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What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

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Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#861

Post by vidarh »

makomk wrote: post #842
tallanvor wrote: post #839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would most places bother with the expense of a fireplace really designed to heat a room? I can assure you that most new construction in Oslo (pretty much only apartments these days) don't include fireplaces. And why would they? With steam pipes running through much of the city, there's no need for the expense and pollution involved with a fireplace except for show anyway. The fact is that cities in the US, like i…

Cities in the US and Europe have very reliable power and gas supplies, until suddenly they don't. The trouble is that people have started to take the reliability of the power grid for granted and stopped thinking about what happens when it inevitably fails.

We've started taking it for granted because it works. It's ~35 years or so since last time I experienced an outage longer than a few minutes, and enough years since I experienced any outage that I can't remember when it was.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#862

Post by ghaff »

com2kid wrote: post #230
lurquer wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you people for real? What did people with children, elderly, and pets do 150 years ago? If your house is 25f, put on a couple sweaters and a coat and have a beer. It’s not the end of the world. As far as the kids go, they’re outside building snowforts. In short, you make do. It astounds me that the typical HN poster can whip up a C++ compiler, pontificate about solutions to every social-ill, purport to speak inte…

> If your house is 25f, put on a couple sweaters and a coat and have a beer. It’s not the end of the world. Houses were designed very differently 150 years ago. Lower roofs, fewer windows, huge thick drapes or tapestries on the walls, animal skins or carpets on the floors. 9 ft windows (double pane or not) on all walls is going to leak out a lot of heat. Most importantly, fireplaces. Houses had fireplaces, and rooms…

They had wood burning heat sources and they didn't have indoor running water. So, as you say, people could gather around fireplace(s) and there were no actual issues associated with the rest of the house being cold.

But for those being very casual about other people sitting around in 25 degree temperatures, that's actually fairly chilly especially if you don't have the clothing and bed coverings for it. And I say that as someone who lives in New England and has done winter camping.

Could I manage modulo piping concerns? Sure. (And I know you can drain pipes but I'd hate to be in a situation where I felt I had to do so in an emergency situation without electricity and then fire things up again when the electricity came back on.) But you're talking about huddling under covers if you don't have wood burning heat.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#863

Post by todd8 »

hinkley wrote: post #713
kevinmchugh wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The ones on the outside can use outside air to go up the chimney, avoiding the problem listed above. Harder to do with inside chimneys. Last place I rented with a fireplace, there was a metal door in brickwork below it in the basement. It wasn’t until after I moved out that I realized what it was for.

Wood ashes also collect in the small chamber in the basement under the chimney. As a child in Michigan, one of my hamsters escaped his confinement. Poor little Pinky couldn't be found in the house, but a couple of days after disappearing my Mom found him in the chamber covered in ashes that had cushioned his fall. (He made a full recovery from his adventure.)

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#864

Post by ghaff »

byecomputer wrote: post #748
com2kid wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your house is 25f, put on a couple sweaters and a coat and have a beer. It’s not the end of the world. Houses were designed very differently 150 years ago. Lower roofs, fewer windows, huge thick drapes or tapestries on the walls, animal skins or carpets on the floors. 9 ft windows (double pane or not) on all walls is going to leak out a lot of heat. Most importantly, fireplaces. Houses had fireplaces, and rooms…

My house is 140 years old and it's a sieve with 12 ft ceilings & 9 ft windows... in Iowa.

I have about a 200 yo house in Massachusetts. I've had a lot of work done to tighten it up but it still is very drafty in many spots. It has smallish windows and low ceilings but it's definitely not what you would call well-insulated overall.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#865

Post by vidarh »

varjag wrote: post #838
theshrike79 wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think any completely 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. American fireplaces in general are a joke. You are just spending way too much energy and not really storing it anywhere except the air around it. They are built to look good, not to actually heat anything properly. Check any Nord…

There are absolutely countless iron fireplaces here in Norway, they been the most popular installations for decades. The modern ones with afterburn contour are also quite efficient in energy output per unit fuel burned.

Jøtul [1], one of the the largest manufacturers of fireplaces in Norway has been around since 1853, manufacturing mostly cast iron fireplaces.

The considerations are different, though. Cast iron is great if you want to radiate as much heat as possible as fast as possible or need to heat a small area (e.g. single room per heater). There's a reason small cast-iron Jøtul fireplaces used to be the stereotypical heater for cabins etc. in Norway.

[1] https://www.jotul.com/

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#866

Post by todd8 »

trulyme wrote: post #731
sizzle wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there no CO2 danger from sleeping with gas stove on? Don’t people die from carbon monoxide poisoning from sleeping with open flames?

Nitpick: CO. Otherwise - no, if there is enough oxygen coming in. When fireplace is done properly it is not a problem.

Technically, I believe the problem is the CO concentration and exposure time, not displacement of oxygen. CO binds to hemoglobin more effectively than oxygen, preventing enough oxygen from getting to the body's tissues. CO poisoning is common: 20,000 hospital visits per year in the United States, and in many countries is the most common form of poisoning. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide_poisoning

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#867

Post by evgen »

geoduck14 wrote: post #467
newbie789 wrote: post #415

Can somebody explain as if I were a kindergartner why exactly natural gas is down by such a large amount in the state? Did the pipes freeze? Does natural gas not burn efficiently in snowy conditions? How will raising the spot price dramatically help with these physical conditions of the pipelines/other power production/distribution apparatus in such a way that providing power becomes available more quickly (if at all…

Texan here! This weather is CRAZY, I've NEVER seen something quite like this. I've seen it dip down to the teens, before, but I haven't seen: sub 20, with snow, for more than 2 days... across the entire state. I'm not entirely certain why we are sucking hard at making electricity, but here is what I've heard: Nat Gas pipelines "close to the well" are "freezing" because they have a lot of impurities (like water) that…

Wind turbines that are not built for cold weather operations will have problems with lubricants for joints and bearings and icing on the blades. The icing does the same thing to turbine blades as it does to plane wings (i.e. makes them suck in terms of aerodynamics and kills lift) and as the blades slow the friction and load from the lubricant failure means that eventually the turbine will stop spinning and then just freeze up.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#868

Post by sokoloff »

8note wrote: post #654
ranrotx wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Resistive electricity will be close to 100% efficient, and heat pumps even higher depending on the outdoor temperature. What kinda of air conditioners beat that for efficiency? I don't think we covered those in heat engines

> What kinda of air conditioners beat that for efficiency?

All of them beat resistance electric.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#869

Post by shireboy »

roenxi wrote: post #782
gregw2 wrote: post #117

What went wrong is that the Texas legislature which owns Texas-specific grid process to avoid interference from the Feds didn't figure out how to also ensure Texas generator companies got compensated for weatherizing (and ensuring it was done). How many of the 24+6 recommendations from the NERC/FERC review of last time this happened in Texas (hint:2011) were taken up by the legislature or those at ERCOT they delegate…

It is annoying when this sort of event happens and everyone starts deciding what they believe to be truth within 48 hours of the outage. It makes more sense to be talking about the 2011 outages in terms of what went wrong than the 2021 ones - because we have actual information on 2011 instead of "things went wrong!" now. I want to thank you personally for injecting a PDF into the discussion, but also positively asser…

I agree and have been feeling this more lately. You know this is already being politicized. Armchair investigators are suddenly becoming power grid experts. The complex reality of balancing a huge diverse power grid is becoming an “easy” problem - if only the evil other side had done what my media source and politician said they should!

It’s tricky - I also have a problem waiting months for a slow inefficient government agency to figure out how to cover their collective asses (or find the right scapegoat). I don’t think it’s unreasonable to make systems we can monitor, analyze and draw conclusions from much quicker.

There needs to be a happy medium- find the problems and “trust the experts” for sure, but do so without being so damn _loud_.

Re: What went wrong with the Texas power grid?

#870

Post by ghaff »

Ma8ee wrote: post #848
makomk wrote: post #842

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cities in the US and Europe have very reliable power and gas supplies, until suddenly they don't. The trouble is that people have started to take the reliability of the power grid for granted and stopped thinking about what happens when it inevitably fails.

We take metric shit tons for granted in our everyday lives. The risk that we will be out of power for more than a few hours where I live is very small, so I chose to save the about $10000 that it cost to install a fireplace and a chimney, so I’m instead prepared if I get long time sick, unemployed, or the car breaks down. All of those risks are order of magnitude higher than that we would be without electricity for a…

For that matter, as someone who lives in New England, if I wanted to install backup for extended power outages (which do happen where I am now and then), the sensible thing to do would be to get a propane-fueled generator installed because that would work if I were traveling (to keep pipes from freezing) and would also keep refrigerators running in a summer outage. (Added: Maybe a Powerwall-type thing would make sense today.)

I do have a fireplace and a wood stove which provide something of a backup but won't heat the whole house and only work if I'm there.

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