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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?

#751

Post by bpodgursky »

cowboysauce wrote: post #410
redisman wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it not good for heating? I'm sure resistance based electric heating is very efficient. I've lived in very cold places and the heat has almost always been electric or water heated by electric. You just need radiators. Northern European countries for example use that a lot and the temperatures are often as low as -22F. Of course they build to optimize for low temperatures unlike TX.

It’s more efficient to burn natural gas directly for heat than to use it to generate electricity which is then used for heating. Typical gas turbines are around 40% efficient, plus a few percent for transmission loses. Though apparently there are some cutting edge turbines that are 60% efficient.

It's more efficient, but not more environmentally friendly, given how much of Texas's grid is wind power (and increasingly solar).

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#752

Post by pixl97 »

bdcravens wrote: post #261
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.

The issue is that the plants weren't built to handle these temperatures, and the deregulation and political climate in Texas makes it difficult to incentive those plants to make those changes. (Pre-pandemic) you'll see some random electric company setup outside of a grocery store asking everyone who walks in what their rate is, and offering to beat it.

Many of those places are calling their customers and telling them to cancel their service as fast as possible.

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/texas-power...

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#753

Post by dmitriy_ko »

caf wrote: post #698
qbasic_forever wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck, and here's some advice from a midwesterner that has dealt with cold, ice, and snow forever. If it's cold enough to start freezing things inside then make sure you have some water flowing in your pipes. Keep your kitchen sink running on a low (very tiny) dribble. Maybe even keep a shower/bathrub running at a very low rate too. You do NOT want to be dealing with frozen, broken flooding pipes on top of no pow…

Why don't pipes in areas prone to this sort of thing have some of cheaply replaceable burst disc relief valve, given how catastrophic an uncontrolled failure of the pipework is?

I don't think relief valve will help with freezing pipes. Freezing pipes burst because ice is less dense than water, so water expands as it turns into ice. Pipes freeze on the outside first, resulting in remaining water being entrapped in ice. As remaining water freezes, it can't move into relief valve.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#754

Post by pixl97 »

naebother wrote: post #680
pault wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About half of Austin has been out for 42 hours now. Source: I’m one of them.

That's ridiculous. I always thought the point of rolling blackouts was to make sure no one area was without power for too long.

Rolling only works for demand overages of up to 20% or so. With a loss of generation capacity of over 1/3rd of generation that is out the window.

They were trying to keep the grid alive and not have a statewide blackout.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#755

Post by pixl97 »

da_big_ghey wrote: post #12
masklinn wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "100 year winter" storms It’s like the third time in 30 years.

This is the first time since the eighties that we have had weather this cold. Edit: why u booing me? I'm right!

What happened to 2011?

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#756

Post by unethical_ban »

magnawave wrote: post #18

The result was "an electrical island in the United States," Bill Magness, CEO of ERCOT, said. "That independence has been jealously guarded, I think both by policy makers and the industry." https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/16/texas-power-... Maybe it’s time to rethink that. HaI has an interesting take on something similar: Japan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo88zA5nq4Q Running your own grid seems cool…

I echo the sentiment that federation (in most things) isn't itself a bad thing. It just happens that in the case of electrical reliability, ERCOT has been the root of these issues, given their warnings from years ago.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#757

Post by yborg »

cbmuser wrote: post #708
rodgerd wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A nuclear plant stopped generating because the turbine froze; components were exposed to open air because Texas doesn't normally get that cold. People built to a certain set of assumptions, with an implicit risk, and the risks came due. The only way to avoid another event like this would be to make the generation more resilient to extreme cold, which will cost more.

> A nuclear plant stopped generating because the turbine froze; components were exposed to open air because Texas doesn't normally get that cold. That’s not true. The plant tripped because of a false alarm. The operators said the reactor would be back online shortly after safety checks. A whole turbine doesn’t freeze. The turbines are in buildings, not outside. Edit: Apparently, South Texas has its turbines outside.…

This is wild - they built a nuclear plant that has its generator sets just sitting out in the open? This seems like a bad idea regardless of what is generating the steam.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#758

Post by xornor »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #702
kelnos wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1996 (or thereabouts), I lived in Maryland, and my family lost power for 6 days due to a snow/ice storm that took out a ton of power lines (water froze on them and the added weight pulled them down). We had no natural gas service, and our running water was provided by a well in the backyard that had an electric pump. So no electricity, heat, or running water for 6 days in ~20-30°F weather. (Fortunately we'd prepar…

Interior or central chimneys make more sense to me than ones against an exterior wall, and they seem common enough in houses of a certain vintage at least. If your chimney is on an outer wall, doesn't it radiate heat to the outdoors?

Here where I live (northern Europe), chimneys are always internal. Nobody would even think external chimneys. Heat loss is massive that way.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#759

Post by unethical_ban »

turtlebits wrote: post #625

Maybe its time for people to stop treating electricity like essentially an unlimited cheap resource and instead something they consciously try not to waste. I've been working in an off-grid office where I am limited by solar and battery capacity and it really puts into perspective what really needs to be plugged in all the time and how much running a large appliance affects capacity. Maybe electricity should be sold…

I think "emergency ration pricing" would make sense, but I'm not sure non-emergency restrictions are needed.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#760

Post by unethical_ban »

bhupy wrote: post #385
worker767424 wrote: post #94

The Texas-only grid was definitely part of it, and should be a lesson to people who thought the lesson from Covid is "do more locally." No, having stronger, longer distance connections is what makes you more resilient, at least when there are local problems.

On the flip side, the fact that we're talking about a Texas-specific outage means that the system actually worked as designed, in a degraded state. We generally try to incorporate redundancy and decentralization in systems design for the purpose of antifragility and graceful degradation. If something bad happens, best to isolate it so that it doesn't afflict everyone globally. At the time of this writing, every State…

Your entire argument is only valid if the other two major grids don't have the excess generation capacity to support the gap in Texas.

Otherwise, it's cutting off a limb because of a papercut.

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