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Texas electricity maximum renewables record

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Re: Texas electricity maximum renewables record

#51

Post by watwut »

jjulius wrote: post #41
thrance wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are we wasting so much time on this website needing to debunk every reheated conservative talking points? What is the moderation doing?

That's not so much the responsibility of actual mods like dang. It seems like the community moderation, eg up/downvotes, is doing the job just fine here - you've responded to the lowest-ranked comment in this thread, and it's currently greyed out. The system's working.

Actual mods allowed most thought out anti-conservative posts to be flagged. (Less thought out remained.)

Re: Texas electricity maximum renewables record

#52

Post by [deleted] »

meandthewallaby wrote: post #25
hk1337 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> West TX FYI, there actually is a city called West, so it would usually appear as "West, TX" or West TX". It's actually between Dallas and Austin though and not in the west.

I assume you're just correcting capitalization, but for clarity's sake, the aforementioned Bitcoin mines are in west TX, the region with oil derricks, wind turbines, and tumbleweeds, and not West, TX, the town with the Little Czech Stop and delicious kolaches.

[deleted]

Re: Texas electricity maximum renewables record

#53

Post by toomuchtodo »

lowwave wrote: post #32
hk1337 wrote: post #10

https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards

Getting this on the link and their homepage. Maybe AI bot blocking? Normal NON Tor or VPN. If you believe you have a valid business reason for accessing ERCOT resources, please contact the ERCOT Service Desk at ServiceDesk@ercot.com.

They geoblock non US IPs at a WAF.

Re: Texas electricity maximum renewables record

#54

Post by [deleted] »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #23
magicalist wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but we need a lot more nuclear that can be dialed up to compensate for renewables going offline The problem wasn't the renewables going offline, they dipped in production due to not being winterized, but that was well modelled and they actually outperformed their expected output. The problem, as mentioned in toomuchtodo's links, was the nuclear and gas plants going offline because they weren't winterized and trying…

ERCOT was also load shedding major circuits that fed fossil gas compressor stations (which fed downstream fossil gas generation), leading to a generation death spiral. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41787696 (previous comment I wrote with citations)

[deleted]

Re: Texas electricity maximum renewables record

#55

Post by vel0city »

drob518 wrote: post #48
martinpw wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we need a lot more nuclear that can be dialed up to compensate for renewables going offline during certain weather conditions If you want something to compensate for intermittency, nuclear seems like the worst option. It implies you have nuclear plants sitting offline until needed, or being ramped up and down. My understanding is that you really want to run nuclear plants 24/7 at full output.

You don’t have nuclear totally offline except when refueling (and MSRs might solve even that). Nuclear can dial up down relatively easily. , however. Simplistically, you just pull/push the rods out/in (yea, there’s more to it than that, and it doesn’t react instantly, but roughly speaking, that’s it).

Its not a matter of if the nuclear reactor can increase or decrease its output, its the economics of building a very expensive machine that you then only use some of the time. A massive chunk of the cost of the nuclear plant is actually having the plant and the people working on it, if you spent all that money and paid all these people to work there but only using half its actual capacity you've practically doubled the cost.

To my understanding the per-kWh cost of the fuel for nuclear isn't the real expense, but smarter minds in the subject please feel free to correct me.

Re: Texas electricity maximum renewables record

#56

Post by AndrewDucker »

drob518 wrote: post #11
AndrewDucker wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or build more renewables. If that's the cheapest thing to do, of course.

Well, then you need some diversity strategy such that you aren’t just building more stuff that also goes offline. And you would need it to be able to flex up in a controlled fashion to make up for losses in other geographies. That’s hard with wind and solar. They don’t flex very well. When things are going well, you get what you get. There’s no way to make the wind blow harder or make the sun shine more brightly when…

Depends on whether they go to zero, or just drop to 50% of normal output. If it's the latter, then it might be cheaper to build twice as much wind as you'd need at optimal times than to build a nuclear plant. You'd need to do the maths for the specific situation.

(And also if they drop to 0% for an occasional hour then you can use batteries. If once every five years they drop to 0% for two weeks then you absolutely need to have something else that can fill that gap.)

Re: Texas electricity maximum renewables record

#57

Post by vel0city »

verall wrote: post #20
drob518 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you ignore grid failures, the fact is that power output from renewables drops during the winter. That’s just a fact. That drop must be made up by other things (natural gas, nuclear, or coal, in Texas, very little hydro). I’m all for more renewables, but we need a lot more nuclear that can be dialed up to compensate for renewables going offline during certain weather conditions.

In Texas doesn't electricity use also drop during the winter? Almost everyone I know in Texas has gas heat and the winters are mild while summers are scorching. I use about 3X the electricity in summer months vs winter. I would guess nearly all residential energy use in Texas follows this pattern.

A lot of newer construction and especially apartment buildings will end up using resistive heating, the least efficient option.

Sadly, getting an HVAC person willing to install a heat pump system in Texas seems to be quite a challenge.

Some of the highest peak energy usages the state has ever seen have been in the winter. For instance, that 2021 winter storm absolutely crushed the records of energy usage in the state before it all crashed, and every year after that has seen even higher amounts of usage in the winter since.

Re: Texas electricity maximum renewables record

#58

Post by jeffbee »

philipkglass wrote: post #16
drob518 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you ignore grid failures, the fact is that power output from renewables drops during the winter. That’s just a fact. That drop must be made up by other things (natural gas, nuclear, or coal, in Texas, very little hydro). I’m all for more renewables, but we need a lot more nuclear that can be dialed up to compensate for renewables going offline during certain weather conditions.

Texas is building more grid scale battery storage than any other state: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/chart-us... This year EIA again expects Texas to outpace California, only now by an even wider margin than last year. The Lone Star State could build nearly 7 GW of utility-scale storage in 2025 compared to California’s 4.2 GW.

Note though that this is largely because Texas uses a crazy amount of energy compared to California. Some due to local climate, some due to lack of efficiency regs, and a lot due to lack of rooftop solar (going back to their weather again). California's record for grid demand served by batteries is 4x the record of Texas. California's renewables-to-load ratio is double Texas's. Again this is significantly due to California having over 5x the rooftop solar of Texas, which lowers grid demand in the daytime.

Re: Texas electricity maximum renewables record

#59

Post by tocs3 »

vel0city wrote: post #57
verall wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Texas doesn't electricity use also drop during the winter? Almost everyone I know in Texas has gas heat and the winters are mild while summers are scorching. I use about 3X the electricity in summer months vs winter. I would guess nearly all residential energy use in Texas follows this pattern.

A lot of newer construction and especially apartment buildings will end up using resistive heating, the least efficient option. Sadly, getting an HVAC person willing to install a heat pump system in Texas seems to be quite a challenge. Some of the highest peak energy usages the state has ever seen have been in the winter. For instance, that 2021 winter storm absolutely crushed the records of energy usage in the state…

Sadly, getting an HVAC person willing to install a heat pump system in Texas seems to be quite a challenge.

We had a heat pump installed here in central Texas about a year ago. It replaced a heat pump 40+ years old. There are a couple local installers (in Blanco, TX) and I regularly see adds for others in surrounding areas (San Antonio / Austin). It is expensive (I have no idea related to other areas but seemed expensive). It is not hard to get a heat pump around here.

Re: Texas electricity maximum renewables record

#60

Post by hk1337 »

meandthewallaby wrote: post #25
hk1337 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> West TX FYI, there actually is a city called West, so it would usually appear as "West, TX" or West TX". It's actually between Dallas and Austin though and not in the west.

I assume you're just correcting capitalization, but for clarity's sake, the aforementioned Bitcoin mines are in west TX, the region with oil derricks, wind turbines, and tumbleweeds, and not West, TX, the town with the Little Czech Stop and delicious kolaches.

I didn’t really mean it as corrective. I just thought it was interesting how subtle differences can completely change, in this case, a location.
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