to foreigners?

I get the impression they're blocking requests from outside the US, yes. I get the same error message in the UK, but can access the site fine through a VPN to the US.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#368

Post by baq » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 12:01 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #342

nottorp wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I was wrong - there is no EEA 4. It's up to the local utilities to determine how to shed load; I suspect many office parks are already without power (but at 4 AM they're also probably not using much power).

that's the scary part: daytime demand is much higher.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#369

Post by baq » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 12:08 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #343

londons_explore wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People make similar choices all the time... Eg. "Oh, there's a queue at the gas station today. I'll drive on and get gas tomorrow instead." Thats them observing that the cost (to their time) of getting gas is high today, and that they can purchase later for a lower time cost.

That's on a per-day granularity. Not on a per second granularity. Imagine yourself standing at the pump and observing the gasoline price ticker, manually PWMing the pump trigger to only feed the gas when its price is below some threshold.

in before "but this is freedom to make rational decisions!"

rational decisions require concentration and that isn't free. at some point the cost of making these decisions outweighs any potential benefits. don't forget your externalities, folks.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#370

Post by markvdb » Mon, Feb 15, 2021, 12:12 PM UTC

joosters wrote: post #272

londons_explore wrote: post #263

Earlier 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"?

Giving electricity consumers the opportunity to set their consumption preferences is actually super logical. It's an obvious way to shave peaks off the total demand for electricity.

Consumers obviously shouldn't have to monitoring this themselves all the time though. Ideally, a device would do that for them. But even without that, quite a few people in Latvia buy their electricity at spot market prices and adjust their behavior to price changes. Working poor trying to penny pinch do so manually. More affluent eco minded people use intelligent devices.