SouthTex99 said:

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I hate what this event has put Texans through. I hate the black eye its given the state nationwide. I personally had no power from Sunday until yesterday morning. BUT....maybe this will keep some of the crazy California and NE liberals from continuing to move to the state.

And I DO NOT support linking our grid to the rest of the country. We'll learn from this and be just fine very soon. And don't come crying when its 100 degrees this July in New York and all your brownouts begin. You should have fixed that by now. So get your laughs in while you can...and we'll keep moving your Fortune 500 companies to Texas.

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The typical power demand profile in Texas would show a big peak in the summer, when most of the state has to run air conditioning 24 hours a day to keep its inhabitants from melting. Because of this, power generators schedule needed maintenance and upgrades for the winter months, when demand is generally lower. As a result, the Texas grid is less able to match spikes in demand during the winter.

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Wind turbines iced up and stopped generating, cutting into the grid contribution of renewable power. But wind (and solar) don't produce as much power during the Texas winter under normal circumstances, so the loss of some capacity there wasn't as much of a problem as it might have been in summer; they weren't expected to produce much anyway.

As we mentioned above, the natural gas market saw power generators competing with home users for a limited supply of natural gas. That gas supply ended up being even more limited by the fact that as much as half the state's natural gas production may have ground to a halt. Natural gas doesn't come out of the wells as a pure gas, and one of its major contaminants is water. As temperatures dropped, that water froze in inopportune places, choking off the flow of gas.

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Dagle said that both coal and nuclear rely on water to generate power. This water has to replace any of the material that's lost as steam from the portion used for generation, and it may be used as part of a cooling or condensing system. If the water intakes freeze up, then the plant will inevitably have to shut down.

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It turns out that these conditions are rare in Texas, but not extremely so; Texas faced something similar a decade earlier, in 2011, when its grid suffered similar failures. In the wake of these earlier problems, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a report suggesting changes to the grid in order to prevent a recurrence. Obviously, if there's a similar event today, it must mean those changes weren't made, right?

Not quite. Dagle told Ars that the earlier event was probably not as cold as the conditions Texas has faced this week. Even if the people operating power plants had made changes that would have gotten them through the 2011 event, those changes might not have been sufficient to handle this week. In addition, the Texas grid, like the rest of the US, has become increasingly reliant on natural gas supplies over the last decade. According to the FERC report, in 2011, Texas lost over a million Megawatt-hours to frozen hardware and mechanical failures; it lost only 120,000 Megawatt-hours to fuel supply problems. The reported problems with natural gas supplies this time around suggest that those numbers will now look very different.

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Finally, Dagle noted that, in the absence of actual cold weather, it's hard to test whether the hardware you've put in place to protect against it is actually effective. "It's kind of hard to find all these problems when you can't test it," Dagle said. In Minnesota, you will know if things work in the next winter. In Texas, you might have to wait a decade for a stress test.

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XXXVII said:

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SouthTex99 said:

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I hate what this event has put Texans through. I hate the black eye its given the state nationwide. I personally had no power from Sunday until yesterday morning. BUT....maybe this will keep some of the crazy California and NE liberals from continuing to move to the state.

And I DO NOT support linking our grid to the rest of the country. We'll learn from this and be just fine very soon. And don't come crying when its 100 degrees this July in New York and all your brownouts begin. You should have fixed that by now. So get your laughs in while you can...and we'll keep moving your Fortune 500 companies to Texas.

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I really hope it is different this time and they actually take action to solve our cold weather resiliency, but after the 2011 snap, nothing was done to solve those problems. 2011 was like a mini 2021 with similar issues.

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Old McDonald said:

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it's times like these I miss the qanon thread, I wonder what zany theories they would have come up with to explain all this

coordinated attack by the deep state on the texas power grid to scare us into not seceding/punish us for voting for trump? or is that too surface level?

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