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What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

houstonchronicle.com

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Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#591

Post by gkop »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #537
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering how rolling outages on the proposed schedules were supposed to work in this situation. If they gave everyone power 50% of the time, everyone would crank everything they have to the max during those periods to get some heat into their buildings. Unless their total ability to consume energy is less than 2x their average consumption, it's not going to help. To have any effect on overall power consumption,…

You are right if they were trying to reduce load 50%, that's basically impossible for the reasons you mention. They were only trying to get it down 20% and it might have worked if they could have effectively rolled the blackouts. A lot of people have natural gas heat. It doesn't work when the power is out (no ignition, no thermostat, and no fan), but doesn't put a huge load on the electric grid when it is on. For a w…

> A lot of people have natural gas heat. It doesn't work when the power is out

That doesn’t have to be the case. I have gas heat [0], that works fine when our power is out.

(Not intending to detract from the rest of your point)

[0] a basic Williams wall furnace on a 50 year old thermostat.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#592

Post by woeirua »

bassman9000 wrote: post #269
hahahahe wrote: post #245

Can someone explain how the ninth largest economy in the world where it is dominated by the largest energy companies in the world failed so miserably? This is all self-inflicted.

Simplistic, but: http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/181766/IntGenbyFuel20... 1/4 of the mix is wind, and turbines were frozen. Maintenance in extreme condition not done, because either they didn't think it was needed, or because they didn't want to pay for it.

Not true. Stop spreading misinformation.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#593

Post by zamadatix »

bouncycastle wrote: post #532
zamadatix wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if all of the bitcoin mining in the world happened in TX and 0% of them shut down it'd still just be 1/4 the normal power draw in the state (121 TWh vs 429 TWh), far less than the demand increase due to the cold or current production/demand gap.

Still keeps the floor price of electricity up as some would probably not bother turning off in the case of an astronomical bitcoin price. (Read the article Yahoo, they are in fact keeping some on!) Also I'm assuming 429 TWh is when it's at full capacity. You have to quote the number for the current crippled capacity for a fair comparison.

429 TWh is average yearly usage, current "crippled" usage is 77% the yearly average usage, so 100% worldwide bitcoin usage would only account for ~1/3 the current "crippled" power delivery.

Worldwide mining would have to pull a hell of a lot more than ~1/4 (of TX) of ~1/10 (TX of the US) ~1/7 (US of world) to be setting the price floor of electricity.

http://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/load note some figures are in power (watts) and energy (watt hours)

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#594

Post by woeirua »

nickysielicki wrote: post #427
teraflop wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even worse than that, because it's not even that there's no historical data to draw from! It got just as cold as this back in December 1989, resulting in power shortages and rolling blackouts, because of increased demand and reduced generation capacity. And then it happened again in February 2011, for almost exactly the same reasons, despite the weather not being quite as severe. https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/F…

It gets below freezing every year in Texas. But in the biggest city in Texas -- Houston, with a metro population of 7 million, it does not. This is unprecedented in the modern era. Statewide load on the grid, for this time of year, is unreasonably high. Black swan.

There are objective meteorological records that definitively prove that you are wrong.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#595

Post by creato »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #382
creato wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop giving cover to politicians that think government always sucks and private business is always better? I think that's true most of the time, but not when it comes to things like this. Preparing for a once in decades event is something private business has a hard time doing without getting eaten by more aggressive competitors. The only way to get this kind of preparedness is to have it be part of the level playing…

What can we do with our unique skills that every other American cannot?

I don't understand where you are going with this. I can think of two significant things that would make sense to do here:

- More transmission lines with the rest of the US to spread the load.

- Improve the natural gas infrastructure to better withstand freezing temperatures.

Neither one of these things are about unique skills, let alone ours.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#596

Post by snowwindwaves »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #507
newbie789 wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, to answer my specific questions 1. So basically, this is the worst winter in the history of Texas to such an extent that nobody could have possibly predicted this? That sucks. 2. Can you answer my question about the spot price increase? What does that accomplish in immediate terms? As a sub-question, the article that I'm asking about says that electricity generators haven't been able to make money for over a deca…

>So basically, this is the worst winter in the history of Texas to such an extent that nobody could have possibly predicted this? More like "to the extent that people who were actually accountable for how money was spent couldn't justify spending the money to hedge against it". Could you justify to your boss spending 5% per year on a project to hedge against something that happens every 50-100yr and has a 10% chance…

Plus they are not really screwed, they lost 5 days revenue from not being able to pump/generate, surely at elevated prices - but these businesses will not feel this event in a negative way on their annual report

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#597

Post by [deleted] »

JohnCohorn wrote: post #453
slfnflctd wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why power demand is up in TX generally, but I do know that right now a big reason for the demand is because a lot of residences have electric resistance heat only-- which is great for electric blankets, but not so much for heating all the air in your home when it's extremely cold.

Lived in TX all my life. Every residence I’ve seen has had a heat pump for decades. The the thing is though it switches to resistive heat at something like 20F when they are no longer efficient. Rarely a concern in TX, most of the time we’re complaining it’s over 100F!

[deleted]

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#598

Post by 8note »

gregmac wrote: post #416
tw04 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't think any lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well. I'm curious how they didn't lose heat. Any furnace built in the last 30 years, even gas, has an electronic control board in order to ensure it doesn't accidentally turn on the gas without a functioning pilot light and/or heating element (whi…

> No electricity = no heat, regardless of natural gas supply. You're confusing furnaces and fireplaces. A fireplace is soemthing that sits in a living space usually with a visible flame behind glass and is designed more for aesthetics than function. They typically run using a millivolt valve for the gas supply, with the voltage generated from a thermopile sitting in the pilot flame. They're often controlled by a regu…

For a full on description of how a good portion of furnaces, tech connections made a video not long ago: https://youtu.be/lBVvnDfW2Xo

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#599

Post by bushbaba »

arrosenberg wrote: post #403
hotsauceror wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had an incident early this AM and of the eight people we paged, only one had power. I’ve been without power, heat, internet, water, or septic more than 90 minutes at a time for two days. My house was 44 degrees this morning when I woke up. Sunday night we were without power or heat for seven and a half hours. Our DR plan didn’t really account for all of our staff being on the same power grid!

Remote workers just became a resiliency requirement for businesses.

It already was. 24x7x365 geo redundancy SRE and Ops teams is pretty common place.

Texas was actually a preferred location as the time zone allowed both west coast and east coast work hours.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#600

Post by 8note »

beerandt wrote: post #392
tw04 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't think any lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well. I'm curious how they didn't lose heat. Any furnace built in the last 30 years, even gas, has an electronic control board in order to ensure it doesn't accidentally turn on the gas without a functioning pilot light and/or heating element (whi…

Being close to the gulf a lot of people have generators that are likely big enough to power at least their fridge and one or more window/portable AC units. (For hurricanes.) That size is usually big enough to run a blower and control board (and maybe a few other circuits), but it wouldn't come close to powering an electric heating element. But having a gas heater makes it all doable. That's what we do, anyway.

Maybe not a heating element, but heat punp?
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