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Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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