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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

#461

Post by bob1029 »

ddreier wrote: post #17
rossdavidh wrote: post #4

Texan here. I tried, on Thursday, to buy a space heater; not only was the hardware store out, they told me a list of other places around town that were also out. Most homes use natural gas for heat, but I think a lot of space heaters are probably turned on right now. I also have to wonder how an everyone-videoconference-from-home society changes electricity usage? Not saying it has a significant impact, just wonderin…

Several articles have said that only 40% of homes in Texas use natural gas for heat. https://climatecrocks.com/2021/02/14/the-eyes-of-texas-are-o...

I have lived in Texas all my life and this figure surprises me. Every home I have ever lived in or rented has had a gas furnace, even if some of the appliances are electric. I've never even lived north of ATX, so this makes even less sense to me.

Why would we be building out all these homes in the Houston area with insanely powerful gas furnaces? The home I am in right now could easily get to 80F+ in this current ambient weather if I let the furnace run constantly. But, my 5 ton AC struggles in the summer to pull 30 degrees of delta. This stuff really staggers me sometimes.

As a counterpoint, I also have a friend who lives in the downtown area with new construction (completed late 2019) and its a heat pump/resistive setup. He is on griddy and not having a good time right now.

Perhaps its some economics thing with home builders and supply chains, rather than rational application of engineering talent.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#462

Post by [deleted] »

ogre_codes wrote: post #80
mlyle wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries solve a different problem. They can smooth over daily shortfalls, but aren't so great when you have a week-long aberration. To fix that, you need significant overprovisioning or alternate means of generation. That is, if you depend upon wind and wind is screwed up for a week... batteries aren't going to let you stretch limited solar all night long.

> To fix that, you need significant overprovisioning or alternate means of generation. They have alternate means of generation... natural gas. There is a big problem with wells shutting down due to the same extremes which shut down wind. Which has caused shortages of natural gas which is doubly problematic because it's also used extensively for heating. What do you do when your backup power is vulnerable to the same…

[deleted]

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#463

Post by ubermonkey »

tgtweak wrote: post #448
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…

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…

>would not make any financial sense.

Yeah, that's what people often miss. We're not prepared for this, and don't build for it, because it almost never happens.

And it'll be 70F on Sunday.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#464

Post by stdbrouw »

bombcar wrote: post #443
brianwawok wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As an addendum, this winter I unfortunately found out that, at very low temperatures, the limiting factor might be the furnace, but it might also be the capacity of the radiators (or underfloor heating, or whatever) to shed heat. Tiny radiators or highly spaced underfloor pipes and it won't matter how fancy your furnace is, there's only so much heat it can distribute.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#465

Post by ubermonkey »

chiph wrote: post #451
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 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 offi…

Yeah, you get hosed on insulation if you buy a spec build. Custom homes are often built better, but come at a premium.

Larger townhouses -- say, 2500sqft & up -- are often zones more reasonably, at least here, such that heating/cooling can be managed with more granularity. But doing it really requires multiple units, not a single big unit.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#466

Post by heyflyguy »

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…

They were frozen. De-icing helicopters un-froze them.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#467

Post by clavalle »

bluGill wrote: post #359
jodrellblank wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the problem with incandescents here? They’re inefficient, which means they turn lots of energy into heat instead of light, which means your thermostat will turn down your heating to compensate because it needs to produce less of the desired amount of heat. In the abstract, they’re bad when you’re cooling a Texas house and they’re putting more heat into it; on a cold night a 100W resistance heater is a 100W res…

Natural gas to a powerplant is overall less energy efficient compared to natural gas to a high efficiency home furnace. This is about Texas though where high efficiency gas furnaces. In the north natural gas is the normal way to heat. I'm not sure about Texas.

I'm in Austin and my heater uses gas. Every house I've had has used gas. It's incredibly cheap around here.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#468

Post by hedora »

manyes wrote: post #418
eitland wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"? Pricing here in Norway already changes through the day. I changed my supplier yesterday to one that has an api. I'll use the current prices as an excuse to fix a few things: -…

Batteries don't work all that well at these lower temperatures. I suppose if your Tesla is in a garage that would work, though.

Teslas regulate their battery heat for this reason.

https://www.tesla.com/support/winter-driving-tips

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#469

Post by stdbrouw »

tgtweak wrote: post #375
jcranmer wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is the high tomorrow in Dallas is supposed to be about 10°F. The typical winter high for Dallas is a bit below 60°F. This means that the demand for heating is about 4-6× what it normally would be for winter.

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…

As others have pointed out, heating requirements (watt/m^2) are in fact linear which is why it's possible to more or less accurately calculate a building's insulation performance in watt/m^2/K, it's just that there's a grace zone where if it's e.g. 65F outside and you want it to be 72F inside, you might not need to heat at all because the shortfall is covered by solar gains through your windows, internal gains (cooking etc.) and energy stored as thermal mass. That is, the nonlinearity is not in heating needs, but in the efficiency of heating production and the amount of heating you get for free.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#470

Post by lotsofpulp »

ubermonkey wrote: post #460
lotsofpulp wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Houston is not a mild climate, based on how much AC usage I’ve seen there.

Conditioning an extra 2 to 12ft above your head is absolutely choosing vanity over energy efficiency.

However, most people don’t even have the choice since they’re making trade offs between various neighborhoods of various income levels, and once you get above a certain income, all the houses are made with open foyers and tall ceilings. The builders wouldn’t be able to sell the more energy efficient homes at as high of a price as the non energy efficient ones, so obviously we’re going to end up with a stock of homes where the all the heat downstairs is constantly going upstairs.

The reason the homes with higher ceilings will sell for a higher price is because people feel a certain way about them. A high ceiling has no practical benefits and is purely for aesthetics at the expense of energy efficiency. My intention isn’t to insult, but I think it is accurate. People do many things to project their status.

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