Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

houstonchronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 1001 posts

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#411

Post by mike_d »

txlpo78 wrote: post #204
mike_d wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not correct. Because the Texas grid is isolated, the frequency is not synced with the two other major grids and cannot import electricity at any meaningful capacity. (See http://fnetpublic.utk.edu/frequencymap.html ) Frequency conversion is a costly and difficult to scale problem. If Texas was part of the Western grid they could be drawing excess hydroelectric power from the pacific northwest right now for ex…

Nothing I said in my comment is incorrect. Texas has 5 different connections with the other grids and can import/export through them. But they are irrelevant right now because the other grids do not have enough spare capacity to send to Texas. >If Texas was part of the Western grid they could be drawing excess hydroelectric power from the pacific northwest right now for example. Texas also could have contributed to h…

> that does not mean that people living in Tulsa can pull power as needed from a dam in Washington

Not directly, but by way of demand shifting, effectively yes. Northern California is fed by Washington, SoCal by NorCal generation, etc. until you get excess capacity closer to the demand sink.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#412

Post by epistasis »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #370
epistasis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have great ways of storing electricity, it's just that they're only getting built right now, and they're getting cheaper so fast that waiting a few years will get you a 30%+ discount off the price. There are currently 17GW of batteries in the ERCOT interconnection queue for the coming years, for a grid that's only ~80GW. The ERCOT of 2025 will be massively different from the ERCOT of 2021, and it's going to mean a…

GW is a unit of power, it’s not a unit that energy storage capacity can be measured in.

Yes of course, that's trivial. Grid connections are measured in power, not in energy units.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#413

Post by oasisbob »

txlpo78 wrote: post #204
mike_d wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not correct. Because the Texas grid is isolated, the frequency is not synced with the two other major grids and cannot import electricity at any meaningful capacity. (See http://fnetpublic.utk.edu/frequencymap.html ) Frequency conversion is a costly and difficult to scale problem. If Texas was part of the Western grid they could be drawing excess hydroelectric power from the pacific northwest right now for ex…

Nothing I said in my comment is incorrect. Texas has 5 different connections with the other grids and can import/export through them. But they are irrelevant right now because the other grids do not have enough spare capacity to send to Texas. >If Texas was part of the Western grid they could be drawing excess hydroelectric power from the pacific northwest right now for example. Texas also could have contributed to h…

A good example of this is the PNW interties which move (primarily) hydro power to California from Washington and Oregon.

One system is DC. The other is AC. They both do primarily the same thing through elaborate systems.

Washington can send electricity south via AC - doesn't really mean CA and WA are functioning on the same grid.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#414

Post by nrmitchi »

landemva wrote: post #379
tpmx wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik, the way abnormal situations like these are handled in northern Europe is that the grid suppliers have agreements with the very large industrial consumers (think aluminium smelters) who agree to shut down immediately when the grid frequency goes below a certain trigger level. The way I understand it, this is useful both in time-critical emergencies (like keeping the grid at 50 Hz when a nuclear plant suddenly g…

The bitcoin mining farms claimed to shut down, so some industrial load shedding seems to be in play in Texas.

> claimed to shut down

I would guess that there is an ~0% chance any bitcoin mining operation, who's main cost is power, is still operating with power prices as astromonically high as they currently are.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#415

Post by newbie789 »

Can somebody explain as if I were a kindergartner why exactly natural gas is down by such a large amount in the state? Did the pipes freeze? Does natural gas not burn efficiently in snowy conditions? How will raising the spot price dramatically help with these physical conditions of the pipelines/other power production/distribution apparatus in such a way that providing power becomes available more quickly (if at all)? [1]

Has Texas never had weather like this in 350ish years and there was no reasonable justification for preparing for something like this?

[1]https://mobile.twitter.com/jmontforttx/status/13617035547890...

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#416

Post by gregmac »

tw04 wrote: post #232
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…

>I don't think any 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 that well. I'm curious how they didn't lose heat. Any furnace built in the last 30 years, even gas, has an electronic control board in order to ensure it doesn't accidentally turn on the gas without a functioning pilot light and/or heating element (whi…

> No electricity = no heat, regardless of natural gas supply.

You're confusing furnaces and fireplaces.

A fireplace is soemthing that sits in a living space usually with a visible flame behind glass and is designed more for aesthetics than function. They typically run using a millivolt valve for the gas supply, with the voltage generated from a thermopile sitting in the pilot flame. They're often controlled by a regular light switch or a simple two-wire mechanical thermostat.

There's natural gas and propane models, and they'll run so long as you have gas flowing.

I upgraded mine to use an older wifi thermostat, but kept a light switch on a small cable underneath so I could always use it in case of a power outage, and it's come in handy a couple times. [1]

Mine also has a mains-powered blower fan built in (that's the plug on the left), but electrically it's completely separate and controlled by its own thermostat. It turns on when a certain temperature is hit -- usually about 5-10 minutes after the fireplace is on -- and stays on for some time after the flames are off. Obviously the blower doesn't work when there's a power outage but the fireplace still generates a usable amount of heat for the room.

On the other hand, my gas forced-air furnace -- which distributes heated air via ducts around the house -- is, as you describe, entirely useless without electricity. Even if it was running without the main blower fan, it would just be heating up the air sitting in the duct coming out of it. At best it might get some heat into the house via convection but I suspect it would cut out on thermal overload before actually doing anything useful.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/secdqaR.jpg

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#417

Post by StillBored »

falcolas wrote: post #373
refurb wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure this is a truly "black swan" event. Cold fronts that bring snow and cold temperatures to Texas are becoming more and more frequent. This is simply the worst one so far .

Apparently its not, there was one in the 1940's that was worse. So its the usual "ignore any outlier we don't like" attitude that seems common in so many things. Plus, its not like this is unusual. The random unexpected heat wave in oct -> rolling blackouts. Unexpected storm during hurricane season -> power goes out for a week due to unmaintained power lines, etc.

Its why you need engineers running your grid, not some politically connected organization which seems to prioritize free market theories above delivering power.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#418

Post by sjg007 »

gregw2 wrote: post #213
gregw2 wrote: post #117

What went wrong is that the Texas legislature which owns Texas-specific grid process to avoid interference from the Feds didn't figure out how to also ensure Texas generator companies got compensated for weatherizing (and ensuring it was done). How many of the 24+6 recommendations from the NERC/FERC review of last time this happened in Texas (hint:2011) were taken up by the legislature or those at ERCOT they delegate…

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…

For natural gas you want a sealed one so effluent goes up the chimney but the heat radiates through the glass. But heat rises so you create convection. I think a fireplace is an 80% loss so for $10 spent you get $2 heat.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#419

Post by nickysielicki »

jcranmer wrote: post #70
nickysielicki wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give me a break. Actually, the whole reason for this series of outages is because Texas took the bait and installed a bunch of solar and wind instead of taking the safe route and doubling down on coal. Peak energy consumption in Texas is almost always in summer when there's a lot of AC units running -- which just happens to be when solar and wind work best. They gambled on green, paid the price in the past few days,…

> to be clear about what I'm claiming, I'm saying that if Texas invested in coal instead of making the large investments they made in solar and wind, this never would have happened. I don't see how anyone can dispute that. If I remember the statistics correctly, there is more coal power offline right now than wind power offline. If that is true, that rather debunks your theory, doesn't it?

What I'm interested in, and what I'm talking about, is judging each method of power production from its total current output relative to nameplate capacity.

All I'm really arguing is that non-renewables are able to accommodate bursty and unpredictable demand much better than renewables. For every dollar spent on solar and wind, if that built X amount of coal or NG plants, they would have such an excess of capacity that the few plants that have gone offline would be completely irrelevant.

My point isn't that Texas shouldn't have invested in renewables. It's just that this is really not an appropriate time to be lecturing Texas about renewable energy, because had they invested their money in non-renewables instead of renewables, they would likely not be in this situation.

The problem is not a lack of regulation. It gets below freezing every single year in Texas. The problem is that it doesn't get this cold in Houston every year, and they misjudged demand.

Post reply on HN