61–65 of 65 posts
Texas also has installed large amounts of battery capacity, often providing over 5% of the total grid power during sunset hours
https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Bat...
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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).
Right but that's massively inefficient. You want a base-load power source operating at as close to it's rated output as possible for as much time as possible.
Now, if only it was reliable in the winter…
If only Texas had invested in weatherization to prevent issues in the winter. Their gas based powerplants also had failures during the freeze a few years ago due to ignorance/cost cutting measures.
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It was one major occurrence with freak weather conditions and unpreparedness for something that _rarely_, if ever, occurs in Texas every 100 years.
> It was one major occurrence with freak weather conditions and unpreparedness for something that _rarely_, if ever, occurs in Texas every 100 years. it happened in 2011, too, and all the warnings and published recommendations as a result of that storm weren't acted upon.
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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 expen…
That's what I mean. You have to want to pay for someone who is going to upcharge you more for the equipment you want and the cheaper installers won't touch it. So you have to go with the primo installers charging you a lot more for otherwise the same equipment.
Aside from the backup heat requirements, having a central AC installed is already 95% the same equipment. And yet they'll easily charge you 20%+ before even talking about installing extra resistive heat. And from what I've seen (a dozen quotes in North Texas) none of them would install gas as the secondary heat source despite the gas line being right there already. They were all arguing "no, it needs to be resistive electric for the secondary".
I wanted a heat pump. I shopped around for months. The only people willing to do what I wanted (heat pump + gas backup) wanted more than 2.5x the cost of the group I went with that installed ac and a gas furnace.