Texas officials warn of rolling blackouts to ease strain on power grid
dailymail.co.uk
dailymail.co.uk
No, it said that if we had the exact same disaster storm THEN we would then have a 14.4% chance of a rolling blackout at 8am. The odds of this storm could be 2% for all we know.
Heres the report:
https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2023/10/10/MORA_December202...
I assume our odds are better due to the winterization we put in.
https://www.ercot.com/news/release/2022-01-18-final-winteriz...
(1) After the huge power outages in February 2021, state government promised various improvements (weatherization, etc.) would be made. Trust in them is low, but it's true that in the next winter (2022), we didn't have any significant power outages. We also didn't have such extreme cold weather, though.
(2) The state's population has increased rapidly in the last decade, and construction of power plants has not kept pace. This is one of the main reasons for the outages.
(3) Because of (2), price volatility has been crazy. Investors have added quite a lot of battery storage to the grid recently hoping to capitalize on this volatility. (It's buy low, store, sell high.) We had record demand this last summer because the insane heat wave, and the batteries helped us ride that out with no significant outages[1].
(4) Texas has a big budget surplus, and in the recent election, there were several propositions of the form "should Texas spend X billion dollars on Y?" One of them was Proposition 7, which creates a $10 billion fund for the grid, mainly power generation. It passed[2]. Basically only fossil fuel plants are eligible, and true to form for Texas government, they did not mention that on the ballot.
In my own opinion, since it will take time to build more generation, we are probably not in great shape for the next few years, but there does seem to be deliberate action that should move us in the direction of reliability.
When it comes to renewability and climate change, the state doesn't seem to care about that, but at least (through dumb luck) we are getting some grid battery storage as a consolation prize. (I support efforts to fight climate change, so I'm trying to find a silver lining here.)
---
[1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/battery-storage-texas-relia...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/texans-pass-amendment-that-...
Also worth noting that we came close to rolling outages twice this summer.
While I don't disagree with you at all because I have zero actual info on it but the rate of wind power growth is just insane. If you drive south from San Antonio to Corpus Christi it's almost impossible to not see a truck carrying a part of a wind turbine. Then the port in corpus Christi has them coming off the boats all the time.
Natural gas comes out of the ground with water in it, and is piped around wet until it reaches a processing plant that removes water.[1] Everything upstream of water-removal is vulnerable to frozen water.[2] So, where freezing is a possibility, water removal needs to be near the wells, or it's possible to accept some freeze shutdowns and use more downstream storage. Texas used to have a climate where that wasn't a problem.
This is all well understood. There are plenty of natural gas operations in cold climates. So how is Texas doing on improving their system?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycol_dehydration
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/17/22287130/texas-natural-ga...
>About 98% of the facilities visited had been winterized. The remaining 2% or so were in the process of winterizing at the time when RRC visited them in the last few months.
[1]https://www.rrc.texas.gov/news/011922-natural-gas-winterizat...
>Analyses after Uri revealed that a lack of winterization in the electric and gas sectors was a critical cause of systemwide failure. The Texas legislature enacted new winterization requirements for electricity generators. But it did not do the same for natural gas producers, which provide fuel to about 40% of Texas power plants and weren’t able to deliver during the storm.
> Since then, Texas saw significant drops in natural gas production during winter cold snaps in January and February 2022. As happened during Uri, production at many gas wells was halted because water and other liquids that come to the surface with the natural gas froze when they hit a frozen wellhead, creating an ice dam and stopping the flow of gas into pipelines.
>...(jumping to 2022 Christmas cold snap)
>Additionally, Texas natural gas production is estimated to have fallen by almost 20 percent on Dec. 23 from the week before, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
[0] https://theconversation.com/two-years-after-its-historic-dee...
There are glycol stations but as I recall those are really only used in gathering systems with a compressor. The large plants will have tons of equipment online to condition the gas before pushing it upstream. The biggest issue we ever had was just baby-sitting compressors in the middle of the night because some of them just really don't like to operate in cold conditions.
I used to test the gas in a lab and there wouldn't be enough water vapor left in the line to cause any issues under freezing. You have far more issues with carbon sludge build-up since anything above butane just really wants to be a liquid. That area typically produces wells with something like 4% N2, 70-80% C1, 2% CO2, and the rest is basically C2+ with maybe some H2S in a few places. It's very easy gas to pipe around for the most part.
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Natural_gas_production_an... [2] - https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/where-our-na...
Any comments on this: “Gathering lines freeze, and the wells get so cold that they can’t produce,” said Parker Fawcett, a natural gas analyst for S&P Global Platts.[1]
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/natural-gas-power-st...
The root issue is coal and natural gas plants being retired. At 8am solar is not generating much, so if a winter storm knocks down wind again, there isn't enough production to meet morning demand.
Full report here:
https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2023/10/02/Winter-2023-24-C...
In winter, peak demands typically occur before sunrise and after sunset, when solar generation is not available to serve those peaks (except for a negligible amount), making the system dependent on wind generation and dispatchable Resource availability to serve the peak demands. [...] The ERCOT Region has also experienced a large increase in the number of thermal units that are planned to be indefinitely mothballed by the start of the 2023-24 winter Peak Load Season or will operate under a summer-only availability schedule.
2021: “More than 4.5 million homes and businesses were left without power,[9][10][11][12] some for several days. At least 246 people were killed directly or indirectly,[3] with some estimates as high as 702 killed as a result of the crisis.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
“In 2011, Texas was hit by the Groundhog Day blizzard between February 1 and 5, resulting in rolling blackouts across more than 75% of the state.”
Now ERCOT has warned there is a 14.4 percent chance it will need to employ controlled outages in December, with the estimate rising to 16.8 percent in January.
That's not what the report says. The report runs various models, and in one of the models, there is a 14% chance. That model is based on weather and production assumptions, but does not assign a probability to those assumptions.
It could be there’s a 14% chance of at least minor issues but 2/3 of the time when any problem happens it’s going to be serious. Or alternatively there’s a 14% chance of issues, but only 1/100 of those will result in serious issues.
Therefore talking about rolling blackouts as if they would always result in hundreds of dead is inherently misleading.
Characterizing a true statement as “convenient for {x}” is low effort weaselspeak.
> It’s too bad Texas is the only place on Earth it ever gets cold, otherwise we might have worked out better options someplace else…
Snark is a poor substitute for actually knowing what you’re talking about. Texas is more reliant on wind generation than any other state, so of course it is more exposed to this failure mode than others.
https://www.kvue.com/article/tech/science/environment/renewa...
It can be a state emergency. I don't see why we should be stepping in to fix something for Texas that they absolutely can fix, but are choosing not to.
- hurricanes hit eastern states every year and the US taxpayer helps - wildfires hit western states every year and the US taxpayer helps - tornadoes hit the mid-western states every year and the US taxpayer helps
After deregulation, the Texas power companies were motivated purely by profit, which meant they got rid of extra capacity, winterization mechanisms, etc because all those things cost them money. A grid that runs right on the hairy edge of failure works great as long as everything happens as planned, but eventually a February 2021 comes along.
Some penalties for lack of winterization have supposedly been put back in place, but knowing how Texas politics works I expect most of the power companies have figured out ways around them.
Also, Centerpoint, one of the main distributors, pays their CEO $40 million a year... All while we might have rolling blackouts because we can't winterize our infrastructure.
$40M isn't really going to move the needle.
It does seem excessive for a CEO of a regional distributor - though the PG&E CEO made $51M in 2021.
The 2021 event cost north of 200billion USD and killed people.
A similar event, even half the magnitude, is likely, and very bad.
It is also an active policy decision by Texas. This would be easily fixed by integrating into the national grid and applying some supervision to the utilities.
Texas, it’s people through it’s politicians, chose this situation.
Supposedly, the policy was created to keep the energy groups from more fed regs and taxes. In the mean time, it's roll the dice with the weather forecast and peoples lives.
Isn't that "I don't need no steenkeeng badge", from The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre? (I don't know Blazing Saddles).
It’s Texas. That a foot of snow falling all over a state that doesn’t really have any snowplows caused an emergency is well, common sense.
It seems really stupid to stock up on snowplows in a place where it is frequently 70 degrees and sunny in February.
And I don’t know the word for the state of mind for risking losing that again.
You can but a lot of snowplows, interconnectors and backup plants for that money.
Reminds me of London, which of never prepared for snow as it never happens. Happened twice in the short time I lived there. Each time costing a lot more than a bit of preparation.
And then a decade goes by before snow sticks past 10am?
Being able to navigate the roads isn't a magical cure for a power grid that can't handle low temperatures, of course. It would make it easier for emergency vehicles and utility vehicles.
You’ll find you need an epic amount of snowplows to be able to clear up after that storm.
And then remind yourself while you’re sipping on a lemonade on a sunny and warm February day in central Texas that preparing for unlikely extreme weather events is stupid. How about, here’s a fucking idea, plan for hurricanes instead?
Do they plan for hurricanes where you live? Well why not? I mean, think of the children……………
So yeah, it Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and most of New Mexico sent all their power to Texas nobody in Texas would have lost power. Just everyone in all those other states.
SPP had generation issues like Texas because of the massive drop in natural gas supply coupled with high demand and had rolling blackouts as well. MISO was the most impacted part of the country weather-wise and had practically no spare capacity, and PJM was also still under very heavy load.
You get far enough out and you start realize the rest of the country isn't a single grid. The east and west aren't very connected, and from the central US to the east there's really a few different grids with interconnections, which were all getting maxed out without trying to take on the shortfall in Texas.
Simple proof, no where else in the US or any other developed country does such a situation arise. And even most developing countries have better connected grids. When southern Australia didn’t, it paid for that in rolling blackouts.
And once again you're just ignoring that pretty much every state even near those other states were also near their breaking points with many of those areas having rolling power outages at the time. It's not like the storm was only hitting Texas.
When I say "most the other states", I'm saying most the other states combined. The shortfall alone was more power than several average US state generating capacities put together.
The reality of Uri is that the neighboring regions to the north (SPP) and east (MISO) were on the brink themselves (grid emergency and rolling blackouts in SPP), and the import capacity from their neighboring regions (i.e. the midwest) was constrained; they couldn't import more power from their neighbors. If Texas were part of the Eastern Interconnection AC grid (i.e. connected to SPP and MISO), I think fewer people in Texas would have lost power and more people in Oklahoma. SPP and MISO just didn't have any more power in those areas to ship them.
SPP & MISO have been interconnected with each other forever, they're on the same AC grid. But the capacity between their systems is limited, hence the blackouts in SPP. They just never bothered to build out the capacity because it hasn't made a lot of economic sense. I think that's the best counterfactual example of "what would have happened if Texas didn't have their own grid", and it suggests that the storm still would have been a problem.
So normally, this wouldn't be a huge deal. People would just pull out space heaters they use once in a decade. Unfortunately Texas does not have that ability either because the grid has not been maintained and expanded to meet the demand. And here is the crux of the problem.
Black outs happen multiple times a decade in every state I've ever lived in. And these states are all connected to other states but it doesn't stop the black outs from happening. In Florida I've gone two weeks without power after a hurricane.
Texas has massive wind farms in the northern part of the state that provide as much as 40% of the power for the state. They were not winterized to handle freezing temps because Texas is a subtropical/semi-arid state that is not supposed to see these kind of temperatures for such a sustained period. Natural gas demand was more than doubled because the wind farms were down and everyone has electric heat pumps in Texas because gas or wood heaters are not needed 99 years out of 100.
At any rate if Texas sees another blizzard like '21 anytime soon we're going to have to start to have a conversation about global cooling.
What sucks is that due to the inability of Texas to regulate its power industry, the 2021 blizzard caused spikes in natural gas for everyone in the region. I'm still paying the stupid fee for the excess charges.
And sure, we'll need to have a conversation about global cooling. Nice talking point from the climate change deniers you have in your back pocket.
But of course, it’s just a headline…
The sole reason it made it to the front page so quickly is HN has an irrational obsession with the powergrid in Texas due to the politics involved.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/weather/2021/02/16/thousands...
Here’s a deep dive if you want the nitty gritty details: https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/Pages/February-2011-Southwest...
https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/Pages/February-2011-Southwest...
2021 was way colder for way longer. Sure on paper the same words are being used to describe it, some power outages over a few days due to the cold. But 2021 was way worse both weather-wise and grid-wise. In scale they're pretty much incomparable. In 2011 it got above freezing during the days and melted a lot of the snow and ice. It stayed well below freezing for many days in 2021, more days below freezing in many decades.
In 2011 a few friends had their power turn off for a few minutes every few hours for a couple of days. Most people I know never lost power. Stores stayed open. Transit was still operating. They even still managed to play the Superbowl at AT&T stadium.
In 2021 everything was shut down for nearly a week. No mail, no shipping services for several days. Stores were without power. Gas stations unable to pump gas because of no power. All the airports shut down. All transit shut down. There was a 100-car pileup on the highway.
I don't disagree about if the operators implemented the weatherization recommended in the NERC's report it would have at worst alleviated and at best completely prevented the issues that would have happened, but 2021 was still way worse than 2011. Other than they were both storms in February they're massively different in scales in almost every way.
Lower temperatures increased heating demand by around 20%, but it’s not like heating was the only thing people use electricity for. Stoplights, water pumps, exterior lighting, etc need power either way.
What made it worse was the triple whammy of more generation going online, slightly higher demand, and prioritization of specific areas which didn’t lose power.
The magnitude of electricity demand increased by more than the entire state of most states' entire generation capacities.
I do agree, the main root cause for the power going out so bad was power was cut to natural gas processing which caused shortfalls of natural gas which couldn't be alleviated until things thawed. But in 2011, that would have just been overnight since it got above freezing every day. It took several days to get above freezing in 2021. Things are pretty different when it's below freezing multiple days in a row, and that just doesn't normally happen in most of Texas. It's pretty different having your highs be in the 20s versus the upper 30s and low 40s.
I've never seen ice accumulate on a pool in Texas. In 2021 it formed over an inch on my pool, and I never lost power. If that's not an obvious indicator the cold was way more I don't know what to tell you.
Your area may have gotten above freezing every day in 2011 but that wasn’t true statewide. El Paso airport recorded February 2 High 15, Low 6f, February 3 High 18f, Low 1f, February 4 High 37f, Low 3f, and that was kicked off by a low of 14 on February 1st.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets/GHCND/stations/GH...
And they didn’t see such extreme weather in 2021.
Yeah, my area and most of the rest of the state. And pretty much every major population center. That's a massive difference.
You're pointing to one of the smaller/midsize cities that isn't even a part of ERCOT. It really shows how much you don't understand about the situation if you're arguing the state of Texas' grid and using weather data from El Paso to back your argument. El Paso is one of the coldest cities in Texas in the winter. Its not indicative of most of the state. And its not connected anyways. You should have picked Amarillo if you wanted to single out a cold city for an imbalanced data point, at least it would have been connected to ERCOT.
2021 was way colder for the entire state. That makes a massive difference.
Except not the entire state, I was pointing to one of several areas that got above freezing every day in 2021 while also being dramatically colder in 2011. So your experience wasn’t shared across the entire state just the highest population areas.
As to ERCOT seriously fucking everything up, well yea that’s completely accurate. Yet, Foard County along several other counties are within ERCOT and didn’t lose power from the 2021 storm. Those are low population areas, but understanding why power outages where continuous relates both to lack of power but also an inability to route available power.
Gee, wonder where the majority of the energy usage is...
Roughly 1/2 the population had any power distributions from the 2021 storm, and many of those were fairly minor. The lack of transmission infrastructure meant they couldn’t spread the pain evenly across the state and thus it concentrated on ~4 million customers who got absolutely fucked.
Keep proving to me you don't understand what you're talking about if you want. I'm probably done after having to say 20/29 is greater than 50% and point out El Paso isn't in ERCOT.
As to different experiences: https://publichealthmaps.org/motw-2021/2021/2/17/17-february...
Wilson, Guadalupe and a few outer counties within that metro area didn’t lose power, others had saw only a fraction of their area suffer blackouts.
“At the peak, over 5 million people in Texas were without power,[67] with 11 million experiencing an outage at some point,[22] some for more than 3 days.[68]” out of 29 million that’s a long way from 50%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
Similarly the temperatures experienced across the Texas triangle varied significantly, it’s a big area. (The site I use for weather data seems to be down for maintenance.)
Sure, but not most of the population nor most of power usage. That 20M figure was simply adding those metro areas, ignoring College Station, Corsicana, Waco, Hearne, etc. Only the metro areas, only the dense (for Texas) areas. Empty fields don't use much electricity.
And yeah, many areas never lost power. I'm not arguing against that. After the giant issue most operators stopped trying to do rolling blackouts as obviously operators didn't know what was safe to turn off. Trying to resume rolling blackouts was a massive risk, so most just stayed static. Once again you're showing you don't really know what was going on during the time. I never lost power, but circuits all around me were without because my grid operator did some initial rolling blackouts and gave up after they took out a bunch of gas refineries. If you really think it was mostly a distribution problem it really shows you don't know what was going on.
Keep digging that hole deeper buddy.
Metro area does not imply urban or dense, you’re counting farmers in that “metro area.”
Austin has an urban population of 1,809,888 at 2,921.0/sq mi (4.6 people per acre) covering 620 square miles which is already fairly low average. The metro area is however 2,421,115 people covering 4,285.70 sq mi but remove the urban bits and (2,421,115 - 1,809,888) = 611,227 people across (4,285.70 - 620) = 3,665 sq mi your down or 166 people per square mile (0.26/acre) which is in no way dense.
Hell the state of Tennessee averages 168 people per square mile, good luck arguing the entire thing is dense.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-bitcoin-min....
I live on a main street in East Austin that had one of the longest contiguous power outages, ~72 hours, there was no cell service and no power (except verizon which would allow old school MAP SMS messages to go through irregularly), no ambulances, a friend had covid at the time and her o2 sats dropped below 80 and they still wouldn't send anyone.
The roads were iced over and slick, I moved to Texas as an adult from a cold weather region and it's just a different environment here in terms of failure to maintain roads and the freeze/thaw cycle that makes roads insanely slick with re-frozen water.
The local children's hospital had doctors shitting in buckets in the halls. All over the city water mains were broken, apartment complexes and homes flooded, power lines down.
My part of town is a combination of multi-million dollar homes owned by tech people such as myself and homes built in the 40s and 50s with no insulation. On day 2 my wife made a big pot of soup with distilled water we had on hand because water pressure in the city was low and they advised not to run water. Our gas was still on (others also lost gas) and we opened the windows in the kitchen so we wouldn't poison ourselves, we carted the soup around the neighborhood, it was a complete horror show.
We met one elderly man who started panicking after he realized we had no power and weren't the authorities and there was no timelines and no mobilization for aid, we were just at the mercy of the weather, he had had no communication with anyone and had been huddled in bed freezing, unable to draw blood to check his insulin because he was too cold so he had been randomly injecting himself with insulin.
A complete breakdown of public services with 0 communication in and out and zero official presence.
I have been in third world countries after monsoons and disasters and often there is a sense that at least someone is paying attention or bringing aid, this was a complete breakdown of government and infrastructure, I have never seen anything like it and I also lived through the 100yr flood in Nashville as well. Austin was just a bunch of housed and employed people quietly dying because our government is anti-humanist.
At least we have warming centers now.
Good lord.
It was a once in a century weather event. Austin and Texas in general celebrates a limited government. So you should take responsibility and prepare accordingly.
If you seriously feel like the city government is anti-humanist and out to get you, then maybe you should pack up and leave town immediately.
Not everyone was as prepared. After 2 days our power became at least intermittent. With a few minutes of power every few hours. And our pipes didn’t burst at least.
Meanwhile, some areas just didn’t lose power at all. My grandmother only lost power for an afternoon.
Many of the natural gas producers said they lost electricity so they couldn't operate. [1] Oil and natural gas systems must have power to operate in all weather conditions. Without electricity to power these operations, the wells and production facilities will not operate. No amount of insulation, flow additives or equipment housing will overcome a sustained loss of power. Oil and natural gas facilities regularly operate in a wide range of severe weather conditions, but cannot operate when they don’t have power. Loss of power was the biggest factor in natural gas production issues during Winter Storm Uri in February.
When electricity supplies became short, ONCOR began rolling blackouts. If they had known who the natural gas producers were, they would have not denied electricity to them. [2] That meant that Oncor, which delivers power to the Permian Basin — the state’s most productive oil and natural gas basin — had unwittingly shut off some of the state’s power supply when it followed orders to begin the outages...simply because natural gas companies failed to fill out a form or didn’t know the form existed, company executives, regulators and experts said.
If the natural gas producers didn't have electricity pulled out from them, the worst would have been avoided. [2] “In my opinion, if we had kept the supply [of natural gas] on, we would’ve had minor disruptions,” James Cisarik, chairman of the Texas Energy Reliability Council, told legislators. “[Texas] has all the assets, we just have to make sure we evaluate every link in that chain to keep it going.”
[1] https://www.txoga.org/policy-issues/winterready/ [2] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/18/texas-winter-storm-b...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-08/tesla-is-... | https://archive.is/xU9Kg | https://www.angleton.tx.us/DocumentCenter/View/3793/Gambit-E... (Gambit Energy black start installation near Houston)
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/images/figure_6_01_c... (EIA monthly; draw attention to gray circles in Texas, those are battery installs in pipeline over the next year, sourced from https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/)
(Tesla utility scale storage manufacturing has a 2 year backlog with a target of 40GWh/year of production)
Tangentially (because there is always nuance):
Texas has 100GW of solar, 50GW of batteries, and 20GW of wind in its interconnect queue. This is more than double current fossil gas generation capacity (66GW), and would add to the existing 37GW of wind generation and 18GW of solar generation. Not all projects in a queue will be built, but much of it will.
ElectricityMaps.com zone data: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-TEX-ERCO
ERCOT Nov 2023 Fact Sheet: https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2022/02/08/ERCOT_Fact_Sheet...
Terabase Energy robotic assist for deploying utility scale solar (to give an idea of how quickly solar can be deployed with state of the art techniques): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj2zdQYXGNE
Not to imply some sort of opinion on the matter other than my dislike of this kind of slanted writing.
In fact, many more than 246 people died during this time. The 246 number from Winter Storm Uri, published by Texas Department of State Health Services is significantly undercounting the deaths during the storm which can be attributed to the storm.
The number from DSHS is decomposed as - "148 as 'direct,' 92 as 'indirect' and six as 'possible,'"
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/01/02/texas-winter-storm-f...
Buzzfeed suggests that the deaths are closer to 700.
Buzzfeed provides code to substantiate their claims on the data - https://buzzfeednews.github.io/2021-05-tx-winter-storm-death...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/texas-wint...
The title says “the same strategy that led to 200 people's deaths” but I don’t see any data at all on power outage related deaths.
“X led to y” means x caused y. So the title says they contribute 200 deaths to power outage. But then they don’t back that up.
And to be clear because everyone’s always looking for a fight: I wouldn’t be surprised if the number is lower or higher. But they fail to back up the title. They falsely equate one statistic with another.