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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

#551

Post by o-__-o »

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…

Hey neighbor, you live in the heights? You are describing my house and neighborhood :D

Still have power here

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#552

Post by brianwawok »

stdbrouw wrote: post #464
bombcar wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Radiators are an alternative to, not a part of, a forced air gas furnace.

Gas furnace burns gas, blows around hot air.

Radiator heats water, and pushes that water around to heat rooms via radiators.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#553

Post by dzhiurgis »

toast0 wrote: post #206
dzhiurgis wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your AC has not heating function (I assume everyone in Texas has AC)?

I'm guessing most Texas AC systems don't have a reversing valve, and a defrost system and all the other goodies you need to run it for heat. It adds to the equipment cost when many years heat isn't needed, and if the temperatures are 10F, you'd still likely need other heat sources.

> a defrost system

What does a defrost system includes? My dad manages a place where defrost system on one of the devices broke. Technician replaced something and hence it was fixed. IIRC it was temperature sensor. All defrost system does is periodically warms up the outside grill basically. It used to get stuck at -15C or so.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#554

Post by svnpenn »

carapace wrote: post #546
svnpenn wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, real fuckin funny. I've had no power for 8 hours and it's 9 degrees outside.

It's a quote from "Back to the Future": https://backtothefuture.fandom.com/wiki/Jigowatt

I don't care.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#555

Post by ubermonkey »

aftbit wrote: post #509
tgtweak wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I remember my parents covering my old leaky single-pane windows in our first house with plastic in the winter. It looks goofy, but it's cheap and it really helps. We also had storm windows that we'd replace our screens with in the winter. We later moved to a house with newer windows that removed this need, and adult me has a ground source heat pump so I'm toasty even with the 15°F weather here.

Anticipating the cold snap, my wife ordered insulating curtains for the big windows on the front of the house, to hang behind the decorative ones.

I figured it was more an example of "must do something" than "activity that will actually help," but I was proven wrong IMMEDIATELY. They've made a material difference (no pun intended), and I'm said I said no when she asked if I wanted some for my office.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#556

Post by ubermonkey »

o-__-o wrote: post #551
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…

Hey neighbor, you live in the heights? You are describing my house and neighborhood :D Still have power here

Montrose, near Taft & Fairview.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#557

Post by pdx_flyer »

Some other thoughts:

1) Preventative maintenance on large units is planned 5-6 years out and in Texas typically takes place in the fall/winter as that is the lowest demand.

2) These units cannot be brought up (quickly at least).

3) Severe winters like these in Texas are extremely rare. Homes have been built for the conditions that have existed up to now. For example, I grew up in Houston and then moved to the PNW later in life. I experienced snow a total of two times while living in Houston and they were really more like glorified ice storms. I can remember Dallas and north Texas getting bigger, colder storms but even then they weren't awful.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#558

Post by kasey_junk »

bombcar wrote: post #444
kasey_junk wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The screen in my kitchen is a dakboard (https://dakboard.com/site) we largely use it as a digital picture frame and calendar but it supports querying/parsing json out of the box. So to get the price on it I have it hit my providers json api https://hourlypricing.comed.com/hp-api/.

For the charts in my office I have a Prometheus/Grafana setup at home for a variety of things and built a bridge to the comed data for Prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/comed_exporter). For usage data I have a neat gadget called a Rainforest Automation Eagle (https://www.rainforestautomation.com/compare-emu-and-eagle/) that reads my smart meters radio signal. It exposes an xml api and I wrote a bridge to Prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/reagle).

Once it’s all in Prometheus the Grafana dashboards are pretty straight forward affairs.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#559

Post by toast0 »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #553
toast0 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing most Texas AC systems don't have a reversing valve, and a defrost system and all the other goodies you need to run it for heat. It adds to the equipment cost when many years heat isn't needed, and if the temperatures are 10F, you'd still likely need other heat sources.

> a defrost system What does a defrost system includes? My dad manages a place where defrost system on one of the devices broke. Technician replaced something and hence it was fixed. IIRC it was temperature sensor. All defrost system does is periodically warms up the outside grill basically. It used to get stuck at -15C or so.

That's the gist. It's not much, but if the outside unit is iced over, there's not going to be a lot of heat exchange into the working fluid, so you're not going to get heat into your conditioned environment.

So, a defrost system will include a temperature sensor, and a resistance heater, and often something to signal the inside unit to run the emergency/auxiliary heat until (unless) the outside unit can get up to a temperature where it will work.

Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

#560

Post by PeterisP »

makomk wrote: post #354
ChrisIsTaken wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Energy loss through an insulator is exactly linear to temperature. The problem is that people who would have otherwise tolerated 50F temperatures without heating by putting on a sweater are pulling their old oil column heater out of the storage.

One other problem is that one of the ways people have been making their heating more efficient is by using heat pumps, and their efficiency gain drops off with lower temperatures until they become no more efficient than the resistive heaters they replaced during the kind of unusually cold weather Texas is apparently seeing. This makes the peak to average power usage problem even worse.

Are their heat pumps linked to outside if their efficiency is so affected? The models I see generally pipe underground, where the temperature is mostly stable and isn't affected by a week of unusually cold weather.
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