What went wrong with the Texas power grid? • Hacker News Board

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#61

Post by afavour » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 11:41 PM UTC

nickysielicki wrote: post #30

kbar13 wrote: post #10

is this the wakeup call that texans need to acknowledge that climate change isn't a coastal elite type thing, and that it affects us all and requires investment from all of us? imo texas is in a great spot to capitalize on the shift to green tech. they have strong engineering talent, large investments from the energy sector. car manufacturers are already clamoring to be the next to go fully electric. get your leaders…

Give me a break. Actually, the whole reason for this series of outages is because Texas took the bait and installed a bunch of solar and wind instead of taking the safe route and doubling down on coal. Peak energy consumption in Texas is almost always in summer when there's a lot of AC units running -- which just happens to be when solar and wind work best. They gambled on green, paid the price in the past few days,…

…but the primary reason for the current outages is that fossil fuel plants failed. Wind power etc has also failed but is a rounding error in terms of lost production.

> if Texas invested in coal instead of making the large investments they made in solar and wind, this never would have happened.

If they invested that money in coal and failed to winterise it in the same way they failed to winterise the other plants then there would be absolutely zero difference.

This is kind of a meta point and probably sounds patronising, but you’ve just said a bunch of stuff that’s flat out wrong. It’s time to start questioning your information diet. Where are you being fed disinformation from? What can you do to diversify your sources of news?

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#62

Post by maxerickson » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 11:41 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #7

daenney wrote: post #2

Choice quote from the article: “The ERCOT grid has collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union,” said Hirs. “It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances.”

Which confuses me, as it follows a statement about how energy has been deregulated. Of course, deregulation would also reduce some of the incentives for maintaining preparation for "100 year winter" storms. Much like how hospitals reduced the number of beds based on their average case loads, not the uncommon-but-not-unheard-of peaks.

In the US, licensed hospital beds are pretty heavily regulated.

https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/con-certificate-of-need...

And then Medicare won't pay any old place for services (which is something that would impact many potential hospital sites).

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#63

Post by i_am_proteus » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 11:41 PM UTC

Lots of folks in these comments seem to want to use this event to litigate wind vs. solar vs. gas vs. nuclear vs. coal, but it seems like, across the board, power generation facilities in Texas were simply unprepared to operate in such low temperatures.

All of these technologies can and do work well in very cold climates.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#64

Post by gitgreen » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 11:42 PM UTC

roywiggins wrote: post #39

sokoloff wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "proper winterizing" for a state where the 99th percentile design temperature is mostly 25-30ºF? Properly sized heating systems should run 24 hours a day when the temps are well below the design temp. If almost all of those systems are electric (because they are simple and cheap to install and don't get a ton of use), you get a lot of constant demand for electricity. Smart load-shedding (to dump large 240VAC…

Long-range interconnects probably would help, the rest of the US isn't having this problem, just Texas's mini-grid.

The regional grid above TX is also instituting rolling blackouts due to this weather.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#65

Post by huffmsa » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 11:42 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #16

stevenwoo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where would one build them? Since the USA has no long term nuclear waste storage plan, the current plan is to store at the plants for the most part which is a huge NIMBY issue. IIRC Texas went mostly in on gas/wind because of prevailing prices for the different fuel/plant options. This article gives a bit more data about current generation sources in Texas. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/02/16/tex…

NIMBYs are not an impediment to building nuclear. The first impediment is finding a funding for a project of a class that has a huge chance of being a multi-billion dollar economic disaster. If you can find the money, the problem is actually completing it, and continuing to find new funding as build times go to 2-3x initial estimates, and costs balloon to 2-5x initial estimates. There are plenty of sites that welcome…

They are to building the waste facility you need for long term storage of spent fuel.

See Harry Reid vs Yucca Mountain

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#66

Post by jeffbee » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 11:43 PM UTC

ranrotx wrote: post #49

sokoloff wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "proper winterizing" for a state where the 99th percentile design temperature is mostly 25-30ºF? Properly sized heating systems should run 24 hours a day when the temps are well below the design temp. If almost all of those systems are electric (because they are simple and cheap to install and don't get a ton of use), you get a lot of constant demand for electricity. Smart load-shedding (to dump large 240VAC…

Yep, this is the thing no one is talking about. Dallas has easily added 10k apartment units in the past 5 years. Almost all of them are all electric (no gas heating). Considering it’s more energy efficient to cool with Air Conditioning on the hottest summer days than it is to heat with electricity in the winter, it’s no wonder the grid collapsed when the region was below freezing for several days and some generating…

Pretty sure you are off by a large factor. It looks like Dallas added almost 300k apartments in the last 5 years.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#67

Post by tryonenow » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 11:44 PM UTC

kbar13 wrote: post #10

is this the wakeup call that texans need to acknowledge that climate change isn't a coastal elite type thing, and that it affects us all and requires investment from all of us? imo texas is in a great spot to capitalize on the shift to green tech. they have strong engineering talent, large investments from the energy sector. car manufacturers are already clamoring to be the next to go fully electric. get your leaders…

A single cold snap is no more evidence for climate change than it is against global warming. The earth is huge, climate is chaotic and oscillatory with large variance, you need many data points over, at a minimum, decades (though centuries or millennia may be more appropriate) to determine with certainty that the climate is changing.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#68

Post by daenney » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 11:44 PM UTC

nickysielicki wrote: post #30

kbar13 wrote: post #10

is this the wakeup call that texans need to acknowledge that climate change isn't a coastal elite type thing, and that it affects us all and requires investment from all of us? imo texas is in a great spot to capitalize on the shift to green tech. they have strong engineering talent, large investments from the energy sector. car manufacturers are already clamoring to be the next to go fully electric. get your leaders…

Give me a break. Actually, the whole reason for this series of outages is because Texas took the bait and installed a bunch of solar and wind instead of taking the safe route and doubling down on coal. Peak energy consumption in Texas is almost always in summer when there's a lot of AC units running -- which just happens to be when solar and wind work best. They gambled on green, paid the price in the past few days,…

Doubling down on coal? What makes you think that would’ve worked any better than the natural gas and nuclear plants that failed too?

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#69

Post by jdkee » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 11:44 PM UTC

i_am_proteus wrote: post #63

Lots of folks in these comments seem to want to use this event to litigate wind vs. solar vs. gas vs. nuclear vs. coal, but it seems like, across the board, power generation facilities in Texas were simply unprepared to operate in such low temperatures. All of these technologies can and do work well in very cold climates.

Solar panels don't work well under a foot of snow.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#70

Post by jcranmer » Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 11:44 PM UTC

nickysielicki wrote: post #30

kbar13 wrote: post #10

is this the wakeup call that texans need to acknowledge that climate change isn't a coastal elite type thing, and that it affects us all and requires investment from all of us? imo texas is in a great spot to capitalize on the shift to green tech. they have strong engineering talent, large investments from the energy sector. car manufacturers are already clamoring to be the next to go fully electric. get your leaders…

Give me a break. Actually, the whole reason for this series of outages is because Texas took the bait and installed a bunch of solar and wind instead of taking the safe route and doubling down on coal. Peak energy consumption in Texas is almost always in summer when there's a lot of AC units running -- which just happens to be when solar and wind work best. They gambled on green, paid the price in the past few days,…

> to be clear about what I'm claiming, I'm saying that if Texas invested in coal instead of making the large investments they made in solar and wind, this never would have happened. I don't see how anyone can dispute that.

If I remember the statistics correctly, there is more coal power offline right now than wind power offline. If that is true, that rather debunks your theory, doesn't it?