Analysis: Texas power outage leaves officials working political angles
texastribune.org
texastribune.org
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/17/texas-power-outage-a...
It appears that wind and solar power produced more electricity this week than they were expected to produce, but at this time of year, that’s a relatively small part of the expected statewide generation. Generation from gas and coal plants was far below expectations, causing supply to fall as demand rose. How much of that is bad design — a case where the system should be reworked — and how much was operator error is still to be sorted out.
As someone in the Houston blackout and hearing a bit of the initial blame-game: I’d like to find out what failure modes were gamed out, what likelihood’s were assigned to each and how and what mitigation was chosen with the knowledge that between time, money and people not all failure scenarios can be covered.
For example: water vapor in methane (natural gas) freezes and causes sensor and valve problems which have shut plants down. That seems predictable to a point, something that operators with experience in other climates would know about. On the other hand, the mitigation strategy for that failure may run counter to fixes for hot weather problems.
Since then I guess nobody bothered to do anything? Supposedly it's all described in this here document (I can't actually open it, probably because someone in ERCOT is real scared of GDPR): http://www.ercot.com/content/meetings/other/keydocs/2011/201...
Here's a twitter thread by some rando who remembered what happened in 2011 and dug out the report: https://twitter.com/kidstatic/status/1361914818307981314?s=2...
The folks in the El Paso area (which is not regulated/managed by ERCOT) are going just fine it appears:
> El Paso Electric said they always try to prepare for the future and after a winter storm in 2011, the utility company worked towards replacing and upgrading their equipment. Many generators now have antifreeze protection.
* https://kvia.com/news/el-paso/2021/02/15/el-pasos-not-seeing...
"THE EVENT
The strong arctic front that arrived in North Texas on February 1, 2011 was the most intense cold wave for the majority of the state of Texas since December 1989. The event was so severe that the National Weather Service issued a rare Wind Chill Advisory for much of the state. The arctic front reached deep into Texas and sustained below freezing temperatures as far south as Corpus Christi. Much of North Texas experienced record setting sleet and snow, producing blizzard conditions and temperatures well below freezing for up to 100 hours. Snowfall occurred as far south as San Antonio, with snowfall totaling up to seven inches in North Texas. This winter storm was also accompanied by sustained winds of 30-40 mph with gusts as high as 51 mph.
The icy conditions of this winter storm resulted in the closing of both DFW Airport and Dallas Love Field. In addition, Dallas-Fort Worth area water utilities reported hundreds of water main bursts during the event, compared to expected four to five on an average winter day. ERCOT also reported a new record winter peak of 56,334 megawatts.
The winter weather event of February 1-5, 2011 was determined to be a one in ten year event for some regions of Texas in terms of low temperature extremes and duration. Lows during the period were in the teens for five consecutive mornings and there were many consecutive hours below freezing temperatures throughout Texas. Taking these temperature extremes into account, and coupling them with the sustained winds of this event, it is estimated that the resultant convective heat loss (wind plus ambient temperature) event suffered by many Texas generation facilities approached a one in 25 year severity. (Reference: Weatherbank, Inc.)
Generating unit issues that affected reliability were mostly attributed to frozen instrumentation due to convective heat losses greater than instrumentation design, faulty instrumentation heat tracing or compromised insulation. It is normal practice for the operating units to add incremental protection against these extreme winter weather events. Typical examples are wind breaks and heat sources applied to high risk areas.
In addition, the cold and wind affected the units that were not operating. Units in cold start status are less prone to derates/trips if they are dispatched to minimum stable load (MSL) before the onset of extreme winter weather. Bringing all units to MSL gives ERCOT maximum flexibility in responding to grid emergencies.
HOW IT AFFECTED ERCOT
The high load demand, coupled with generation issues within ERCOT, resulted in actions from ERCOT that triggered an Operating Condition Notice (OCN) issued for cold weather at 08:55 on February 1. The event level escalated to an EEA2A (Energy Emergency Alert) declaration at 05:18 on February 2 to deploy responsive reserves, followed quickly by an EEA3 declaration at 05:58 on February 2 to begin shedding firm load to maintain system frequency at 59.8 Hz or greater. The event continued until ERCOT cancelled the EEA at 09:58 on February 3. "
Good estimate.
I don't even necessarily believe it was malicious (unless you consider cost cutting to make a profit malicious, which, maybe you'd have an argument there), just potentially lazy.
This is the sort of thing we should have some baseline regulations to support -- critical infrastructure should be designed to support a temperature range of X to Y, where X is a record cold times some factor and Y is a record heat times some factor.
Meanwhile the folks in the El Paso area (which is not regulated/managed by ERCOT) are going just fine:
> El Paso Electric said they always try to prepare for the future and after a winter storm in 2011, the utility company worked towards replacing and upgrading their equipment. Many generators now have antifreeze protection.
* https://kvia.com/news/el-paso/2021/02/15/el-pasos-not-seeing...
The first step is making sure you have regulators who are somewhat clued in.
Of course being hooked up to the national grid could be useful as well, so as to allow for energy inputs when your own infrastructure is having problems. Though that would mean dealing with the Feds, which seems to be undesirable:
> Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry says that Texans find massive power outages preferable to having more federal government interference in the state's energy grid.
* https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/rick-perry-says-texans-woul...
El Paso Energy is interesting bc it represents the old school community monopoly. I wonder if the JPM buyout will help or hinder its mission.
I bet they don’t. If they did they don’t now.
Playing devil's advocate here: It might not have been malicious or lazy, but actually just good judgement in avoiding unnecessary waste and getting those services deployed sooner for less cost to the customer.
Of course it looks bad now that the situation they didn't expect to happen has happened, but in the long term, were the losses worse than what they saved by not implementing extreme cold weather mitigations?
But they did. And were warned. And they ignored it.
Differences in incentives are why hospitals for example have backup generators. They might be paying 100x as much to get power from a generator for a few hours a year, but losing power would cost them vastly more.
That said, individual consumers are going to have their own personal preferences. For some people saving 10c a month on their monthly electric bill might be worth a once in a decade power outage. Some might even agree to save 1c/month.
Power companies making that choice for their customers isn't fair. As a utility it should be expected that it is well run and stable. It isn't an easy market to have competition in due to the infrastructure meaning we can't have "cheap and unstable" options next to "expensive and stable". Where the state decides the utilities fall on that axis is the question here, I personally think they should be on the more conservative side and provide stability.
The other thing to consider are the huge knock on effects from losing power. I may be ok with getting extra cash in exchange for power outages but when the stop lights are out and restaurant freezers start thawing things get a lot worse.
A lot of people (and businesses too) have been without any power for several days. In the case of Austin, “a lot” appears to be around 40%. Many more have had power only intermittently. That’s got to be a pretty sizable hit to economic output. Not to mention all the busted pipes.
[edit: formatting]
The there are the things we do know, like the Samsung IC shutdown that will cost millions in itself.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-02-20/texas-bla...
As someone in Texas who just got their power back and no longer has running water, I'm having a real hard time not posting a really vicious retort here.
Pure capitalism without any humanism is really quite gross and frustrating.
The cost of electricity is not a constraint on the size of hospitals. And there are plenty of states who are part of the national grid, with cheaper electricity than Texas.
More than 300 people have ended up in ERs in Houston alone for carbon monoxide inhalation as a result of misguided efforts to avoid freezing to death, I'm not entire sure how to allocate that cost, either.
1989, 2011, 2021. At some point, having been told twice now, and soon to be a third time, you spend the money to avoid the pitchforks.
I'm sure "we saved a few bucks" will be comforting to the families of people who froze to death or died of carbon monoxide poisoning from this entirely avoidable disaster.
Texas runs its own power grid specifically to avoid doing that
https://www.wwltv.com/article/news/local/orleans/rotating-po...
at the direction of MISO, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator.
The company describes itself as similar to an air-traffic controller, monitoring the flow of electricity across 15 states and one Canadian province.
This stuff isn’t rocket science.
Because people have died, and the energy industry is heavily to blame, you're extremely unlikely to get any information to confirm or even satisfy your curiosity until a federal investigation has completed.
> A hurricane is an act of God. But failure to prepare, when the necessity for preparation is well known—that’s sin. That’s failure to hit the mark. And the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). The ancient Jews always blamed themselves when things fell apart. They acted as if God’s goodness—the goodness of reality—was axiomatic, and took responsibility for their own failure. That’s insanely responsible. But the alternative is to judge reality as insufficient, to criticize Being itself, and to sink into resentment and the desire for revenge. - 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/shows/town-squar...
Only 7% of ERCOT’s forecasted winter capacity, or 6 gigawatts, was expected to come from various wind power sources across the state.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/natural-gas-power-st...
Wind shutdowns accounted for 3.6 to 4.5 gigawatts
“We are seeing wind generation down 60% week-over-week”
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/02/16/nation/why-is-power-o...
At any rate there has been zero investment in grid interconnects which could have been much more helpful. ERCOT only has the capacity to source sub-1% of load over the interconnects which is not meaningful. That's one of the ultimate failures in my mind: A relatively small investment in HVDC interconnect upgrades would have allowed the grid to import power - especially from the US Western grid which has not been impacted the way some parts of the US Eastern have.
ERCOT is fairly toothless as well. I'm not sure they bothered to issue any requirements for weatherproofing prior to the freeze but they wouldn't be able to do much about it if the generating plants refused to comply. And the Texas Railroad Commission regulates Natural Gas. And by "regulate" I mean let them do whatever they like.
IANAL.
Mess with the status quo too much and that could change. If they want to continue to avoid federal regulation, it's in their best interests to not invest heavily in interconnect.
You can use it to heat your home, or you can send it to a power plant to convert it into electricity and heat your home at a 3x markup.
But regardless, you are relying heavily on a single resource in a single state.
400 watts per hour isn’t a huge amount of power, a space heater consumes about 1,300 watts per hour, but it’s still a pretty decent chunk of electricity. A deep discharge marine battery (common for cheap backup power) could keep a larger blower running for maybe 3 hours tops, assuming an unreasonable 100% discharge and 100% conversion efficiency. So, not a lot, but still something that you’d need some pretty specialized backup gear to run.
As an anecdote, my furnace blower pulls about 11 amps on 120V AC. So I can run it with a little 2000W inverter generator but won't have much spare capacity for anything else.
For backup heat generation nothing beats an EPA certified wood burning stove, especially the free standing ones.
Probably obvious in retrospect, but took a bit of brain rewiring to realize no-power != no-hot-water given I had mostly dealt with areas with electric water heaters with fairly small tanks up till then.
Both a hot water and a forced air furnace work by burning natural gas to heat something up until it's hot enough. In both cases the combustion is separated from whatever its supposed to heat by a chunk of steel, and the gas is simply burned in open air without any extra compression. Ventilation is usually done via convection, which works without power. So far, so good; both cases just need a small amount of power to open a valve and kick off combustion. The similarities largely end there though.
In the case of a hot water heater, the flame is heating a big slab of metal under 40+ gallons of water. It's very hard for this slab to overheat and get damaged, as water is both thermally dense and a great conductor. There's also no need to move the heat around; the flame is literally right underneath the thing that needs to be heated. This proximity also makes the control logic extremely simple; you turn on the flame when the tank is too cold and turn it back off when it isn't. This consumes a tiny amount of power, and you can use the heat generated by the pilot light to keep such a circuit alive.
A furnace on the other hand has an issue. While burning gas in a furnace is easy, getting that heat back up to where you need it isn't. Air is a pretty terrible thermal conductor, and without some cooling that combustion chamber is going to overheat and get damaged. You need to move a lot of air past the combustion chamber to get the heat away before that happens, which means you need a powerful fan to get that air moving. These fans consume a lot more power than you can reasonably generate locally, about 75-400W per hour, with an extra spike needed to get the fan moving in the first place. You also have the issue that it's not possible to measure the outcome of the furnace at the furnace; which means you're going to need relatively complex remote sensing and control devices, which only adds to the system's total power needs.
Most (gas) furnaces are forced air, and how exactly would the fan run without electricity? How do you think the thermostat runs its thermistor (and probably LCD display) without a power?
The Technology Connections YT channel has a recent good overview, "Forced-air Furnaces: The What, Why, and How":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBVvnDfW2Xo
As for efficiency, you can get units that are 99% efficient (AFUE):
* https://www.lennox.com/products/heating-cooling/furnaces/slp...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annual_fuel_utilization_effici...
I have no idea if this is common or not, but I know of at least two counterexamples to your statement here in Michigan.
Some do, some don't. Mine has a pilot light and a thermocouple. I used it to keep warm while our power was out for three days this past weekend.
Gas fireplaces are slightly less efficient than high-efficiency furnaces because some heat goes out the exhaust.
If you use a heat pump, you might get a COP of 3 or 4, which is effectively 300-400% efficiency. It's able to do this because it makes the outside colder while it makes the inside warmer.
Overall, the electric/heat pump system can be more efficient, but it has a lot more complex and expensive machinery, both in the home and in the power plant, and it's only been in the past 20 years or so that this has been practical. Many new homes are being built without gas hookups and use heat pumps instead.
My gas costs $0.51 per therm, including distribution. When I consume electricity (more on that in a sec) it costs me $0.085 per kWh. On a straight therm to kWh basis, electricity is ahead.
But a single therm is equivalent to 29.3 kWh, so on an energy equivalent basis we've got $2.49 worth of electricity per therm of gas. So for 100% efficient electric radiant heat, electricity is about 5x more expensive than gas. That's close to the efficiency band of an air source heat pump, which tends to run in the 200-300% efficiency range, and geothermal might just beat out gas per BTU transferred into the house, especially if you include hot water consumption in that.
The extra complication is solar. Roof top solar is getting cheaper every single day, and for some of us the effective cost of electricity is $0. If you've got a rooftop solar system it's kind of silly not to switch over to electric heating if possible, since you can get your electricity cheap. Especially if you have net metering or a backup battery. If I didn't have a really high efficiency furnace in my new house, I'd probably have already done that.
That being said, we know that in the long run rooftop solar reduces electricity cost, because otherwise most people would never buy it. From my numbers above rooftop solar only needs to reduce electricity prices by ~40% to put them within striking distance of a heat pump being cheaper than gas.
A basic gas furnace is 80% efficient, with a nicer condensing unit being 96-98% efficient. Meanwhile most gas turbines hang out in the 32-38% efficiency range, plus transmission losses. Maybe if you’re using a heat pump and your local power plant is a triple pressure high efficiency model (~60% efficient) you might end up ahead, but for most users in most municipalities it’s actually better to burn the gas at home directly rather than at a power plant, at least for heat.
https://www.calculator.net/voltage-drop-calculator.html
I’d call them semi -complementary from a consumer perspective and have different strengths and weaknesses, similar to phone and cable before.
My long term view is gas will go away first as electric costs go down and reliability goes up with local caches such as the PowerWall. Eventually usage will be light enough to cut the cable from long distance generation for close range neighborhood nukes.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/a-texas-sized-g...
> According to a paper from Pecan Street, an Austin-based energy research organization, the transition would reduce climate-warming pollution, save Texas households up to $452 annually on their utility bills, and flip the state from a summer-peaking to a winter-peaking system. And that winter peak would be “nothing the grid couldn’t evolve to handle,” according to co-author Joshua Rhodes.
> Our analysis finds that electric heat pumps generally use less energy in warm states and have moderately positive economics in these states if a heat pump can replace both the furnace and a central air conditioner.
> Based on our analysis, we find that electric heat pumps have higher equipment and installation costs than gas furnaces and that electricity is generally more expensive per Btu than natural gas. As a result, in all of the comparisons the gas furnace has a lower life cycle cost for homes without central air-conditioning. However, if a central air conditioner can be replaced with a heat pump, the high-efficiency heat pump has lower life cycle costs in climates from Virginia southward as well as in the Northwest. This is shown by an analysis that credits the avoided cost of a central air conditioner and also includes cooling-energy savings from replacing a central air conditioner meeting federal minimum efficiency standards—a seasonal energy efficiency ratio (SEER) of 13 in the North and a SEER of 14 in the South—with a higher-efficiency heat pump
> As discussed above, our analysis is only for existing homes. The results may be more positive toward heat pumps for new homes, as most new homes have air-conditioning and the cost of supplying gas to the home can be avoided by installing heat pumps.
Note that this is a few years old (2016), and more efficient heat pumps improve the economics.
In that mode less of the energy in the gas becomes heat in the home (good furnaces are really good).
[1] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Tex... ("A federal report that summer recommended steps including installing heating elements around pipes and increasing the amount of reserve power available before storms, noting many of those same warnings were issued after similar blackouts 22 years earlier and had gone unheeded.")
Weatherization makes any heating and cooling more efficient too, so everyone should assess for improvements.
* https://www.mitsubishicomfort.com/benefits/hyper-heating
These are designed in Japan, where they often have earthquakes, and so any flammable materials (natural gas) seem not to be used for heating. Things can get quite chilly up north:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rikubetsu,_Hokkaido
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokkaidō#Climate
AFAICT, the units do not have external thermometers, but rather look at the refrigerant temperature. So if the piping from the unit into your wall is short, then the refrigerant isn't exposed to the cold that much, and so may not effected as much by air temperature.
I believe why natural gas heating is not popular is because they are a bit expensive and gas pipes aren't common outside big city. I'm getting curious why gas heating isn't popular even in big city (Sapporo). Your assumption (earthquake) looks reasonable for a part of reason.
Maybe gas heater is hard to install/uninstall and never use except winter. So we don't want to put all year on small house is reasonable.
And then gas does usually need ducting or radiators.
It's not just Texas. There has been extreme cold across Europe, and unseasonable warmth across parts of the Arctic.
Of course it's far too late to fix the primary cause now. But it's still true that extreme weather events caused by climatic instability were being discussed more than twenty years ago.
Adding more of Power Source [X] is a bandaid. The real problem is structural, and it could have been solved more cheaply back then.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26159680 - "What went wrong with the Texas power grid?", 2021-02-16, 1010 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26146945 - "Texas’ power grid crumples under the cold", 2021-02-15, 35 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26137893 - "Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid", 2021-02-15, 568 comments
It is not unusual for the news section and the editorial section to take completely opposing positions on an issue. (I think they did that this past summer on the issue of effectiveness of masks.)
Who do you imagine the audience is for the editorial pages of the WSJ?
Even long before Murdoch took it over, that part of the paper has a very different reputation and appeal than the rest.
I suspect that the target audience of WSJ is inclined to like WSJ no matter what the editorial board pursues as long as they stay within their tribal lane.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/natural-gas-power-st...
EDIT: even more bizarrely, a different fact check from Politifact relating to the Texas outages claims yet another loss figure for wind power of only 2 GW, disagreeing with their other fact check: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/17/tucker-car...
>...between the mornings of Feb. 7 and Feb. 11, wind as a share of the state’s electricity fell to 8% from 42%, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
>Gas-fired plants produced 43,800 MW of power Sunday night and coal plants chipped in 10,800 MW—about two to three times what they usually generate at their peak on any given winter day—after wind power had largely vanished. In other words, gas and coal plants held up in the frosty conditions far better than wind turbines did. https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-spins-into-the-wind-11613...
so wind power cratered and other sources are running at 2-3x their normal despite problems from the cold like equipment freezing and water at water intake facilities freezing. this is despite a just in time operational mindset that is causing shortages of natural gas. power plants are shutting down because they don't have gas to burn.
so you can't blame it on wind power really. but your comment is fantastically derisive.
generation is not equal to consumption because texas lacks batteries to store excess energy.
the politifact article is correct that the failure is on carbon based plants, and its on plants that are not used to cold weather for obvious reasons. but its also silly because the implication is that you just need more windmills. which is obviously silly because texas has one of the highest wind energy %s in the US.
but carbon based plants are running 3 times as hot as theyre used to and plants are shutting down because they dont have fuel. So you obviously need carbon fuel to help out.
the carbon plants are stepping up as much as they can but its not enough.
thats it. no huge conspiracy theory. but lots of people like to make fun of the other side.
they need more power, and you cant magically sprout up wind turbines
I don’t know how to reconcile your claim of “wind power cratered” with plenty of other sources claiming “wind power generation exceeded expectations.” It makes me suspect you are not arguing in good faith.
but the wind power dropped to 8% of power generated. carbon power obviously has to make up the difference and there are plants shutting down because they dont have fuel.
all wind power has to do to exceed expectations is to lose 50% as opposed to the expected 60%. (random numbers)
its easier to pump gas than it is to construct a wind turbine? the politifact article is blaming carbon plants, and I said that's true, but you need to understand the context. theyre blaming carbon plants because theyre the only source of power you can ramp up quickly without the wind complying
Note that's the governor of Texas in that clip, not some internet armchair grid operator.
My understanding is that natural gas, coal, and other fossil fuel-based electric sources only run when it is profitable to do so. When the price of natural gas is low and the price of electricity is high, it makes sense to use natural gas to generate electricity. When it's the other way around, turning natural gas into electricity is a money-losing proposition.
By contrast, wind and solar power have no input cost. So long as there is wind or sunlight, renewable power is being provided to the grid.
Last week, temperatures were higher and there was less demand for electricity. Prices were lower, so less fossil fuel energy was needed/wanted/generated.
This week, the temperature drop greatly increased demand for energy, increasing prices with it. More fossil fuels are burned. While the amount of wind/solar power generated did not greatly chang, the total amount of electricity generated increased, reducing renewables' share.
but isnt that the point? even if wind energy held up better than expected, theyre still not enough to cover the energy needs?
texas needs energy that they dont have.
and obviously the wind/solar output DID drop, and carbon plants have to make up for it
The same price forces caused Texas to install a lot of wind and (more recently) solar. The federal production tax credit makes wind-generated electricity very cheap for Texans, if somewhat less cheap for all Americans.
By the early 1970s, the artificially low price set by the federal government had created a shortage, but only of interstate gas. Gas consumed within the state where it was produced was plentiful, but more expensive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_in_the_United_Stat...
https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/counties/matagorda_county/n...
So it's not clear that relying on other electricity sources would have been better, if those other sources also failed to plan for operating in prolonged cold weather.
I was more commenting on the gap in the articles logic that suggested wind/solar was off the hook because nat gas went down worse. I really don’t know the systems well enough to fill that gap on my own.
But this isn't about wind vs. coal vs. gas, it was about weatherized vs. not weatherized.
PVGR Output (solar) is currently 0 MW, with over 3000 MW of installed capacity. That's 0%.
Nuclear is apparently doing best, outputting 75% capacity (with a capacity of around 5000 MW). I'm not sure on the exact numbers for coal, gas, etc., but they are clearly supplying the bulk of the 49089 MW demand.
> Wind actually outperformed what it was projected to
If you read the full quote from the article, this is so heavily qualified that it seems designed to be quoted out-of-context. As in, they couldn't say that wind generation performed well in any meaningful sense without outright lying, so they came up with this quotable take instead, knowing that the extremely heavy qualification would not make it into the quotations. If I project wind power to generate 5% of its capacity, and it actually generates 10%, I can say that wind power "exceeded expectations" in exactly the way the fact "checkers" mean it. But this ignores the fact that most of the wind capacity failed to produce anything, which is what people actually care about.
If the projections had been made a month ahead of time, then "exceeding projections" might have some useful meaning. But the projections referred to are only made 24 hours in advance, meaning that the expectations being exceeded were incredibly low and easy to "exceed". I'm sure ERCOT does projections more than 24 hours in advance as well. Why doesn't PolitiFact reference those, or compare this February's output to previous Februarys, or do anything other than cherry-pick a single set of numbers that just so happens to support their political agenda?
> But this isn't about wind vs. coal vs. gas, it was about weatherized vs. not weatherized.
This seems to be spot on. Many of the issues could have been avoided if the systems had been built to sustain cold weather.
[0] http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi... [1] http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/219848/Capacity_Chang... [2] http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/144926/ERCOT_Quick_Fa...
From ERCOT’s winter weather best practices:
http://www.ercot.com/content/meetings/other/keydocs/2011/201...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_National_Laboratory#Nucl...
In any case, the current generation mix isn't particularly dependent on wind/solar (a couple percent of predicted winter generation).
The article takes one position (weakly) that renewables weren’t to blame. The Texas governor for instance has taken a very strong position that renewables are to blame. It seems likely that the real answer is between (and on the side of this articles position) these points. But to just arbitrarily judge based on what solar did vs “expectations” compared to what nat gas did, ignores the idea that solar demands more nat gas than other energy sources.
I’m good with the answer “we’d have adopted solar/wind/nat gas mix in the same proportion given the same risk modeling we had for this sort of event in comparison to coal/nat gas/etc”
But that’s not what the article actually argues.
Good luck. I'd be glad to suffer short blackouts here if the grid were interconnected so we could share power with your state.
It costs a lot to go from 99.99% uptime to 99.999%, but we do it every time.
The savings to go from 99.99% uptime to 99.9% is also huge. Most of the world does fine with under 99% and we could too if we built our systems and lives to handle power going down sometimes, even unpredictably. Hospitals, elderly, etc would need special treatment. The rest of us could reduce our needs and learn from how people lived all the time for hundreds of thousands of years.
We'd save tons of money, live healthier, and pollute a lot less. We'd learn to treat nature with a bit more humility and respect.
That and the last 5 paragraphs departing from just reporting facts and instead start trying to convince the reader of a viewpoint gives the article a smell for me.
https://www.city-journal.org/texas-cold-snap-a-warning-for-w...
The article picks on this amongst other items, but I want to know: who HAS had a successful rollout of vaccines? The US, the UK, and the EU have all failed. Is there a model state, province, or nation that has been doing 'great' at rolling out of vaccines?
I tire of the constant opposition to nuclear energy on HN and in general. We discovered rocks spicy enough to power our civilization 50+ years ago, but got outplayed so hard by big oil that to this day people are still opposed to it.
Waste? Nope not a problem Too expensive (HN's favorite critique), nope, not really. Unsafe? Patently false Doesn't work in cold weather? Only because of ERCOT's ineptitude
The current crisis in Texas is a direct result of anthropogenic climate change. Had we gone big into nuclear 50+ years ago this might have never have happened
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
I'm not even really responding to GP anymore I'm just salty. Give me an ENORMOUS breakthrough in energy storage. Or give me fission power plants.
We have those. Did you mean fusion?
Better sensor maintenance and weatherproofing systems seem like they could solve the issue Texas faced with nuclear power. That seems like a much more minor change than figuring out how to solve the issues with gas, wind, or solar. Plus, as far as I can tell the problem was with a fifty year old power plant. If we had been building new nuclear plants and investing in them I bet we'd have better, more modular, and safer systems (that might not rely on a single safety sensor system like this).
But in less than a century Miami could be under water. We missed a huge opportunity to buy time.
Nuclear is extremely safe and clean. The passage of time will make it more so as we develop reactors that consume nuclear waste, better storage or nuclear technology, etc.
Challenges to your hand waves are not "needlessly hostile"; they're exactly as "hostile" (i.e. skeptical) as the situation warrants. Maybe it's confusing because you're unaware that the consensus here is not the consensus among people who actually work on this stuff. They recognize that the current "solutions" are only stopgaps.
> Nuclear is extremely safe and clean.
Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Hanford. Not actually a great record considering the number of deployments involved. Yes, newer kinds of reactors are likely to be safer. As I said elsewhere in this thread, I'm not actually against nuclear power. I just recognize that it's not easy or perfect. Blind faith is not my thing.
Regarding nuclear power accidents, of course this is actually a great record considering the amount of power nuclear provides and the number of deaths caused by other forms of power.
I don't think you've yet made a worthwhile argument and you continue to try and be rude. On top of that, you don't even seem to believe the argument you are pretending to make. I won't read further replies here.
That's not the only solution. Texas is big enough that a lack of wind across the entire state is even less likely than the weather they've been having. Wind has held up better than oil and gas there, and properly weatherproofed wind would be even better. Texas also has rivers, and waves. There's still untapped potential in energy storage. Most significantly, better interconnection to other grids would be pretty helpful but has been foregone to protect Texas suppliers' profits. There really doesn't need to be that much non-renewable baseload generation in Texas.
Also, why do you (and others) assume that anyone who mentions unsolved problems with nuclear must be flat-out against it? I for one am not. It can be part of a complete energy solution, but until some of those problems are solved it can't be a primary solution by itself. What I object to, mostly, is not nuclear power itself the simplistic "atomic energy please, this is a solved problem" hand wave. Contrary to the HN ethos, not every problem has a simple technical solution, and people who point that out wrt energy are not necessarily shills or dupes of the oil industry. It's a matter of being empirical about things and working them out instead of turning technologies into new religions.
The phrase “too cheap to meter” was used in a 1954 speech by the then-Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis L. Strauss. ... Chairman Strauss predicted that: “Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter…"
Until we have socialism, exploitation and abuse of the poor will continue.
If you want to have a discussion about the merits of different political ideologies then do that. But this is not a community designed for you to crusade.
Here's a screenshot of what Tim Boyd (the mayor I quoted) said, in his own words: https://twitter.com/Holiday1326/status/1361808806515253248
and here's Rick Perry in his own words: https://www.republicanleader.gov/whats-up-in-texas/
I'm not in any way mischaracterizing what these people say and therefore it is not a character attack.
You may disagree with my conclusions, and you might even be justified saying my conclusions don't belong on this site, but you can't just imply I'm lying or simply trying to make people look bad.
https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1362140199644495874
"We've gone from Big Mistake to Big Lie. The official GOP response to the power outage is now in the same moral and intellectual universe as Stop the Steal and Jan 6 was a false-flag antifa operation. No acceptance of reality, let alone responsibility."