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Comment by gcr | Hacker News Reader

The article states that the sharp drop in reserves was being “investigated,” and that it is “suspected” that a large power plant stopped working.

Is observability of Texan infrastructure so poor that the _power company_ doesn’t have a comprehensive view of _which power plants are operational_?

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It sounds like they're dancing around what may be a social issue; ERCOT sent an email asking people to "conserve", within 30 minutes they saw a negative impact. Is it possible some recipients saw the email and took the complete opposite action?

something something ... cold dead hands?

It wouldn't surprise me if after an email telling them to lower their consumption, consumers would anticipate the worst and instead decide to recharge any electrical appliances reliant on batteries (Power banks, EVs, etc...) "just in case".

Bank/toilet paper rush style.

Given the previous grid crash this is a rational reaction.

While may be cathartic to muse how certain political ideologies tend to do the exact opposite when asked to conserve, Texans' don't trust the grid and they have valid reasons to not trust it.

if I was looking at potential power cut during a heat wave in my home, I would probably lower my AC a few degrees, and if your honest, most of you would too..

Texans like their guns and demand freedom so probably.

Guns don't kill people, ERCOT kills people.

I can see that- if I got a grid warning first thing I'd do is make sure all my batteries are topped up.

I wouldn't doubt that at all. During covid it became clear to me that there is a large part of the population that does the opposite of what any authority figure tells them regardless of how much sense it makes, just to be spiteful & show how 'uncontrolled' they are.

I'll admit that when I get the "turn your AC off from noon to 3 pm" email at 8 AM, I go turn it down so that I can turn it off at noon.

I don't know if this thermal battery helps much.

For Austin Energy’s opt in thermostat management program they will precool the houses ahead of the “savings event”

It is a peak issue not a sustained issue during off hours so that can assist.

They don't just send emails, they also send texts. Given that this is the 7th time they've done this in the past ~2 weeks, if anything I would expect people to be more likely to ignore the messages now, since (from the perspective of residents) nothing obviously bad happened the other 6 times.

The difference is that this was the first time that they followed up the first message with a second one when reserves became critically low and the frequency started dropping. But by the time I saw the second message, it was obvious from their dashboards that the situation was well on its way to being resolved, so I'm doubtful the second message had much affect either way.

Gotta turn the AC way up if you think there will be no power soon

I do make my house a few degrees colder and charge batteries every time I get an emergency message from ERCOT this summer. Part of it is simply tragedy of the commons - I'm 10^-6% of the regional grid usage and have little individual effect on the grid, but will suffer more if I don't get mine while I can. Think about whether you want to discourage honesty before you downvote. I've made my house extra well insulated with efficient zoned AC units otherwise, so I'm not an energy abuser in general.

I have an rational distrust of ERCOT's grid management given my experience of freezing for a week in 2021. What's more the current situation is entirely preventable(who could predict summer in TX would be hot?!) so I rebel at suffering to compensate for ERCOT's negligence and corruption.

The grid operator knows immediately, but it is confidential [1]. Similar "CEII" rules are enforced by FERC for the other US grids.

[1] https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2018/09/28/902NPRR-01_ERCOT...

ERCOT is not "the power company". They're the marketplace where many power companies exchange. And they probably do know a bit of what happened but aren't going to share preliminary information until deeper analysis is complete.

The power marketplace company should actually have better information on questions like “did a powerplant selling into the market go offline” than anyone except the plant operator, and should have more information about the impact than anyone.

And we don't know if they do or don't have that information, they haven't said either way. So its a bit early to complain about them not knowing something when we don't know if they know or not.

If they truly don't know, then that's a problem. If they do know but are waiting to release information until they know all the facts, that's probably fine.

That’s a good point.

On a re-read, the article does mention that the speculation of power plant failure is coming from outsiders on Twitter, so we don’t know whether the observability is there or not

It depends on how they're joined to the "grid" - if a company running multiple plants is providing 10 GW and later is providing 9900 MW did a plant go offline? Did clouds obscure solar? Did the wind die down?

ERCOT already has information about location-specific supply and demand: https://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/contours/rtmLmp.html

From how the headline was worded, I was expecting an interesting answer explaining the 'why' but the article is focused on grid stability with the headline's answer being "dunno, maybe because it was hot" -- except the article implies this was not a single hot day but part of a larger trend.

That is what I thought. IF a power plant went offline, wouldn't they know it? Aren't they measuring all of their production, so they could pinpoint what plant dropped?

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