It's curious that the current tide of public opinion reckons that we're all going to be in EVs in 10-15 years, when the grid nearly collapses under the weight of everybody plugging in a heater and turning on Netflix at the same time.
Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
81–90 of 597 posts
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#82Seems like this is where a generator and appropriate hookup for powering (primarily?) a gas furnace might not be a terrible thing. Unfortunately almost all homes regardless of source will lose heat if the power goes out because of fans and furnace control.
You could conceptually also use something like Modern Electron's meta-material thermionic electric generator that just used a home's natural gas flame to make (lots of) electricity. https://modernelectron.com/technology/
Looks pretty neat but they seem to be pre-launch. Call me back when they have a product with verifiable specs. I'm hoping a breakthrough in solid state thermocouple materials will eventually make heat engines obsolete (at least at small scales).
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#83Problem is that:
1) People's use of energy is relatively insensitive to price, or they don't know the price, or few people care about the price when it comes time to need it
2) When you need the energy, it's too late to make the equipment/house more efficient, and when you don't need it, people don't think it's important to make it more efficient
3) Mandating that people upgrade their equipment is unpopular, they vote against it, yet when they get hit with the bill for the energy later, they're unhappy with government for not having done more to control it.
It's a thankless job, to be sure. Good thing taking away people's incandescent bulbs was recognized as a threat to democracy and stopped.
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#84Natural gas prices have been absolutely wild the past few days. https://www.naturalgasintel.com/weekly-natural-gas-prices-so... If you're not used to their bizarre units of volume the key takaway is this: Quantities of gas that usually sell for ~ $3 were selling for over $300 on Friday/Saturday.
How isolated are different natural gas networks in the US?
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#85i'm in Dallas, power has been stable so far but i made sure i got ye'olde generator out, checked the oil, and got plenty of gas. My house is really old and the cold just slowly creeps in. By Tuesday i bet i can't get it over 60 inside.
All of my furnaces run on gas at least but if the power goes they'll probably turn off. I have a little bit of firewood for the fireplace but not enough to heat the whole house that's for sure.
i was contemplating just basically evacuating wife and kids to San Antonio or something but the whole state is under a winter storm warning.
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was just looking at natural gas powered generators because of this. I've had an accumulative 24 hours of outages in the past month. They don't seem bad, the units themselves are around $6k. Definitely worth considering!
If you’re just looking for emergence power you can get honda e2200i generator with a gas adapter for around 1500 USD.
Most people around here (Pacific Northwest) do propane. No one wants to store large quantities of gasoline on their property.
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#87Weird.. you'd think with the AC demand in the summer they'd have enough capacity for winter..
IIRC air conditioning is generally less demanding because you’re ‘only’ trying to drop the temp by ~30F to get back into the 70s on a hot 100F day, whereas for heat you’re trying to increase by a much larger 50-70F on a cold 0-20F day. I’m sure wishing the house was better insulated today (Austin).
The insulation thing is weird because better insulation saves you in the summer too. I guess it's just the construction fixed cost. Electric heat seems like a weird compromise though considering the gulf of Mexico..
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
$0.05 to $0.10/kWh seems like normal pricing. Average US house uses ~1100-1200 kWh (I don't actually know this, based on googling, assuming most places in Texas are standalone houses) per month. If prices are $3000-9000 per MW, then ~40 to 60 kWh/day (let's be generous, people are explicitly turning on heat for this extreme cold) for a week... Even $2/kWh (which was exceeded days ago) would demolish peoples' budgets.
Those prices are far below normal prices. Normal is 28-50 cents in places like San Diego ( https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/energy-green/s... ).
In Texas griddy exposes you to real time spot pricing. I was frequently getting paid to use electricity at night due to excess generation by wind. As an electric car owner this was fantastic as I frequently got paid to recharge my car. My average delivered rate before this week was 7c/kwh all in.
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#89Texas is shockingly green when it comes to power. The windmills have frozen and it is the winter when there isn't as much sun. Most people are on a contract with fixed pricing, but some startups like Griddy are hurting people's wallets. We will likely see some retail electric company bankrupcies. Some of the electric providers are paying customers to move to someone else on Monday. The Joke is all the Californians wh…
Just to add some numbers; we(Texas) have over 31,000MW of installed wind energy capacity. No other state comes close.
Probably a lot of things people find shocking about Texas when compared to its reputation lol.
Re: Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, not really. As far as I'm aware HVDC links are more efficient than AC links (even with AC/DC/AC conversion).
It looks like a tradeoff. The only place in the world doing a significant amount of long distance transmission is China. Their wind and coal resources are in the west, and demand is in the east, and transporting coal by rail just further increases air quality problems in the east. Based on what they are implementing, HVDC make sense at 800km+, and AC for shorter runs. I think it comes down to HVDC requires less condu…
Manitoba Hydro's total DC transmission distance is +3,000km over 3 runs.