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Comment by adrianmonk | Hacker News Reader

Also, as I understand it, there's another "grid" which failed, which is the network of natural gas wells and pipelines. Natural gas wasn't being pulled out of the ground and pumped to the electric generation plants.

Apparently natural gas isn't easy to store, so basically there's not a lot of buffer, and everything needs to stay online or there won't be any natural gas to burn at power plants even if they were winterized, which some of them were.

I think some power plants may have even just shut down because natural gas was available but too expensive, and they weren't under a legal obligation to keep producing electricity.

Point being, to solve the problem, winterization of plants is just part of the problem.

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The natural gas load was nearly double it's average load, because the entire state of Texas was below freezing for a week solid and almost nobody has gas heat in Texas. Everyone was pulling on inefficient electric heaters to warm their house. And the Windmills, which power about 22% of the Texas grid, went almost entirely offline.

“Almost nobody has gas heat in Texas” That’s incorrect. Approximately a third have gas heat per https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=47116

Well, you must be a fun conversationalist. Nearly 2/3 of Texans use electricity for heat, and it no doubt becomes more electrically dependent in the southern latitudes of Texas (it being a very large and widespread state, climate varies quite a bit in various parts of the state).

By your own source that's 50% higher electricity dependence for heat than the U.S. average.

But no, I was not talking about the upper latitudes of Texas where freezing weather and snow is quite common and gas heaters are more prevalent.

You get plenty of people in Austin and more southern parts of Texas that also have gas heat. The older homes, typically — like from the 80s. Most newer homes are all electric.

Of course, if the fans are electric, then the gas heat doesn’t help.

In that case, you better hope you have a gas fireplace.

You might also want to read the analysis here around power sources during the outage: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/04/28/texas-power-outage-w...

> And the Windmills, which power about 22% of the Texas grid, went almost entirely offline.

Which was also a problem of not winterizing.

The picture of the entire event is that the government of Texas flagrantly ignored what it was told was the problem from the previous blackout, and then naturally the exact same problem caused the next one.

This week-long freezing event had never happened before in the state of Texas. The entire state was blanketed and plunged to temperatures colder than Anchorage, Alaska. We had single digit temps in Austin. Austin, has the same latitude as Jacksonville, Florida. This isn't some "flagrant ignorance" this never happened in modern meteorological history in Texas.

https://www.texastribune.org/2014/01/06/ercot-rolling-blacko...

2014. After the event the government was advised that winterizing the powerplants needed to be done to prevent similar events in the future.

Instead, Texas did nothing for another 7 years, and then the same thing happened again.

This was wholly predictable: Texas running an independent grid doesn't have enough power import capacity to manage long-tail events, but also chose to manage them by ignoring them and damn the consequences - those consequences being Texan citizens froze to death in their homes (https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/19/texas-power-outage-w...).

Natural gas plant outages were around 30,000mw, and there were issues with both coal and nuclear plants going offline also. Wind was only a few thousand MW below planned values.

Not close to being entirely a wind power issue. (Even though wind power could clearly have done better, as it did in Iowa, where it was significantly colder and the wind turbines stayed online.)

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/14/historic-win...

Over half the turbines were completely frozen. Wind typically accounts for ~22% of Texas power supply. Meanwhile, there was a record high spike (nearly double normal loads) in demand for electricity. If not for natural gas, the blackouts would have been even worse, because at least they were able to be ramped up and provide some power via rolling blackouts.

> If not for natural gas, the blackouts would have been even worse, because at least they were able to be ramped up

Natural Gas, Coal, and Nuclear accounted for over 80% of the lost generation. Most of that was gas.

See page 16 here: https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2021/04/28/ERCOT_Winter_Sto...

Same thing happened in both 2011 and 1989… NatGas was not there when the state needed it most.

The wind turbines need to be winterized, too.

They didn’t do as well as they should have, but they did a lot better than expected.

I recently heard a podcast with the CEO of MidAmerican (based in Iowa). They had materially colder temperatures than TX and operated 91% of their wind capacity. There's nothing inherent in wind that keeps it from operating in cold weather.

(MidAmerican did pay extra for winterization, so you can maybe make the argument that it wasn't worth it for TX to have done the same, given the risk profile.)

No, the windmills actually produced more power during that cold period than was projected that they would be capable of. They didn’t go offline. A standard Republican refrain is to blame alternative sources of power generation for the faults that actually exist primarily in the old systems that bought off said Republicans. It’s like the pot calling the kettle black, but the pot actually is black and the kettle isn’t.

No, it was the gas-fired power plants that didn’t have enough gas to burn, caused by the fact that many of the gas producers had not winterized their systems, and in fact some of the gas producers got their own power turned off in the rolling blackouts — they hadn’t been marked as mission critical.

Try reading the report.

Sadly, very little has changed since February. The producers and the gas power plants have paid a trivial fee that allows them to choose not to winterize (because that would be too expensive), and so far as I know they still haven’t even bothered to mark those systems as mission critical, so when the rolling blackouts happen again, they’ll get their power cut off again.

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