What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
houstonchronicle.com
houstonchronicle.com
How many of the 24+6 recommendations from the NERC/FERC review of last time this happened in Texas (hint:2011) were taken up by the legislature or those at ERCOT they delegated responsibility to or the power generation providers?
https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/ColdWeatherTrainingMaterials/...
The eye opener to me from skimming the 2011 recommendations is that there was no explicit rating/SLA for a power plant's acceptable temperature operating that could be used by planners for assessing the risks of an upcoming weather event by policy planners. It'd seem pretty basic to be able to ask "How many plants do we lose when temperature drops below X"? Dunno whether they fixed trying to create such a basic measurement for Texas plants, but it doesn't seem like it.
If you want to know some of the specifics about what "winterization" means in practice for a power plant including natural gas ones, you can read some of the details in that report. It's kinda interesting.
I want to thank you personally for injecting a PDF into the discussion, but also positively assert that it is not obvious what just happened this week. We don't yet know how many of the recommendations were ignored, what happened in the last decade regulator-wise or whether this round of failures are for the same or different reasons.
Speculation is much less useful than waiting a few months for the actual investigations. Emergencies are urgent, engineering (and political) decisions and assessments are never emergencies.
However, this problem is not at its root an engineering one; it is political. While the public attention is on this, we should point attention as close as possible to the most likely cause given the information we have at the time. It's bayesian truth and bayesian politics.
You'll note I didn't draw conclusions about which recommendations were ignored but having read through them all, there is no way they were all actually followed and we ended up where we are. I think some basics are fairly obvious. While some winterization perhaps was done, there is some degree of winterization that was never done; power plants in other states far north of us and colder than us are not having the same types of problems. Various professors in various cities in Texas who follow this stuff confirm this in various news outlets I haven't cited here. I also wouldn't be surprised if there was were issues with gas transport from wells through pipelines to plants that were noted in 2011 but much more severe this time due to even colder temps and unexpected by all. But still...
At the end of the day, Texas has optimized for cheap power and has not funded the work of reliable power. This is a political decision at the end of the day due to companies not paying for their externalities of poor service. I'm open to saying we shouldn't blame follower-type politicians who were scared of "raising electrical rates" and we should blame ourselves, but let's all acknowledge that some costs that weren't borne should have been borne and some oversight that should have occurred didn't occur. Is that so hard to concede at this early juncture?
Re: everyone starts deciding what they believe to be truth within 48 hours of the outage.
Maybe, hopefully... the epidemic is humbling us. It's been significant and long lasting enough to rub our noses in whatever opinions we so brashly got behind too early. Professors and peasants alike. We're more likely to stop and say "I don't know."
The classic example of this is governments taking credit/blame for economic stuff. Low unemployment, high gdp, etc. Current government decisions are really unlikely to be affecting these, because stuff takes time. Meanwhile, short term data about the economy is both uncertain and fairly useless even if it wasn't. The whole thing is so disingenuous, yet I doubt there has ever been an democratic election where this wasn't a major factor.
It kind of feels like the problems are evident, and waiting for time to lull people back into complacency on the issue seems like it will just set up the next such disaster.
[0] https://twitter.com/MikeZaccardi/status/1362038182234251267?...
It’s tricky - I also have a problem waiting months for a slow inefficient government agency to figure out how to cover their collective asses (or find the right scapegoat). I don’t think it’s unreasonable to make systems we can monitor, analyze and draw conclusions from much quicker.
There needs to be a happy medium- find the problems and “trust the experts” for sure, but do so without being so damn _loud_.
Most lost water for some stretch of time and some still don't have it.
I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well.
(I haven't found clear findings on what determines whether your fireplace net-warms or net-cools your house in super-cold weather (by sucking heat out of adjacent rooms and pulling cool air from the outside and sending hot air up your chimney). Pointers welcome.)
American fireplaces in general are a joke. You are just spending way too much energy and not really storing it anywhere except the air around it. They are built to look good, not to actually heat anything properly.
Check any Nordic country, we don't have gas fireplaces nor do we have the silly tiny iron things you have. What we do have is stone fireplaces. [1]
How it works is this: You heat the multi-hundred kg stone mass using any material you want, for us it's usually wood in some form. After the stone is hot enough, you stop wasting wood and close the chimney when the fire has burned out to prevent heat from escaping.
The stone mass will store heat and distribute it slowly and evenly over many hours, keeping everyone warm without electricity. If you want to distribute it, there are fans that operate on the radiant heat coming from the fireplace. A properly installed fireplace (central to the house) will keep a normal home toasty warm for a day or two with one proper heating cycle depending on how cold it's outside.
We had two fireplaces in the house, one each in the living room and master bedroom, so we kept all doors closed and all slept in the master bedroom. They did a decent enough job keeping us somewhat comfortable while wearing several layers and winter coats at all times, and sleeping in sleeping bags and with extra blankets. (An oddity of our house was that the chimney ran through the middle of it, not outside an exterior wall, so even some of the heat going up it would warm the house a bit.)
After 4 days my dad felt the roads were clear enough for us to go to a motel where we could shower and experience some heat. Going back to the house after that (before power was restored) was in some ways worse than enduring the first 4 days.
Granted, the reason for that outage was very different from what happened in Texas, but I just wanted to highlight that our power grid everywhere is still very susceptible to bad weather. (Well, ok, this story is 25 years old, but I suspect things haven't changed all that much.)
Walking out of my apartment is indistinguishable from an apocalypse. The emergency system batteries died days ago. Police don't come. The roads are pure ice. Nothing is open. All essential supplies are sold out. Fire systems are all disabled because pipes have burst. Elevators have been gone for a long time. Without a flashlight you might as well be in a cave.
Pray for us. People are going to die
My experience with fireplaces is that the house winds up net-colder, but you can warm yourself with radiant heat while it burns. Freestanding wood stoves on the other hand are very capable of warming a large space.
A good fireplace is completely closed (yes! no fire visible!) and is built to recover and store as much heat as possible.
* the fireplace must be enclosed completely so that it is possible to regulate amount of air going inside and especially to close it completely and SAFELY when you go to sleep. You need to close it so that it does not suck air out of your house. The fireplace stores heat but it does not make any sense if, once it burns out, the air takes all that stored heat out.
* the hot gasses go through a complicated tunnel (not directly into chimney) to heat up a large amount of bricks made from material that has high energy capacity. That's why here in Europe we don't tell silly stories about Santa coming through the chimney, because that would be totally ridiculous. He could just as well be coming through water pipes, it is just as accessible.
* the fireplace is built on a steel bed so that you can easily take out the ash WHILE it is burning. Also, it supplies the fire from beneath which makes for much better heating.
* traditionally, if you made effort to keep fire on throughout the day, you want to make as much use of it as possible. That's why you will see these frequently performing multiple functions: separate space for oven, large top to be able to heat multitude of things, maybe even place to sleep (that especially in really cold climate in Russia, in Poland much less popular).
Here are pictures of traditional fireplaces you could expect to heat well:
https://images.app.goo.gl/Ka9uiuNTU3LxMHqa6
https://images.app.goo.gl/rWrvoqGxzcJHC5P77
The first one is something you would expect heating the kitchen and the main/dining room and provide most of the heating for the house throughout the day.
The second one is something to put in individual rooms that are too far from the kitchen. It is easy to light it up and it heats extremely quickly but also stores absolutely no heat.
This is extremely problematic. Power going out for periods of time less than 48 hours is one thing, losing water from the utility is a problem 3rd world countries have. You sure these people's pipes didn't simply freeze.
If its the utility, shame on Texas.
I'm curious how they didn't lose heat. Any furnace built in the last 30 years, even gas, has an electronic control board in order to ensure it doesn't accidentally turn on the gas without a functioning pilot light and/or heating element (which would blow up your house).
No electricity = no heat, regardless of natural gas supply.
I've got about a dozen coworkers in Texas, they've all been without power (which means no heat) for two days now. The power comes on long enough to at least warm their houses up to 50ish degrees before dropping back out so they're not completely screwed but I know they're scared.
I have a gas fireplace, it's vented to the outside through a chimney.
If you sit right in front of it, you can feel a little radiant heat, but the true warmth comes from the electric fan that circulates air through the firebox that's heated from the gas flames. I'd always figured that if there was an extended power failure, I'd set up a 5V fan from my computer to blow air through the the fireplace.
Some gas fireplaces are "direct vent", which means that they vent the exhaust right into the room. I'd never trust one of those not to fill the room with Carbon Monoxide.
I believe fireplaces in Texas are for decoration. I live in a relatively new house in North Dallas, read open floor plan, and turning on the fireplace make absolutely no difference.
We managed to turn it on by replacing the igniter batteries and turned it back off after an hour because you don't get any heat unless you sit within 1 feet of it.
tl;dr - a typical residential fireplace isn't an alternative to a furnace.
Wood stoves and furnaces are pretty advanced these days, some of them have catalytic "converters" (I guess that's the term).
A fireplace looks nice, but doesn't do much else other than that.
Lost water before daylight Tuesday.
Power came back on just before daylight Wednesday, off just over 48 hrs, not as bad as some hurricanes.
Water service unlikely for a few more days, worse than any hurricane this century.
I've been without power for 2 days and it sucks. My house was 34 degrees this morning. No water for 2 days.
Most of my friends are in the same boat.
The summary is: Regularly inspect and maintain your equipment, here are the obvious things that must be done. (Unstated: We feel a need to say this, because obviously it didn't happen in at least one place...)
Probably got cut by the bean counters and a cut-throat market that didn't require safety and availability as considerations.
This argument to incentivize rather than punish applies to many issues with legislative bodies across all complex industries like Big Tech and other Engineering fields. You pass a law that drinking water cannot have over 10ppm of XXX carcinogen? There is most likely going to be 9.99ppm because that's the bare minimum.
We really need to move from stick to carrot.
The problem is that Texas is an outlier. Other governments, broadly, get this right. Those FERC recommendations mentioned upthread? They're the work of the government (hell, NERC is even a multinational globalist thing). That argues less that "governments are bad" than it does for "THIS government was bad".
Their incentive structure rewards short term budget savings at the expense of long term preparedness. The real fix is to have a non-partisan body staffed by actual engineers setting this kind of policy, isn't it?
In my experience running capital projects, you get performance by paying modest performance bonuses and assessing tough penalties for non-performance.
Local monopoly.
1. Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Utility_Holding_Company...
Limited the profits of a utility holding company, spurring the formation of additional shell companies to each get the maximum allowed.
Overturned in 2005, when today's highly increased risk was cemented.
2. Houston Industries, Inc.
https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/67/HOUSTON-IND...
3. The Public Utility Commission of Texas
Still exists in more toothless form after 2005.
4. Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_o...
Est. 1970 just in case of unreliability (for utility shareholders), not much of a factor until recently. Given more leeway to disappoint consumers after 2002.
5. Public Utility Regulatory Act (PURA)
https://www.lawinsider.com/documents/5KMbhJATuC2
Est. 1975.
Modified 1995, 1997, 1999, restructured 2007, latest edition effective as of September 1, 2017.
Straight downhill as far as reliability goes.
https://www.electricchoice.com/blog/guide-texas-electricity-...
Up until 1995, under the HL&P monopoly the first 675 kWh remained extremely low cost for residential consumers as had been agreed with PUC to allow jacking up further residential kWh, and business accounts, into rates beyond the reach of low-income households. Check your old bills. Of course 675 kWh is not enough for air conditioning but otherwise a small household could remain within that tier if they could conserve effectively, and had gas heat for the normally mild winters. As soon as deregulation started, HL&P then began the agressive promotion of new plans to all their established customers, similar to the limited number of newly allowed competitors where giving a break for the first bunch of kWh was no longer required. For a while there it was still required for HL&P consumers who had not opted out of their 1980's plan, but they made whatever straight-rate deals were necessary to get this info off of people's bills ASAP.
6. Deregulation of the Texas electricity market
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation_of_the_Texas_elec...
Headed us in the current direction starting in 2002.
New company Centerpoint took over the energy delivery infrastructure. Transmission assets from HL&P and others, delivery pipelines from gas suppliers, all of it.
As the name implies, pay no attention to a central point of failure. Nothing to see here.
By 1983 in the other most air-conditioned state, FPL the Florida state monopoly in a number of power plants was consuming the same grade of fuel oil as the Houston monopoly. A fuel oil vessel could be loaded from a Houston refinery, and with freight to FL the consumers there were paying half the price as in Houston using the same fuel without the added cost of sea freight.
7. As we have seen, Gov. Abbot has never been good enough for Texas, Lt. Gov. Patrick experienced his high point as a failed sports announcer, and Atty. Gen Paxton has only enough integrity for an uninhabited island.
Don't get me started on the equally compromised Ex. Rep. DeLay who in 2002 became US House Majority "Leader". Left in disgrace over lack of ethics himself.
No garage doors to keep the cold air in since it didn't really matter to the power company.
No mayor has ever wanted citizens to be very aware of that since the city took over the building in 1999.
Interconnect with neighbour grids does not cost 20% more, AC or DC. In fact the huge peaking capability of a state with ~50% gas generation would generate revenue supplying peak demand and variations in renewable supply.
Pricing systems (i.e. market rules) that encourage reliability doesn't automatically lead to gold plating.
Was the 20% cost savings they just stopped winterizing the generators?
It certainly could raise your electrical costs by 20% for weatherization, but there's nothing stopping the utility from raising your costs for any other reason. If weatherization doesn't completely eat into their profit margins, they don't HAVE to raise prices at all. The government could also fund it as a one-time expense.
Exactly the same thing happened in South Australia in 2016
1) Renewables % of generation mix grows (wind + solar)
2) Base generation sources get pushed out by economics and regulation (coal)
3) Peak generation sources get squeezed by the economics of wind + solar over summer (lots of wind, lots of sun) and begin to be relegated to backup roles
4) Something bad happens (in SA it was software misconfiguration across multiple wind generation sources)
5) The backup generation gets used for the first time, suprise suprise it doesnt work
6) chaos
2/3rds of the power that went offline from the storm was fossil.
Moreover, Texas's independent grid (not connected to the rest of the US) makes it difficult for them to import power from neighboring states.
Stop trying to push political tribalist stories that blame renewables for bog standard failures in traditional systems that could have been avoided.
https://www.powermag.com/ferc-nerc-february-blackouts-in-the...
Renewables are down from their peak capacity in Texas, but they're actually performing above what the grid thought they'd do. So it's not like ERCOT got caught with their pants down when it comes to renewable generation.
Instead the issue appears to be that thermal (gas, coal, and nuclear) plants all over Texas are failing in the face of cold weather, and because Texas has its own grid it can't shift enough power from nearby states in order to cover the demand.
And it's not like these plants were off and everyone is surprised that they didn't turn on; Texas gets most of its power from natural gas most of the time. More to the point cold weather specific recommendations from back in 2011 weren't followed with sadly predictable consequences.
> Most of the power knocked offline came from thermal sources, Woodfin said, particularly natural gas.
Don't believe anything you read about "rolling outages". It's only rolling, if you define that as "out until it's not freezing anymore".
My office back in Dallas which is not normally open offered to let people stay the night since they happen to be on the same grid as a hospital and I seriously considered trying to make it there today
(edit: when you're on the internet, better to specify which unit you use, your audience is international)
Hope your power came back already. If not / or for another time: candles are great for heating a single room. Small, safe, but they make a difference.
If they gave everyone power 50% of the time, everyone would crank everything they have to the max during those periods to get some heat into their buildings. Unless their total ability to consume energy is less than 2x their average consumption, it's not going to help.
To have any effect on overall power consumption, they first have to overcome this effect, and reduce power availability so people can't just shift the load.
Depending on creativity (if you have an electric tumble dryer... that's a fan heater), I bet many people could easily 10x their average power consumption.
If I had power for a short period of time and cold was an issue, I'd be dumping ~10 kW into water immediately (the only energy storage I can improvise on short notice).
Don't they have any kind of smart meter in Texas? Maybe reprogramming them is a slow operation that cannot be done to almost every meter in a short timespan?
The only real power consumption anyone does above usual is plug in their phones. And obviously their heaters run full blast.
Here is our simi-successful attempt to survive.
* boarded up all the windows and doors with sheets, curtains, and heavy drop clothes
* limit going outside to fewest essential trips
* close all bedrooms and abandon them. All pets and occupants sleep in close proximity in a common area
* we have lots of sleeping bags and mink blankets. It’s more about layers
Agreed that they’re misusing “rolling outages”. We got an hour of power a day for the last two days and don’t foresee getting even an hour today. I don’t know who they think they’re fooling because everyone here knows exactly that these outages aren’t rolling and is out for ERCOT blood.
Also, it's up to the power distributors in different cities to cut in the ways that they can. Some are doing rolling blackouts, and others (like mine...) aren't.
You are crazy to not have a backup generator! It is an essential item to have!
Now I live in a single-family home and have an entire RV parked beside the house (with an on-board generator, and around 100 hours of fuel in the RV's gas tank to run it). I can run an extension cord to power the house furnace as needed, but unless it was below freezing and I was worried about the pipes freezing in the house, I'd probably just let the house stay dark and move into the RV during an extended power outage.
So I can confidently say "You are crazy to not have a backup Recreational Vehicle!". Maybe I should buy a travel trailer to back up the RV.
Do not run a propane generator in or near your garage if it's attached to your home, since there's a serious risk of CO poisoning. It should be located as far away from the house as possible and away from windows and doors.
Prefarably at least 20 meters, especially if it is a gas-powered generator (OP mentioned theirs is propane, which is not quite as dangerous as gasoline).
Edit: I hope you have battery powered CO detectors on each floor and near the bedroom.
Have the water pipes been emptied as a precaution? Otherwise they’ve all exploded due to being frozen, right?
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/16/texas-power-...
Maybe it’s time to rethink that. HaI has an interesting take on something similar: Japan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo88zA5nq4Q
Running your own grid seems cool Texas style, until you have a regional problem and have no where to turn.
The problem is that this is a truly regional event and not just isolated to Texas. The entire central US is struggling right now. The SPP (which manages electricity for Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arkansas, and other states) has been struggling with forced blackouts over the last several days as well. They don’t have enough power for their own grid, let alone enough to share with Texas.
If Texas was more interconnected with the SPP, the end result wouldn’t be Texans all having their problems solved. Many Texans would still be without power, but so would many more Oklahomans. The fact that the Texas grid is separate is the only thing keeping OK from having even worse blackouts. Which makes sense, because the entire point of grid isolation is to keep issues localized and not cascade over the entire network. And that’s working to Oklahoma’s benefit right now, but Texas is getting the short end of the stick.
This cuts both ways, and most of the rest country is often a benefactor - many US/NA companies (and I'm assuming govt/military) have a 3rd DR location on the TX grid precisely because it provides an additional point of redundancy. TX also wasn't impacted by CA mismanagement of it's grid, for example..
Even worse: for about the first 24h there were (largely uninhabited!) commercial buildings all over the place that were fully lit up. We're talking skyscrapers. Even some unfinished skyscrapers. I think they've finally begun to address those. The charitable interpretation is that it was simply a massive failure of coordination.
Unfortunately in a situation like this that means that 45% have remained off for the past 48 hours (no rotation is possible), while many empty buildings are fully illuminated. It is a technological failure of their ability to shut down specific power users.
How are you keeping the whole house warm if you can't circulate the air? I'm genuinely curious.
https://www.amazon.com/PYBBO-Improved-Fireplace-Magnetic-The...
https://www.amazon.com/heat-powered-stove-fan/s?k=heat+power...
The federal government has started doing electricity cuts in most Mexico to control the gas reserves and distribute energy to the Northern states.
Edit:
Here is an article about this in English:
https://www.8newsnow.com/news/international/mexico-suffers-a...
Apparently one of the issues in Texas is that they use just-in-time gas delivery from their wells .... which just froze.
Power out for 2 days now, while west across I-35 has always had power. There's some baloney they're feeding us about "complicated critical loads" while huge swats of hotels and office buildings have power (I can see from north to south since my unit overhangs the frontage and has windows all over, and elevated enough to see over I-35). My fridge food is in a cardboard box outside with a shower curtain liner around it.
Water still working, and there are no plans according to the water company to interrupt service. There's no hot water (which IIRC, condemns a building) because the apartment's water heater needs electricity.
I'm out of battery bank capacity and might have to leave the area. Appears it will go on until Friday or Saturday, so 5-6 days total.
Since cold is a rare event, Texans figure they can save a penny by making nothing cold-resistant, then skimp on maintenance, all while bragging they have the cheapest rates of the country.
Misleading text in linked article: "We didn’t run out of natural gas, but we ran out of the ability to get natural gas. Pipelines in Texas don’t use cold insulation – so things were freezing."
It's probably that theirs are cheaper because why pay for more hardened tech if the typical range isn't this?
That said, yes, we don't use lubricant for super-cold weather, because we don't normally have super-cold weather. So we use cheaper stuff that is suited for our normal climate, where heat is usually a bigger problem than cold. It's been ten years since the last time it would have been important, and 12 years before that.
People built to a certain set of assumptions, with an implicit risk, and the risks came due. The only way to avoid another event like this would be to make the generation more resilient to extreme cold, which will cost more.
We generally try to incorporate redundancy and decentralization in systems design for the purpose of antifragility and graceful degradation. If something bad happens, best to isolate it so that it doesn't afflict everyone globally.
At the time of this writing, every State in the contiguous US except Georgia, Alabama, Florida are covered in snow; for many of those States, the snow is catastrophic and generally unplanned. The fact that, in the face of that black swan event, it was "just" Texas that had degradation means that, collectively, the US is better off. Obviously we should learn from this and improve Texas's grid to be resilient to such a failure in the future, and that's exactly how a healthy system that "localizes" implementations should function over time.
The inter-connectedness is actually what caused that. blackout, and what caused it to be so hard to recover from.
No more than that.
To say this can always be avoided is misleading. When black swan events happen, shit goes bad.
Also, it sounds like Texas' population has increased by 3.8 million to 29 million from 2010 to 2020. That sounds like pretty darn close to 20%.
https://thetexan.news/texas-population-increases-in-the-last...
Haven't look up the numbers but it's possible that this and other industrial facilities consume a large amount.
So its not just a statement of per capita consumption. Toyota, Tesla, Samsung, etc moving their factories are not insignificant.
We had a situation here where extreme weather and a natural gas pumping station that exploded caused real problems in our natural gas supply. The utility asked everyone to lower their consumption by turning their heat down to 65.
Luckily, that was the extent of the rationing.
The way I understand it, this is useful both in time-critical emergencies (like keeping the grid at 50 Hz when a nuclear plant suddenly goes offline for some random safety reason) and when things are moving a lot slower, like during periods of extreme colds and extreme electicity demand from heating houses.
So, this approach is useful in removing the need for rolling blackouts, at least until demand reaches some very extreme level, but it does require ahead of time investments in shutdown agreements.
Perhaps Texas hasn't been in this extreme situation before, and they simply don't have enough industrial shutdown agreements in place?
https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/over-200000-people-in...
That was only good for those of us still with power, though.
As I post this, demand is 99+% of supply, and the outside temps are dropping.
Even today, homes are built with an overhead tank and anyone who can afford it has a UPS capable of powering the home for a few hours under load or a few days if used sparingly.
I plan to have a water tank or two with several hundred gallon capacity and a pump to service the house.
I would be curious to see a recommendation for a whole home UPS.
It might be worth following the money to see if there are decision-makers heavily invested in this type of thing.
Has Texas never had weather like this in 350ish years and there was no reasonable justification for preparing for something like this?
[1]https://mobile.twitter.com/jmontforttx/status/13617035547890...
> The systems that get gas from the earth aren't properly built for cold weather. Operators in West Texas’ Permian Basin, one of the most productive oil fields in the world, are particularly struggling to bring natural gas to the surface, analysts said, as cold weather and snow close wells or cause power outages that prevent pumping the fossil fuels from the ground.
> “Gathering lines freeze, and the wells get so cold that they can’t produce,” said Parker Fawcett, a natural gas analyst for S&P Global Platts. “And, pumps use electricity, so they’re not even able to lift that gas and liquid, because there’s no power to produce.”
> Texas does not have as much storage capacity as other states, experts said, because the resource-laden state can easily pull it from the ground when it's needed — usually.
This weather is CRAZY, I've NEVER seen something quite like this. I've seen it dip down to the teens, before, but I haven't seen: sub 20, with snow, for more than 2 days... across the entire state.
I'm not entirely certain why we are sucking hard at making electricity, but here is what I've heard: Nat Gas pipelines "close to the well" are "freezing" because they have a lot of impurities (like water) that are literally freezing amd clogging the pipes. I'm not sure why wind is down (maybe bad lubricant???). I'm also not sure why the power plants designed to run on oil (or Nuclear!!!) aren't sufficient.
The emergency charges for the spot prices changes from that order are recent news that I've not had time to digest yet and as such can't reply to.
Apologies for not providing sources - barely have cellular data service at the moment and have only had electric back for a handful of hours. (Edit: And I jinxed myself there... back in the cold dark again.)
I've been working in an off-grid office where I am limited by solar and battery capacity and it really puts into perspective what really needs to be plugged in all the time and how much running a large appliance affects capacity.
Maybe electricity should be sold in blocks that have to be refilled, set daily/monthly quotas or limit current draw. Or even just significantly raise "2nd block/high usage" kWh prices.
> Maybe electricity should be sold in blocks that have to be refilled, set daily/monthly quotas or limit current draw
Or maybe there should be realtime electricity price and fines for outages, so both providers and consumers would be incentivised to optimize consumption, and market will make the electricity available.
It’s a scandal
San Antonio was able to do rolling blackouts, Austin really messed them up
Basically TX doesn't required electricity generators to cold-proof their assets so they fail. That's the low regulation low cost route.
All of these technologies can and do work well in very cold climates.
The technologies can work, but only if measures are taken to make them work that way, and those measures are expensive. Texas' grid, like most of the nation's grid, is optimized to keep prices low for consumers and profits steady for generators and distributors, and it's worked amazingly well at that.
But "running lean" is great and everyone wins until you get hit with a highly consequential long-tail event (Taleb's Black Swan), and then you sometimes get caught without any backups.
That’s simply not true. The only people “litigating” do so in response to dishonest indictments of wind power.
http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/181766/IntGenbyFuel20...
1/4 of the mix is wind, and turbines were frozen. Maintenance in extreme condition not done, because either they didn't think it was needed, or because they didn't want to pay for it.
1. generators, generators with plenty oil.
2. satellite internet
3. water tank or large container
4. food for two weeks.Now many deregulated retail providers hold the customer accounts, and depend on Centerpoint (now sole owner of power & gas lines only) to deliver from their third-party wholesale provider, who contracts with one or more generators for ultimate supply. Plus of course ERCOT is involved and has been intentionally configured to take blame for things like this so there's another entity to participate in the finger-pointing.
Sure, they claimed that they turned it off, but there will always be someone who doesn't turn it off, especially when the bitcoin prices are going up astronomically. Rising electricity price doesn't matter.
Also, they hold up the "floor price" for electricity and push it up, meaning that electricity prices will never be cheaper.
I’m in Dallas and thought I made it through unscathed. Power and inet have been stable with gas furnaces doing their best. However today at about 430pm a water pipe burst in an exterior wall. I shut off the water, found the break, cut a hole in the wall all set to repair. I get to home depot and they closed early! Closing a hardware store early during a major weather event seems wrong to me.
I called a couple plumbers but they’re booked for weeks (not surprising)
No. Most of the missing production was not wind, and several nukes went out (unclear whether that was because the grid was dying though).
What would have helped was proper standards (avoiding emergency being much of the reason why Texas still has its own grid) and properly winterising.
The wind thing is just a bullshit excuse, the vast majority of the missing generation is in fossil power plants. Even with half the turbines frozen over (which still has to do with Texas’ lack of proper winterization, those things work fine in Canada, Washington State, Montana, etc…) wind performed above expectations for the period.
In the 2011 cold snap, the problem was all about frozen lines like the pressure sensing line that caused a problem yesterday for the nuclear reactor. Likely similar things are causing problems for natural gas.
The answer is weatherization of all these sources. Wind turbines work great in other settings with icing wind, you just have to have the hardware for it. Just like you have to have the hardware to keep your pressure sensing lines from freezing.
We are likely to experince more events like this before a single nuclear plant could be built. And the idea of building 30GW of new nuclear, the amount of gas/coal/nuclear that was lost, is so daunting that not even China is trying to build that much nuclear, and they're pretty much the best at doing it of anyone out there.
Honestly, building 60GW more of wind and solar, and 10GW/40GWh of storage would be a lot easier and cheaper than building 30GW of nuclear. Solar delivered an extra GW when it wasn't expected, wind dropped 4GW from what was expected, and gas/coal/nuclear dropped 27GW.
So why aren't you asking "maybe having more nuclear instead of natural gas would have helped?"
Since nuclear uses water, which freezes, the reason why the gas plants were knocked out, maybe the problem isn't the power source itself but the lack of weatherization?!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/frozen-wi...
I imagine the person in the article is griping about the downward pressure wind and solar can put on energy prices (so maybe you lose money operating a traditional plant, but less money than you'd lose by walking away; operating at net that doesn't cover the up front investment).
The economics of building a traditional nuclear plant right now don't work out: they are incredibly expensive to build and tear down, take a decade to plan and another decade to build. In the time until a new nuclear plant is built and has paid back the investment you could have built a wind park, made back the investment, made a profit, decommissioned it, built a new one and made back the investment for that one.
Maybe small-scale nuclear will help somewhat, but properly weather proofed wind and gas would work just fine too.
Of course, deregulation would also reduce some of the incentives for maintaining preparation for "100 year winter" storms. Much like how hospitals reduced the number of beds based on their average case loads, not the uncommon-but-not-unheard-of peaks.
Even in climates where there cold weather is common, cold weather disasters still happen. The 1998 North American Ice Storm caused power outages that lasted weeks. It affected Ontario, Quebec and Main. It left 4,000,000 people in Canada and 700,000 in Main without power for weeks. Twenty-five people died from the cold, 12 more from related flooding caused by Ice. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ic...
Texas has only four nuclear reactors, it should have many more as only nuclear is able to deliver power under virtually all weather conditions (yes, I know that South Texas 1 tripped but that was due to a false alarm).
It’s because of renewables and gas power plants that electricity became scarse. Many wind turbines in particular froze because of the low temperatures.
The situation in Texas reminds me of the situation during a blizzard in East Germany 1978/79 where all lignite-fired power plants came to a hold due to the lignite freezing while the two nuclear power plants delivered electricity without any problems.
When California encountered power issues, it was easier for Texas politicians (and many of their followers) to espouse malicious soundbites about Commifornia than to empathize, offer support and self reflect on what lessons can be learned and applied locally.
Now that Texas is reaping its own fruits of decades of anti-"other side" politics and political mismanagement it's all too easy for whatever "other side" to treat Texas with the same derision and malice instead of empathy and support.
The government run Texas grid is ill prepared because the responsible parties are more interested in playing division politics than in governing.
Cold and snow are not novel, it's not a technical problem.
Anyway seems like this storm is so bad Texas would be in trouble no matter what, but letting utilities under-invest in winterizing and not joining either of the major grid corridors just made a bad situation 100x worse.
The good news is this is fixable going forward, and hopefully Texans will demand their politicians address it.
It's just so depressing that the extremes control more and more of the political discourse.
Do some research into who pushed FUD propaganda about Nuclear industry, (Big oil) and who paid off the shrill environmental FUD lobby, (Bug oil).
Nuclear power is used safely in aircraft carriers and submarines for decades. It's time to build more nuclear power and build the cleaner, safer, cheaper electrical energy future.
"Texas"
It’s not always someone’s fault.
There are currently 17GW of batteries in the ERCOT interconnection queue for the coming years, for a grid that's only ~80GW. The ERCOT of 2025 will be massively different from the ERCOT of 2021, and it's going to mean a lot less gas, a lot more storage, and a lot more solar.
The problem here is not being prepared for the cold not the choice of energy production method.
Learn neat skills like: keep your water in a cooler so it doesn't freeze; pee in a nalgene rather than go outside to pee, then keep the nalgene in your sleeping bag to retain heat; eating to stay warm; changing clothes to stay warm; covering your neck to stay warm; which clothes will actually keep you warm and which just look neat; what fabrics are best in winter; layering; what stoves work below freezing; how to stay positive ("hey, my toes still work!"); how to remove ice from your socks in the morning; how to keep icicles from forming in your tent; how to anchor a tent in a blizzard; how to find a tent in a blizzard; how to help your friend find his tent that blew away in a blizzard; how to pick snacks (two things that don't freeze hard: fat and alcohol); how to pick snacks so you don't need to poop often; staying hydrated and warm.
It’s also a bit late to learn winter camping if you’re already stranded with neither electricity nor gear.
I see bans on home solar coming. Maybe if you can disconnect from the grid with batteries it solves the problem too - but those people would be suffering right now.
If you downvote me please tell me what is wrong and if you have ideas on how to solve the problem.
In winter all renewables are inhibited and at risk. Wind: frozen/disabled turbines. Water: low water levels, small hydro plants often have to shut down. Solar is obvious.
I'm not a fan of nuclear - externalities that last thousands of years are horrible. But until fusion arrives (if ever), nuclear and gas sadly are the baseline providers we have to rely on for the foreseeable future.
Last I saw they got something like 50% of their power from wind.
Anyone who is using this event to say that renewables are a bad idea is selling a completely false narrative.
Almost all of the ERCOT shortfall was loss of thermal generating capacity--mostly natural gas. The natural gas was shunted to heating because those contracts are fixed and higher priority (market failure). Also, some of the natural gas lines, wells, and pumping stations froze (planning failure).
ERCOT lost more than 35% of its natural gas generating capacity. This was everybody cutting corners and finally getting burned.
> First, Texas has its own independent grid as a matter of physics.
Except that every state directly north of Texas is either on the East or West interconnects. ERCOT having its own grid is solely a matter of political desire.
> One top of that reduced capacity, not all equipment is prepared for ice storms because it doesn't really happen here.
Except a very similar event happened in 2011, and a specific set of recommendations were made by FERC to winterize power producers, and the recommendations were promptly ignored. Better discussion on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/ll2slh/texas_failed...
> And finally, the wind farms are not handling the ice well
Yes, this is true, but this is almost insignificant. The grid is already designed to handle windless days: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/frozen-wi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPS/UPS#Interconnections_with_...
You just need to be in sync with whatever the phase is in your local grid. For a real world example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPS/UPS