Datadog dashboard for the Texas power grid | Hacker News Reader

Datadog dashboard for the Texas power grid

p.datadoghq.com

303 pointsfiniteseries131 comments

The surprising inference from me, as an energy layman, is that solar output coincides with periods of peak demand. Obviously this is seasonally adjusted, but in an era when the Saudis have solar contracts being supplied for $10USD/MWh [0], the potential profits for a solar provider at periods of peak demand seem more than sufficient to encourage investment, especially with interest rates still at a historic low for big capital projects.

So, what gives? Where's the solar?

[0] https://reneweconomy.com.au/saudi-solar-plant-locks-in-new-r...

Solar capacity in Texas tripled since last summer.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/21/heat-ener...

Thanks! Makes sense if it's being built as fast as possible given the number of workers available for installation.

Solar is actually super super hard to install right now, because tariffs are in an uncertain space, so nobody knows if, should they import, if they are are going to get a bill in the next 12 months for past sales that's 1x-2x the cost of the import (I forget the exact factor).

This sort of protectionism isn't even buying us a bunch of local solar panel production, unfortunately. I'm not a free-market purist, and am in favor of protectionist tariffs to build a nascent industry, but this is not a way to do to it and we are only harming our installer industry with these terrible forms of tariffs and uncertainty.

Edit: here's an article from a little while ago on this

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-solar-industry-warns-slo...

There’s about 100GW of solar generation in ERCOT’s interconnect queue at the moment. If there is uncertainty, utility scale developers aren’t signaling it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071998

> As of 30 September [2021] developers had 100.3GW of solar capacity in the queue, 42.4GW of utility-scale battery storage, 22.5GW of wind, 13.5GW of natural gas and minor amounts of other technologies such as biomass.

For comparison, ERCOT has a maximum capacity of 15GW of coal generation, and 65GW of fossil gas generation (per electricitymap.org, which sources zone capacity data in the US from US EIA-860 reporting).

Well if you are a solar developer it makes sense to get in line in the interconnection queue and hope that this stupid tariff stuff gets sorted out before it's time to actually buy all the panels. But I bet we'd have a lot more installed all over the US if it weren't for this.

> But I bet we'd have a lot more installed all over the US if it weren't for this.

Agreed. Solar PV module tariffs are suspended for 24 months FYI, so there is some near term policy clarity for utility scale developers. The ITC tax credit is also phasing down over the next 2 years, so the incentive is there to build build build.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/biden-to-pause-solar-tariff...

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

Since batteries are always the issue... How inefficient is mechanical storage? For example using electricity to just raise a heavy mass then as that lowers it can produce power. It seems that would be cheap to build at scale with the chance for almost unlimited storage.

I have to assume there would be a more than 50% loss through the process, hope someone on hn can comment. Maybe it's not worth it when you can tap into unlimited sunlight the next day.

Not worth it, easier to scale up battery manufacturing (which the world also needs for all vehicles to transition to electrification).

https://youtu.be/iGGOjD_OtAM

This system is currently only cost-effective with water, and only where you have a natural place to put it (i.e. a crater on top of a mountain vs. building a tank on a tower). Constructing a greenfield mechanical apparatus is too expensive for the energy stored.

People are actively researching and working on kinetic energy storage systems, for example https://www.energyvault.com/ev1

> How inefficient is mechanical storage?

The density is the problem.

If you raise a 25,000kg mass by 100m, that's 24.5MJ, or roughly the energy contained in one kilogram of coal. Or 6.6kWh (standard meter units) of electricity.

(and that's on the input side, not accounting for losses)

.. or, if you want a fun comparison, a 2000kg Tesla with a 100kWh (360MJ) battery pack would have to be raised over 18km into the air to equal the energy stored in its battery.

That’s not how water storage works though for example. You are forgetting that for every unit of mass raised 1 unit, you can add another unit of mass where the previous unit was. Thus you are getting a progression of 1+2+3+4…up to the height units of power stored.

The water tower in my town is several hundred feet tall (many units) and has a big bulb tank at the top. When you pump a gallon of water up into the tank, it is raised hundreds of feet and contributes a fraction of an inch to the total height of the water stored.

It's an actual implementation of energy storage, the water is pumped up there and then gravity distributes it, so there is a buffer if the pumps can't run for some reason.

Pumped hydro is usually considered the best way to do this. Basically, you pump water from the bottom of the dam back up to the top. This is great because you probably already wanted most of the infrastructure for hydroelectric power; the pumps are a relatively inexpensive addition once you have that. There are other techniques, but pumped hydro is generally what you'll see for this reason.

Flywheels are also pretty good short term, but supercapacitors mostly do their job better these days. That said they are competitive, and technological changes could nudge them into more use. Just making your wind turbine really large gives a flywheel effect, e.g., so again if you already have a spinning thing they are often worth it.

> 100GW of solar generation in ERCOT’s interconnect queue at the moment.

This seems mad - is that built and not connected, or just awaiting permitting?

Interconnection listing is one of the first stages for a project; but that doesn't mean that all of these projects will go through.

It does give a good sense of investor sentiment between relative technologies, however.

That’s surely the purpose. Natural gas and coal interests want chaos and uncertainty in solar coated with a glaze of misdirection.

Another factor for building solar right this moment is that the price of polysilicon has jumped to the point where large projects are potentially at risk of cost overruns/delays. Growing pains.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-22/china-is-...

What does it take to setup a decent size solar farm? There’s a lot of cheap, flat, easy to develop land in far west Texas (Brewster county).

The hardest part tends to be the interconnection to the grid, at least in most of the country. I think that ERCOT is also experiencing geographic regions with consistent grid congestion, though I can't recall which. That data is all public, but there are some providers that make it nice and easy to view:

https://www.energyacuity.com/blog/ercot-lmp-map/

One thing I wonder about is how far can you be from population centers in practice? I remember hearing that you want to be close or else you lose a lot to transmission but that might not be at all true

Long distance synchronous AC transmission or HVDC transmission is pretty efficient - enough to overcome the inherent land pricing differential.

You make the X vs Y call.

Assuming it is material, at some distance the cost of land (X) vs the transmission loss (Y), it becomes economical to choose X instead of Y

Grid connection, land use permissions (i.e. local planning). The latter is very easy in rural Texas so just the former really.

Don't forget about environmental studies and approval.

In Texas?? Lol

That's a big problem in most of the US, especially the Coasts. Not so much in Texas.

It doesn't take much honestly: https://www.erthos.com/

> So, what gives? Where's the solar?

Being installed as fast as the fabs can churn it out? Production capacity isn't infinitely elastic, factories take time to build. Solar is growing very rapidly, for reasons exactly like this, but it's not magic.

Also huge tariffs on Asian solar panels cuts demand.

Tariffs are a thing, but there is absolutely no shortage of demand right now, and hasn't been for a while.

It's a bit more insidious than that, because uncertainty on the part of the importer means that they don't know how much to charge. A tariff action in the future can be assessed on past sales, and when you don't know how much can be assessed, you can't even really hedge or buy and then give rebates later. It's a really fucked up situation.

That may be so, but it remains the case that every wafer that comes out of a solar panel fab gets sold, with a large backlog of demand in every market. And the supply side is responding to that by building out capacity rapidly. Tariffs may or may not be "fucked up" as a matter of principle, but in practice they aren't a barrier.

Is every wafer that comes out of Asia being purchased in the USA or have tariffs shifted demand to other countries? How have tariffs affected future purchase orders and new factory build outs? I’m just having a hard time believing they have a negligible effect when the worlds second largest economy adds added cost to solar panel imports.

They’re pushing purchases to places where there’s already significant renewables and nuclear at the grid level. All uses of solar are not equivalently useful in reducing green house gas emissions.

They get sold, just not in the US, or specifically, Texas, as the original poster was asking.

This hurts us in the US, quite a bit. And I wouldn't mind, if it meant that there was going to be a more robust US industry for panel production, as that would be fantastic. But the tariffs don't appear to be designed for that, but instead to benefit a few tiny manufacturers that are not expanding.

> They get sold, just not in the US, or specifically, Texas, as the original poster was asking.

I don't think that's correct. Or at least it seems to require evidence. On the whole the US solar market has been extremely robust, with dropping prices and rapid buildout. It's possible that we're somehow lagging the rest of the world somehow, but that seems unlikely.

Why wouldn't massive uncertainty about prices hinder us? A strong market doesn't stay strong in the face of massive uncertainty about prices being 2x what they should be. Instead of massive growth, like all prior years, we are seeing contraction:

> The number of shipping containers delivering solar panels to American ports during the first three months of the year was down 17% from the prior quarter and 26% from a year earlier, according to research firm Panjiva. The drop came ahead of a March 28 announcement that the Commerce Department is looking into whether solar manufacturers used factories in Southeast Asia to circumvent American tariffs on imports from China.

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

This is the US messing up its solar industry with no productive gain.

What makes you say there is no shortage of demand? If demand is elastic then lower price would mean more demand. I know that’s just econ101 which is often misleading, but what makes you say otherwise?

I only ever took econ 101, so forgive me if I'm missing a subtle point...

Isn't saying that there exists a *shortage* of demand the same as saying that there is available supply but no one is willing to buy at the current price? Thus, by definition, there cannot be a shortage of demand if all units are being purchased at the current price?

On a typical supply and demand curve you can expect that raising the price reduces demand. No one in this thread has actually established that all units are being purchased by the USA. So what you will see are projects in the US that would have gone to solar if it was 30% cheaper but instead go to natural gas or some other source, and those units that would have been purchased get purchased by people in other countries.

But also if demand significantly exceeds supply, that is cause for manufacturers to make more investment in increased production. You’d see major solar projects booking out orders six months in advance for example, and with more demand they would book out one year in advance let’s say. So the thing is that demand is a gradient and it’s not a binary thing of “everything is being purchased”. Raising the price of something will usually price someone out of that purchase.

I found this really interesting as well as here in New Zealand that relationship is inverted - we don't typically have residential air conditioning yet use a lot of electric heating so our peak demand is in the mornings and evenings, and most intense in the winter. This makes the business case for solar a lot trickier here as the periods of max generation (daytime during the summer) coincides with low demand and subsequently low wholesale energy prices.

People need to realise that not all forms of renewable generation are good solutions in all parts of the world, just because they're renewable. I hate the "green energy" cults that shout you down for suggesting solar might be bad idea for these sorts of reasons.

Well, bad idea for now. If we can start storing up solar energy for the winter, then it might start making a lot of sense. The sand battery that can store thermal energy for months seems pretty interesting in this aspect.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520

Getting one discharge per year and being less than 30% efficient is a major limitation for any kind of construed thermal battery.

A more viable though still impractical approach is to store energy in rocks underground. Essentially trading the need for a multi km deep borehole for geothermal with the need to provide your own heat.

Doesn't New Zealand have tons of hydro? Is it possible summer solar could be used to pump up a mountain reservoir somewhere with that energy sold 6 months later at a premium?

Getting only one cycle per year out of your storage solution is hard to justify economically. Regular pumped hydro gets 200-365 cycles per year, and there's already a substantial difference between day and night electricity prices.

Wind should work better than. Especially offshore. Tends to be much more expensive than solar in a sunny place like Texas, but also much more reliable/stable.

In the end, you'll always need a mix of supply. Or simply better insulation and efficient heat pumps rather than wasting electricity on heating at above freezing.

It makes we wonder if something like the Australia-Asia power link would make sense. 2.2GW would be enough to cover current Gas, Coal and Diesel generation for NZ. With sufficient storage (Batteries, Pumped Hydro), you could recharge in the day, carry load into the evening peak, before switching to stored power.

Initial cost would be higher, but long term cost of Solar is ridiculously cheap.

> It makes we wonder if something like the Australia-Asia power link would make sense.

There is the AAPowerLink project which proposes exactly this. It's a ~20GW solar farm in Australia with battery storage and a 4500km HVDC undersea cable to export power to Singapore. Seems currently in a planning and Project seems to be in a planning and exploration stage with funding not fully secured though.

I've seen this idea elsewhere, but for latitudes like NZ it makes sense to tilt panels in a way that it optimises for winter & morning/evening sun.

Also wonder how much kWh batteries one would need for winter heating (generate at day, use at evening). Kinda feel NZ, especially north island should have enough. Over in Eastern Europe you can get recycled batteries for $150/kWh!

The first thing I did was move the mouse over the demand curve and noticed that it was 1:1 with something in the wind / solar box. It is almost too obvious that there should be 20-30GW of solar installed.

So much for "sometimes the wind doesnt blow" as well. Looks like they are doing just fine with their wind power in texas.

This is why some places have net metering arrangements for PV. Energy provided at your yearly and daily peak and located at your demand centers and so reducing peak transmission load? Worth far more than the 1 for 1 offer adopted purely for convenience due to how old meters worked.

Yet Texas doesn't have such a policy statewide. Because a simple money saving idea got politicised and lots of people got convinced they were subsidizing liberal elites, rather than paying their neighbours for providing a useful service.

I was looking at the source code linked from dashboard, and surprised a bit that it's a gist, rather than a repository. Is it just to facilitate discussions on the code? Otherwise it feels a bit ad hoc that way, wouldn't consider a gist with this many files more ergonomic compared to a repository.

Also, trying to follow to the data source of the Ercot website https://www.ercot.com/ I get blocked with things like this:

    Access Denied
    Error 16
    This request was blocked by the security rules.
    If you believe you have a valid business reason for accessing ERCOT resources, please contact the ERCOT ServiceDesk at ServiceDesk@ercot.com.

This seems ... pretty old school as well. Is it geofencing, or more general IP whitelisting? Feels very strange, guessing the former, as Google's cache returns a page that can be viewed. I don't see anything that would _really_ be drain on those ERCOT resources...

I think they block anything outside the US.

They also seem to allow Canada .. and Sydney, at least out of all of the AWS regions.

> Otherwise it feels a bit ad hoc that way, wouldn't consider a gist with this many files more ergonomic compared to a repository.

All gists are actually GitHub repositories — you can clone them, branch, and commit changes. There isn’t PRs or an issue tracker, though.

(Same with GitHub wikis.)

> This seems ... pretty old school as well.

This doesn't surprise me. One of my projects as an intern was to generate reports from public data from ERCOT and a few other North American ISOs (organizations that control a region's power grid). Some of them are happy to reply to a basic cURL request. Others are more particular about things like your user agent or cookies set (even sites that didn't require authentication would set a cookie on first load and would reject requests to certain pages without that cookie). A few were very particular and ran some Javascript code to serve requests that made it so something like Selenium was required.

It was a bit surprising to me how many hoops we had to jump through considering this is public data that tax payers are entitled to.

If I recall correctly PJM was the best to work with because they had a well-designed REST API and provided a developer guide with sample code.

> I don't see anything that would _really_ be drain on those ERCOT resources...

I'm not sure if these controls are in place to safeguard against abuse. Most people don't even know these companies exist and I doubt they get too many requests. I'm assuming this is just a symptom of software sold to the lowest bidder.

Yeah, from my EU IP address I could not visit the site, with US-provided IP from my VPN I could. I don’t understand why they would geofence it honestly but that’s how it is.

They probably got DDoS like usage patterns from badly behaved scrapers around the world. Geo fencing is the easiest solution while still keeping data public domestically.

It's easy to blame them, but if you provide any data on the web, the load you get from scrapers is insane.

A lot of ERCOT heat these days. I work in energy and it’s both intriguing (because some things move faster there than other markets so there are more opportunities to advocate on the regulatory side of things) and just a mess (over RUC-ing costing consumers an extra ~$2B by the end of the year probably, extreme political spin on grid ops).

Two weeks ago I even threw together a simple Twitter bot[0] because I was annoyed with some of their communications there. This datadog dashboard has been around for a while - it shows up on energy Twitter somewhat frequently when the Texas grid is having issues.

[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/ERCOT_Status

I got hit with a rolling blackout on Thursday. Coincidentally, settlement prices skyrocketed to over $1.2k. I should connect this data to my power transfer/backup power system to preempt potential blackouts

ERCOT didn't declare any capacity emergencies on that day, or any recent day. Is it possible you just suffered from a stochastic outage, and not a capacity-related intentional disconnection?

https://www.ercot.com/services/comm/mkt_notices/opsmessages

Oooooor maybe they're not publishing notices when they should be.

The grid being under-frequency for days at a time shows they didn't have enough generation capacity.

The hypothesis that there was a rolling outage invisible to everyone except one guy on a forum doesn't strike me as being very likely. Just an ordinary power outage seems a lot more likely.

Are you misreading a label? The largest deviation is to 59.97 Hz.

Pretty unlikely. Outages are common, especially in this above average summer, due to higher transformer load and temps.

Ever since the freeze, people who have even planned outages, refer to them as “rolling blackouts”. ERCOT is a pretty open data organization aside from QSE and generator data, and it’s unlikely that this data would have been fudged. We would have seen EEA3 in addition to $5k settlement prices if there was enough of a shortage to invoke rolling blackouts. These prices directly affect end users, e.g. businesses, datacenters, end users still on RTM rates, and solar buyback users. Generators definitely have offers open up to the $5k price point, and there is no way they’d be able to lock the settlement price without it being obvious to businesses/end users, or to generators/REPs/TDUs that there is market manipulation.

As far as sagging frequency, this is also wrong, because frequency sag calls up additional reserves, and we haven’t run below 1 gigawatt of reserves since the winter freeze. The number to watch for is 59.5 hertz, which is automatic EEA3 (we haven’t hit this since the winter storm, where we reached a whopping 59.3 hertz) This is also directly measurable by TDUs and (maybe) end users.

https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/do-you-know-the-difference-b...

I got hit by a rolling blackout. It was a blackout drunk rolling his truck into a utility pole.

Outages can have a lot of causes.

Odd to present temperature in Celsius for a US state, but otherwise very cool!

I wish it were easier to see the moments when demand and capacity were at their closest, as those are the "interesting" moments.

Made in Germany! (I’m not the creator)

https://github.com/danopia

https://twitter.com/danopia

Apart from the already mentioned fact that it was made in Europe, using Celsius makes sense for scientific dashboards. And here, data is pulled from airport weather reports, which always report in Celsius.

> Odd to present temperature in Celsius for a US state

It's only odd if you assume that any type of data presentation is always targeted to those living in the area the data is collected for, which of course is not always true. And as others have pointed out, Celsius is in fact used in the US by scientists, physicians etc. -- just not by laymen.

This is a site for American laypeople primarily, so yeah I do think it an odd choice.

Neat! The California ISO grid has a really nice web and mobile app showing similar data. The site is complicated and has a lot of different views, it's not as nicely organized a dashboard, but the data is great. Example view: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx#secti...

Normally, this EIA dashboard has all regions but it has been down for a month now. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...

What kind of information are we, as energy layman, supposed to glean from this? How can one present data in a way that conveys actual significance to the audience? All of this information, yet I still don't feel any wiser.

There are some bits missing from this dashboard but as a layman who lives in TX, let me give you the rundown I gave a friend:

This dashboard gives you an overall of the capabilities and capacity of the grid.

Capacity and Demand - How much capacity the system has available against how much is being used in real-time. As the two lines get closer together, it can indicate that the grid is nearing capacity and the need for conservation or an EEA may be necessary.

Grid Frequency - While related to load, a lot of appliances keep their clocks based off of the grid frequency. Our grid is 60Hz. Deviations from that are expected and usually OK. However, anything greater than ~.5% is considered bad and a 1% variation (e.g. 59.4 Hz) can actually cause equipment damage. In fact, the reason we had load shedding back in Feb '21 was because we got down to 59.4Hz.

Wind & Solar Generation - How much of our capacity is coming from those sources. The days where Wind is down usually is when conservation notices come in.

Energy Flow to/from Other grids - How much power are we getting/sending from/to other grids. We have ties to MX, a "railroad" tie as well as ties to the eastern/western grids. We can and do import/export up to about 800 MW from those grids when needed.

ERCOT Ancillary Real Time is where things (IMO get interesting).

Supply Regulation (freq. adjustment) and ancillary supply are really the big indicators of issues. The more "supply regulation" that goes online the more we are having to adjust the frequency of the grid to compensate. If the grid frequency is too low and all of the regulation freq. up has been deployed—that's a BIG issue and indicates that the system cannot deliver enough.

If the system has deployed all of its online/offline reserve capacity, then there simply is no more generation capacity available. When things "get bad" THOSE two are the ones to watch because those are the ones that are engaged in ensuring the overall stability of the system.

I wish this were available for my power grid vendor. They send me emails in hot weather begging me to turn off my oven and ac. I know they send similar emails to much bigger power users too. It would be very nice if they had this data available, so big power users could plan.

Sometime in the next few years, power grid vendors will start to understand they're in the real-time information business.

Which vendor is that?

I'm on the Texas grid and we have been getting the same emails from our electric provider the last few weeks.

Can you add legends to the charts that have multiple items in it?

What are we supposed to glean from this as energy laymen? How do you provide data in a way that provides real meaning? All this data but no real insight.

Perhaps energy laymen are not the intended audience

That doesn't make the GP question any less relevant or meaningful.

Nobody said the question was irrelevant or not interesting, but it does answer the question "what am I supposed to take away from this", if the answer is "you're not".

For one, the peak price of electricity was ten times the usual low point (~$36)

I'm not sure what to make of the frequency drift; federally operators are supposed to balance it out for timekeeping, among other reasons.

Taking a week to get on-frequency is...not good.

TX is not a federal operator, correct? And what is the problem with drifting a bit? I know back in the day lots of peoples' clocks used it as a time reference, but that can't be very true today.

It means the power plants are over capacity is all.

The Texas interconnect is not federally regulated. There is also no such thing as a federal operator. There are three interconnects in the US, east, west and Texas. The other interconnects are not run by one central authority (let alone a federal agency). Each one has a mixture of authorities. The eastern interconnect, for instance, is run by several interstate operators (MISO, PJM and ISONE), intrastate orgs (NYISO), and vertically integrated utilities (Southern, Duke). Every one of these is a private enterprise. Each does have federal and state regulators. Ercot only has state regulators (funny enough, the Texas Railroad Commission is the Ercot regulator).

ERCOT actually falls under Public Utility Commission. Natural Gas actually falls under the Railroad Commission which was one the issues during Uri, ERCOT had no authority to get natural gas flowing to power plants.

One of the issues, not the issue.

Thanks for the correction.

FWIW, none of the ISOs I mentioned have the ability to order natural gas to flow either. What they do have, and Texas does not, is a contract with the generators that requires the generators to offer their supply to the market regardless of the price of gas (and associated risks). This doesn’t help if gas isn’t available but generators are not allowed to say ‘buying gas was too expensive or risky or we went home for the evening’. In exchange for signing this contract, the generators receive constant and regular payments during the year for their ‘capacity’, i.e., to be ready and willing to run when called. These payments are significant. This doesn’t always work but it is a notable difference.

Nor frankly could we have meaningfully imported Power, our shortfall was greater then the entire generation capacity of California.

From the creator:

All good, it's just a ton of numbers without explanations. Here's a couple very basic insights tho:

Grid frequency below 59.8 is always bad, 60 is perfect

Capacity should be at least 1 GW above demand

Demand equaling capacity is bad

https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/lktl07/comment/gnn0...

Is purple capacity and blue demand?

Yes, you can also see it here: https://www.ercot.com/

HN is obsessed with the TX power grid....why?

A large number of fabs and other manufacturing facilities exist there.

Texas has had several power failure related disasters in recent years; which have cost many lives and much value, as well as caused shocks to the rest of the US.

Much of the rest of the US does not have those issues, or has them in only very small predictable circumstances, mostly caused E.G. by huge windstorms (trees), earthquakes, fires, other 'natural disasters'. Climate generally not regarded as a natural disaster since it's something that should theoretically be planned for. Even the windstorm example, for metro areas power should not go out. It's only poorly managed rural areas that tend to go off the grid.

It's an interesting case of one area trying to stay independent and deregulated, then failing in basic areas like low costs, and maintenance, leading to serious issues in recent winters. With certain media trying to turn the management failures into an anti-wind campaign thus not making things better.

Honestly it's an interesting trainwreck to observe from far away. Shame that it affects real people locally.

In case you're not familiar with Ercot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_o...

Direct link to the 2021 Texas power crisis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

Those failures didn’t happen until they started shifting to so called “green” energy. And compared to California’s power woes, Texas is a model of efficiency.

With natural gas and nuclear, there would never be a power shortage in Texas. But for some reason people are obsessed with ugly, bird killing windmills and giant solar farms.

That's factually incorrect. They've been suffering severe power outages due to poor maintenance and planning as far back as at least 2011 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zahrahirji/texas-power-...

Here's a fun and well sourced video about the source of failures: https://youtu.be/PmYvkCXXI4E

Or if you don't like fun: https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/17/texas-energy...

> These failing sources largely included nuclear plants, coal plants and thermal energy generators. Frozen wind turbines were a factor, too, but Woodfin said wind shutdowns accounted for less than 13% of the outages.

That's ERCOT Senior Director of System Operations Dan Woodfin. So no, it definitely would've happened with just gas and nuclear.

It's one of the larger ones in the world (same GW as the largest European countries), there's a lot of data available and it's the only one that recently collapsed. I cannot remember a similar collapse due to a mismatch of demand and supply in any other network that size, especially one where we get all the data for.

I believe the CA power grid gets similar attention here whenever there's any news. A post for a dashboard would've probably attracted as many upvotes.

Texans can use HN as well?

Wonder if there’s one for blackout central — CA.

CA has had blackouts, not for lack of power, but recently, rather for liability reduction vs wildfires sparked by woefully behind the times maintenance of the grid.

Ah so such a dashboard would need to display expected vs actual.

We had capacity blackouts in 2020.

https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/18/...

Yeah, I was part of those. Sometimes living in CA feels third-world, and due to completely preventable maintenance items.

As a European, it always baffled me that power outages are such a common phenomenon in the US. I've heard stories about rolling blackouts due to heat/cold from people in all areas in the US. Whereas in Europe, I cannot remember a single instance rolling blackouts were used because of a gap in supply.

Sure, Europeans pay more for electricity, but maybe that spare capacity and inter-connectivity is worth it.

don't worry, the grid in EU isn't issue-free by any standard and solar and electric cars will do it no good at all.

I know it's not issue free. But Europeans tend to pay a premium to avoid its shortcomings rather than have blackouts. And I prefer that over having cheaper electricity but with a threat of blackouts.

I don't think most Europeans pay more for electricity than most Californians.

California's largest utility, PG&E, would top this list:

https://www.electricrate.com/data-center/electricity-prices-...

The 48 states that aren't Texas and California just don't have these problems

In most of the US they aren’t common. Outside of that debacle in Texas, I can’t recall any rolling blackouts in the US from lack of supply. The rarity is quite likely why that event made international news and got so many people around the country talking about it

The only power outages I have had in Chicagoland have been due to trees and those get resolved in a few hours. I'm pretty sure TX and CA are the outliers.

In 8 years of living in Chicago... I've had the power go out for approximately 2 seconds.

On any given day this month I've had an 87% chance of having uninterrupted power. 27 hours of total downtime, despite paying some of the highest rates.

Small nitpick, they weren’t from lack of capacity it was reported as a planning problem.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-10-06/califor...

From the linked article,

A program known as convergence bidding, in particular, is meant to help keep electricity prices steady but instead “masked tight supply conditions” during the August heat wave, the analysis concluded.

and

Energy providers collectively under-scheduled the amount of electricity they expected to need.

This was definitely a lack of capacity.

Some context: wind power is falling short during peak demand recently.

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/07/24/this_one...

That is the most slanted site I have read in quite some time. Should not be trusted.

I noted that as well, but it did give context for why it’s worth looking at this data right now.

For me it was relevant to answer “oh that interesting, someone posted this ERCOT data I wonder what’s going this week”

Kind of weird my comment was downvoted so heavily - but whatever. The dashboard was posted to Reddit over a year ago during DIFFERENT issues for ERCOT so it seemed relevant to find out what’s going on this time around.

Well, it could have something to do with right wing weirdos slamming wind farms as the reason for all failures of Ercot. And the article bringing up the winter issues when mostly the gas/thermal plants failed. And not mentioning the fact Ercot decided out to be a part of a bigger market that could help the situation by trading the energy with other states. And the capacity planning issues.

Instead it effectively says: look at this graph, wind doesn't solve all our issues, so we're going to call it the reason instead. It's a shallow opinion piece not a serious article.

Okay, sorry, not an expert on this.

Why do you think someone posted the dashboard link that was already shared over a year ago? Is ERCOT having issues this month? What is the cause of the issues?

I am legitimately asking. I don't know, so that's the only recent link I was able to find.

Can't speak for their intentions, but it's data, it's cool, and maybe they didn't see it before (I didn't)

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