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Comment by mimikatz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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-...

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

$5k?!?!? How?!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

$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.

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.

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.

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

Power is very very very cheap in Texas.

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

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

Ouch, yet wow.

>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".

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

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).

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.

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

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.

> 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.

> windmills

Wind turbines! :)

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

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