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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

#451

Post by chiph »

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…

> The upshot is that if you set the thermostat to warm the lower 2 floors to, say, 65F, the 3rd floor main bedroom will be intolerably warm and dry.

Every townhouse I've ever lived in had this problem. The thermostat is on the ground floor or 2nd floor, which results in the bedrooms upstairs being oppressively hot. I will drop the temperature by 5+ degrees before retiring for the night. I hear you about the cold office floor - I have hardwood over a slab and I'm thinking of ordering a heating pad like the one the cat has.

There are many intersecting problems here - the main one is that the standard building code in the South requires a minimum of R-15 insulation in the walls, so that's what the builders put in to remain cost-competitive. You can't get much more than that in a wall cavity framed with 2x4's. Builders and owners need to be incentivized to super-insulate. Not necessarily to a "Net Zero" standard, but increasing the minimum to R-21 (which requires going to 2x6 framing) would help in both heating & cooling seasons.

The other problem is that I have had only a single heat pump for the entire house. It would be much better to have a variable-refrigerant-flow (VRF) system where you have multiple "heads" with their own thermostats that run independently (commonly called a Mini-Split although there are differences). And then you can close the doors to rooms that aren't being used, dropping the thermostat in them to reduce usage.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#452

Post by meowster »

ubermonkey wrote: post #428
lotsofpulp wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You seem nice.

OP doesn't seem mean at all, just accurate that open floorplans these days are built poorly. When I was shopping for houses, I never saw a good open floorplan. They all had weird angles, flows that didn't make sense, and zero symmetry, and the asymmetry was terrible to. Open floorplans these days aren't built to be nice, they're built to sell.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#453

Post by bob1029 »

bombcar wrote: post #332
Animats wrote: post #251

59.774Hz? That's a huge frequency error. I saw 59.6 go by. 29.5 seconds behind. Those are load-shedding levels. Unusually cold weather and heat pumps. Ouch. Back up to 60.080. They'll run a little fast if they can to make the remaining synchronous clocks catch up.

Up to 30 seconds behind again, was as low as 10 just recently. 800MW of reserve remains. I wonder what "Current System Inertia" is.

From ERCOT's materials:

Power system inertia is defined as the ability of a power system to oppose changes in system frequency due to resistance provided by rotating masses. The level of inertia present in a system at any time is dependent on the amount of kinetic energy stored in rotating masses of synchronously-interconnected machines, including various types of generators as well as synchronously operating motor loads.

See: http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/key_documents_lists/141324/... (you may need a VPN to USA IP to access this)

Effectively, this is the amount of kinetic energy in the grid at any given point in time.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#454

Post by Ajedi32 »

fluidcruft wrote: post #433
Reason077 wrote: post #426

Browsing from the UK, I got: "Access Denied Error 16 www.ercot.com 2021-02-15 14:23:49 UTC If you believe you have a valid business reason for accessing ERCOT resources, please contact the ERCOT HelpDesk at 512-248-6800 or 1-866-870-8124 (USA) or HelpDesk@ercot.com. Your IP: 148.252.xxx.xxx Error code: 16 > This request was blocked by the security rules" Using a VPN with a US IP address, I was able to view the ercot…

I'm in the US and was blocked because I have firefox set to request https. SSL Not Supported Error 29 www.ercot.com 2021-02-15 14:37:28 UTC If you believe you have a valid business reason for accessing ERCOT resources, please contact the ERCOT HelpDesk at 512-248-6800 or 1-866-870-8124 (USA) or HelpDesk@ercot.com. Please provide the HelpDesk with the information supplied below. Your IP: x.x.x.x Error code: 29 > SSL i…

I got that message as well. Seems kinda silly given that the error page was delivered over SSL. They even have a valid certificate.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#455

Post by imtringued »

macintux wrote: post #421
jabl wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you'll find the usual blowhards explaining how Biden is personally responsible for this.

Nah, but I’m sure they’ll be shouting about how wonderful coal is vs that unreliable renewable power.

And gas somehow didn't fail?

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#456

Post by sneak »

genewitch wrote: post #358
sneak wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The one I was thinking of is https://youtube.com/c/FascinatingHorror - they aren't quite as in depth but cover a lot of different events.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#457

Post by ubermonkey »

bombcar wrote: post #441
lotsofpulp wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well, as childfree people, that was an appeal.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#458

Post by martinald »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #51
martinald wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not really. As far as I'm aware HVDC links are more efficient than AC links (even with AC/DC/AC conversion).

It looks like a tradeoff. The only place in the world doing a significant amount of long distance transmission is China. Their wind and coal resources are in the west, and demand is in the east, and transporting coal by rail just further increases air quality problems in the east. Based on what they are implementing, HVDC make sense at 800km+, and AC for shorter runs. I think it comes down to HVDC requires less condu…

Yes, exactly. But for example interconnecting Houston with AZ or NM power plants, I think HVDC will have fewer losses than AC. Could be wrong thoguh.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#459

Post by netsec_burn »

pridkett wrote: post #445
noodlenotes wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

Their press release from Feb 24th indicates that yesterday they were frozen. Perhaps not today, however. http://www.ercot.com/news/releases/show/225151

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#460

Post by ubermonkey »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #435
ubermonkey wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem nice.

It wasn’t a personal comment. I’ve seen it in all the houses built in the past 3 decades, coast to coast. Makes no sense thermodynamically. Obviously it sells better than a house that wastes less energy.

"So that people can feel rich and high status" is an insulting way to phrase "has a different set of architectural preferences than I do."

It heats and cools far more efficiently than the traditional homes in Houston (mostly pier and beam construction). There's more to home appeal than thermodynamics, especially in a mild climate.

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