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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

Wind was going to get the blame no matter what because energy sources are now partisan. There is the coal and oil party and the solar and wind party.

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This matters very little at this point. Wind and solar are being deployed in Texas very rapidly (tens of GW of capacity are in the queue [1]). FERC has a recent ruling, encouraged along by Tesla, to make utility storage a first class citizen within ERCOT [2]. By the end of 2023, wind and solar will eclipse Texas’ gas fired generation capacity, before accounting for rooftop solar deployments “behind the meter.”

With that said, this illustrates death gasps of a dying ideology. Let the market continue to do its thing and drive out fossil generation.

(disclosure: an extended family member comes from rural Texas oil money, so these are frequent heated discussions in our family)

[1] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

[2] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/court-upholds-f...

> With that said, this illustrates death gasps of a dying ideology.

Ideology or party?

As a follow up - I say this because it’s not clear to me what ‘ideology’ the GOP actually follows these days.

I think it matters policy wise. If you have folks trying to put out false information and it emboldens politicians to change policies, good choices become very difficult.

Good choices becoming difficult explains 90% of American problems. It's such a common pattern that simply tearing away the crap and doing the absolute minimum would turn you into one of the greatest politicians of all time with almost zero competence needed beyond the willingness to not make obviously bad choices.

It's certainly a political issue that comes with partisanship. And folks will do it to spite their face.

Trump could have made fighting COVID a great nationalistic crusade.... he might even have been reelected had he done so.

But he didn't like the news and picked his hill to die on despite the fact that there was no real political reason to do so.

I really don't see the types of energy as a partisan issue at all anymore, compared to policies that threaten to put the US on a dependence on foreign sources of energy. Nobody wants to burn dirty coal if they can help it, but coal plants in lieu of importing oil as long as there isn't any smog around their homes, most people would take the former.

Granted those families or counties that historically have depended economically on specific forms of energy, it's another story, but they're a relatively small segment of the population.

Unfortunately, there is partisanship among clean energy proponents, they're split into the nuclear party and the solar/wind party, and they keep fighting each other while we keep burning fossil fuels.

It's a textbook display of the narcisissm of small differences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...

> Nobody wants to burn dirty coal if they can help it, but coal plants in lieu of importing oil

Outside of a few places (i.e Hawaii) oil is not burned for electricity, so in that sense there isn't really a trade off between coal and oil in that way.

When electric vehicles become broadly prevalent, then the tradeoff will exist, but only if we haven't done the job of deploying enough renewables by that time.

> Nobody wants to burn dirty coal if they can help it

This is, sadly, very much untrue.

Climate change, and particularly the way our energy sources affect it, have become so partisan that I have seen people with strong right-wing leanings express the desire to burn the dirtiest coal they can, as dirty as they can possibly burn it, largely to "own the libs".

That's just not true.

There are people who absolutely want other people to burn dirty coal because aligning themselves with the coal industry affects their bottom line in a positive way.

The Republican Party of Texas is highly anti-regulation when it comes to energy sources. Much of the party constituents' money is tied up in oil and gas. They were completely fine with people losing property and time if it could be used as a political wedge issue to get more donations.

I lost all the food in my house because I was without power for a week in the recent ice storms. Several of my pipes were damaged despite my best efforts to mitigate the issue. My work week was completely disrupted, and I was forced to scramble to keep my family and family pets warm.

I wasn't remotely alone. There is still no effort by the state to winterize the state's energy grid. Turns out that once your home costs past a certain point out here, you're probably running gas and they start to include generators too.

Note that generation capacity doesn’t say much of the actual amount of electricity available throughout the year.

Wind and solar don’t provide dispatchable electricity and will always need a backup plant.

Man do you think the guy you are responding to doesn't know that? Do you think a significant % of people here on HN don't know that? The guy you responded to clearly had a pretty advanced understanding of the issues in this field, and the fact that wind doesn't always blow is very very basic. He even talked about storage!

Storage firmed renewables are rapidly reaching cost parity with natural gas. In many US geographies, storage backed solar already is.

“Jim Robo, chief executive of renewables giant NextEra, made the same point on the company’s January earnings call to discuss the company’s 2020 results: "There is not a regulated coal plant in this country that is economic today full period and stop when it’s dispatched on any basis, not a single one, OK."

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/04/14/solar-and-storage-are...

http://ieefa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/US-Power-Sector-...

For what it's worth, ERCOT is not subject to FERC regulation, so order 841 doesn't apply to ERCOT.

While ERCOT is not required to adhere to 841, their documentation to stakeholders indicates they intend to.

We need a spent fission rod party, which when I write it down reads like "fishing rod" which could cause a lot of confusion later.

In any case, spent uranium, solar and wind is the way forward regardless.

That joined in too, a reactor had an unplanned shut down as well during the storm.

The nuclear power plant shut down because its water supply froze and the pumps to cool the reactor shut down.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/how-and-why...

> “It’s very rare for weather issues to shut down a nuclear plant," said Brett Rampal, director of nuclear innovation at the Clean Air Task Force. "Some equipment in some nuclear plants in Texas has not been hardened for extreme cold weather because there was never a need for this.”

> According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the shutdown of the nuclear reactor was caused by a disruption in a feedwater pump to the reactor, and that caused the plant to trip automatically and shut down early Monday.

https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...

> Rowland said Feb. 16 the unit shut "due to cold weather-related issues in the plant's feedwater system." Weather conditions did not impact the 1,312-MW South Texas Project-2, which operated at 100% early Feb. 15-18, according to NRC.

> Rowland said the unit shut at 5:37 am CT Feb. 15. STPNOC said in an event report filed with NRC that the unit tripped at 5:26 am due to low steam generator levels. "The low steam generator levels were due to loss of Feedwater pumps 11 and 13," according to the report.

As far as I know, it was a malfunctioning sensor.

I generally that it’s a poor design decision to build the steam engines on the outside with no weather protection.

Yes we in texas understand that basically ALL of our energy production methods were hampered by the cold (not our solar panels tho!), because none of them were prepped for cold. Which in some cases makes sense, in others it does not because it would have been cheap to do, up front.

How long does it take a pressurized water reactor to start up again? Is there some kind of "idle neutron balance" they can use when coolant flow is interrupted, or do they have to shut down the pile?

From https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956

> About 25% of U.S. power plants can start up—going from being shut down to fully operating—within one hour, based on data collected in EIA’s annual survey of electric generators. Some power plants, especially those powered by coal and nuclear fuel, require more than half a day to reach full operations. The time it takes a power plant to reach full operations can affect the reliability and operations of the electric grid.

https://engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/7394/why-doe... goes into it a bit more.

It's complicated. Nuclear fission generates a load of by-products, and some of those are known as fission "poisons", mainly Iodine-135 decays to Xenon-135, which very easily absorbs neutrons and inhibits fission. During normal operation, there are plenty of neutrons flying around, so there are enough for some to be absorbed by Xenon-135, and the rest to continue the fission reaction. However, when the power output is reduced, the Xenon-135 can inhibit the nuclear reaction. This can make it less safe to restart the reactor, because the operator would need to increase the reactivity of the system - if they increase it enough to overcome the inhibition caused by the Xenon-135, then the increased nuclear activity can burn off the Xenon-135, and then you have excessive reactivity and the reactor could go out of control. For that reason, when a reactor is shut down, you typically need to wait several hours for the Xenon-135 to decay by itself - this is called the "Xenon dead time". Failure to do this was partially the cause of the Chernobyl disaster.

That’s why you use spent rods in a TWR. Which obviously needs built first but the science is sound.

Energy sources have been partisan since before Reagan had the White House solar panels removed.

Before that. Reagan had them removed not to create a new partisan issue, but because it was already a partisan issue.

That's why I wrote 'since before' and not 'since'.

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