What went wrong with the Texas power grid? • Hacker News Board

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#401

Post by pasttense01 » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 1:39 AM UTC

refurb wrote: post #271

worker767424 wrote: post #94

The Texas-only grid was definitely part of it, and should be a lesson to people who thought the lesson from Covid is "do more locally." No, having stronger, longer distance connections is what makes you more resilient, at least when there are local problems.

I think the big lesson here is “when you have extreme weather events, things can go wrong”. No more than that. To say this can always be avoided is misleading. When black swan events happen, shit goes bad.

Of course it could have been avoided: much of the rest of the country has much colder weather regularly than this "extreme" Texas cold weather event. And the solution is to winterize the power generating facilities. And this type event regularly happens in Texas every couple decades or so. Look at what happened in 1989 for example.

https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/san-antonio/weather/2021/02...

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#402

Post by jeffbee » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 1:41 AM UTC

brundolf wrote: post #381

jeffbee wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rolling outages work when you need to shed 1% of your load, not when you need to shed 80% of it. If Austin is down to critical loads only (hospitals or whatever) there may not be anything left to rotate.

There are non-critical loads all over that were never interrupted (my neighborhood, north edge of ATX). It's pretty arbitrary. Even worse: for about the first 24h there were (largely uninhabited!) commercial buildings all over the place that were fully lit up. We're talking skyscrapers. Even some unfinished skyscrapers. I think they've finally begun to address those. The charitable interpretation is that it was simpl…

Do grid operators really have controls at that level? In California they can shut off a substation or not, and that's as low as they can go except in the special case of industrial customers with demand-responsive equipment installed. If those empty skyscrapers were on the same local circuits as a hospital, perhaps it simply wasn't possible for the electric company to turn them off.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#403

Post by arrosenberg » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 1:41 AM UTC

hotsauceror wrote: post #289

gregw2 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote: All 7 developers in my Houston team (semi-geographically scattered in the city) lost power; half for >24 hrs (it's 10-25 degrees F here for the last 2-3 days). Most lost water for some stretch of time and some still don't have it. I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work t…

We had an incident early this AM and of the eight people we paged, only one had power. I’ve been without power, heat, internet, water, or septic more than 90 minutes at a time for two days. My house was 44 degrees this morning when I woke up. Sunday night we were without power or heat for seven and a half hours. Our DR plan didn’t really account for all of our staff being on the same power grid!

Remote workers just became a resiliency requirement for businesses.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#404

Post by yellow_postit » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 1:42 AM UTC

fastball wrote: post #193

yellow_postit wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree on the point about Texas extreme stance on having their own power grid. I don’t known if there’s enough micro grids in Texas to determine how well, or not, they worked in these conditions.

It's not that extreme. Texas is huge. Having it's own grid is not some support of excessively-local craziness.

Yes it’s a huge area but the Texas interconnection[1] has a long history of fierce protectionism from other parts of the national grid.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#405

Post by zamadatix » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 1:43 AM UTC

landemva wrote: post #375

t0mbstone wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frozen wind turbines aren't the problem. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-...

Natural gas doesnt really freeze, so something else is going on here. Misleading text in linked article: "We didn’t run out of natural gas, but we ran out of the ability to get natural gas. Pipelines in Texas don’t use cold insulation – so things were freezing."

https://www.genscape.com/blog/record-freeze-offs-result-wide...

It's not the natural gas itself that's freezing and the article never claimed it was. Things aren't misleading just because you didn't know about it - that's the point of articles in the first place.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#406

Post by brundolf » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 1:43 AM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #402

brundolf wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are non-critical loads all over that were never interrupted (my neighborhood, north edge of ATX). It's pretty arbitrary. Even worse: for about the first 24h there were (largely uninhabited!) commercial buildings all over the place that were fully lit up. We're talking skyscrapers. Even some unfinished skyscrapers. I think they've finally begun to address those. The charitable interpretation is that it was simpl…

Do grid operators really have controls at that level? In California they can shut off a substation or not, and that's as low as they can go except in the special case of industrial customers with demand-responsive equipment installed. If those empty skyscrapers were on the same local circuits as a hospital, perhaps it simply wasn't possible for the electric company to turn them off.

It's more that they needed to communicate with the owners of the buildings to shut off massive systems that weren't even being used, while the minority of residents who still have power are being asked to "live as if we didn't" and navigate by candlelight, etc.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#407

Post by maxerickson » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 1:44 AM UTC

gowld wrote: post #327

ip26 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, if you think about it almost all of the heat from the fire goes right up the chimney. The brick of the firebox & chimney are generally built outside the building envelope for safety reasons, so any heat in the brick doesn't warm the house. The only heat that actually makes its way into the house is the radiant heat cast from the fire itself, which is small. The smoke is poison, and unlike a furnace, gas firepl…

Why don't we run radiator water pipes across the chimney, to bring that heat back to the house?

Wood boilers are common enough. Pipes and radiators won't do all that much good if you aren't moving the water, and at that point it makes sense to optimize the whole thing for heating water with the minimum required fuel.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#408

Post by nrmitchi » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 1:46 AM UTC

s0rce wrote: post #303

mikesabbagh wrote: post #270

It is surprising that windfarms are freezing. Here in Quebec, we have windfarms that have more than 6 months a year of snow and temperatures much below the freezing point. How can they freeze? they dont use water or gaz or oil. It is only a fan and dynamo. Did water seep inside and freeze it?

Different choice of lubricants? I have no idea really, I also read they have wind power generation in Antarctica so its not a fundamental problem just a result of certain design/engineering choices.

> just a result of certain design/engineering choices

I think this is the point. Things are engineered for the environment which they are expected to operate, and to be optimized for those environments[0]. I would not expect a wind turbine that operates (and is designed to operate) in Antartica to not fail (potentially catestrophically) when operating in 100 degree Texas heat,

[0] One could (and should) argue that these systems should take climate change and more extreme weather events into account, but that is a political problem more-so than an engineering problem.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#409

Post by bstar77 » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

worker767424 wrote: post #94

The Texas-only grid was definitely part of it, and should be a lesson to people who thought the lesson from Covid is "do more locally." No, having stronger, longer distance connections is what makes you more resilient, at least when there are local problems.

No, having a distributed grid is what makes you more resilient. If every house had solar panels this would likely be a non-issue.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#410

Post by cowboysauce » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

redisman wrote: post #359

slfnflctd wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why power demand is up in TX generally, but I do know that right now a big reason for the demand is because a lot of residences have electric resistance heat only-- which is great for electric blankets, but not so much for heating all the air in your home when it's extremely cold.

Why is it not good for heating? I'm sure resistance based electric heating is very efficient. I've lived in very cold places and the heat has almost always been electric or water heated by electric. You just need radiators. Northern European countries for example use that a lot and the temperatures are often as low as -22F. Of course they build to optimize for low temperatures unlike TX.

It’s more efficient to burn natural gas directly for heat than to use it to generate electricity which is then used for heating. Typical gas turbines are around 40% efficient, plus a few percent for transmission loses. Though apparently there are some cutting edge turbines that are 60% efficient.