Eastern US power grid orders cuts, issues system wide emergency

I got an email 11 hours after the event ended telling me I needed to volunteer to cut power. Opps.

Shouldn't have called it emergency is just feeding a thirsty news cycle

Happy Holidays from someone working in another utility who only gets noticed when we do our jobs poorly which is, luckily, not often. :)

Don't forget to thank your sysadmin today!

'get an ad-hoc message out'

Being after the event was resolved, it may be post-hoc.

> Heat pumps can have back up electric heating elements to provide the heating in the extremes. You get a more resilient system than gas.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but wouldn't the backup electric heating elements require, well, electricity to function?

I'm no fan of gas, but the idea of losing heating, phone service (the old copper wire systems could function even in a blackout), the ability to cook (since gas stoves are being phased out), and the ability to travel (EVs and some trains) because a transformer exploded is kinda scary. Like, we're putting all our faith in a system that is routinely knocked out by errant tree branches.

Maybe we could do buried lines, but given infra costs in the US that sounds... expensive. Someone in another thread mentioned heat reservoirs of some kind, but I have no idea how realistic that is. Even if it buys a few extra hours, that'd improve things dramatically.

From the sound of it, you're far more familiar with specific legislation than I, so maybe I'm totally off and all this has been taken into account. But having experienced an extended blackout and my family realizing we couldn't even boil water, I'm apprehensive to say the least. IMO it'd be nice to move away from fossil fuels without betting lives on ConEd doing repairs in a timely fashion.

There are pros and cons to oil, and there are certainly reasons to use it even if they don't happen to apply to you.

Oil can't explode. Oil can be carried in as low tech as a pail and stored in an equally low tech tank (where a gas pipe doesn't exist or could fail, where a propane bottle requires a lot more infrastructure).

And these are valuable even in developed areas with gas pipes, because it's always valuable to have that flexability to scrounge up milk jugs and drive them in your car, or a bike, when things aren't all perfect. Just on principle even if you never have to do it.

Similarly, there are reasons why the best way to distribute the heat around the building is actually not any form of hot water or air but ancient steam.

I still look forward to outfitting a house with a fancy buried ground glycol loop heat pump and in-floor water, not oil fired steam, but that's because I can afford to be impractical and I don't kid myself that it's anything else.

I'm not sure you understand. The required energy is around 4X the baseline. Most smaller homes could heat on a 220V 20A circuit until it get's very cold (-5f or more), at this point you're up to almost 80A @ 220VAC additional resistive heating load per home.

Surely this takes up even more space - heat pumps themselves are already large enough that it's hard to see where we would put one.

Water. Cost per joule is really good so long as you have room for the large insulated tank.

You can use a heat pump to bring the water up to 180 degF, a fail safe mixing valve to use it to produce 120deg water for the baths and taps, and a heat exchanger for radiant heating loops.

It's much more cost effective than batteries to the extent that your energy use is driven by heating demands. If the tank is inside the building envelope the lost heat from imperfect insulation still heats the space too.

never heard of a heat reservoir, what medium are we talking, water? salt?

But your house walls do. More heat is escaping so you demand more heat from your geo system.

I've stumbled upon a few sites that provide this data; I don't know if this is the best source or not, but here is one that i found:

https://www.ieso.ca/en/Power-Data

In Kansas our utility has an option for anyone to participate in exchange for slightly better rates. Even a single small household can participate.

It's not even that extreme for the northern US. Just that these temps usually happen in Late Jan-Feb. 60 miles east of Buffalo I'm still waiting for the first shovelable snowfall for the season.

Huh, not seeing the difference really, expectations there were also usually not a whole winter-long event but contained events? Or otherwise then totally the same though to the planned load shedding SA is running on now on different levels for some time? Doesn't make it better..

Texas had some hiccups last year

Yes some would consider every ten years as regular.

There are various ways to prepare for future potential badness. One solution embraced by Texas, amounts to "yolo", resulting in gas-fired plants being inoperable during the cold snap in Feb 2021[0] . A different solution, favored by many other locations across the globe including in Europe, is for there to be regulations set by the government, saying "you must perform this upgrade". While these regulations cannot alter the fundamental laws of physics, it is eminently possible to “winterize” various aspects of power generation and delivery systems through practices like insulating pipelines.

[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/17/texas-power-grid-fai...

Blackouts happen if the power lines themselves get damaged. But rationing and rolling blackouts due to insufficient capacity are basically unheard-of.

Make sure you are comparing the same thing.

Several times here and elsewhere I've seen comments from Europeans mentioning they use 5-6 kWh per day which is average to a little above average for their country and wondering how Americans average 29 kWh per day.

Almost invariably, when I cannot figure out how the heck one can get by on 5-6 kWh per day, since I use at least 10 kWh in the early summer when it is warm enough to need no air conditioning and cool enough to not need any cooling or fans and ask for details, I get the same answer.

That answer is that they are using gas for house heating, water heating, clothes drying, and cooking, leaving only a computer or two, a fridge, a few lights, and maybe a TV to be powered by electricity. Americans are far more likely to have an all electric household.

When comparing energy use instead of just electrical use Americans still average higher then Europeans but it is no longer a huge difference.

It's a weird thing so say that a higher electricity consumption equals to "vastly higher living standards" when the higher consumption might just be in part because of badly insulated homes.

> what they really need are for the guys with two-story-tall electric arc furnaces and the like to dial things back.

It'd be interesting to see sourced data comparing them to data centres and crypto farms on a mean monthly total usage basis.

Wind and hydro are more of a western thing, the eastern grid probably relies more on gas and coal as well as nuclear.