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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, the Texas grid is cruising along at ~59GW right now [0]. Our all-time demand record was set 2 months ago @ ~76GW [1].

[0] https://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_cond...

[1] https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2022/07/20/ERCOT%20Monthly%...

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That seems... super inefficient? California has ~40% more people than Texas (40M vs 28M) and seems to have historically [1] stayed at or below 50GW for the last 20 years.

[1] https://www.caiso.com/documents/californiaisopeakloadhistory...

Much of Texas energy consumption is industrial, actually. Source: https://www.eia.gov/state/data.php?sid=TX

* Residential use: 13%

* Commercial use: 12%

* Industrial: 54%

* Transport: 24% (incl. commercial)

Huh, I did not expect such a huge swing in relative weights! TX uses ~15% more energy (1744 trillions vs 1508 trillion BTUs) than CA for Residential use, but an absolutely massive 7266 trillion BTU for "industrial" vs 1701 in California.

Filtering the LLNL Sankey diagrams to Texas (last available seems to be 2019) at [1] sadly doesn't break down the Industrial use, but I'd guess it was for oil wells and such (and I'm disappointed I didn't think about that earlier). The summary at [2] includes the simple quote:

> Texas leads the nation in energy consumption across all sectors and is the largest energy-consuming state in the nation. The industrial sector, including the state's refineries and petrochemical plants, accounts for more than half of the state's energy consumption and for 23% of the nation's total industrial sector energy use.

But both the Sankey diagram and that wording suggest direct use of the energy (e.g., onsite burning of petroleum) and not anything related to the grid. I'm more confused than we began this :).

[1] https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/energy

[2] https://www.eia.gov/state/print.php?sid=TX

Good website, but note that the data is from 2020, which is better than I've got but one might expect Industrial to be actually higher in 2022, and residential somewhat lower.

Hard to compare with CA though because their data is probably even more skewed by 2020 special factors.

Texas has a pretty sweet setup because their solar resources are far to the west of their population centers. In California, it’s the other way around. Our solar resources are east of our principal cities, so at that critical moment right around sundown in the late summer the demand and supply have a close encounter.

It was not so sweet two (or three?) months ago when cloud coverage in West crippled our grid and central/south Texas was in record high temperatures.

When and where exactly? I don’t see any relevant emergencies in the 2022 data from ERCOT.

July 11. No blackouts took place but they sent out notices to turn up thermostats and the available reserve was a bit touch and go for a while.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/texas-grid-operator-warns-p...

Yep, if you hear about it it means it got pretty damn bad - these utility balancing grids are usually pretty good about keeping from potentially impacting anyone (asking industrial uses to shut off, etc).

I presume there is much higher industrial demand in Texas and that explains the large delta?

Both grids have challenges in extreme weather. In 2020 in California I lost power for about 4 hours due to too much load. I got to see the stars. In 2021 32 people died and $195B in damage was done when power went out in Texas. Extreme weather events are hard, and maybe they are more common than we think?

More TX graphs: https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards

And PJM is cruising along at 100GW while paying $20 less per megawatt. What do either of those things have to do with California?

I like to ping my CA friends when I hear about rolling blackouts or grid strain. It's pretty fair after all their "hurr durr deregulation bad Texas has shit power" talk they sometimes send.

I have lived in California for 39 years and have never once experienced a rolling blackout.

Where are the CA blackouts?

2020 was the last one, but before that was long before. https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2021-01/caiso-cpuc-cec-issue-...

And even the 2020 blackouts were pretty mild. Affecting only a small percentage of californians, and for about an hour, and about 10 minutes on the two recorded occasions in 2020.

Indeed they were small, I think I was out about 3 hrs, but was close enough to coast temps were already down to 80 ish. Planned PSP outages, that's another story. I think we were dark for 4 days in fall 2019

2001 was the last time i was impacted but google is telling me there were some in 2020

How many pings before you no longer have those friends?

Idk I put up with the same from them? Friends put up with making fun of each other and don't get butthurt like that.

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