Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid | Hacker News Reader

Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

ercot.com

324 pointstomrod570 comments

Problem 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.

Do you still have incandescent bulbs in the US? Its really hard to find them here in Australia. I thought they were banned but I just read that they are not, but have been phased out.

There was an incandescent bulb phase out over several years that was supposed to end in 2020, but Trump blocked it because he claimed that LED bulbs were too expensive and made him look orange.[0]

You pretty much can’t buy them anymore at stores except for specialty bulbs like oven lamps, but that might vary state-to-state.

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/climate/trump-light-bulb-...

So, someone at the Department of Energy that was hired in 2012, under Obama, made a ruling, and that's translated by the NYTimes as the "Trump Administration" doing it, which then gets referenced as "Trump blocked it because they make him look orange". Fake news in action, folks.

He literally said it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_iFi1qH8Cg

You gotta love implying the president has no power in this sort of thing while simultaneously implying Obama is at fault here. In the same sentence, no less.

Typical LED bulbs have shit spectrum coverage, and have terrible flicker when used with dimmers. I’ve been stockpiling incandescents.

Maybe try dimmable LED bulbs? They work perfectly fine here.

I find LEDs look much better, particularly if you have chandelier type lights.

Dimmable led bulbs come in multiple varients and don't work with all style of dimmers. Quality matters too.

The best bet is switching to Hue or other smart bulbs that manage their own dimming. It's generally cheaper too unless you have a dozen bulbs on one dimmer.

Stockpiling incadescent bulbs instead of spending time doing research to find LED bulbs with a better light spectrum?

LEDs tend to give off a good range over the visible light spectrum. Incandescents tend to bias towards the higher end of the spectrum (towards red).

Agreed that some research can also help find a good light. There are plenty of "full spectrum" light solutions out there which may work for the original poster.

Compare Incandescents (A) vs LED (D) at https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Emission-spectra-of-diff...

As an example for high-CRI LED lighting components, I'll mention Yuji.

https://www.yujiintl.com/

I bought a bunch of 25w bulbs for my lava lamp :)

I replaced all of the frequently used lights in my house with LEDs. Now I actually have a stockpile of incandescent bulbs for things like the closets, laundry, and guest rooms where those lights may be on for less than a minute a day.

When's the last time you used an LED bulb? The CRI has greatly improved since they first came out.

Worse, a bunch of them have awful coil whine. I seem to be one of the few who can hear it, but quite a lot of electronics kick off an infuriating, high-pitched ringing and I don't want one more doing that.

yep. CFLs and LED bulbs are available everywhere, but every store stocks extremely cheap incandescent bulbs right next to them

Its pretty much LED bulbs and fixtures in the US. I think Trump administration reversed the original law but there are a few state laws that are even stricter. The manufacturers have all moved onto LEDs so no going back.

It would have been an executive order the Trump administration reversed, he wouldn’t have had the authority to reverse a congressional passed law.

Looks like it was just the more recent DOE regulations that were reserved. These were for specialty bulbs. But with some of the states still enforcing the changes combined with other countries doing similar things, the manufacturers probably will move on to newer technology.

> In 2014, the Department of Energy issued regulations that would extend the efficiency standards of the 2007 EISA law to some specialty bulbs, effective January 2020.[91] The new standards would apply to Edison, globe, and candelabra bulbs among others. In February 2019, the Department of Energy announced a proposal to withdraw this change. In September 2019 the Trump administration rolled-back these energy efficiency standards for lightbulbs with the Energy Department's publication of regulations in the Federal Register.[92][93] The Energy Department announced the reversal of the 2014 regulation that would have taken effect on January 1, 2020 and implemented the last round of energy-saving light bulb regulations outlined by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.[94]EISA law to some specialty bulbs, effective January 2020

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_incandescent_ligh...

There are loopholes that allow incandescent bulbs to be sold in the US still. However, replacing incandescent bulbs would do basically nothing to help with this kind of power shortage caused by a cold spell - all their waste energy is heat, and they're as efficient at producing it as any other resistive heater. Switching to LED lighting saves people money during more normal times but makes the long-termp peak to average power usage ratio worse, and ordinary people have no reason to care about that because they pay the same amount for power during this kind of peak than they do at any other time even though it's a lot more expensive to produce.

> However, replacing incandescent bulbs would do basically nothing to help with this kind of power shortage caused by a cold spell

It depends on what you replace it with. If you switch to a resistive heater, yeah, that's pointless, but if you switch to a heat pump or natural gas-based heating it'd help.

IJS record-breaking cold weather in Texas currently.

The problem here is the high tomorrow in Dallas is supposed to be about 10°F. The typical winter high for Dallas is a bit below 60°F. This means that the demand for heating is about 4-6× what it normally would be for winter.

Energy loss is strongly supralinear in the temperature gradient, so it's probably a lot more than that.

Time-dependent solutions to temperature change across a gradient are exponential decay functions that solve diff eqs based on Newton's law of cooling. It depends mostly on the insulation and the temperature difference.

While it is 10 F outside, the central heating system for my apartment in a 6-story building cannot maintain temperature. It is 66 F and gradually falling. I would guess it would be 2.5kW running 24/7.

25KW more likely

Probably closer to this than 2.5kw. 2.5kw on a decently modern heat pump should be providing 25k btu. About enough to heat a 2000sqft house ~50f over ambient.

I have a 2.4kW heater in my bedroom...

Just in case anyone is about to miss this detail:

That heater probably doesn't run continously.

For a well designed shared system you can get away with less than n x what an individual unit needs.

(That said, I too guess 2.5kW is too small for what GP mentioned.)

Energy loss through an insulator is exactly linear to temperature.

The problem is that people who would have otherwise tolerated 50F temperatures without heating by putting on a sweater are pulling their old oil column heater out of the storage.

Oh you're right.

One other problem is that one of the ways people have been making their heating more efficient is by using heat pumps, and their efficiency gain drops off with lower temperatures until they become no more efficient than the resistive heaters they replaced during the kind of unusually cold weather Texas is apparently seeing. This makes the peak to average power usage problem even worse.

More modern heat pumps can be efficient at up to around -10 degF[1]. Higher efficiency federal/local rebates are not bad across the US, so I wouldn't be surprised if these were installed in some TX homes. It's still a capacity problem if average use is 10hr/day instead of 2hr/day and your house has no gas furnace heating. I would guess most TX (Dallas/Austin) homes probably do have a gas furnace, but maybe not in coastal/south TX (Houston).

[1] https://daikincomfort.com/go/aurora/

Are their heat pumps linked to outside if their efficiency is so affected? The models I see generally pipe underground, where the temperature is mostly stable and isn't affected by a week of unusually cold weather.

The overwhelming majority of heat pumps across the US are air-source (rather than ground-source), so "yes, overwhelmingly".

Energy usage is superlinear below a certain point. As I recall, about 25% of homes in Texas use heat pumps. but below 30-ish degrees, heat pumps don't work and they have to switch to resistance-based heating So, demand will start rising a whole lot faster.

There are newer heat pumps that work below 30 degrees, but they're more expensive and not typically used in Texas for obvious reasons.

But on the other hand there are only so many hours in a day to run your HVAC/space heater. So from 8 hours per day, it can go worst case to 3x.

Hm, heating is either switched off/on depending on a thermostat ("bang-bang") or in more sophisticated systems is regulated according to need (modulating control). It might be on 24/7 regardless of whether it's hot or cold, but it's not going to use the same amount of power.

My furnace, which is common in mid level units, is two phase. It’s off, low, high. Basically it starts by modulating off and low. Once low is on 24/7 and it needs more heat, it modules low/high. At peak heat it’s just high all the time.

Upside to being in Indiana is our furnaces are made for this. I think I can keep my house at 70 down to like -30F outside. It’s a pretty expensive furnace though, wouldn’t make sense in Texas.

Even a cheap thirty year old furnace can do that - it was able to keep my house at 80° during the -40 (no need to specify; they’re the same that low!) last year. I actually intentionally drove it to 80 to give me thermal mass if needed but it turned out not to be necessary.

Burning gas is insanely thermodynamically active.

As an addendum, this winter I unfortunately found out that, at very low temperatures, the limiting factor might be the furnace, but it might also be the capacity of the radiators (or underfloor heating, or whatever) to shed heat. Tiny radiators or highly spaced underfloor pipes and it won't matter how fancy your furnace is, there's only so much heat it can distribute.

Radiators are an alternative to, not a part of, a forced air gas furnace.

Gas furnace burns gas, blows around hot air.

Radiator heats water, and pushes that water around to heat rooms via radiators.

Seems to be a combination of many things (a perfect storm...):

• Dwellings are not insulated to the same level as their northern counterparts. Over 60% of houses in Texas have single pane glass.

• Texas seems to rely substantially on heat pumps for residential heating, with fallback to resistive heating. At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - my guess is that many are using 2-3x less efficient resistive heaters at night.

• Heating peak demands tend to be correlated with the longest time since the sun was last shining... This bodes poorly for solar supply and also self generators - even those with battery backup.

• Texas typically imports from neighboring states... Most of which are in a similar irregular climate.

• Heating requirements for a building vs exterior temperature is non-linear, as are heat pump efficiencies. This is especially pronounced with poor insulation factor.

To put it into context, Quebec has ~46,000MW of peak electrical production capacity for a population of 8.4M. during cold winter days (-30°f) it uses all of that capacity and becomes a net-importer. In Summer months, it uses 1/3 of this.

Texas had peak electrical production capacity of 37,600MW for it's population of 29M.

Greetings from Texas. Yeah, all that is true. You build based on how things usually are, or at least usually WERE when the dwelling was built.

I live in Houston -- very close to downtown, so I'm only about 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. This makes it VERY FUCKING WEIRD INDEED that my entire yard is covered in snow, and it is 16F outside. This is NOT Houston weather. It's almost unprecedented -- it's certainly never been anywhere NEARLY this cold in the 26 years I've lived here, and the idea that we really won't be above 32F (0C) for a material amount of time until SATURDAY is really really nuts. In a normal Houston winter, by contrast, we MIGHT see 3-4 nights that freeze. We go years without needing to wrap plants, and I've never bothered to wrap outside pipes before. (Outlying areas to the north and especially northwest of the urban core get as much as 10 degrees F colder, but even so it's not a regular thing.)

So yeah, we're all built here for cooling and not heating. Ambient air temp outside is rarely more than 95, so getting your house to 78 is pretty attainable. But when we get cold snaps, WE certainly notice in our house, which is a relatively new (1997) 3-story townhouse (very vertical; it's about 1800 sq. ft. or 167m^2). It's just not set up to heat evenly or well.

The first problem is just distribution. Our house has a modern 'open' style floorplan, with soaring ceilings in the middle (living) floor. Heat, of course, rises. The upshot is that if you set the thermostat to warm the lower 2 floors to, say, 65F, the 3rd floor main bedroom will be intolerably warm and dry.

As a consequence, a window in our bedroom is open about 2" all winter.

The other gotcha in our house is the floor in the first level, where I have my office (I work from home). It's a stained concrete floor, which is great in the summer because it helps keep the room nice and cool. Unfortunately, it does exactly the same thing in the winter. I'm wearing thick wool socks and long underwear in here now, even though I have a plug-in radiator to supplement the central heating.

Actually, the radiator -- a Delonghi; it works great -- would probably be enough IF the windows were better sealed. My desk is up against a window. My legs feel cold all day in weather like this (well, in cold weather; there hasn't been any weather LIKE THIS before), to the point that last week when it was much warmer (45F during the day) I was wearing sweatpants over jeans.

The house is wonderful and comfortable and attractive. It works GREAT for the vast majority of our weather. It just gets drafty in the winter. And, of course, today I'm concerned that we're going to get rolling outages. Whooo!

At least we have a fireplace. (People laugh about it, but in all honesty having a fire is the easiest way to make the living area comfy without overheating the top floor, just based on where the heat goes. If the house was a little bit bigger, I suspect it would've come with 2 climate control units and proper zoning, which would help a LOT, but as is: just one big zone.)

For open spaces an IR radiative heater - the kind with glowing elements - is better. It won't save much energy, but for comfort - you can actually point it toward your body and warmup it that way without having to heat everything around you first. The fireplace does this too.

Yeah, hence the fireplace in the very open main room.

The radiator in my office -- which is a normal shaped room with maybe an 8 foot ceiling -- does very well.

> the kind with glowing elements

There are far-infrared ceramic heaters that don't glow. Less smell and more energy converted into radiation instead of warm air.

> The first problem is just distribution. Our house has a modern 'open' style floorplan, with soaring ceilings in the middle (living) floor. Heat, of course, rises.

This style of house made so that people can feel rich and high status while wasting enormous amounts of energy to heat and cool is an affront to our future generations.

And it’s almost inescapable unless you’re interested in custom building or buying an old house.

You seem nice.

It wasn’t a personal comment. I’ve seen it in all the houses built in the past 3 decades, coast to coast. Makes no sense thermodynamically. Obviously it sells better than a house that wastes less energy.

"So that people can feel rich and high status" is an insulting way to phrase "has a different set of architectural preferences than I do."

It heats and cools far more efficiently than the traditional homes in Houston (mostly pier and beam construction). There's more to home appeal than thermodynamics, especially in a mild climate.

Houston is not a mild climate, based on how much AC usage I’ve seen there.

Conditioning an extra 2 to 12ft above your head is absolutely choosing vanity over energy efficiency.

However, most people don’t even have the choice since they’re making trade offs between various neighborhoods of various income levels, and once you get above a certain income, all the houses are made with open foyers and tall ceilings. The builders wouldn’t be able to sell the more energy efficient homes at as high of a price as the non energy efficient ones, so obviously we’re going to end up with a stock of homes where the all the heat downstairs is constantly going upstairs.

The reason the homes with higher ceilings will sell for a higher price is because people feel a certain way about them. A high ceiling has no practical benefits and is purely for aesthetics at the expense of energy efficiency. My intention isn’t to insult, but I think it is accurate. People do many things to project their status.

From a thermodynamics POV, we're very mild. We only ever really want to cool about 20F. Heating is nominal. Most places to the north end up with significantly more expensive heating needs AND roughly equivalent AC needs.

You are still being insulting, or absurdly reductive. Neither is especially welcome. Normal humans value all sorts of competing concerns when evaluating a home where they may spend many many years. Maybe YOU only value thermodynamics and care nothing for aesthetics, but that doesn't mean people who don't share your POV are only trying to project status or whatever other uncharitable thing you envision.

I'm very much in favour of this kind of aesthetic, but having both the heating on and the window open all winter is sad and should be unnecessary.

To be super clear: the amount of heating actually done in a normal Houston winter day is very very minimal. It's just that enough of it collects in the high point of a tall home that an open window is desirable for balance (and, honestly, humidity).

OP doesn't seem mean at all, just accurate that open floorplans these days are built poorly. When I was shopping for houses, I never saw a good open floorplan. They all had weird angles, flows that didn't make sense, and zero symmetry, and the asymmetry was terrible to. Open floorplans these days aren't built to be nice, they're built to sell.

Did I piss off an architect?

If anyone wants to see what I'm talking about, I think there are some examples here: https://McMansionHell.com Some of them aren't really that bad, but there are some definite atrocities.

I hate open concept with enough fury to heat all of Texas to boiling. They’re clearly built and sold to people who never have had to try to keep kids out of things.

And even worse are houses badly “opened up” - thereby ruining whatever design was originally in place.

Well, as childfree people, that was an appeal.

My home is majority open concept on 2 of 3 floors with high ceilings and even with 3 kids I can say it's more appealing than those 1-room-per-100sqft 80s/90s layouts. Turns out kids are people too and enjoy nice spaces just the same.

Add zoned areas for the rooms that need heat/cold to isolate your usage.

Zoning a house built with a 1 zone system is very expensive, and zoning doesn’t do much when the house looks like this:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/94/7b/67/947b6734e9ec93809b2c...

“ This style of house made so that people can feel rich and high status while wasting enormous amounts of energy to heat and cool is an affront to our future generations.”

Wow dude. You decided why people want specific things and let us know that it’s an affront to future generations. I’m glad it tops the list over deep sea drilling, paved suburban road jungles, ocean acidification, and dubstep (they will look back and mourn the loss of our sanity in this age, but it’s so addictive...).

Maybe people just walk into a tall place and feel more comfortable in it? Maybe builders and markets respond to purchasers and their response to something that lots of people find more comforting?

Perhaps a hyper efficient off-grid renewable-driven earthen hovel isn’t for everyone?

I live in a small, modest, low ceiling home with zoned temperature management and comprehensive energy usage monitoring. That’s great for me and my family, but it’s a preference.

And, you know what? Open plan high ceilings are nice, especially when you don’t have kids and can hear each other more easily.

I'll add that up here in the great north - we also use combined air conditioner/heat pumps but in most cases spring for the "low temperature" models with a built in defroster and higher pressure refrigerant - allowing them to heat down to -18°f. This would almost never make sense in a southern climate where it happens once every 20 years. Likewise, investing in any high efficiency/dual-source heating setup would not make any financial sense.

Any Texans looking for some guerrilla insulation/heating techniques:

Put up some painters plastic on the inside frames of Windows (with dual sided tape) as this acts like a very rudimentary dual-pane window. Kits exist for this also (apologies for the Canadian link: https://www.amazon.ca/3M-2141W-6-Indoor-Window-Insulator/dp/... )

Next I would look into a propane space heater (sometimes referred to as a garage/barn heater). These can be operated on a standard 20lb tank and can keep a house warm for a day or two on a single tank. Co2 levels are minimal but you should still make sure you have a decent co2 sensor nearby.

>would not make any financial sense.

Yeah, that's what people often miss. We're not prepared for this, and don't build for it, because it almost never happens.

And it'll be 70F on Sunday.

I remember my parents covering my old leaky single-pane windows in our first house with plastic in the winter. It looks goofy, but it's cheap and it really helps. We also had storm windows that we'd replace our screens with in the winter.

We later moved to a house with newer windows that removed this need, and adult me has a ground source heat pump so I'm toasty even with the 15°F weather here.

Anticipating the cold snap, my wife ordered insulating curtains for the big windows on the front of the house, to hang behind the decorative ones.

I figured it was more an example of "must do something" than "activity that will actually help," but I was proven wrong IMMEDIATELY. They've made a material difference (no pun intended), and I'm said I said no when she asked if I wanted some for my office.

She's a keeper :)

Absolutely. We've been keeping each other for almost 20 years.

Bubble wrap produces very decent insulation for single-pane windows.

Plastic or rather polyethylene tarps or sheets, even plastic bags, stapled to Windows around frame help a lot to keep house warm. Another very good trick, is to hang blankets in hallways that don't have doors. It keeps the room where the heat is warmer, and really really helps with drafts. That also helps to survive, if no heat anywhere, and to keep one living space warm To keep water in sinks bathrooms kitchens from freezing, keep the cabinet doors open, and if really cold, keep the water trickling, especially in cold water lines. These tricks can save your pipes from freezing, which is real mess and expensive. Source - Canadian.

> The upshot is that if you set the thermostat to warm the lower 2 floors to, say, 65F, the 3rd floor main bedroom will be intolerably warm and dry.

Every townhouse I've ever lived in had this problem. The thermostat is on the ground floor or 2nd floor, which results in the bedrooms upstairs being oppressively hot. I will drop the temperature by 5+ degrees before retiring for the night. I hear you about the cold office floor - I have hardwood over a slab and I'm thinking of ordering a heating pad like the one the cat has.

There are many intersecting problems here - the main one is that the standard building code in the South requires a minimum of R-15 insulation in the walls, so that's what the builders put in to remain cost-competitive. You can't get much more than that in a wall cavity framed with 2x4's. Builders and owners need to be incentivized to super-insulate. Not necessarily to a "Net Zero" standard, but increasing the minimum to R-21 (which requires going to 2x6 framing) would help in both heating & cooling seasons.

The other problem is that I have had only a single heat pump for the entire house. It would be much better to have a variable-refrigerant-flow (VRF) system where you have multiple "heads" with their own thermostats that run independently (commonly called a Mini-Split although there are differences). And then you can close the doors to rooms that aren't being used, dropping the thermostat in them to reduce usage.

Yeah, you get hosed on insulation if you buy a spec build. Custom homes are often built better, but come at a premium.

Larger townhouses -- say, 2500sqft & up -- are often zones more reasonably, at least here, such that heating/cooling can be managed with more granularity. But doing it really requires multiple units, not a single big unit.

We live in a 1914 house. There's 2 returns on the main floor. We end up with a wide gap among the floors (basement to 3rd floor). I looked into systems that have inflatable bags that block the areas that are warm so the other areas can get more of the hot air.

Something like this: https://www.retrozone.com/Catalog/flexdamper/Pumps.htm I didn't end up doing it and I don't know anybody who has. And it's probably a lot more expensive than opening your window in the winter.

There is probably a generation or two of work to retrofit housing across the US for energy efficiency, which can also address comfort, and health (indoor air quality). This is something that can only be accomplished using a government program like the Green New Deal (especially for rentals).

I lived in a similar structure for a while, a 3 story townhouse with single zone hvac, thermostat on the second floor. What was in that system that made it work was three dampers, one for each the floors. If you can locate the main duct going to each floor, you should be able to add a manually operated damper to reduce flow to the upper floor when heating and reduce flow to the lower floor when cooling. When I switched my system from heat to cool or cool to heat, I would usually make a point of adjusting the dampers, as well as using that as the time to replace the filters. If you don't have dampers at the source, closing the dampers at the registers on the respective floor to 90% should have a similar effect.

We have a sort of dumb zoning already, which is a thermostat on the first floor, but it only allows the first to opt out of whatever heating or cooling is happening in the rest of the house. This is never something we want to do.

Before COVID were were shopping to upgrade, so we're not going to put any more upgrade money into this house, but if we were going to stay I'd absolutely make changes in this.

The manual dampers for the ducts can be as cheap as $20. Why wouldn't you turn off cooling on the ground floor in summer? Heat should rise.

Re: dampers, we generally close 2 of the 3 vents in the 3rd floor for the winter.

Re: the downstairs, unfortunately it warms up quickly on a hot day, and the structure of the house is such that the downstairs room's heat doesn't really have an easy path up.

The other factor is that, in a NORMAL, non-plague year, I'm alone in the house during the work day. If had perfect control of the house climate system, I'd let the upstairs drift to 80 or 82 while keeping my office at 76 or 78, and not start trying to cool the rest of the house until after hours when my wife gets home. Same with heating: just heat down here during the day, and warm the rest of the house in the evening.

December 1989, there wasn't an unbroken water pipe in Houston. Had to use hammers to break up ice waterfall on steps to apartment.

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-weather/article/Photos-Re...

Do you close off the vents in the upstairs rooms? Seems like that would help a lot in the winter.

There are 3: one in the bedroom, one in the vanity area, and one in the actual bath/wc room. We close all the ones except the one in the bath/shower/wc tiny room, bc that is the place where we are often both naked and wet. :)

Hey neighbor, you live in the heights? You are describing my house and neighborhood :D

Still have power here

Montrose, near Taft & Fairview.

As others have pointed out, heating requirements (watt/m^2) are in fact linear which is why it's possible to more or less accurately calculate a building's insulation performance in watt/m^2/K, it's just that there's a grace zone where if it's e.g. 65F outside and you want it to be 72F inside, you might not need to heat at all because the shortfall is covered by solar gains through your windows, internal gains (cooking etc.) and energy stored as thermal mass. That is, the nonlinearity is not in heating needs, but in the efficiency of heating production and the amount of heating you get for free.

Yes that is correct in theory, BTU requirements are linear based on delta temperature with everything else being static.

What doesn't follow is electricity consumption per BTU produced, ie. if your heating source efficiency is non-linear, such as a heat-pump + resistive fallback heating. You can easily consume 8x the amount of electricity with a delta T of 60 than you do at 15.

In reality, outdoor air temperature alone isn't indicative of the entire building heat loss/requirement - ground temperatures don't respond linearly to air temperatures. Likewise, there are some oddities that come into play with high temperature deltas such as phase-change of materials or outright failure in some cases. Precipitation and wind can also affect thermal efficiencies.

A bitter-sweet example for Texans: The snow can actually provide some insulation. It would be worse if you had no snow and similar air temperatures than getting that 12" of fluffy stuff later this week.

Why does Quebec use more electrical power in winter if most (nearly all) of their heating is natural gas/oil based?

IDK what it's like in quebec specifically, but a lot of my friends in Ontario would have multiple space heaters (depending on how many people were around and where they were) that they would use in the winter months for more 'localized' warmth and the HVAC was more about keeping pipes from freezing.

Central heaters may be natural gas/oil based but the blowing fans or water circulation are typically electric. Also people will supplement with electric space heaters for whatever room they are in while keeping the house somewhat colder than they would prefer.

Power is super cheap in Quebec ($0.04/kwh USD) and gas is not, so many people heat their homes to 16-19ºC with gas, then have electric space heaters in their rooms to bring it up to 21-23ºC.

I'm not sure where you're getting your information, but every source I've seen indicates that the majority of heat in Quebec is electric.

This matches my experience, FWIW. When I lived in Ottawa, I occasionally looked at houses and apartment across the river in Quebec and nearly all of them had electric heat.

More data: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-402-x/2007/1741/ceb17...

https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr... (see Electricity heading)

https://www.ivey.uwo.ca/energycentre/blog/2019/06/a-closer-l...

Another thing that takes electrical power to heat in the winter is vehicles. In many Canadian cities in the winter it is very common to plug in your car over night so the engine won't be frozen solid in the morning. Forgetting to do this means your car won't start after a cold night.

Electricity cost in Quebec is around USD $0.05/kWh. Combine that with the fact that most alternative heating sources are at a premium (natural gas, propane and oil all cost substantially more in Quebec than they do in, for example, Texas) and the fact that 98% of Electricity is renewable source, that leads to a very heavy proportion of electric heat. It's not uncommon to have residential units exclusively heated by baseboard heaters - the least efficient means as far as energy required per unit of heat - however it's still cheaper to operate on a yearly basis than a natural gas furnace, while costing 20% of that to install/maintain.

There's non heating reasons to use electricity too.

Canada is north. In summer, the sun can set round 11PM and in winter at 330PM

That's a lot of hours of electrical light vs natural

> At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - my guess is that many are using 2-3x less efficient resistive heaters at night.

How is it possible for heating devices to be less efficient? Where does the waste energy go?

Normally, waste energy in devices powered by electricity means it's lost to heat, but here it would be lost to...?

https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/241-heat-pumps-and...

Heat pumps use a small amount of energy to move thermal energy, but it's much more efficient than resistive heat. But if they can't move enough heat, they fall back to resistive heat to top it up.

Ohhhh, interesting. Right, that makes sense.

There's no waste heat with resistive heating, but heat pumps use electricity to move heat from outside to inside, and they can add more than 1J of heat using 1J of electricity.

The trick here is that with heat pumps, they aren't generating the heat, just moving it. As such, you can have, e.g. a 1 kW heat pump moving much more than 1 kW of heat. Wheras with a resistive heater, the best you can do is turn 1 kW of electric power into 1 kW of heat output.

> Texas had peak electrical production capacity of 37,600MW for it's population of 29M

Texas delivered a peak of over 60GW last night, before an unprecedented falloff in generating capacity due to weather and grid conditions.

Majority of the difference between consumption and generation is imported. ERCOT is operating at 52,000MW right now, with 37,600 of it being generated on-grid.

No. Texas does not have 15 GW of import capacity.

I was agreeing with your points....until I got to the bit, "Texas typically imports from neighboring states". Not with power. ERCOT is an isolated grid.

It imports from Mexico and neighboring grids.

From ERCOT's own Q&A:

-----------

EEA1

When the reserves drop below 2,300 megawatts, Emergency Energy Alert 1 is activated. That’s when ERCOT communicates to the public and to power generators that the situation is deteriorating.

At this time, ERCOT will import power from other states and from Mexico. This regularly happens during peak summer months and is not new. But right now, because prices are so cheap, and unrelated to the weather, ERCOT was already importing power from Mexico and other power grids.

Rotating outages do not happen during this stage.

EEA2

When the electric reserves drop to 1750 megawatts, other steps are taken to bring on additional capacity, but rotating outages are still not yet activated.

EEA3

When the reserves get to 1,000 megawatts and they are not expected to recover within 30 minutes, ERCOT will then ask electric suppliers like Oncor and Reliant to begin rotating outages to reduce load on the system.

ERCOT said the location of outages would be determined by each provider like Oncor and Reliant.

https://www.wfaa.com/article/weather/texas-power-outages-fre...

The DC ties represent <1.7% of current load. About the size of a single large generating station. ERCOT, by policy (to avoid certain federal regulations), keeps it that way. I guess you're technically right that they can import power, but that is far from the design intent of the system. (Which is stark contrast to the eastern and western interconections, and their internal multistate ISO's.)

Following up on this, I checked ERCOT status this morning and none of the DC ties are moving energy (at a moment when you might expect they'd really like to):

http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...

the Texas Interconnection (operated by ERCOT) is not fully isolated. They have 3 interconnections from Mexico (one of which has only ever been used once), and two with the eastern US.

It is not clear to me if these interconnections are normally used, or only used in Emergency scenarios. I think they are used both. However I have no idea what sort of capacity these have, and if that is enough in cases like this.

The roads here aren’t designed for snow either. My heat went out on Friday and I can’t even get the heater replaced because the trucks that deliver heaters can’t get through the roads.

Would be quite inefficient for municipalities to have plows and salt/sand spreaders sitting around for a decade not being used. Similarly for garages and distributors to carry winter tires.

Texas hit a peak of 69GW of production, not 37. 37 is what we're able to do after a ton of natural gas plants froze over.

Can't edit, but I was wrong on that number being production, that was peak capacity. That was peak capacity. However from my understanding there isn't a ton of interconnect capacity, so I have a hard time believing peak production was only 54% of peak capacity. Do you have a source for your numbers? It seems extremely low.

Sort of - to understand how extreme a 10 degree high really is we should be comparing it to the high on the typical coldest day of the year, and then consider how many deviations away from that number this event is, not just how it compares to a typical winter day. Probably want to consider the low temps as well.

> 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

Basically this. Few individuals pay the actual price of electricity. At best, they'll pay time-of-day rates that might change schedules 2x/year. Otherwise, everyone pays the average cost, and couldn't care less if noon-time electricity costs 10x on Monday vs. last Thursday.

The real fix here is to have more residential customers either knowing the minute by minute pricing, or paying extra for the privilege of an "unlimited plan" or something.

That could be achieved for example by instead of setting your space heater to "low heat", "Mid heat" or "high heat", you could just hit the "$1/hour of heat", "$2/hour of heat", or "$3/hour of heat" settings. The heater itself can look at the minute by minute pricing to decide how much heat to output, and the user can decide to turn it up if they want to pay.

Electronics to connect to wifi and check a server for pricing cost under a dollar now (ESP8266).

The real fix here is to have more residential customers either knowing the minute by minute pricing

This is insane. Do you really believe that individuals are going to be monitoring the energy prices like a rabid day-trader, making 'rational' decisions between "oh good, power is cheap now" and "power is expensive, I guess I'll just freeze"?

People make similar choices all the time...

Eg. "Oh, there's a queue at the gas station today. I'll drive on and get gas tomorrow instead."

Thats them observing that the cost (to their time) of getting gas is high today, and that they can purchase later for a lower time cost.

You're comparing filling up the car to literally freezing. Find some humanity!

The alternative to heating that much is wearing outside clothes inside, while heating only enough to prevent frost damage (and ideally not requiring gloves).

Imperfect economic analogy is imperfect. It doesn't mean it's unreasonable, and it doesn't imply the malicious intent you want it to.

There's imperfect analogies, and then there's completely unrelated 'analogies'. It was the OP chose this analogy in particular, it kind of implies that they consider the situations to be similar.

I just read some people in Texas are camping out in their cars to keep warm.

That's on a per-day granularity. Not on a per second granularity.

Imagine yourself standing at the pump and observing the gasoline price ticker, manually PWMing the pump trigger to only feed the gas when its price is below some threshold.

in before "but this is freedom to make rational decisions!"

rational decisions require concentration and that isn't free. at some point the cost of making these decisions outweighs any potential benefits. don't forget your externalities, folks.

At some level, consumers do pay that minute-by-minute rate, it just gets averaged out.

No doubt, today, while some people heeded the advice to turn their thermostats down to 68 to avoid a grid crash, another group of people jacked up theirs up.

Now that rolling blackouts have started, I'm sure some of those 68s are going to get changed to 80.

If consumers were paying the $1-$2/kwh+, I'm sure a lot more will be set 68.

If anything, the poorer people will be the ones going to 68. So your grand plan is to let the poor freeze while the rich stay warm?

We normally operate our thermostat at 67 during the winter but have put it down to 60 given the power crisis. If people are crying about going way down to 68 I have no sympathy.

68 = they deserve the pain, 67 = all ok?

It's not about the absolute numbers, they were presumably just picked out of a hat. It's the general concept. Why is there so little empathy on here?

Because there’s a difference between

- the poor are freezing to death while the rich have plenty

- we have you over a barrel, how much is it worth not to die?

- the poor might have to run their dishwasher at a different time if they want t-shirt and shorts temperature indoors in the coldest winter in 40 years

Why are you assuming that the poor are demanding t-shirt and shorts temperatures? Please stop making up strawmen.

And when did dishwashers come into this? Are you really expecting that poor people should be buying brand new 'smart' dishwashers that will pick the right time to run to save some cents? I'm sure they've got the cash for that purchase just sitting around in the bank.

Because that’s what the discussed 68F temperature is, I didn’t make up 68F as a straw man, it was suggested by parent comments as an unreasonably cold that it’s in humane to leave poor people to experience unassisted.

Dishwashers come into it when the parent poster arguing in favour of markets-fix-everything said their plan was not for poor people to become human icicles, but for everyone to be pushed by prices to adjust non-essential power use such as washing to other times. Such a plan doesn’t depend on a smart anything - ERCOT twitter feed is suggesting people don’t do laundry on Valentine’s Day to reduce power use, the suggested price influence is that people don’t do laundry by their own choice because it costs more.

Pricing isn’t demand based, so everyone does laundry and uses heat, then the grid collapses - do you think the rich and poor are equally affected by rolling blackouts? That they’re more egalitarian? I suspect not, as rich people will have more and fancier clothing, more money for impromptu propane purchases, more insulated houses, more luxurious vehicles and more money for gas, etc.

There is no current way to provide enough electricity to keep people alive while not providing any for rich people’s luxuries. If demand-based pricing can reduce overall use so the grid doesn’t collapse and there isn’t a huge price surge and people can afford to survive, isn’t that better?

Fixing wealth inequality or assisting the poor could come outside this system - UK has a winter fuel payment for the elderly and poor, for example: https://www.gov.uk/winter-fuel-payment

When we are facing record snow and temperature low with possible grid collapse that could result in numerous deaths then yes... my sympathy for first world comforts softens.

Ok just for the record you’re not going to freeze to death at 67. I know because I’m in Dallas and my heater is out entirely. It’s 52 in here and were cold and uncomfortable but we’re not going to freeze to death either.

While I agree with your outrage, 68F is 20C, that’s a hot summer day in the UK; check this historic weather data for Heathrow Airport[1] for example, 5 months recorded a temp over 20C in 2020 and usually 4 or 3 in earlier years.

That isn’t a temperature you can reasonably describe as “freezing”. I’m not used to having a thermostat that high even in winter, it’s getting hot and stuffy that warm.

[1] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/sta...

You must have much higher humidity. Because 68F at 0 humidity is a little chilly even in a sweater. Right now it is -8F and my heater just clicked off set at 60F and I’m cold even under my electric blanket with a sweater on.

Must be; it's 16C (61F) indoors and I've a window open to get a cooler breeze in because it's fresh outside.

I think you have that backwards. Cold air with low humidity doesn't feel nearly as cold as cold air in high humidity.

20°C isn't cold at all unless you're soaking wet or there's some serious draft going on in your house.

Making people pay directly for what they use puts them at an advantage when the alternative is for them to pay a share of what everyone uses.

Would you prefer to be poor and have a large electricity bill because bob up the street uses power at the worst time of day, or would you prefer to at least have the option to save money by heating your house when power is cheaper and let bob pay extra for not being considerate about his power use times?

Devices can offer functionality to take the decisionmaking burden from the user.

For example a dishwasher could have a setting where you tell it what time the washing must be done by, and it schedules the wash cycle to be when it thinks electricity will be cheapest.

don't know about you but my dishwasher's shortest program is ~30 minutes - if price of electricity changed every minute, i just wouldn't care because it'd be pointless.

Most of the energy a wash cycle uses is for heating the water it just took in. The part where it splashes the water around uses next to nothing.

Waiting a bit to start heating that water if there's a high consumption peak right now is hard to transfer to any significant benefit for the consumer, because electricity is just that cheap. But it might make sense from the grid point of view to have higher demand elasticity.

> from: GE to: end user

> Subject: Missed payment on warranty program, features disabled

> Hello <name> due to missing your yearly warranty payment, your GE dishwasher's peak pricing avoidance has been disabled.

> In order to save money, please send us money.

> P.S. if you haven't paid up within a month, your dishwasher will only heat water when the cost of electricity is higher than the 24 hour rolling average peak.

> thank you for your consideration.

> Mike at GE

I do this today. My energy provider bills me based on live fluctuating rates. It’s no big deal, on most days prices fluctuate less than they would on a regular peak/off peak pricing scheme.

Some days there are short periods of high demand that cause price spikes, I’m given ample warning and can choose whether to adjust my behaviour during that spike. That might mean being more gentle with AC during a heatwave, or pre-cooling the house before the spike hits. (Price spikes can be 10x or even 100x typical rates.)

Why does this make sense to do on an individual level? If there is ample warning of price spikes, shouldn't we be expecting the power companies to do the energy hedging? Why make thousands of people do the job instead of the one single entity?

If we are trying to make the energy system smart, shouldn't the power companies be the ones trying to add smarts to the system? (e.g. better energy storage for peak usage, etc)

You make it sound like an economics problem when it's ultimately an engineering problem. Energy companies already do many things to keep the grid stable, but you can't rely entirely on supply side solutions else you are forced to over-engineer the grid to handle extreme demand, a cost that's inevitably passed onto consumers.

This is going to become more important as electric cars become mainstream—without some incentive for consumers to delay charging their vehicles during extreme peaks, we're going to be paying for some fairly hefty upgrades to keep electric grids stable.

Focusing on demand saves everyone money, because it means we can do more with existing infrastructure. In my case, if I'm willing to react to price spikes, I can reduce my annual energy cost by literally hundreds of dollars. For me, it just means occasionally delaying use of the dishwasher or dryer by an hour or so. And by occasionally I mean a handful of times every year.

It's far less onerous than the regular peak/off peak pricing I've dealt with in prior decades.

There is a large cost to building out excess capacity to handle peak demands. That cost gets passed on to customers, and everyone ends up paying more for electricity. There’s also an environmental cost, as “peaker” plants typically burn fossil fuels. Even building grid-scale storage solutions would have a fairly large environmental impact (assuming that’s even feasible at all on the scale necessary).

It makes sense to target both the supply and demand sides of energy consumption.

They could have automated systems to react to prices. Or they could be simpler (like on a fixed daily schedule).

They might not need to now, when most energy is generated by systems that run around the clock. But as we generate more solar, it'd be great if people could run more of their high energy activities like say, car charging during the day. I don't know of any way to incentivise this behaviour other than pricing.

Of course it's unreasonable to expect people to monitor prices on a minute-by-minute basis. But the future probably looks like "oh, car is low right now. I'll plug it in this afternoon instead of right now".

> This is insane. Do you really believe that individuals are going to be monitoring the energy prices like a rabid day-trader, making 'rational' decisions between "oh good, power is cheap now" and "power is expensive, I guess I'll just freeze"?

Pricing here in Norway already changes through the day.

I changed my supplier yesterday to one that has an api.

I'll use the current prices as an excuse to fix a few things:

- turning down heat at night, heating fast before demand peaks, lower heating during peak etc. Boxes that can do this are available in the $150 - $350 price range

- scheduling washing and drying and - if necessary - showering to low demand times

- maybe install a fireplace (chimney was mandatory when tje house was built so I'll just pay for the actual fireplace and installation, not extensive modifications to the construction

- or a air-air heat pump (also works as AC)

- not relevant to me at tjr moment but EV owners (of which there are plenty around here) can save a lot by scheduling charging to avoid peaks. Further down the lane I think I've heard about someone (Tesla?) planning to allow their vehicles to be used as power banks.

It is probably the main selling point for Tibber here in Norway, prices were slightly lower than my previous supplier, but not enough to make me switch. The current price hike, API access and real time price information helped me to make the jump however.

Conclusion:

Providing pricing information and APIs to end users seems like a good idea for companies that are in a position to provide it.

Batteries don't work all that well at these lower temperatures. I suppose if your Tesla is in a garage that would work, though.

Teslas regulate their battery heat for this reason.

https://www.tesla.com/support/winter-driving-tips

Sadly Tesla doesn’t have the tech in their car to pump power out fast. You need their home battery product power wall.

It’s actually very sad, I have a great 75 kWh battery in my garage. Would be happy to power my home with it during peak demand.

Here in Australia, I'm on a power plan that charges you the actual current wholesale price (plus an admin fee).

I have an app where I can check the price, and set up alerts for when there are price spikes and such.

I don't rabidly monitor it, but it does nudge you into changing your behavior gradually.

Giving electricity consumers the opportunity to set their consumption preferences is actually super logical. It's an obvious way to shave peaks off the total demand for electricity.

Consumers obviously shouldn't have to monitoring this themselves all the time though. Ideally, a device would do that for them. But even without that, quite a few people in Latvia buy their electricity at spot market prices and adjust their behavior to price changes. Working poor trying to penny pinch do so manually. More affluent eco minded people use intelligent devices.

If you have a Tesla power wall, I believe you can set it up to do this. Basically go power wall (house battery) to house during expensive times of electricity. And then charge the battery back up during cheap electric times. I think even 10% of the grid with such a system would do a lot to take the edge off peak demand, as all of those goes guys go to 0% usage.

I have 2 charts running in my office all day. One is energy load and one is energy pricing. I also have the current energy price displayed on a screen in our kitchen.

This has worked to change our habits pretty well. For instance we now consider it “expensive” to run the dishwasher during the day. We’ll do it if necessary but there is now a mental barrier to doing so.

This is amusingly interesting to me. I’d love to know more about your setup and the results make sense (I’ve considered installing a second dishwasher to be able to handle an entire days worth of dishes overnight) but it also seems somehow slightly dystopian.

I agree with the note later in the thread that the solution is powerwall like things for demand smoothing / moving.

The screen in my kitchen is a dakboard (https://dakboard.com/site) we largely use it as a digital picture frame and calendar but it supports querying/parsing json out of the box. So to get the price on it I have it hit my providers json api https://hourlypricing.comed.com/hp-api/.

For the charts in my office I have a Prometheus/Grafana setup at home for a variety of things and built a bridge to the comed data for Prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/comed_exporter). For usage data I have a neat gadget called a Rainforest Automation Eagle (https://www.rainforestautomation.com/compare-emu-and-eagle/) that reads my smart meters radio signal. It exposes an xml api and I wrote a bridge to Prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/reagle).

Once it’s all in Prometheus the Grafana dashboards are pretty straight forward affairs.

Very cool

Ahh, yes, the center of Neoliberal logic. Widespread rip-off is acceptable if the individual has technically a choice to not get ripped-off and if the fineprint of the contract had a size of at least 0.000001pt.

Can you elaborate further on why you think the parent is in favor of ripping people off or deceitful contracts? I didn’t read anything in their comment to suggest that, so I am genuinely curious how you came to that conclusion.

Half-hourly electricity pricing exists in the UK: https://octopus.energy/agile/ I'm considering switching to it actually.

Interesting offering. This is where you want a battery (electric car counts as one). Costs need to come down first.

I actually don't have a battery. I have a large hot water tank with immersion heaters, heated overnight. I'm already on "economy-7", which is where the price is cheaper for 7 hours overnight.

Texas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138767

Oh, cool, interesting to see a similar thing exists elsewhere. It looks like Griddy is missing a reasonable price cap though.

Notice that it's pseudo-realtime pricing... The price for a given half hour is set the day before. That means the price can't adjust for unpredictable events like a power station failing.

Counter argument is that it is not my business to have to think how to consume energy to match the production pattern of my provider. It is literally their business to meet my energy demands. Invest in more generation capacity, more storage, improve the transportation grid.

The problem is it's the coldest night in about 30 years.

Here in Austin, it's just past midnight, and it's already down to 13°F (-10.5°C). It hasn't been that cold here since December 23, 1989.

Also, a lot of Texas homes have electric heat (except in the northern part of the state). Winters are relatively short and mild.

Many homes use electric heat pumps as the heating source. They're energy-efficient and easy to install in a home which has AC, so generally a good choice. But they get less and less effective as the outside temperature drops, so a backup electric heating coil kicks in, which uses way more electricity.

And with windchill, it's well below 0°F.

I've lived in Texas all my life and can't remember the last time that happened.

> And with windchill, it's well below 0°F.

You won't feel the windchill inside, but it will amplify the impact of draughty buildings/poor insulation.

Yeah it's crazy. The water pressure in my apartment has dropped so much I basically don't have running water. The upstream pipes must be mostly frozen.

Luckily I stocked up on soup before all this so I'll last until the freeze breaks.

It has been snowing like crazy’s I just lost power too. Time for bed. :)

Just about every Texas building has air conditioning which is blasting for those 100 days of summer where it's often above 100 degrees. I'm surprised that a few days of cold is a bigger load than the crazy heat of summer.

I'd think it's the difference between cooling 30F (100->70) vs heating 60F (10->70)

That makes sense.

Edit: Now that the sun is up and shining through our windows, the duty cycle of our (natural gas) furnace has dropped way off. I'm pretty sure our energy usage today will be less than on a 100 degree day.

Cooling from 100 degrees to 70 uses much less energy than heating from 10 to 70.

Texas has the equipment, but it's all frozen due to an extreme weather event.

1. The extreme cold is driving up demand to heat homes which is usually done in part by natural gas but

2. The cold has frozen natural gas pipes and wells, driving up the cost of gas 33x.

3. People are trying to heat their homes with electricity but

4. Wind turbines are frozen, limiting capacity, AND those sky high gas prices are limiting what gas power plants can output.

How do you manage to freeze natural gas pipelines? It isn't even liquid at the near-surface air low-temperature record (-89.2 C/-128.6 F).

Crude natural gas is usually saturated with water downhole at warm temperatures and high pressures, some of which condenses as it is produced at the surface.

At many points in a pipeline further water removal can be essential too.

Even when not liquefied like LPG, when passing through a restriction valve or orifice, there is still additional cooling due to the product acting a bit like a refigerant.

The water content may be small but the quantity of cold gas passing through a narrow point which is well below 0C eventually can build up kilos of ice and block the flow until the ambient temperature rises enough to open it back up.

And you get can get clathrates (combinations of methane/ethane/propane and water).

Methane can't realistically freeze in the pipes, but unrefined natural gas has plenty of impurities which can. Note they're talking about "pipelines and wells" freezing in a gas production context, not residential gas mains.

Understandable. As long as it remains available, the price hike seems to incentivize operators to expend energy on manually thawing them. I'm assuming they could rig up makeshift natural gas burners/heat lamps to keep critical sections above freezing.

I feel like this reads like the first 60 seconds of intro to one of those youtube disaster-recounting videos.

https://www.youtube.com/user/USCSB being one of said channels. I don't want to say in enjoy their videos due to the content, but for being so simple they convey a great deal of information in a way that few other media have done in decades.

I've definitely watched over 20 hours of their content. It's very well produced, very approachable and easy to understand. I'm pleasantly surprised at how good of a resource their videos are. I had lower expectations with them being part of the federal government.

The one I was thinking of is https://youtube.com/c/FascinatingHorror - they aren't quite as in depth but cover a lot of different events.

Thanks for the link.

And yes, my wording seemed weird, even to me.

Most of this is correct, but thankfully, wind turbines do not appear to be frozen. In fact, current wind power to the grid is 4300MW. The predicted level is about 2450MW for right now. That’s difference amounts to the entire reserve power in their grid. You can see this on the ERCOT page (it’s a popup which is hard to link from mobile). If wind wasn’t doing so well things would be even more painful.

Everything else you said appears to be spot on.

Their press release from Feb 24th indicates that yesterday they were frozen. Perhaps not today, however. http://www.ercot.com/news/releases/show/225151

They were frozen. De-icing helicopters un-froze them.

My parents live in Dallas and rarely use the heating because of cost; instead they wear scarves and mittens inside. They are running it now, because it is the coldest they've ever seen. When your alternative is to freeze to death, you pay. Finding fault with people because of that is insensitive and lacking in empathy. They know the cost, they also know what the temperature outside is.

Resilience is an important principle in engineering, we know that from software, but it is even more important in infrastructure. People rely on this for staying alive. It is important to have a diverse set of electrical generators. Atomic energy and coal are very resilient. As someone else pointed out, a lot of green infrastructure is prone to failure in extreme events. The wind turbines froze. When the sun isn't shining the solar doesn't work, and it is coldest at night. It is great to have green infrastructure _with_ other types. This stuff is way to important to play politics with.

Of all the things the comment you replied to complained about, people's inelastic demand wasn't one of them: it was merely the background for all of the actual things being complained about.

Shutdowns of natural gas plants made of the majority of the shortfall, not wind turbines[1].

[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-...

So the people decide to act in a way that there will be power cuts - if it was only them, it wouldn't matter much - they would deserve it.

But since the system is shared, it affects everyone.

Insulation and heat pump equipped spot price aware water heaters etc could probably help a lot.

Insulation is the main issue. I live in a cold country where it often gets to -20c (-5F) during winter, but we can have peaks well below that. We usually don't even turn our heating on until it drops below freezing as our home is well enough insulated (we have much stricter building standards regarding this than the US), so that it's comfortable inside (21C/70F) until then.

Insulation helps in the summer too though - it's not just something you need in cold climates. If it's hot outside and you are running AC there's a temperature differential. Insulation will reduce the equalisation of that, and reduce the amount of energy you are using to cool your home. It's epecially important if you are in a stick framed home where there's basically no thermal mass (as opposed to masonry).

What’s the problem with incandescents here? They’re inefficient, which means they turn lots of energy into heat instead of light, which means your thermostat will turn down your heating to compensate because it needs to produce less of the desired amount of heat.

In the abstract, they’re bad when you’re cooling a Texas house and they’re putting more heat into it; on a cold night a 100W resistance heater is a 100W resistance heater and if you’d banned them, the people with them would need 100W heat from another source for every bulb replaced. That wouldn’t save power or money or reduce demand now as you seem to be suggesting.

Or it’s day time and the bulbs are off, or nighttime and the bulbs are off for sleep. They seem the least relevant thing to gripe about in this specific context?

Natural gas to a powerplant is overall less energy efficient compared to natural gas to a high efficiency home furnace.

This is about Texas though where high efficiency gas furnaces. In the north natural gas is the normal way to heat. I'm not sure about Texas.

Natural gas heating is common in Houston. Most new construction I’ve looked at in north Houston use gas forced air for heating. I have never seen electric central heating in Houston; I am sure it exists, but in my experience most houses that have central heat, have gas.

I'm in Austin and my heater uses gas. Every house I've had has used gas. It's incredibly cheap around here.

Some time ago, I worked for a defunct energy company that provided demand-side relief in exactly this scenario - when total system load outstrips total system capacity, we'd begin taking actions on behalf of end users, not the utility. Lights would turn off, generators would spin up, fridge temperatures would be raised.

ERCOT (Texas) is an interesting case in that it can't import power from other states as easily - it has its "own grid" at 60Hz, but not necessarily in phase with either of the other two major grids in the country (there's eastern US, western US, and "most of Texas"). So to import power, it first has to convert grid-scale amounts of energy from AC to DC, then back to AC, which incurs a pretty significant loss.

Preface: I know very little about power grids, but had a couple thoughts.

In the UK, there is a system of load shedding that is tied to the grid frequency. My understanding is that some industrial users agree terms where they get cheaper rates but if the demand outstrips supply, they are first to be cut. This load shedding is implemented by components that monitor the grid frequency, and if it drops below a fixed value, it disconnects. It seemed a nice system to me as in theory it operates just based on the principles of an AC power supply.

Secondly, the UK has its own grid but is linked up to the EU grid with asynchronous HVDC connectors. We get a lot of our energy though those. Is this inefficient?

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 conductor due to the AC skin effect, weighed against cost/loss for DC->AC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...

Manitoba Hydro's total DC transmission distance is +3,000km over 3 runs.

https://www.hydro.mb.ca/corporate/facilities/bipole_lines/

Hydro-Quebec is also doing at least one 1500km hvdc to the US and multiple 1000+km lines to the dams in the north. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydro-Qu%C3%A9bec%27s_electr...

If anyone is curious about this HVDC line and the Quebec grid in general I gave a small talk about it ;)

https://github.com/pirate/quebec-power-grid-talk

It's one of the only multi-terminal HVDC lines in the world, most of the others are just point-to-point.

They also literally short out the power lines with DC to warm them up and melt the ice off during ice storms, pretty crazy stuff.

You also have reactive losses with AC.

The Pacific DC Intertie was the biggest in the world until the Three Gorges stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie

More interestingly--it dates to the Kennedy Administration.

Yes, exactly. But for example interconnecting Houston with AZ or NM power plants, I think HVDC will have fewer losses than AC. Could be wrong thoguh.

Yes, for that run. The reality is that a far cheaper option would be to just install natural gas peaker turbines in Houston. Chienre Energy is exporting LNG from there so plenty of gas, and I’d estimate the cost per GW at $200M vs $1B, and the time to complete at 1 year vs 5 years.

AC transmission has worse power loss per unit distance. But has very little 'base' cost.

HVDC has better marginal loss , but you pay a loss up front for conversion

Load shedding exists in the USA - however industrial customers who can shut off probably already have given the rise in spot prices.

I know the Datacenter we were in years ago would be asked to go to generators during CA power crisis.

Zayo just sent notice that they’re cutting over to generators in the Texas area

I don't know that ERCOT has any similar program - here in the US, for areas that run a load-shedding system, load is typically dropped after 0.2 seconds of 59.5hz or lower (nominally 60hz). Some consumers may choose to cut themselves off prior to that point, to prevent damage to equipment at the lower frequencies.

ERCOT (and others) also implement peak demand charges, where some portion of a large user's overal yearly rate is determined by their usage on days when the grid is under the most stress. Usage for that particular day ends up setting rates for the entire year, which makes it not only risky but also very costly.

The UK had that too for demand charges.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_(Great_Britain)#...

A small industry popped up predicting when the 3 half-hour snapshots would be taken so their customers could minimize their use during those periods to minimize their costs for the year.

https://www.havenpower.com/news/what-you-need-to-know-about-...

HVDC is the only reasonable way to transmit power underwater. There's loss due to the conversion, but less than a short underwater run or a long (500+ miles) high tension AC run.

The technical term for what you're describing is under-frequency load shedding (UFLS) and it is part of most modern power systems around the world, including all of the North American grids. It is an important safeguard against system collapse, however, the goal of system operators is to avoid reaching this stage. In fact, resolving contingency events without interruption of "firm load" (that is, loads that have not previously agreed to be interrupted) is an important performance metric for any grid operator.

UFLS is mostly intended to buffer transient loss of power supply (for instance, tripping of several large generators). If the grid operator knows they are facing an inadequacy of generation supply and all resources have already been called in, they will start to shed load under manual operator action to avoid UFLS activation. Before doing this they will declare an emergency which, generally speaking, requires all generators to make best efforts to supply as much energy as they can to the system.

Think of it like automated emergency braking on a car vs driver braking. AEB is great, but if you can already see that you're gonna hit something, just hit the brakes right now instead of waiting for AEB. By the time UFLS kicks in, you're already in dire straits and have only moments before reaching an unrecoverable state.

In the central european grid, there is actually a market where companies can offer frequency stabilization service to the grid, which exists in both directions. It doesn't matter if the combat a lack of power in the grid with shedding loads or spinning up another generator.

This exists on a few different timescales, and the faster-responding contracts trigger at higher frequency deviations.

Primary operating reserve triggers at +-200 mHz and needs to be fully available within 30 s and for up to 15 min, secondary operating reserve has to take over (and be fully available within 5 min), and the tertiary operating reserve has to be fully available within 15 min.

The entso-e map: https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/

Curious that the map doesn't match its legend. Powerplants are drawn as substations. Ah, a PDF matches the legend.

Yes, this function exists in some fashion in every grid (although the economic setup of how you're paid for that service differs widely).

The problem in ERCOT is demand massively exceeding available supply over a period of days. You need to carry your primary operating reserve all the time, because you never know when a generator or transmission line may trip.

When there's simply a lack of energy supply to meet demand on a steady state basis, you still have to preserve your primary reserves for other unexpected events and cannot call them in to meet longer term (30+ minutes) demand. So load shedding happens once available reserve dips below a certain threshold (generally around the single of the largest single contingency on the grid which may be the largest single generator or a line that feeds multiple large generators).

ERCOT hasn't run out of primary reserve, but they are going to have to shed load in order to maintain adequate reserves. You always have to shed load before exhausting reserves, because one moves you closer to stability while the other moves you further away (consuming operating reserve).

At this point, with power prices spiking to thousands of dollars per MWh, any plant that can run is running, including some that have come out of planned outage earlier to help out (and be paid handsomely). Even if you simply invoked some emergency order that "all generators must run until further notice", there simply isn't enough capacity due to the large number of generators on forced outage. There's no way out of that situation except temporary load shedding.

Yeah, but part of our operating reserve is in form of industrial consumers. The slow (has 15 min to get to full power) tertiary reserve is partially provided by arc furnaces in steel mills.

Also, going beyond this, charging spot prices to consumers (both commercial and residential) serves to align incentives. Such as dis-incentivizing the use of resistive heating for extreme cold, as the prices are correlated with the extreme cold, making alternative heating setups for extreme weather more affordable in comparison.

Or, building houses so that extreme cold can be tolerated without damage by allowing pipes to be drained and the remaining sections to be heated separately, so the house as a whole can be unheated (and the people stay with friends).

Longer-term predicted loads can be billed at a fixed rate, but spiky loads, especially those correlated with ones at other customers of the utility, can't be.

You'd raise the prices until demand falls below the limits, instead of needing rolling blackouts. If people can't afford to take a hot shower right now, they just wait. At least in the absence of certain diseases, the human body is fine without showering for months. And as long as your building doesn't take damage, you'd gladly be payed a few thousand $ to put on really warm clothes for half a week.

And depending on the details, you'd even conclude it more economical to have to replace some pipes after water damage, than to keep that area heated.

They are not "cut", those industrial users ( mostly in chemistry) get paid to power down.

They could receive more money to power down than to work, so they do that when it's interesting enough..

The electricity net is really fragile. You need to guess averages to the system as a whole, so there's not much flunctuation. Renewable energy is an extra variable too.

Some additional reserves can be powered on/off to make the system stable.

Ps. If you cross those averages by 5% for example, you get a hefty fine, so monitoring your power outage is really important.

Source: worked at a company monitoring this for multiple countries.

ERCOT does have several HVDC links, which when I checked a couple hours ago were exporting power. Also, I believe that with modern technology HVDC is more efficient than synchronous AC connections (largely because of higher voltage interconnects)

Did ERCOT build them bidirectionally though?

Here's their news release about it:

http://www.ercot.com/news/releases/show/225151

That links to this PDF which describes their emergency procedures:

http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/200198/EEA_OnePager_u...

Basically, there are 3 levels of response:

(1) Reserves below 2,300 MW: get more power, including from other grids.

(2) Reserves below 1,750 MW: interrupt power to industrial customers (who've contractually agreed).

(3) Reserves below 1,375 MW: order transmission companies to reduce demand (i.e. rolling blackouts).

The reserves are shown on their main page (http://www.ercot.com/), and when I've checked today, it has been roughly 3,500-4000 MW. So that sort of sounds promising, but the graphs on the same page (projected capacity and demand) don't look as promising.

Uh, were at 1210 mw right now

When I go to that page I see "Operating Reserves: 3,126 MW"

I suspect the person you're responding to is using the featured link (real-time conditions) and looking at the diff between system capacity and current demand, which doesn't match the current operating reserves on the ercot homepage.

1.21 gigawatts? Do you have any idea how much energy that is? The only power source capable triggering that kind of energy is a bolt of lightning. It would have to be a real wall-shaker, big enough to stop a clock!

(I mean this as purely a bit of comic relief. Texas is in dire straits right now, and I wish the people and infrastructure all the best in this time.)

Yeah, real fuckin funny. I've had no power for 8 hours and it's 9 degrees outside.

It's a quote from "Back to the Future": https://backtothefuture.fandom.com/wiki/Jigowatt

I don't care.

edit: Took 15 minutes to go from Level 2 to 3.

"Energy conservation is critical. Rotating outages are underway to reduce demand on the electric system. We urge Texans to put safety first during this time. Traffic lights and other infrastructure may be temporarily without power. 01:25:40 150221"

https://nitter.42l.fr/ERCOT_ISO/status/1361215084010352644#m

(old stuff):

They just went into Level 2:

https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO/status/1361211669788176384

"has declared an EEA 2. Consumers are urged to reduce electricity use. Rotating outages may be needed to protect the system. 01:12:06 150221"

Not sure how much load-shedding is available at 1AM...

Manufacturing.

Just went to Level 3:

> has declared an EEA 3. Energy conservation is critical. Rotating outages are underway to reduce demand on the electric system. We urge Texans to put safety first during this time. Traffic lights and other infrastructure may be temporarily without power. 01:25:40 150221

https://nitter.42l.fr/ERCOT_ISO

Rolling blackouts in effect now. https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO/status/1361215084010352644?s=2...

Problem is they aren't "rolling": they shutdown specific parts of Texas and leave them down. We've been down for 36 hours. Meanwhile some parts of Houston never suffer "blackouts".

Likely it's the usual "who you know and who you blow (or pay)" that decides. But long term some people are going to get nailed over this situation; it is truly FUBAR.

Texas 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 who immigrated brought the blackouts with them.

>We will likely see some retail electric company bankrupcies.

REP's go bankrupt all the time, especially when the weather gets funny. As WallStreetsBets says, "Sir, this is a casino".

Griddy literally emailed every customer yesterday and told them to switch providers asap.

Yep. I was on track for a $5000 electric bill at the end of the week. I got switched over yesterday. Still going to be painful but not horrible.

$5k?!?!? How?!

$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.

I think most people are on fixed prices though. The supplier gets a big mark up over the wholesale cost and then is expected to have a plan to deal with situations like this.

Griddy is a different provider which gives you grid prices for power

Yeah, this is the answer to slater's question, that some people have signed up for exposure to wholesale prices.

griddy's twitter is full of people angrily demanding refunds because "i signed up for cheaper rates and it's been cheaper til now why am i paying higher rates??? this is a scammer"

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.

Does anyone there get a battery system, like a Tesla Powerwall, to save up negative priced night electricity to use in the daytime?

It doesn't happen enough that I've seen to make it worthwhile

Of course, during these cold snaps, the battery doesn't really work well, right?

Powerwalls have an operating temperature range of -4 F to 122 F (-20 C to 50 C), although they recommend 32-86 F (0-30 C).

They can also be mounted indoors.

My power comes from, I believe, a nuclear plant in Wisconsin.

$0.098 per kW-h, with $15 a month connection fee.

Wi has a lot of coal by the lake, where is there a nuke? Chicago was almost all nukes at one point

Point Beach is still operating afaik. Kewaunee shut down several years ago though.

CA power is hilariously expensive compared to the rest of the country. 10c is much closer to average.

The weighted average price is 10.54¢ per kwh. In California it's 16. Both 5 and 35¢ are pretty poor estimates.

I paid $.36 last month living an hour north of SF.

Average or marginal? Most PG&E customers have a “baseline allowance” with a higher marginal cost as you draw more energy over the month.

Marginal. I was doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation about getting an EV and realized that the $/mile cost to charge it would be about the same as paying for gasoline on a car which gets 30 mi/gallon.

I'm paying 8.5-8.3 cent kWh on a fixed contract.

Power is very very very cheap in Texas.

My house normally uses 70kwh/day. We have an electric heater and with this cold weather we were on track to use 150-200kwh day. At $5/kwh for 5 days of 200kwh due to the cold puts me at $5,000.

Holy cow! How in the world do you use that much? My old house in Colorado would use ~350kwh/month. Swap out that electric heater for a heat pump asap!

Big house (3700sqft or so), tall ceilings, four people working/schooling from home and an electric car as the primary family car. In 2019 I literally did not turn the heater on a single time, I don't think the investment in a heat pump would be worth it.

Heat pump systems can sometimes be an upgrade to standard air conditioning systems

Does your AC has not heating function (I assume everyone in Texas has AC)?

I'm guessing most Texas AC systems don't have a reversing valve, and a defrost system and all the other goodies you need to run it for heat. It adds to the equipment cost when many years heat isn't needed, and if the temperatures are 10F, you'd still likely need other heat sources.

> a defrost system

What does a defrost system includes? My dad manages a place where defrost system on one of the devices broke. Technician replaced something and hence it was fixed. IIRC it was temperature sensor. All defrost system does is periodically warms up the outside grill basically. It used to get stuck at -15C or so.

That's the gist. It's not much, but if the outside unit is iced over, there's not going to be a lot of heat exchange into the working fluid, so you're not going to get heat into your conditioned environment.

So, a defrost system will include a temperature sensor, and a resistance heater, and often something to signal the inside unit to run the emergency/auxiliary heat until (unless) the outside unit can get up to a temperature where it will work.

We have colder weather where I live, but I see I used 550 kwh per month (at most). Even if my house is half your size, 70 kwh seems like a lot for a daily baseline. I have a similar situation (kids at home studying, me working at home).

Does the the car that drives up your electricity usage that much?

Car adds about 500kwh/mo. During offpeak rates charging this amount cost between $1 and $12 for the month.

A don't think a heat pump would help them in this weather.

Modern ones and designed for purpose go to -20C.

I bet absolutely nobody in texas asked "how efficent is the heatpump at -20c" when buying them. Same reason why all the windmills froze: "would like this wind mill model that produces eletricity at -20, or this cheaper one that freezes at 0c?"

No, but those who make heat pumps know that to sell in the north people care so they try to make one model that works anywhere.

Have you seen how houses are insulated in TX/LA?

New construction is actually pretty good in Texas. But most houses are not new and have little.

It would make sense for you to turn off your water, drain all the pipes, turn off the heat and go somewhere else for a few days.

and go somewhere else for a few days

Or put a tent up in the living room.

Wow! European here. Family of 5 and we are at 8kwh per day. Total yearly electricity bill is < 1000 EUR.

Even higher this morning. Up to ~ $6000/MWh or $6/kWh. http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/contours/rtmLmp.html

I’ve been half ignoring them because they tend to cry wolf with the high price emails. But this is no joke, I checked current rate which is $9.01/kWh. I immediately switched back to my old provider.

They emailed, sent a phone notification and called their customers to tell them to switch

I hope they get some sort of a surcharge for this. Part of what you pay for with a big utility is for them to eat weird price fluctuations. Getting grid pricing just when it's convenient is cheating the system.

Probably not a surcharge, but maybe a minimum contract length? I don’t know if that’s possible (legally). But, I imagine that a utility would want to make sure that a customer who switched providers to avoid these wholesale prices would want to ensure that the customer would stick around long enough to make sense financially.

The contract lengths yield different prices. griddy has referral recommendations for several 1 month contracts through different providers until prices stabilize

It sounds like Texas has a substantially different market than most of the rest of the country, by typically utilities are heavily regulated. I would be curious how the other market players react to this (perhaps requesting more regulation).

It kinda feels like someone who could have gotten insurance but declined getting coverage until after learning they have cancer. That's certainly not the spirit of how insurance is supposed to work (spreading tail-end risk across a pool of people), and if everyone acted that way, it would be far from sustainable.

As a whole people are poor at assessing low probability risks. Low probability high cost risks pose a big threat. Letting people get spot pricing may help the market be more efficient, but considering many people would struggle to pay a $200 unexpected bill, it does feel odd to let everyone do spot pricing if they want. For many people, even having one bill that was double normal would financial headaches, much less 10x!

Giving consumers spot pricing feels like having everyday people selling naked call options. It may work fine for a really long time, but when the strategy blows up, it has unlimited liability potential.

Griddy is basically a variable price for power? I checked their website, but it wasn't completely clear on that point (maybe because I don't understand Texas electrical billing).

Yes you pay a monthly fee and get the grid price. Typically this is a great deal but when these surges happen it isn't

Yeah, they pass through the wholesale prices. Most providers do some work to offer fixed retail prices (gaining when wholesale is cheap, losing when it's expensive). Most markets in the US have some sort of system for matching supply and demand, often a wholesale market.

https://www.epa.gov/greenpower/us-electricity-grid-markets has a picture of the various wholesale markets.

> windmills

Wind turbines! :)

"The Joke is all the Californians who immigrated brought the blackouts with them. "

Ouch, yet wow.

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.

Driving through Amarillo on I-40, the number of windmills on the plains compared to even two years ago is mind-blowing. Saw lots of trucks carrying new blades etc. as well.

Where do all those blades go when they reach end of life?

A giant graveyard outside Sweetwater, Texas. It's a blight in every way. You cannot recycle this stuff.

Are you talking about this?

Global Fiberglass Solutions Of West Texas https://goo.gl/maps/od4YB3MubUqT5B6a9

It’s a field about 600x600 feet. I wouldn’t call that “giant”, it’s about the size of a typical warehouse and certainly smaller than most landfills. And according to some brief searches on the internet, they are indeed being recycled.

I didn't know they can be recycled, and that is not the only graveyard. I appreciate the fact that we have differing opinions on the size of giant!

Currently they go in landfills, but there are programs[1] starting up to recycle them.

[1]: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ge-announces-first-us-wind-...

Iowa comes close. Sure it is a third, but on vastly less land area.

just one nit to pick, it's wind turbines, not windmills. :)

> Some of the electric providers are paying customers to move to someone else on Monday.

I'm on a fixed rate plan and my provider just offered me $150 to change, but I had to do it by tomorrow and the rates available now aren't close to what I'm currently at.

It'll be interesting, when the dust settles, to see how this event squares away with the regulator's risk modelling. My initial impression is there is a correlation between extreme power demand and renewable energy being unavailable that would not have been present for a nuclear or fossil fuel based system.

ERCOT is pretty good about releasing their event analysis after the fact.

I think the main issue with renewables is not inherent unreliability but that grid operators do not understand the potential contingencies as well as with conventional generation sources.

SPP has put out some good analyzes of recent max generation events there involving large amounts of wind being unavailable in cold snaps. It turns out no one at SPP bothered to ask wind turbine owners what temperatures they were capable of operating in and some wind operators didn't buy the cold weather package for turbines despite installing them in the Midwest. So generation availability forecasting didn't take into account the real capabilities of generators - a clear failure in operational planning.

This is more of a regulatory issue than a technical one. The machines can operate at -40 C, but someone has to actually spec that functionality and ensure that the associated subcomponents (heaters etc) are properly maintained.

There is a new NERC reliability standard in the drafting stage for this.

Somewhat off topic, but are regulators also considering mandating Basalt rebar in wind tower foundations, prohibiting steel rebar?

I don't know what the re-use story is for foundation plus tower, but it seems to me a bad idea to start with the assumption of rusting out the foundations.

I haven't heard of that here in North America, but I'll add that I'm not up to speed on global developments.

In general, wind turbine foundations are considered to have a fixed lifespan of 25-30 years. If re-powering occurs at end of life, it may be with a larger turbine that requires a new foundation anyway, so not much thought is given to foundation re-use.

Texas fuels mix in 2019 was 20% coal, 47% natural gas. That's shocking, yes, but not green.

California's mix is 3% coal (2019 figures; in 2021 it is zero) and 34% natural gas, for comparison.

Can you share your source? I wonder if you are looking at production or consumption numbers. California is the largest energy importer in the USA (25%) and my understanding is that the number 1 source for this power is coal and natural gas in Arizona and Utah.

I'm looking at this source for California which includes imports. The main source of error is "unspecified" open market imports, but even if 100% of that is from fossil fuels, which seems unlikely, the worst-case error is another 7% of the total.

https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

Your understanding sounds completely fictional to me. Where did you come to believe that the primary source of imported power is Utah coal?

I didn't say Utah coal specifically. I said the leading sources were coal and natural gas from Arizona and Utah. I based this on theEIA. [1]

>In 2019, California’s net electricity imports were the largest in the country at 70.8 million megawatthours (MWh), or 25% of the state’s total electricity supply ... California utilities partly own and import power from several power plants in Arizona and Utah.

Arizona is ~75% coal and natural gas [2] Utah is ~80% and natural gas [3]

Looking at your link [4], 70% of California imports are "non-renewable and unspecified" and 75% of "non-renewable and unspecified" comes from the southwest (e.g. Arizona and Utah)

I think this brings us to the same conclusion that the number 1 source for imported electricity is coal and natural gas in Arizona and Utah. You are saying that a worst case for CA power is being 3-10% coal. I am talking about the worst case for CA imported power (which happens to be up to 37% coal)

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46156#:~:tex....

[2] https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=AZ#tabs-4

[3] https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=UT#tabs-4

[4] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

How does this materially affect the discussion, though? If Texas at 67% fossil fuels is "shockingly green" then California, with at most 45% fossil fuels, must be jaw-droppingly green or some such nonsense.

I wanted to understand if the numbers you presented reflected a real snapshot of California's fossil fuel consumption or not.

I think the conclusion we came to is that the numbers you presented likely underestimate the fossil fuels, but there is still a big gap between Texas and California, and there is no material impact on the discussion. Thats OK.

I had an honest question about the data you presented, so I asked, and explained why I thought the data could be different.

You said my understanding was completely fictional, so I demonstrated that yes, in fact a significant portion of California imports come from fossil fuels.

Turns out that California's coal could be up to 3x the stated number, but is still less than Texas. My question is answered and hopefully we both understand the subject matter better now

I was on Griddy for about 9 months a couple of years ago.

Until one very hot August, when the wholesale price hit $10/kWh in the afternoon. My power bill for one day was $130. I didn't even wait till the end of the month. I switched back to my old power company that afternoon. Thankfully they were able to switch me back the next morning.

Trick is to set up a couple transfer switches and make a deal with your neighbour on a fixed rate plan. Could do it just for the air conditioner and gain most of the savings.

We’re you able to set up anything interesting to take advantage of ebbs and flows in rates?

No I never did. Griddy didn't have an API by the time I left. I had thought about setting up something to scrap the data from ERCOT's page, but decided it wasn't worth the effort.

Natural 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?

Not a direct answer, but you can adjust the active layers on https://www.eia.gov/state/maps.php to show pipelines. It's pretty well interconnected.

Connections only halfway answers it capacity is also a big part of this.

Virtually everything is interconnected [0], but some regions are more connected than others. All the producers and consumers know how much it costs to ship to/from different hubs, including Asia and Europe, and will do so very quickly whenever it becomes economic.

As you can probably tell from the wikipedia graph, the gulf is heavily plumbed. In addition to the shipping and processing in the gulf, there are also massive storage caverns [1] that can buffer most swings in demand. Different US regions have their own storage hubs [2] but the reason that lots of natural gas-related prices have "Mont Belvieu" in the name is that Mont Belvieu TX is basically the biggest storage hub and serves as the benchmark for everyone else.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_pipeline_system_in...

[1] https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2015/10/19/...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_stor_wkly_s1_w.htm

Edit: wikipedia has a pretty good overview here, but it is a little dated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_storage

That price volatility is an interesting thing. It could actually accelerate the transition to renewables in places like Texas. Gas for peaker plants becomes a lot less attractive when the price can jump by 100x when it is most needed. If that becomes a regular thing, people will want other options. And of course such options are readily available in the market now in the form of e.g. solar + battery that you can install in your home.

Battery storage is wholly inadequate for this current scenario. We need reliable baseload capacity for prolonged demand cycles like this. Texas being frozen over for days on end is not the same as dealing with the duck curve on an intraday basis in the summer.

Running your AC on batteries for a few hours in the afternoon is a completely different ballgame than trying to heat your home for 72 hours straight.

You are right, it's not a solution by itself. But it does help smooth out the energy peaks. The more people do that the better it gets. And if you have an EV with vehicle to grid capability, that's another very capable battery that should be able to keep you powered for 2-3 days. A couple of million of those would go a long way in the next few years. But it does require a bit of planning and infrastructure to happen.

The solution may be hydrogen. This helps in two ways: it can be burned in turbines, and it provides large amounts of dispatchable demand (for the electrolyzers) that can be shut down in emergencies.

ERCOT:

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) manages the flow of electric power on the Texas Interconnection that supplies power to more than 25 million Texas customers – representing 90 percent of the state's electric load.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_o...

ERCOT is the only energy market not to have a capacity market. Combine this with a large dependency on wind(unreliable) and you see problems.

This is not the first time has happened. Summer of 2019 saw a heat wave with no wind that lasted a week. Energy prices were way up.

https://cpowerenergymanagement.com/why-doesnt-texas-have-a-c...

Ps - I just checked the prices for northern Hub - day ahead was over $6,500 and real time around $4,500 per MW for 8pm.

Last Sunday both prices were around $25.

From what I understand, it's not that there is no wind. 50% of the Turbines have been shut down do to icing. The also have some NatGas suppliers that suffered freezing damage. So it's a combination of things that are adding up. I'm in North Texas and I can't remember temps this low in the last 30 years. It's about 13 degrees (- 10 C) at the moment and it looks like it is going to get a lot colder in the coming days.

Correct. The summer of 2019 was no wind. Today’s problem is ice.

I'm guessing ice is such a rare problem the turbines in Texas aren't equipped to handle it. Not that turbines can't de-ice themselves, right? Surely if they can operate in the North Sea, they can operate in West and South Texas, yeah?

I am not familiar with turbine technology. But I do know wind farms is ISO-NE (New England) have shutdown from ice. Just a quick bit of reading describes the challenges - historically the solutions have been expensive and not very good. One article said there is some promising new technology.

Here is that article (or press release - I know nothing of the source)

https://www.windpowerengineering.com/the-cold-hard-truth-abo...

Perhaps there is an unhappy middle temperature where ice forms more easily? I know some people from the northern US that moved to Texas and were mocking how slowly they drove in the snow. Until they had a close call and realized the barely freezing weather makes for worse ice sheets.

Central Texas has been getting a lot of freezing rain this weekend, as opposed to outright snow or sleet. I know this has caused a lot of power line and tree damage (because it causes water to cling to trees and freeze into ice, whereas snow doesn’t accumulate as much on trees). I would imagine freezing rain would have similar effects on wind turbines.

Austin TX here, it's the most bizarre thing I've seen. All trees, all objects, have a thin (couple mms) shell of clear ice. Evenly distributed all the way around, and then icicles on the bottom. It all appeared that first day (Thursday?) when we first had freezing temperatures and there was moderate rain at the same time. All of the trees are sagging, several branches have fallen just within the view of my house.

Walking around my yard this evening and the green vegetation that froze over crunched like potato chips. I'm from the Midwest so familiar with the cold, but I had never experienced that sensation before.

Freezing rain usually occurs when you have an inversion aloft, resulting in above freezing temperatures over sub freezing temps, along with precipitation. The snow that falls melts, then chills down as it goes through the cold near surface layer. So when it hits an object, it freezes on contact.

For this to occur, you need temps to be pretty close to freezing, as if it's too warm, or won't refreeze, and too cold, it never melts to rain.

According to this article[1] you can equip them with cold weather packages that will allow them to operate down to -30C. I am guessing they wouldn't install those packages on turbines in Texas

[1] https://energynews.us/2019/02/27/midwest/wind-turbine-shutdo...

The forecast looks to be warmer after Monday, no?

Tuesday 2am is the lowest we'll see around North Dallas. 2°F is current prediction

Look up grand solar minimum.

> ERCOT is the only energy market not to have a capacity market.

Plenty of energy-only markets around, at least internationally.

ERCOT also has an ORDC. Surely they can tweak that if they want to have better insurance against black swan type events without going to a capacity market, with attendant problems.

Texan here. I tried, on Thursday, to buy a space heater; not only was the hardware store out, they told me a list of other places around town that were also out. Most homes use natural gas for heat, but I think a lot of space heaters are probably turned on right now.

I also have to wonder how an everyone-videoconference-from-home society changes electricity usage? Not saying it has a significant impact, just wondering.

It is odd for Texas to have peak electricity usage in the winter; especially anywhere other than north Texas, we usually get threatened with rolling blackouts when it's 110 degrees and everyone has their A/C cranked up, not in the middle of the winter.

Several articles have said that only 40% of homes in Texas use natural gas for heat. https://climatecrocks.com/2021/02/14/the-eyes-of-texas-are-o...

That actually makes sense since the lower half of the state rarely gets cold enough to warrant a complex heating setup.

I have lived in Texas all my life and this figure surprises me. Every home I have ever lived in or rented has had a gas furnace, even if some of the appliances are electric. I've never even lived north of ATX, so this makes even less sense to me.

Why would we be building out all these homes in the Houston area with insanely powerful gas furnaces? The home I am in right now could easily get to 80F+ in this current ambient weather if I let the furnace run constantly. But, my 5 ton AC struggles in the summer to pull 30 degrees of delta. This stuff really staggers me sometimes.

As a counterpoint, I also have a friend who lives in the downtown area with new construction (completed late 2019) and its a heat pump/resistive setup. He is on griddy and not having a good time right now.

Perhaps its some economics thing with home builders and supply chains, rather than rational application of engineering talent.

> I also have to wonder how an everyone-videoconference-from-home society changes electricity usage? Not saying it has a significant impact, just wondering.

Well, anecdotally, my office is the only room that doesn't need heating.

Yup, year-round I have a window open in that room. It's 10 outside, today, but a balmy 77 in my office.

I powered on all of my servers tonight and opened the window. I’m probably part of the problem

I'm thinking it must take quite a bit more energy to heat all those big sprawling Texas homes to a comfortable temp during the day than the relative efficiency you can get for heating a building full of tightly packed offices. But this would be more of an issue with cooling since it is hotter mid-day. Whereas with cold, it gets colder at night, and most people are at home at night anyway.

OTOH, the homes are probably gonna be heated somewhat anyway, even if no one as homes, and if the offices are shutdown, it's probably a net win.

> I also have to wonder how an everyone-videoconference-from-home society changes electricity usage? Not saying it has a significant impact, just wondering

I work in the industry in TX and we've seen noticeable changes in both usage patterns and amounts. Most notable in the early morning hours as people are waking up and getting ready to work. A whole lot more people are waking up, checking emails, and keeping lights on at home rather then driving to the office.

If you have anything else that can use a significant amount of power (e.g. electric stove/hotplate, kettle, gaming rig, bitcoin miner), it's just as efficient as a space heater.

This also means that if your alternative is running a resistive heater, there's no meaningful extra cost to e.g. mining cryptocurrencies with your GPU (assuming you have decent cooling so your components don't get damaged from overheating).

Thats a terrible idea. Get traditional light bulbs and warm your body and a small room.

Why is that a terrible idea?

Get incandescent light bulbs and heat a small room. I use a 200 watt bulb to keep me toasty at my desk in Connecticut Zone 6B

The main difference between this and California rolling outages last August is the conspicuous lack of ten-thousand-word think-pieces about how it was the inevitable consequence of a failing one-party regime.

Climate change is going to result in local excursions in heating and cooling demand. It's just stochastic bad luck.

I'm sure you'll find the usual blowhards explaining how Biden is personally responsible for this.

Nah, but I’m sure they’ll be shouting about how wonderful coal is vs that unreliable renewable power.

And gas somehow didn't fail?

I didn’t say it was a cogent argument.

It's grand solar minimum, industry not preparing infra for cold snaps, uniformed population who gave up their incandescent bulbs (heaters) for LEDs and power hungry space heaters, people wasting energy. It's not just bad luck.

Now at level 3: Situation Critical:

"has declared an EEA 3. Energy conservation is critical. Rotating outages are underway to reduce demand on the electric system. We urge Texans to put safety first during this time. Traffic lights and other infrastructure may be temporarily without power. 01:25:40 150221"

https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO

"Rotating outages primarily affect residential neighborhoods and small businesses and are typically limited to 10 to 45 minutes before being rotated to another location."

http://www.ercot.com/eea_info/show/26464

I'm curious how they coordinate between the transmissions providers as to what gets cut off when and by whom.

The second link says:

"each utility is required to lower the demand on its system based on its percentage of the historic ERCOT peak demand.

"each utility is responsible for determining how to implement the required demand reduction, most utilities use rotating outages for this purpose."

There's about 25 different utilities, so who knows what each does.

I'm surprised voltage reduction isn't used. It's very effective at reducing resistive loads (ie: heaters and incandescent lights).

The grid has basically zero capability to change the voltage; frequency is all that matters. Frequency is so low that in the past hour any power line time base has fallen over 5.5 seconds behind. That’s a massive drop in frequency.

It's a tool where I am. The grid operator does tests for 3% and 5% reductions:

https://www.ieso.ca/Corporate-IESO/Media/News-Releases/2019/...

Would be very effective with the space-heater (or oven?) driven demand right now in Texas. Not effective for A/C-driven demand (motors will draw more current).

No, voltage can be dropped a bit. "Brownouts" are a thing. But they're less effective than they used to be, because everything with a switching power supply will draw more current if the input voltage drops. That's now a big fraction of the load.

Surely it’s not a big fraction of the load tonight. This whole problem is being caused by heaters.

But heaters on thermostats will just run more if they are putting out less wattage. So across your whole population of houses, you won't move that part of demand much (maybe a few were already running at 100% duty cycle).

>Frequency is so low that in the past hour any power line time base has fallen over 5.5 seconds behind. That’s a massive drop in frequency.

Out of curiosity, where did you find this?

I’m in North Texas (Oncor) and my place just got hit by the rolling blackout 3 minutes ago (1:44am). See http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/main/currentDayForecastSyst... for dramatic shedding of load.

Edit 1:54am - First blackout lasted exactly 10 minutes. They got this down to a tee.

Edit 2:37am CT - Second blackout started.

Edit 3:00am - Second blackout ended.

Edit 3:17am - Third blackout started.

I lost power at 2 am. It’s 2:48 am and still no power...

I’m charging my portable batteries with the power left on my Macbook.

Same here, been an hour and a half with no power in Austin.

Austin here also. 8.5 hours and counting. They need to find a solution soon...

> "Rotating outages primarily affect residential neighborhoods and small businesses and are typically limited to 10 to 45 minutes before being rotated to another location."

I don't understand. Here they shut down a couple large factories (that have agreed beforehand to emergency shutdowns) when there are capacity problems. Those eat so much power that it usually solves the problem.

They don't shut down power to residential just for capacity, if you're without power at home it means something blew up on the path that delivers to you.

Also, how can a gas pipeline freeze? Almost everyone is heating with natural gas here, we have a cold wave, and the only question is if they can deliver enough volume. Which is again fixed by shutting down some large industrial consumers, not by freezing homes.

They've already done that - that is EEA 1 and 2 (1 being voluntary shutdown, 2 being involuntary shutdown).

They've asked everyone who CAN go to backup generators (think: hospitals, datacenters) to do so. If short-term shedding of residential load doesn't work, the next step is to blackout commercial players - think Walmart, etc. Those usually occur for longer periods of time and have security risks involved.

Natural gas pipelines have some water in them, they can freeze if they're not buried deep enough.

> the next step is to blackout commercial players

Yeah, my point is they have the order wrong. They're shutting down residential first with the associated health risks instead of shutting down commercial which will just send people home for a day or three.

I was wrong - there is no EEA 4. It's up to the local utilities to determine how to shed load; I suspect many office parks are already without power (but at 4 AM they're also probably not using much power).

that's the scary part: daytime demand is much higher.

http://www.ercot.com/

You can see the forecasted gap on the home page. It’s going to her worse.

Look at the projected capacity graph on the main page - they expect to be 10 GIGAWATTS short by 9 AM!

Here is a bit more informative article with the background for non-Texans: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/14/texas-rolling-blacko...

Thanks for posting this! First year here [in HTX] and the weather apparently [for born and raised texan locals] is weird.

What I don't understand is that it sounds like the utilities were unprepared for the cold because the windmills and gas lines froze up. But the same tech is used in Canada fine because it sounds like they plan for the cold and have equipment options designed to deal with ice, etc. So, you might immediately think - ah, climate change strikes again! But then I hear this is only a low temp in the last 30-40yrs. Who doesn't design a system to work at low temps that have occurred in the last 30-40 years?

So, the question is - is this system poorly designed? Were corners cut that should not have been?

People may claim to prepare for a once a century event but since it only happens once a century it’s hard to determine if it’s actually prepared for.

Half the houses don’t even have gas heat - because it’s never been needed. What we have here is asking to a earthquake hitting the Midwest - sure it’s known it could happen and there are plans for it - but they’ve never been tested.

I just saw something that said these are the lowest temps in the last 30 yrs. That isn't once in a century!

I think the combination of the lowest temps in last 30 years, with sustained mucher colder temps than average over last 4-5 days with overcast sky (so there is no residual heat from mild Texas winter day), and that 50% of the state's wind turbines were made inoperable by freezing rain a few days ago might make it a once in a century event.

There were 3 'once in 500 year' floods in Houston from 2015-2017. It makes no sense.

I have a friend that lives in an area that drains into the Chesapeake bay. He is doing some changes to his property and is not allowed to do anything that would increase water run-off. OK, I said, that seems quite reasonable. Then he tells me it is for 12in of rain in 24hr. Wow, ok, that is a lot but I guess it could happen. Yes, it is a once in a 100yr storm. Then he tells me the rule is you have to handle that, and be prepared for another one within 48hrs. What?? Any water retention has to be drained within 24hrs so that if another storm hits it can be handled. So two, once in a century storms in a total of 72hrs. Kind of changes the definition of once in a century?

Depends on when you start counting your century. Once a century does not mean literally once every 100 years. These are certainly the lowest temps of this century so far.

Yeah I imagine any once a century event is pretty hard to prepare for. Sure you're covered generally for X, Y, Z but it can play out in so many other ways.

Texas can prepare for Canadian type cold weather but we don’t. I have lived in TX all my life and fondly refer it to the “blast furnace”. Weeks of 100F is what I am used to.

Most folks here don’t own winter tires for their cars. We don’t have car battery kick start kits like Canadians do. Many apartment dwellers only have electric heat. We are optimized for a semi arid plains climate. Optimizing for hot and cold is beyond the reach of most.

One thing I wonder about is all the wind turbines in Texas. If they get iced over and continue to rotate, does the ice cause the blades unnecessary vibration and structural damage?

This came close to happening in 2014.[1] They got to stage 2, but not rotating blackout stage 3.

And yes, natural gas pipelines can freeze. There's some water in natural gas. Happened in 2011.[2] Search for "freeze-offs".

[1] https://rbnenergy.com/the-night-the-lights-almost-went-out-i...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=3390

It is kind of weird and worrisome that such a large entity doesn't use https

Look at the weird error message...

https://www.ercot.com/

The rest of the site appears to be http only

What's funny is that they do have a valid certificate for their error message page.

There's a cloudflare-like MITM in the middle that is serving https.

MITM in the middle? :D

my brain stopped working after -like

be right back, headed out to the ATM machine to get some cash to pay my electric bill

Encryption uses too much power

So that’s why Kirk always had to bother poor Scotty

And so does growing massive amounts of pot and mining bitcoin.

Will these things stop? Probably not.

On the other hand, the page is loading in single digit ms for me, even when I'm sure it's getting 10000x the usual traffic. Honestly I'll take it.

I can't even access it.

"Error code: 16 > This request was blocked by the security rules"

No idea why. Maybe they don't feel the need to serve thier website to foreigners?

I get the impression they're blocking requests from outside the US, yes. I get the same error message in the UK, but can access the site fine through a VPN to the US.

Probably a GDPR thing.

59.774Hz? That's a huge frequency error. I saw 59.6 go by. 29.5 seconds behind. Those are load-shedding levels. Unusually cold weather and heat pumps. Ouch.

Back up to 60.080. They'll run a little fast if they can to make the remaining synchronous clocks catch up.

Up to 30 seconds behind again, was as low as 10 just recently. 800MW of reserve remains.

I wonder what "Current System Inertia" is.

From ERCOT's materials:

Power system inertia is defined as the ability of a power system to oppose changes in system frequency due to resistance provided by rotating masses. The level of inertia present in a system at any time is dependent on the amount of kinetic energy stored in rotating masses of synchronously-interconnected machines, including various types of generators as well as synchronously operating motor loads.

See: http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/key_documents_lists/141324/... (you may need a VPN to USA IP to access this)

Effectively, this is the amount of kinetic energy in the grid at any given point in time.

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.

It's not that the capacity can't be mustered, it's that it can't be mustered overnight.

Not exactly public opinion when places like California are manadating it

What is the cost to build power grids to support days of weather a geography doesn’t experience for decades at a time (it has been 30 years since Texas was this cold)? Would people pay more versus suffer through some power outages?

"Netflix" is not even 10% of a heater. Heating is so much more energy-costly than basically anything you do in your home.

Granted, seems like if you're driving ~40-60 miles a day, then you're looking at needing 4kW during the evenings. Not insignificant, but it's like... electric heating for one big room, basically.

What's your point? That EV conversion shouldn't be a goal? That because of a freak, instant spike in demand in 2020 means grids and production can't be more robust in 2035?

A TV pulls what, 50-100 watts? A space heater pulls 1500W on high. Now think about many people who, for better or worse, are running multiple space heaters in their house. Now imagine millions of households doing that, on two days' notice.

Not the grandparent, but this is an actual concern. As you say, there is nothing preventing us from aiming for large-scale EV conversion while simultaneously improving the grid.

The problem is that many seem to believe the second part will happen automatically, whereas in reality, it'll require large investments in renewing and improving current infrastructure.

As a comparison, I live in the Finnish countryside. Cold like the one experienced in Texas is pretty normal here, but the grid situation is similar to what the grandparent suggests; a large-scale EV rollout would simply not be possible during wintertime as the grid's already maxed out due to electric heating. And this is when most people burn wood or wood pellets in order to keep their electricity bills low.

This will be easier to remedy in urban areas, but unless we start upgrading the infrastructure soon, there's simply no way we'll be using EV's to the extent we want to in 15 years.

If people start using more electricity, politicians will have to choose between improvements or dealing with mobs with pitchforks.

Worst case scenario there are some brown outs as they get their shit together. But it’s relatively easy to solve this with pricing or by subsidizing local solar or a lot of other things. And people will absolutely not tolerate their power going out, so those things will happen.

Savvy grid operators are deploying large battery installations to meet demand spikes, mitigating some of the issues around that. Also the amount of solar and wind energy installations is only going to increase going forward, so no worries. Still, plenty to do.

in this case texas is net short gigawatts. the largest grid scale battery ever built wouldn't last an hour. you'd have to have 20 to get through the night.

What batteries could do here is allow the grid to operate closer to maximum, without having to hold as much generating capacity in reserve in case some generator goes offline. The batteries could keep the grid going until some load could be shed.

How many gigawatts we talking? The largest grid scale battery ever built will deliver 1.2GW per hour.

I'd say 20 of those would certainly do the trick, and then some. Might be able to get by with 10 or so.

They would save rate payers a bucket of money as well; the largest grid scale battery ever built that you mention is projected to offer cost savings of $100 million over its 20 year lifespan versus the alternatives; not bad at all.

As far as the up front cost, it's pocket change for a state like Texas, and they could use it in the summer as well.

my back of the napkin chart-to-eyeball calculations point to a 10-20 GW deficit.

i absolutely agree that not buying these batteries is just plain stupid, therefore the chance of them not getting bought is significant.

imagine if the grid did have the capacity to charge everybody's EV every night, and the only consequence of a sudden intense surge in demand for electricity like this was that you couldn't charge your car, rather than your house losing power completely when the power company has to institute rolling blackouts...

A higher overall demand makes the grid healthier, not weaker.

Perhaps, in 10-15 years electricity output may increase along with demand?

As of Monday afternoon in Texas, it's getting worse, not better. The "rotating outages" have become longer. "Unfortunately, if you are a customer who is currently experiencing an outage, you should be prepared to be without power for at least the rest of the day."[1] Galveston is 95% dark.

Tonight's predicted low temp for Houston is 12F. Tuesday may be above freezing.

[1] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-weather/articl...

Rolling blackouts are in effect. What I have noticed is that if you drastically minimize your power consumption you drastically increase your odds of being spared from the blackouts. The observation is based upon neighborhood data posted by various homeowners to our community page.

They blackout on a home to home level? In CA it was whole towns

They blackout neighborhoods here I believe. My guess is that neighborhoods that largely heat with natural gas are spared, as they don't use a ton of electricity.

That makes sense - if you're going to blackout you want to start with the "highest loads" (perhaps per capita? per household?) so as to reduce the number of blackouts you have to cause. Better 10k people lose power than 50k.

Though if 60% of Texas homes are electric heat then you have to consider that, too, and how long it takes a 60º house to get to 40 (any lower and you begin to risk health and water damage). I assume they'd roll the blackouts and no neighborhood would be without power for more than a few hours.

Ah, looking at the EEA 3 alert: http://www.ercot.com/eea_info/show/26464

In these situations, each utility is required to lower the demand on its system based on its percentage of the historic ERCOT peak demand. While each utility is responsible for determining how to implement the required demand reduction, most utilities use rotating outages for this purpose. Rotating outages primarily affect residential neighborhoods and small businesses and are typically limited to 10 to 45 minutes before being rotated to another location.

Weird.. you'd think with the AC demand in the summer they'd have enough capacity for winter..

I think the problem is that homes are also designed to cool, efficiently, which is why many a/c and heater units are in the attic with vents in the ceiling.

This means that they tend to heat homes more inefficiently than in places that are used to very cold weather.

If that's true people should insulate their attics. Or just keep the taps running and jump into insulated sleep bags at night.

Attic equipment is mainly for low install costs. Easy to run the ducts. It's terribly inefficient.

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..

Electric heat is great if you don't use heat consistently. Relatively inexpensive up front, low maintenance, etc.

Central air and a natural gas furnace are both on the same duct system and low maintenance.

Electric heat doesn't need any duct system though, which is nice. Also, no chimney to worry about. For places with low-co2 footprint electricity, it makes a lot of sense.

Granted, down in TX central AC is a lot more important than worrying about heat for a once-every-30-years cold situation.

Electric heat in the central air is low maintenance too.

Air conditioning can also be more than 100% efficient (from the point of view of the heat in the room), because it's moving heat from inside to outside. If you're using electricity to heat your house, it's only 100% efficient because each kw is being dumped directly into the air. This is why heat pumps are so great, they're basically just ACs in reverse, so for 1 kwh of electricity, you'll get more than 1 kwh of heat in the air of your house.

As an FYI I’ve really enjoyed (Austin-based) Matt Risinger’s home building channel on YouTube [1] recently. He often discusses efficient building trends and materials. You think about your R-value much harder when it’s 9°F outside... [1] https://youtu.be/Ro3Tg9-PqFc

Yeah but it’s just crazy.. the higher R value materials are not that much more expensive and they work everywhere.

Different supply/demand scenarios in summer/winter.

Currently the wind turbines are down over 50%, due to icing.

Solar is out during snow/fog and night time.

Winter peak demand is night/morning (solar supply is out/minimum), versus summer peak demand is afternoon (solar supply is at a maximum).

I've seen comments that there's also like 13-15GW offline for maintenance (cleaning?)

FWIW:

I have a Powerwall and solar. My electric company offers no incentive for me to use my powerwall, or to feed into the grid during high demand.

in these conditions would it make a difference?

Yes.

It's in the grid's best interest that I store power generated during daylight and trickle it back during the night.

Texas's problem has to do with its electric plants inability to operate in cold weather. Fortunately, domestic solar doesn't have that kind of limitation.

The incentive comes during an EEA 3 when they simply cut power to your house for 30-45 minutes.

Browsing from the UK, I got:

"Access Denied Error 16 www.ercot.com 2021-02-15 14:23:49 UTC

If you believe you have a valid business reason for accessing ERCOT resources, please contact the ERCOT HelpDesk at 512-248-6800 or 1-866-870-8124 (USA) or HelpDesk@ercot.com.

Your IP: 148.252.xxx.xxx Error code: 16 > This request was blocked by the security rules"

Using a VPN with a US IP address, I was able to view the ercot site.

I'm in the US and was blocked because I have firefox set to request https.

SSL Not Supported Error 29 www.ercot.com 2021-02-15 14:37:28 UTC

If you believe you have a valid business reason for accessing ERCOT resources, please contact the ERCOT HelpDesk at 512-248-6800 or 1-866-870-8124 (USA) or HelpDesk@ercot.com.

Please provide the HelpDesk with the information supplied below.

Your IP: x.x.x.x

Error code: 29 > SSL is not supported

Usually you just get an error so that Firefox can let you click through to the http site, but this error thing inhibits that.

I got that message as well. Seems kinda silly given that the error page was delivered over SSL. They even have a valid certificate.

One thing about efficiency: How does one pass the liability of crap insulation onto landlords? I see this as a huge issue. As a tenant, you can't replace the windows, upgrade appliances, etc. We have unbelievable regulations that are choking home owners, but this seems like a much bigger target.

> This request was blocked by the security rules

I'd guess they have a geoblock for some fucked-up-BS reason or another?

Imperva seems to be offering a "solve GDPR compliance with this checkbox" solution that blocks the EU from accessing your web site.

That's pretty stupid. Oh well...

Europeans trying to download our powers!

Probably it's to reduce load on their website rather than GDPR related.

I am blocked from the site?

Access Denied Error 16 www.ercot.com 2021-02-15 05:18:28 UTC

It seems like someone or some DDoS detection blocked either everything or all foreign IPs.

Looks like the "GDPR doesn't allow to spy on users, let's block anyone who could be covered by it" kind of block.

I've been able to view the ERCOT site before, so probably not.

At this point it makes sense for them to prioritize getting information out to residents rather than us foreigners with an idle interest. :)

Yup, guess they turned on some crisis plan. Which is targeted more at those evil hackers outside the US than at an actual capacity problem :)

Same here.

Your IP: 91.64.84.221 Error code: 16 > This request was blocked by the security rules

It might be requests from outside the United States.

Anyway: * The cache from google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...

* Arhive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20210215030515/http://www.ercot....

Same here, both my European (.fi) home ISP and mobile data IPs are blocked.

Looks like internet is going to be partitioned one way or another. The time where any (non-loggedin) web site are accessible are coming to an end. Thanks a lot of scrappers and DDOS attack guys. Alway takes a few bad apples to ruined it for rest of us.

Some other thoughts:

1) Preventative maintenance on large units is planned 5-6 years out and in Texas typically takes place in the fall/winter as that is the lowest demand.

2) These units cannot be brought up (quickly at least).

3) Severe winters like these in Texas are extremely rare. Homes have been built for the conditions that have existed up to now. For example, I grew up in Houston and then moved to the PNW later in life. I experienced snow a total of two times while living in Houston and they were really more like glorified ice storms. I can remember Dallas and north Texas getting bigger, colder storms but even then they weren't awful.

NOW LEVEL 3 https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO/status/1361215084010352644?s=2...

THere is no EEA 4 but I assume as demand continues to increase and supply can't keep up they just have to keep shedding more and more loads. I expect a state of emergency to be declared if it hasn't already.

Luckily today is a bit of a holiday.

Can anyone with a voltmeter see if they've cut voltage to 110V or 115V?

Ontario Canada regularly does tests for 3% and 5% voltage reductions to see what the effect on demand is (and if the system even works):

https://www.energyplus.ca/Modules/News/index.aspx?newsId=b37...

A perfect case for the nuclear energy.

This is like, the worst possible case for nuclear energy, because this is a random fluctuation that won't be sustained for more than week. Whereas building a nuclear power plant costs billions of dollars and takes multiple decades to pay for itself.

Indeed - traditional nuclear power plants which cost billions of dollars per reactor unit and are wrapped up in mountains of politics are not the future. I think SpaceX has demonstrated the impact rapid iteration, modularization and standardization can have on billion-dollar+ capex projects.

There are SMR technologies that have already passed important phases of regulatory approval. Proposed nuclear technologies, such as from NuScale, will hypothetically be far more responsive to grid conditions than traditional nuclear power plants. Their current design can immediately reject 100% of thermal energy on demand. Power can be added or removed from the grid in increments as small as 77MW with their solution. This level of granularity is easily on-par with existing peaker plant capabilities.

None of those are the capital cost of a simple cycle gas turbine powerplant (maybe $400/kW).

I knew it was bad, when my electricity provider was raffling off a Tesla for reducing usage.

More than 4 GW of capacity has gone offline in the last few minutes, based on http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi.... A significant chunk of load was shed as well. Frequency is swinging pretty wildly.

Demand went above capacity just now by 100MW - I assume the “ancillary” is doing something.

Or Texas is now an over unity device.

Wind farms can't operate in icing conditions.

Source? I have personally seen one operating in Alaska during the winter.

It's not the temperature per se, it's icing. I read it here

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-14/deep-free...

“When wind-turbine blades get covered with ice, they need to be shut down,” said Joshua Rhodes, a research associate at The University of Texas at Austin who focuses on energy.

A windmill is basically a inverse airplane - and airplane wings don’t like icing. I assume you could heat the blades but at some point you’re consuming more energy than you’re making.

Planes have deicing boots. Holes in the leading edge of the wing that has a balloon on the inside. A non freezing gel is usually pumped in which expands the balloon out of the hole and causes the ice to crack. It then retracts and this process repeats keeping the wing clear of ice.

Not really usable for wind turbines though, the energy cost would be significant first of all (compare the blade area of a wind turbine to a plane!) The bigger issue is maintenance. Wind turbine leading edges are a very hostile environment compared to a plane and even normal materials get abraded very quickly, plus they are expected to last for many years without significant maintenance. Anti-ice systems would just not be economical if they had to be maintained to a working condition at all times.

Given they can generate their own electricity, wouldn't it make more sense to just heat the blades?

Probably not worth the EROEI

Heating the blades would be nearly impossible with any significant wind chill. I imagine anyplace that has wind turbines is going to have significant wind chill.

If you consider plane propellers, they do not have de-icers and must avoid known icing limits. The rotation of the blade causes the ice to fly off the blade up to a certain point. After that point, thrust will be impacted and altitude cannot be maintained. Dropping to a lower altitude will usually resolve the problem. Wing surface deformation is a larger issue for planes and probably not the solution here

That's because they lose lift though. For a turbine, that wouldn't matter (at least directly).

I have to imagine it's really the overall weight or the unbalanced weight not being good for the bearings and such. Not to mention a blade flinging a piece of ice off when it starts to melt...

The wind turbine spins because of an analog of lift - without “lift” it won’t spin.

There’s also the issue of balance.

>The wind turbine spins because of an analog of lift - without “lift” it won’t spin.

Thinking about it, that does make perfect sense, but just intuitively, I would think say, making a blade that had a flat side perpendicular to the wind direction would work, because the force can still be imparted to the blade. I can also intuitively surmise why that wouldn't work for a plane though.

When dealing with a plane, you want to generate force perpendicular to the wing (i.e. up when the plane is moving horizontally), but in a turbine you want the force to be in the same direction as the blade is moving. I feel like I must be missing something.

You're not - a flat board works as a wing with enough force behind it. There's a description on how a wing works involving Bernoulli's law - but it's more accurate to think of it how your hand feels when you hold it out the window of a car at speed.

And of course old windmills were just boards - and I suspect they only stop working in the cold if the bearings freeze.

“We are experiencing record-breaking electric demand due to the extreme cold temperatures that have gripped Texas," Bill Magness, ERCOT President and CEO, said in a press release on Sunday. "At the same time, we are dealing with higher-than-normal generation outages due to frozen wind turbines and limited natural gas supplies available to generating units. We are asking Texans to take some simple, safe steps to lower their energy use during this time."

Turbine manufactures have cold weather packages and deicing systems. I'd wager they don't get installed in Texas.

Quite likely because we rarely have heavy icing. This current storm is the worst since 1989. I've been in Austin for over 50 years and can count such incidents on one hand with fingers left to spare...

>Wind farms can't operate in icing conditions.

Some wind farms can't operate in icing conditions

(https://www.windpowerengineering.com/the-cold-hard-truth-abo...)

Wind farms built in Texas cannot because it's not economical to equip them for that, given how rare icing conditions are in Texas. There's plenty of wind farms in colder places that are perfectly fine in icing conditions.

I'd guess the insulation in most of the homes down there isn't great? If so, please take a moment to turn on any faucets with pipes that run along an exterior wall. Just do it a tiny bit, so that it drips every few seconds. Otherwise when it gets warmer you may have burst pipes to worry about. Good luck Texas!

Yeah... Guess who woke to the rolling blackout tonight and found that the faucets weren't working? Time to get out the heat gun and go frozen pipe hunting I guess...

Though god knows how that'll go with PVC...

Do power saving recommendations given out here to reduce consumption such as "don't use the oven" help in the winter given that wasted electricity ends up as heat? Or is this given by the electricity company hoping that they have natural gas to heat their house with instead?

Beside natural gas, heat pumps have become popular. Ballpack a heat pump at about 1/3rd as much electricity for a given amount of heat, compared to a resistive heater. Even (larger capacity) hot water heaters come with heat pumps now.

If you have GAS you should use the oven and furnace as much as you can and shut off electricity. If you have electric heat it doesn’t really matter either way.

(Pro tip - if you have a gas or propane oven but a electric furnace/baseboard now is a great time to run the self cleaning cycle. The oven will get to 500+ degrees and heat your kitchen up real nice.)

Seems 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.

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.

Yup, especially when those tanks of propane work for hot water and cooking too.

There's a lot of crossover with RVs, industrial, and even marine when you use propane. The cabin I'm writing this from has a battery bank and a standby generator salvaged from a touring bus.

Propane is quite expensive compared to natural gas, though, especially from a fixed-line utility. Except maybe this weekend!

Gas adapters are for propane or natural gas. Gasoline doesn’t require an adapter.

To consolidate and clarify a few comments:

You can get a non-fixed portable generator modified to run on propane or natural gas fairly inexpensively (the "gas adapter" mentioned above). That can be hooked to either a large fixed propane tank or be used with the smaller tanks often used with gas grills (or be permanently connected to natural gas, but then just get a fixed install generator). Advantages of propane are that it's stable (gasoline and diesel degrade), readily available, you can simply be well-prepared for a heavy grilling season if you don't need to use the generator, and because it's stable and stored you can be somewhat insulated from price swings.

There are calculators available to determine appropriate sizes and approximate runtime based on generator size, load, etc. but a simple rule that I saw was that a 3000 watt generator would likely run for 45 minutes to an hour on a 20-25 pound tank depending on load and inverter setup.

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).

i'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.

We just had two brief blackouts (~15m and ~5m) over here in SW Fort Worth

I'm in FW right by DFW, and my apartment is cold even when its warm right now.

Similarly, I dug my cold man lanterns out and fueled them, just to be sure.

If possible shed load on the furnace - close vents in rooms that don't have water pipes in them and close the doors to those rooms - focus the heat on a smaller area. Try to keep rooms that have less "outside wall" area as the main focal point for people and heat. Move computers into the main room, keep people together if possible.

Colocate people into a small room, air mattresses and use incandescent bulb to warm the people and room.

I just got power back. I’ve never seen weather bad as this here. It’s about as bad as it gets in NYC or Toronto. Not prepared whatsoever.

And Ercot [1] "has declared an EEA 1. Energy conservation is needed. There are no rotating outages at this time. 00:17:45 150221"

[1] https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO/status/1361197991659503618

It’s now EEA 2

It took 15 minutes to go from 2 to 3

There is no EEA 4 and reserves are down to 318 MW.

Reserves are now negative 100MW.

So as far as I can gather, there are no generating units (other than wind turbines) that are down for maintenance? There is really only a low pressure problem in the pipeline system that is causing some combustion units to idle?

Yeah normally 11 cents per kWh but right now am at $4.24 per kWh.

Anyone have a status page like this for SPP (Southwest Power Pool)? I can't seem to find it on their site despite clicking around for awhile.

It frustrates me how most analysis of wind and solar cost-effectiveness fail to take into account the need to have tons of backup infrastructure that lays fallow most of the time. You need to decide between poor grid reliability or drastically increased capital expenditures. Hopefully storage tech will get better and this will cease to be such a problem.

"...lays fallow most of the time."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-02/tesla-battery-expande...

Batteries solve a different problem. They can smooth over daily shortfalls, but aren't so great when you have a week-long aberration. To fix that, you need significant overprovisioning or alternate means of generation.

That is, if you depend upon wind and wind is screwed up for a week... batteries aren't going to let you stretch limited solar all night long.

> To fix that, you need significant overprovisioning or alternate means of generation.

They have alternate means of generation... natural gas. There is a big problem with wells shutting down due to the same extremes which shut down wind. Which has caused shortages of natural gas which is doubly problematic because it's also used extensively for heating.

What do you do when your backup power is vulnerable to the same issues as your primary power?

It is arguably a fantastic example of where nuclear power excels. Particularly if you had a nuclear plant which ran well below capacity most of the time and ramped up when we have extreme needs.

> It is arguably a fantastic example of where nuclear power excels. Particularly if you had a nuclear plant which ran well below capacity most of the time and ramped up when we have extreme needs.

Right now that's awful, because most of the cost of nuclear plants is the capital costs. Paying a bunch of depreciation on something you don't use 24/7 is dubious.

Also nuclear tends not to ramp very quickly.

I'm pro-nuclear, but for nighttime base load + power-to-gas and filling other storage in the day.

I should have stuck to my main point which is that they actually did have traditional backup power which is also offline.

Do such nuclear power plants exist? I was under the impression that they provided consistent, baseline levels of power in most circumstances.

You can definitely ramp up and down power generation at nuclear plants. Whether that makes sense economically is another question.

Nuclear plants are OK at this. The current fleet in North America can ramp at about 5% per minute from 50% to 100%. (Between 50% and less gets very slow). There's also concern that repeated ramping could greatly increase the amount of maintenance required.

So, on the same order as a "fast" combined cycle plant and quicker than a older combined cycle ng plant. But.... pretty slow compared to the 4 minutes from 0 to 20% and 4 minutes from 20% to 100% for an open cycle gas turbine, and a fair degree of ability to react to "step" loads.

So, if nuclear needed to, it could help out in grid stability operations, but you really need something very fast like hydro or open cycle NG plants (or batteries) to do most of the work.

Hydro storage is gaining popularity. During the day, with over-provisioned daytime production, they pump water to higher elevation ponds. At night they let it flow down to the lower elevation ponds.

These could still freeze and stop becoming viable sources of energy, but they are a non-lithium source for energy storage. If they could be kept warm enough to flow in these conditions, they could provide generous storage capacity.

Yup, but most pumped hydro is relatively short term power storage, too.

You really want something like power->gas->power to help fill in on the worst couple weeks per year.

This battery is exactly the kind of backup infrastructure the parent was saying we need to account for, and and, to my sibling comment's point, an obvious submarine marketing blurb lazily "reported" by a news outlet.

> "Natural gas rose to a record $600 per million British thermal units in Oklahoma. And as much as half a million barrels a day of oil output in West Texas may be impacted by well shutdowns that began on Thursday because of the extreme cold."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-14/deep-free...

Energy planners didn't account for extreme weather, regardless of source.

They do, but they are planning on the common experience of extremes.

Texas' weather is colder now than in the past 40 years.

> Texas' weather is colder now than in the past 40 years.

Yes. Thus "Extreme" weather.

I was going to suggest it is likely due to climate change, but that is largely conjecture.

There likely is a climate change effect. Polar vortexes have been making deeper incursions into North America because of increased turbulence in the atmosphere, driven by the overall energy level.

This about a pot, slowly boiling. As it gets hotter, it swirls more.

Yeah, we've had a couple of major ice storms/ extreme snow here in the past 3 years too. It's a little disturbing when you realize they are hitting us at the expense of the North Pole.

Or you just massively over-provision the renewable infrastructure. South Australia is aiming for 500%.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-set-sights-on-st...

The nature of the weather is that it is always windy somewhere - if you have a wide enough grid with enough overbuild, it doesn't have to be a problem. And when there's excess energy, people will find uses for it.

Demand has been reading greater than the capacity for some time now.

Everything's bigger in Texas, except the electricity grid.

ERCOT just declared EEA-2 at 1:13am local Texas time.

And more and more people keep moving to Texas.

I love my incandescent bulbs. It is a threat to remove them. The heat they produce is amazing in the winter. I use a 100 watt bulb to keep me warm at my desk. Heat bodies not buildings.

I've been practicing this since a child and I'm 36 now.

To heat yourself, check out: https://youtu.be/3gjvOOlHmsU

For actual good LED lamps (not the crap they push in USA) check out: https://youtu.be/klaJqofCsu4

TLDR most LED lamp are running over spec which cause them to fail and become a commodity rather than infra.

I had a rear projection DLP LED TV which ran its red LED over spec and it burned out at least 3 times as fast as the green and blue.

https://www.foxhop.net/samsung/HL-T5087SA/red-LED-failure

The heat is not always just a byproduct, sometimes you need or want the heat.

Compare this 100 watt bulb to a tiny space heater and you will see the difference in your electricity bill. Buy a "kill a watt" meter to start testing you appliances rather assuming incandescent is evil.

You also use your incandescent bulbs when it’s warm out. Stop wasting power.

Nice try, I'm an environmentalist. I replace the bulb with LED when it's warm out.

I wonder how much this has to do with bitcoin mining?

Miners are being turned off at these electricity prices.

Except in places where the power is being stolen.

Example?

I'm not sure what you mean by "stolen" but I'm sure there's a ton of mining that is occurring at a statutory or downstream low-rate (as opposed to C&I based on peak or wholesale subject to the real-time market). In those cases, the electric providers should be able to pay them to curtail load but it's frankly a travesty on all accounts.

I think you're overthinking it. It's just regular stealing, something that would be more historically associated with Marijuana grow-ops. Bypassing your meter, tapping off your neighbours meter, street lighthing, mining in your employers basement without them knowing, etc.

Basically using electricity that isn't "yours" without paying for it.

This is easier in countries with more retail corruption, and in some with wholesale.

The latter would include Russia, China, and the US; the former, Venezuela, UAE, Nigeria. Retail would tend to be petrochemical power. Nuclear power theft is easier to cover up, so would be preferred where it is common, e.g. Russian military sites and US commercial.

yeah, but there always will be someone who doesn't turn it off, especially when the prices are going up.

Also, they hold up the "floor price" for electricity and push it up, meaning that electricity prices will never be cheaper.

Not at these prices. You'd be losing huuuge amounts of money continuing to mine when electricity prices have shot up 10-100X. If you really want that Bitcoin it'd be much cheaper to turn your miners off and then just buy it at market price those few days while electricity prices are insanely high.

> Also, they hold up the "floor price" for electricity and push it up, meaning that electricity prices will never be cheaper.

This comment seems unconnected to the present situation in Texas.

How's that reliable solar and wind working out for ya?

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