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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

What is "proper winterizing" for a state where the 99th percentile design temperature is mostly 25-30ºF? Properly sized heating systems should run 24 hours a day when the temps are well below the design temp.

If almost all of those systems are electric (because they are simple and cheap to install and don't get a ton of use), you get a lot of constant demand for electricity. Smart load-shedding (to dump large 240VAC loads in rotation) would allow the grid to survive these periods, while keeping houses livable but chilly.

I agree the wind excuse is (almost entirely) BS. Some amount of production is offline all the time, at least enough that you have to design for that.

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as long as they're an independent grid, optimizing for the 99th percentile isn't really acceptable. that's only two nines.

if you have a contingency plan for winter storms, then it makes sense to skip the winterization. but it appears their plan for a winter storm was just to fail.

You’re conflating two things. The 99th percentile design temp for winter heating systems only implies a steady load would be imposed on the grid. Optimizing HVAC systems for the 99th percentile load is proper engineering. A higher powered electric resistance heating plant would make the grid problem worse right now (as houses could draw enough energy in a day to maintain temp rather than only drawing enough energy in a day to not quite maintain temp).

It doesn’t mean you design the grid to only sustain the loads 99 percent of the time. This is going to turn out to be a grid implementation problem, not an insulation or a renewables problem.

Yep, this is the thing no one is talking about. Dallas has easily added 10k apartment units in the past 5 years. Almost all of them are all electric (no gas heating).

Considering it’s more energy efficient to cool with Air Conditioning on the hottest summer days than it is to heat with electricity in the winter, it’s no wonder the grid collapsed when the region was below freezing for several days and some generating capacity was lost.

Pretty sure you are off by a large factor. It looks like Dallas added almost 300k apartments in the last 5 years.

I think Texas as a whole has seen a huge growth in population in the last 10 years.

Resistive electricity will be close to 100% efficient, and heat pumps even higher depending on the outdoor temperature.

What kinda of air conditioners beat that for efficiency? I don't think we covered those in heat engines

Air conditioners are heat pumps. Resistive heating is inefficient compared to burning something, and very inefficient compared to heat pumps

In addition to the other comments your missing the heat delta.

We commonly cool from 100 to 70F, or 30 degrees.

Yesterday we were warming from 0 to 65, or a 65 degrees delta.

> What kinda of air conditioners beat that for efficiency?

All of them beat resistance electric.

The power infrastructure is also failing from the cold. Some big fraction of that could probably be prevented for cheap.

Long-range interconnects probably would help, the rest of the US isn't having this problem, just Texas's mini-grid.

The regional grid above TX is also instituting rolling blackouts due to this weather.

Oh, fair enough. But if they really are rolling than that's not nearly so bad as the areas in Texas that have been out for days.

I don't know enough about importing capacity in that other grid since they're hooked up to the western half supposedly but I agree with your points. TX being hooked up to the rest of the US could have saved them and this other regional grid appears to be managing it better than TX.

That is debatable. Close grids could not have supplied 30GW of power, they were also under near record loads. You would have had to pull from many states away which is insanely inefficient.

Also people miss how big the TX grid is. FL and PA are the #2 and #3 power generation states. TX produces as much as both added together.

Yes, that's the Southwest Power Pool, which covers 14 states. Here's some news from them,

https://www.ozarksfirst.com/local-news/local-news-local-news...

We had two hours without power due to rolling blackouts

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