‘Things are going to break’: Texas power plants are running nonstop
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>I will pay up to $0.10/kWh with no limits, $0.10-$0.25/kWh but only for 6 hours per day, or >$0.25 kWh but only for up to $5 worth per day and it should send alerts to my phone/email/app immediately
Then there'd be no surprise hundred/thousand dollar bills, and the grid operator could get demand to smoothly drop off based on how much people valued it just by raising the price. Could even make that revenue neutral by having all excess money gathered from emergency demand adjustment pricing be evenly distributed back to all customers at the end of each billing cycle, which would help offset the loss for those less well off. It'd be more transparent to see the value of things like home energy storage or conservation measures.
Or maybe those plans just fell out of favor vs more traditional uniform billing where both the best and the worst case are price capped?
A lesser provider, Octopus Energy (which is rooted in the UK) disabled new subscriptions for their market-rate plan and has probably phased out all users by now. They have been running a month-to-month plan, though they were giving customers $100 to leave the month-to-month service (in late May? Early June?).
I'm not 100% sure what this is about. They framed it as being about having to charge really high rates as the summer went on, but it could since it too is a pre-deposit plan, they might be fearing a similar circumstance (grid goes into crisis, prices once again get pegged at $8.99/kwh, and they get stuck with the choice of either turning people off and letting them potentially die in the heat, or being stuck with a massive shortfall).
FWIW, Griddy tried this as well (shedding customers), but the notice came late on a Friday and it wasn't clear who (if anyone) would be taking customers on a Saturday.
That aside, a cap would help, though it's not clear to me that the power infrastructure has controls that are fine-grained enough to actually enforce it? Unless maybe you had your own ~smart-breaker?
Yeah I was thinking it'd be CPE, not on the provider-side since I have no idea what the Texas' grid capabilities are like but my default assumption for anything grid related based on experiences up north is that there is a lot of ancient stuff there that nobody is touching ever. But CPE should fine in this case (installation cost aside), the provider can offer pricing information in real time and each customer could then decide when to drop off the grid themselves. Which I think would also be politically helpful in terms of agency and thus avoiding that scapegoating situation. With customer set CPE nobody ever gets "cut off" they "decide the cost is no longer worth it until price goes back down" so it's still their choice, they get very cheap power much of the year. Could also offer opportunities for partnership with players like Tesla or other newer power storage providers, the Tesla PWs have some customization modes already (see Powerwall Modes [0]). Not hard to envision extending that interface to handle going off grid based on price supplied by the provider, which then has the added advantage of meaning the customer doesn't actually lose power immediately they have 13+ kWh of buffer first. That could further encourage users to drop sooner vs later.
Sort of a shame Griddy died, I don't think the idea of that kind of provider or rapid market response is necessarily a bad one long term. But they didn't flesh things out enough in terms of the customer experience and ability to react to negative price signals not use the upside of positive ones. Maybe it was just too early, and some sort of energy storage as a practical matter would be a requirement for a market-rate plan to work for the general public. I think in the next 10-20 years that might become sort of a gimme, if only because BEVs (and 2-way power work seems to be rapidly developing too) will become common enough that lots of people will have a big chunk of storage "by default" when they're home. Perhaps then a market-rate plan can see a revival all over.
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0: https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/powerwall/mobile-app/po...
>> “Things are going to break,” she said. “We have an aging fleet that’s being run harder than it’s ever been run.”
>> Also See: Texas Confident Stressed Grid Will Hold Up Amid Summer Heat
Seems to me that one statement is rooted in experience, science and measurable facts, while the other is nonsense.
Do you have insider maintenance knowledge or is this a hunch? How many fluid samples have you sent to the lab?
Big machines are thermally designed to run at 100%. Oil and lube can be stretched for the proper economic incentive.
You need to stop the machines to measure critical parts are in good shape. You need to change consumables too.
And some controls are by law every X hours of operation.
In Texas?
Schedule your downtime or your equipment will do it for you.
The conclusion that something will break just because it’s been run harder than ever is not based on “science and measurable facts”. Either the plants an grid are within their performance envelopes or they aren’t. These things are over provisioned precisely for these scenarios.
A meaningful statement would have been based on how close to design capacity they are at. Previous usage is completely irrelevant.
It's clear a lot of people in this thread have no exposure to operations.
Edit: I think I was remembering this: https://twitter.com/DigiEconomist/status/1546844815140216835
Otherwise how on earth would you incentivize the network existing in the long-term? Nobody is going to acquire/power/maintain/network/operate these hashing machines if there's no return for their efforts.
Proof of work (bitcoin) will always have them though. The lower bitcoin price will just wipe out the viability of a lot of miners and hash rate will decrease globally. At that point the network will adjust the difficulty until the target block rate is reached with the remaining miners who can afford at that expected payout.
Yes, but that is still subject to the cost of actually doing the processing. It's perfectly possible that it's net-negative for anyone without free power in a certain area.
There can even be load differences when it's just not worth enough that every gamer will bother setting their machine to hash in off hours.
The most recent goalpost shift put the merge in September.
... honestly doesn't sound smart at all. Are they also buying or just overpaying by mining?
(from another comment to this post)
We're an oil and gas state, 14th largest producer in the world, 2 million jobs, $10 billion economy, owned by oil and gas lobbyists.
Lifelong Texan, will never understand it, but fear of any disruption to that world stops any discussion about green energy in its tracks.
The problem with this theory is that it has not been born out in reality: Despite lacking excessive regulation, Texas has a large quantity of plants stuck in permit hell, and we've been stuck in this situation for years.
Texas likes to sell itself as being small on regulations, but the truth of the matter is the bureaucracy is as bad as anywhere else.
https://www.texastribune.org/series/winter-storm-power-outag...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462962...
https://www.puc.texas.gov/agency/resources/reports/UTAustin_...
There is no doubt at all that there were serious power outages in early 2021. None. What is wrong with you??
I don't believe I'm a madman. Please make sure you're following the HN Guidelines when responding to comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I think what horrifies me most about today is that literally delusional people such as yourself seem to be in positions of power everywhere.
To me it seems the state needs to enforce x amount of backup not a renewable capacity.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/californiapowerproblems-hit-tex...
Edit: they have another editorial today postulating the moved to green energy without sufficient backup is leading to problems across the US and Europe. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wests-climate-policy-debacl...
It should also be noted that nonrenewable energy sources also face supply issues. If anything, the issue is worse for nonrenewable energy in the long term since scarcity can only increase with time. Exploration and more intensive extraction techniques only postpone the exhaustion of resources while increasing costs.
(I also find it somewhat ironic that the burning of carbon would most likely intensify the problem in the long run by increasing energy demands and decreasing the effectiveness of renewables.)
Unfortunately, whomever runs the Texas public utility commission doesn’t work for the people of Texas.
Your reductive reasoning is palpable. People will move to Texas in the near term for the promise of low COL, but I wonder how many massive power grid failures it will take for the rich to begin fleeing for greener pastures.
When my dads family grew up in the 1950s, the allure of buying a cheap bungalow in a lemon farm outside LA felt like paradise…
It had (ahem) some externalities, and wound up collapsing. Fast growth isn't inherently a sign of something being done right, or we'd be talking about Zynga a lot more.
"hurt the cause" facts tend to do that when promises aren't met and people suffer.
Our transition to wind and other intermittent sources instead of building base load is creating a worsening reliability crisis.
It seems that people forgot that we still don't have many good ways to store energy.
If we incentivized efficiency we’d be much better off but instead we champion mocking that as something Californian.
Meanwhile, 48 more states in the union have a variety of significantly more or less regulated energy sectors than either Texas or California and how many of them have rolling blackouts every year?
I don't know why people keep pretending Texas's and California's problems are anything more than the stupidity, or willfull negligence of their respective governments.
Umm, I think you're missing something big here. The only reason this was "economical" were huge tax benefits/subsidies.
Decentralized energy production that involves a bunch of large moving parts will NEVER be as efficient as centralized energy production.
The point is to have an array of energy sources. If there's no wind, solar can compensate. If there's no sun, nuclear can compensate. If nuclear goes down, then you can tap into natural gas. If there's no natural gas, then go for coal or whatever.
Except... There can be a large part of the day when there is neither wind nor sun.
> If there's no natural gas, then go for coal or whatever.
Uh huh, but those coal plants aren't just sitting there waiting for you to use them. They have a long startup period and have to run pretty much all the time to make sense.
I think you're missing how badly we've screwed up base load and creating a reliability problem as we decommission coal plants and think we can replace them with wind.
If people stopped wasting money on EV's and bought residential batteries instead...
Are you proposing that we build some worldwide network of transmission lines to move solar power from Africa -> North America when it is night time in the latter?
Also with coal in particular it can take days to ramp them up - coal is for base load, not demand.
If it were only as simple as you are postulating - which is why these 2nd level effects of blindly pushing renewables without taking the whole system into account are causing issues like we are seeing in Texas, California and many other places too.
With that said, it's worth considering the aspect of what it takes to ensure energy is available when it is needed. With fossil fuels, plant generation capacity has been historically built to ensure satisfaction of peak loads. Fuel was stored nearby to allow meeting rated capacity whenever that capacity was needed. Renewables' generation is slightly more complex, since we have less control for making rated generation happen when we need it to meet demand.
Of course, there are many options with making renewables work. Storage is one approach, overbuilding renewables to ensure a minimum actual generation in adverse conditions is another. As we work to reduce the costs of renewables (and storage), various renewable based options become increasingly economically advantageous. We shouldn't ignore the downsides; we should seek to understand what can be done about them.
As far as data goes, the Energy Information Agency (EIA) provides power generation/consumption data for the US grid, including breakouts by generation source [1]. The data for the Texas grid (ERCO) is interesting to explore.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr... (you can expand the graphs and view hourly data for up to 30 days and daily data for a much longer period of time).
Even if it makes absolutely no sense to do so?
A friend of mine purchases power for a municipal utility. Regulation requires that they have to reserve capacity for up to estimated peak usage. If they choose wind generation they can only apply 7% of that capacity to their requirement! So, in order to match the reliability of other forms of power they would have to purchase 14.3x as much as required.
Wind power is VERY unreliable. That isn't opinion, that is a fact recognized by everyone in the industry. If someone is telling you we can build a reliable grid with wind power as a large component, they are lying to you and pry lining their pockets.
Attitudes like the one you express in your statement are music to the ears of those seeking to take advantage via profiteering and crony capitalism.
This isn't investigated because 1) It is more expensive and 2) That will result in significant extra supply that will literally need to be "wasted". Electricity in many situations literally becomes "too cheap to meter"
I personally don't see that as a downside because that "overproduction" should be thrown at things like carbon capture, which is much more viable when the electricity is literally priced negatively
This is only not possible because people refuse to turn electricity into a fully public utility. They want their profits. The USA should treat it as a huge infrastructure project though, like the highway system, and either force or hugely subsidize the buildout of excessive renewable systems.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-texas-wind-turb...
If you're in the business of providing power (or being a regulator of those providing power), then one of the things you need to be good at is predicting demand. You should be able to model various kinds of weather scenarios and their impact on electricity demand, and find out what the worst-case scenario is, and roughly how likely it is to occur. And then you can plan your capital expansion plans to be able to meet that future demand.
So if supply is struggling to meet demand, there are three possibilities. First, supply could be lower than forecast due to unforeseeable circumstances. Second, maybe things were worse than you forecast, and demand was unexpectedly high. However, we appear to be in the third possibility: you knew that supply was insufficient to meet demand, and you didn't care.
Texas seems to be regulating its grid to ensure low prices above all else, even at the expense of reliability of the electrical system. If you need 1000 MW of spare electrical generation capability, you need that whether your grid is mostly based on solar and wind or whether it's based on gas and coal. That the complaints are directed against renewables are I think because the renewables are undercutting fossil fuel plants, and the state is too cheap to ensure reliability--and the renewables are a more politically convenient scapegoat than the bad regulatory oversight currently in place.
Grids (electric, gas, etc.) are communal things, and Texans resist communism.
What % of new solar farms are cut into forests? I can't think of a one, I'm sure there is one, but it's hard to imagine it's a high %.
We are already having issues dealing with used wind turbine blades.
We’re just coming out of a stretch of having the power off 3 times a day (either for 2.5 or occasionally 4.5 hours at a time.) I am relieved that the power is only going off once for two and a half hours tonight now that things have calmed down a bit. It has been stressful.
Texas even has large open spaces w/ cheap land where they could locate them with minor NIMBY resistance.
The only real downside of dry casks is that after about 300 years the waste is so decayed that it's no longer self-protecting from "amateur" diversion of the contained plutonium. So something needs to be done by then.
Secondly, Texas has the only open power market in the US. Companies compete to lower their prices and have lots of free and discount days for consumers. Is that a perfect system? No, but it does contribute to a lower cost of living which people and businesses seem to like. These are not new setups. This arrangement has existed for decades.
Finally, it's distressing to read all the as hominem attacks in this thread. Texas is not full of dumb, overweight crypto miners or insensitive eco terrorists. We have lots of smart people, some of whom like it that things are run differently than other states and that's ok. It's what freedom is all about.
BTW, Houston, Texas's largest city, gets its power entirely from wind and solar. That's a good goal for any city.
What do they do at night when it's simultaneously dark and not windy?
[0] https://www.papercitymag.com/culture/houston-no-1-renewable-...
This is a bit misleading. It appears the big-C City's own operations do, not the whole city worth of people and private industry.
https://www.houstontx.gov/mayor/press/2020/100-percent-renew...
> As part of the contract renewal, the City will power all municipal operations with renewable energy and realize $65 million in savings over the seven-year contract. Through the NRG Renewable Select plan, the City will receive 1,034,399 MWh of renewable electricity annually from a new, third-party utility-scale solar facility in Texas that is dedicated to City operations.
Oh, wait, I'm late saying this.
Our state government will learn its lesson only when a series of major incidents start making companies reconsider their plans to expand or relocate to the state. Republicans may love their "independence" but money is also a language they understand very well.
If it's the side that you've disenfranchised then you don't really need to worry about it.
I'd love to understand how the Railroad Commissioner ended up responsible for energy.
According to Wikipedia they haven’t dealt with rail since 2005, but it’s been a lot longer since the RRs were politically relevant to the office.
That’s a little harder to do with heat in Texas.
I’m just comparing this to my region where the government doesn’t have an excuse for the power grid failing everytime it’s hot or cold and has actually removed utilities who had catastrophic failures[1].
I’m not judging Texas for having unforeseen problems, I am judging them for failing to respond to their issues
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_Valley_gas_explosi...
We may soon see which way it goes.
If you don't schedule maintenance then your equipment will schedule it for you, usually at the least convenient time.
Here in the real world, we operate under constraints that we can't just wish away because that would be convenient for the point we're trying to defend. Among those constraints is the lack of organizational and industrial experience and infrastructure for effectively making new NPPs.
Ingredients for a quick transition to nuclear:
1. Gov’t must be willing to ignore NIMBY/BANANA people 2. Accept slightly more risk than zero 3. Aggressively poach people from countries with healthy nuclear programs and put them in charge of ours.
> nothing fruitful
I see what you did there.
What you are proposing is, instead, to count on a centrally planned economic model to produce a competitive outcome. This is something the US is not very good at. It's also entirely unrealistic due to the scale of the activity that would be required.
"The plant had scheduled five days of summer shutdown next week, and added two additional days due to a global semiconductor shortage, Toyota said. The seven days of closures are unrelated to the heat wave, the spokesperson added."
"General Motors Co has avoided production cuts at its Arlington, Texas, assembly plant, but has scaled back on air conditioning, the company said on Thursday."
"Sources familiar with LyondellBasell plant operations said early Thursday the petrochemical firm reduced power usage at its Houston refinery by switching from electric pumps to steam turbines where possible."
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/business/toyota-scales-back-...
Also, July is the hottest month: https://www.rssweather.com/climate/Texas/Dallas-Fort%20Worth... and days have been getting shorter since the solstice. We'll see slightly reduced energy demand in August and more so if we get more rain (we've had very little this summer so far, so any change in rain patterns will lower temps).
you should go by their factory sometime. you can get a tour, it’s pretty awesome.
When California has increased demand, so do all the states it's connected to. Hence the rolling blackouts a couple years ago and more are expected for this summer.
There was a particularly nasty heat wave in the western US in 2020 that did lead to load shedding due to a shortage of electricity. That was the first time California had load shedding since 2011 IIRC, and it did not repeat in 2021.
California has had two days with rolling blackouts since 2001, August 14-15 of 2020.
It has had public safety power shutoffs in some areas since 2019 to prevent fire risk during dry, high-wind conditions, but those are a different issue than rolling blackouts and unrelated to energy generating capacity.
Right. And more are predicted for this year. So it was and still is an issue. Or at least, officials expect it to still be an issue.
Wikipedia seems to contradict your claim. Am I missing something here?
>The Texas Interconnection is maintained as a separate grid for political, rather than technical reasons,[1] but can also draw some power from other grids using DC ties.
The power plants and substations are still needed to act as a giant DC-to-AC inverter. So if the plants are offline then the grid is effectively down, as it was in the Feb 2021 blizzard.
We’re mostly engineers on this board, have you never had to build a substandard system to meet the political needs of a higher up and then watched it blow up in their face as reality doesn’t care about political needs?
This certainly isn't just a texas problem
Risking the real economy and even human lives for this.
call it "load shedding"
that's an entire nuclear power plant worth of energy; how noble of them.
no words :'(
Maybe electric cars can be programmed to not allow charging when the grid is stressed. And Smart TVs must power off. Compare that with compelling people to get vaxed to help the herd. Like: social contract, for the common good, gonna kill gramps if you don't vax don't stop charging your car.
The best example in my area is water heaters. The appliance and sometimes even the electricity is provided at a some discount but the power is disabled during peak usage.
But I don't really see how you could incorporate the kind of complex pricing you describe. It would be too easy to cheat.
Curious though, how would it be cheated?
All of that said, a lot depends on the infrastructure. Most places I've lived still have dumb meters...which makes the idea rather moot.
This causes political problems because people like capitalism until they see grandmas dieing so someone can make extra widgets, but it’s the US so we can’t say capitalistic behaviors have to be regulated to prevent that situation, and we get crazily inefficient solutions in response
Unless of course she's mining bitcoins or running a grow operation.
I don't think power, or anything, should be highest bidder wins. But perhaps highest bidder wins above normal usage.
Texas is breaking down because they, for political reasons, want to claim they are capitalist but also for political reasons can’t admit to the consequences of living under such a system
Grandmas literally died during the Texas grid failure but Fox News blamed it on "wind turbines" so I don't see the electorate caring enough to oust their otherwise popular political personalities.