third coast.. said:

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What's the point of bringing that up in this thread?

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Texas legislature and government are ineffective and incompetent, and no focus is given on reform in places that need reform, or preparedness for actual issues.

I've seen higher percentage of outages in Houston (Centerpoint) than other major cities. This driven by generation outages in Houston area?

When ERCOT needed to grab a ton of load to prevent a total collapse from the grid they most likely called CenterPoint and Encore due to their size. I'd assume nothing more or nothing less than it was just the go to.

I happened to wake up when that whole thing started. You could see it from their own app how things started to go downhill in a hurry.

If rolling blackouts started sooner, a lot of this could have been avoided?

The map confuses me. There are a bunch of plants marked red. I believe that means they are low or at less than capacity.

Wouldn't every plant be running near capacity?

Plants that are red could be offline for scheduled maintenance, kicked offline by the grid issues yesterday or suffering an impact from the freeze.

Gonemaroon, say ERCOT had missed and the entire grid went down. What's the process/ length of time for recovery?

Interesting to consider how/why in addition to the coal ash regulations, we've moved to over 20 percent reliance on wind.

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More than 2.5 million people in Texas are currently experiencing rolling blackouts as temperatures remain in the single digits in many parts of the state. The Lone Star state is currently short of electricity because half of the Texas wind fleet (the largest in the nation) is iced over and incapable of generating electricity. Additionally, the natural gas infrastructure Texas has become so reliant upon has also frozen up.
Texas's experience highlights the perils of becoming overly reliant upon wind, solar and natural gas because these energy sources are not as reliable as coal or nuclear power during extreme weather conditions.

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But there is more to the story than that. Texas has what some regard as a free market in energy, but in fact it is distorted by the massive federal subsidies paid by the federal government. These subsidies often cause the price of electricity to go negative; that is, wind farms will actually pay utilities to take electricity off their hands. The resulting market dislocation devastates reliable energy sources:

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Federal subsidies for wind pay wind-turbine owners $24 per megawatt-hour for electricity regardless of whether the electricity is needed or not. These subsidies allow wind operators to make money even if electricity prices turn negative. This means some power plant operators need to pay customers money if they continue to supply electricity to the grid when the prices are negative, while wind generators will make money courtesy of our tax dollars.

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Isaac's post includes a map that shows the prevalence of negative pricing across the U.S.

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When coal plants close, renewable energy activists often cry, "Seeeeeee, it's the market!" But the PTC's market distortions are one of the reasons why these coal plants are no longer available to produce the electricity needed in Texas due to the frozen wind turbines and natural gas infrastructure.

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Tough to compete when your subsidized competition can make money paying someone to buy their product, on a windy (warm) day, regardless of demand.

Our power has stayed on this whole time. We live outside city limits in Collin County and have to go through grayson-collin co-op for power.

STP Nuclear is at 50%

Glen rose is at 100%
Think that's what he sees

I get that but there's a ton of red and yellow coal plants and red and yellow gas on there too. The whole freaking grid is limping along regardless of source.

ROUND 2 . BRING IT

water plants now starting to go down due to lack of power (ft. worth)...what happens to that infrastructure if water can't be moved?

reports saying cell phone towers could start going offline after running out of fuel if on generator

So in short summary why are many of us without power right now still?

Same reason your house didn't probably have broken pipes in that weather but your house in Texas would. Different construction practices. Different designs.

It is possible to make provision for weather like this. It also costs money. Plants in Texas aren't built for days with temps in the teens and never getting above freezing.

Because it's freaking cold

I don't know the definition of a rolling blackout but my mom hasn't had power since 2am on Monday morning. 29 hours.

gonemaroon said:

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Some good news -

ERCOT has a lot of outages forecasted to come back tomorrow - so if this is true it could start to be over for a good chunk of people tomorrow. STP according to a vendor is due back tomorrow / not sure if that is accurate.

ERCOT is forecasting outages to drop from 30,000 to 15,000 by tomorrow.

Have to think that it's all hands on deck everywhere to fix every plant in the state.

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Thanks for the info. If it's not all hands on deck then people need to go to prison. 26 hours now without power

flyingaggie12 said:

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water plants now starting to go down due to lack of power (ft. worth)...what happens to that infrastructure if water can't be moved?

reports saying cell phone towers could start going offline after running out of fuel if on generator

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We lost our water pressure but we get out water from a small town well, Wesminster SUD. They're trying to source a 3 phase generator to get pressure back.

In the the meantime I'm melting snow in the garage to flush.

Zobel said:

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Same reason your house didn't probably have broken pipes in that weather but your house in Texas would. Different construction practices. Different designs.

It is possible to make provision for weather like this. It also costs money. Plants in Texas aren't built for days with temps in the teens and never getting above freezing.

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Gas and power flows in places like Montana and Alberta all the time because there are real design differences, and no one plans for the 100th percentile event, or 97th if you figure this is going to happen every 30 years.

I am very interested to see what additional cost would have been required to weatherize at least the larger plants out there that were knocked out.

Wind turbines are obviously extremely problematic given that they are required to be out there in the weather to work at all, but their bigger impact here is the market disruption. In a situation where actual consumers managed their supply, there would be massive insurance/guarantee markets that kept this kind of thing from happening. Instead, the attention of the industry has been diverted to dealing with a new technology that isn't supporting itself and has big political friends. That has been the focus of electric generation for a decade now. Plain old reliability and resiliency has a VP out there that's going to get the axe, but actual on the margin effort applied to managing a situation like this has been crowded out.

The fact that someone at ERCOT had to write a letter to DOE in the middle of this is a joke. I hope it was a paralegal intern.