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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

#441

Post by bombcar »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #427
ubermonkey wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greetings from Texas. Yeah, all that is true. You build based on how things usually are, or at least usually WERE when the dwelling was built. I live in Houston -- very close to downtown, so I'm only about 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. This makes it VERY FUCKING WEIRD INDEED that my entire yard is covered in snow, and it is 16F outside. This is NOT Houston weather. It's almost unprecedented -- it's certainly neve…

> The first problem is just distribution. Our house has a modern 'open' style floorplan, with soaring ceilings in the middle (living) floor. Heat, of course, rises. This style of house made so that people can feel rich and high status while wasting enormous amounts of energy to heat and cool is an affront to our future generations. And it’s almost inescapable unless you’re interested in custom building or buying an o…

I hate open concept with enough fury to heat all of Texas to boiling. They’re clearly built and sold to people who never have had to try to keep kids out of things.

And even worse are houses badly “opened up” - thereby ruining whatever design was originally in place.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#442

Post by kasey_junk »

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"?

I have 2 charts running in my office all day. One is energy load and one is energy pricing. I also have the current energy price displayed on a screen in our kitchen.

This has worked to change our habits pretty well. For instance we now consider it “expensive” to run the dishwasher during the day. We’ll do it if necessary but there is now a mental barrier to doing so.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#443

Post by bombcar »

brianwawok wrote: post #431
stdbrouw wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, heating is either switched off/on depending on a thermostat ("bang-bang") or in more sophisticated systems is regulated according to need (modulating control). It might be on 24/7 regardless of whether it's hot or cold, but it's not going to use the same amount of power.

My furnace, which is common in mid level units, is two phase. It’s off, low, high. Basically it starts by modulating off and low. Once low is on 24/7 and it needs more heat, it modules low/high. At peak heat it’s just high all the time. Upside to being in Indiana is our furnaces are made for this. I think I can keep my house at 70 down to like -30F outside. It’s a pretty expensive furnace though, wouldn’t make sense…

Even a cheap thirty year old furnace can do that - it was able to keep my house at 80° during the -40 (no need to specify; they’re the same that low!) last year. I actually intentionally drove it to 80 to give me thermal mass if needed but it turned out not to be necessary.

Burning gas is insanely thermodynamically active.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#444

Post by bombcar »

kasey_junk wrote: post #442
joosters wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

I have 2 charts running in my office all day. One is energy load and one is energy pricing. I also have the current energy price displayed on a screen in our kitchen. This has worked to change our habits pretty well. For instance we now consider it “expensive” to run the dishwasher during the day. We’ll do it if necessary but there is now a mental barrier to doing so.

This is amusingly interesting to me. I’d love to know more about your setup and the results make sense (I’ve considered installing a second dishwasher to be able to handle an entire days worth of dishes overnight) but it also seems somehow slightly dystopian.

I agree with the note later in the thread that the solution is powerwall like things for demand smoothing / moving.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#445

Post by pridkett »

noodlenotes wrote: post #217
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…

Texas has the equipment, but it's all frozen due to an extreme weather event. 1. The extreme cold is driving up demand to heat homes which is usually done in part by natural gas but 2. The cold has frozen natural gas pipes and wells, driving up the cost of gas 33x. 3. People are trying to heat their homes with electricity but 4. Wind turbines are frozen, limiting capacity, AND those sky high gas prices are limiting w…

Most of this is correct, but thankfully, wind turbines do not appear to be frozen. In fact, current wind power to the grid is 4300MW. The predicted level is about 2450MW for right now. That’s difference amounts to the entire reserve power in their grid. You can see this on the ERCOT page (it’s a popup which is hard to link from mobile). If wind wasn’t doing so well things would be even more painful.

Everything else you said appears to be spot on.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#446

Post by jeffbee »

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…

Texas fuels mix in 2019 was 20% coal, 47% natural gas. That's shocking, yes, but not green.

California's mix is 3% coal (2019 figures; in 2021 it is zero) and 34% natural gas, for comparison.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#447

Post by bob1029 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #437
bloaf wrote: post #31

Natural gas prices have been absolutely wild the past few days. https://www.naturalgasintel.com/weekly-natural-gas-prices-so... If you're not used to their bizarre units of volume the key takaway is this: Quantities of gas that usually sell for ~ $3 were selling for over $300 on Friday/Saturday.

That price volatility is an interesting thing. It could actually accelerate the transition to renewables in places like Texas. Gas for peaker plants becomes a lot less attractive when the price can jump by 100x when it is most needed. If that becomes a regular thing, people will want other options. And of course such options are readily available in the market now in the form of e.g. solar + battery that you can inst…

Battery storage is wholly inadequate for this current scenario. We need reliable baseload capacity for prolonged demand cycles like this. Texas being frozen over for days on end is not the same as dealing with the duck curve on an intraday basis in the summer.

Running your AC on batteries for a few hours in the afternoon is a completely different ballgame than trying to heat your home for 72 hours straight.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#448

Post by tgtweak »

ubermonkey wrote: post #412
tgtweak wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to be a combination of many things (a perfect storm...): • Dwellings are not insulated to the same level as their northern counterparts. Over 60% of houses in Texas have single pane glass. • Texas seems to rely substantially on heat pumps for residential heating, with fallback to resistive heating. At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - m…

Greetings from Texas. Yeah, all that is true. You build based on how things usually are, or at least usually WERE when the dwelling was built. I live in Houston -- very close to downtown, so I'm only about 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. This makes it VERY FUCKING WEIRD INDEED that my entire yard is covered in snow, and it is 16F outside. This is NOT Houston weather. It's almost unprecedented -- it's certainly neve…

I'll add that up here in the great north - we also use combined air conditioner/heat pumps but in most cases spring for the "low temperature" models with a built in defroster and higher pressure refrigerant - allowing them to heat down to -18°f. This would almost never make sense in a southern climate where it happens once every 20 years. Likewise, investing in any high efficiency/dual-source heating setup would not make any financial sense.

Any Texans looking for some guerrilla insulation/heating techniques:

Put up some painters plastic on the inside frames of Windows (with dual sided tape) as this acts like a very rudimentary dual-pane window. Kits exist for this also (apologies for the Canadian link: https://www.amazon.ca/3M-2141W-6-Indoor-Window-Insulator/dp/... )

Next I would look into a propane space heater (sometimes referred to as a garage/barn heater). These can be operated on a standard 20lb tank and can keep a house warm for a day or two on a single tank. Co2 levels are minimal but you should still make sure you have a decent co2 sensor nearby.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#449

Post by etimberg »

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.

Even higher this morning. Up to ~ $6000/MWh or $6/kWh. http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/contours/rtmLmp.html

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#450

Post by duxup »

bombcar wrote: post #399
throwaway9870 wrote: post #390

What I don't understand is that it sounds like the utilities were unprepared for the cold because the windmills and gas lines froze up. But the same tech is used in Canada fine because it sounds like they plan for the cold and have equipment options designed to deal with ice, etc. So, you might immediately think - ah, climate change strikes again! But then I hear this is only a low temp in the last 30-40yrs. Who does…

People may claim to prepare for a once a century event but since it only happens once a century it’s hard to determine if it’s actually prepared for. Half the houses don’t even have gas heat - because it’s never been needed. What we have here is asking to a earthquake hitting the Midwest - sure it’s known it could happen and there are plans for it - but they’ve never been tested.

Yeah I imagine any once a century event is pretty hard to prepare for. Sure you're covered generally for X, Y, Z but it can play out in so many other ways.
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