third coast.. said:
What's the point of bringing that up in this thread?
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.
Rolling blackouts in Texas
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Last: 3 yr ago by Whitetail
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.
Good morning guys, I'll read back through this thread and respond to some questions in a little bit. I wish I had better news but we've gained about 3000 MW of wind power overnight and as you can see on the graph the generation that's in the red his only went from 44 to 47,000. So we haven't gained back any thermal generation overnight at all.
All I can say at this point time is if you got electricity back on, somebody else probably lost it. We lost Oak Grove Vistra's big coal plant and maybe gained Forney in Dallas. Can't afford to be losing more coal plants and it's a big one - totally at 0.
All I can say at this point time is if you got electricity back on, somebody else probably lost it. We lost Oak Grove Vistra's big coal plant and maybe gained Forney in Dallas. Can't afford to be losing more coal plants and it's a big one - totally at 0.
gonemaroon said:
Good morning guys, I'll read back through this thread and respond to some questions in a little bit. I wish I had better news but we've gained about 3000 MW of wind power overnight and as you can see on the graph the generation that's in the red his only went from 44 to 47,000. So we haven't gained back any thermal generation overnight at all.
All I can say at this point time is if you got electricity back on, somebody else probably lost it. We lost Oak Grove Vistra's big coal plant and maybe gained Forney in Dallas. Can't afford to be losing more coal plants and it's a big one - totally at 0.
Oak grove is trying man it's a war out there, lots of people doing what they can right now. I'm thankful for them
This is a software program call Genscape that all the traders use to monitor plants. Red means it's low, yellow is less than full, and green is typically full load. I would not say the software is 100% accurate.
Wanted to post it on here so that you guys could see the amount plants limping along.
I'm not too busy yet this morning / anyone have questions?
Wanted to post it on here so that you guys could see the amount plants limping along.
I'm not too busy yet this morning / anyone have questions?
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.
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I would like to say, that when I was watching this in real time from what I could see I thought ERCOT lost the entire grid for about 2 minutes. I teared up watching it - I thought the entire state was going black and it was so unsettling to watch how they handled this but in the end they lost 10-15K of MW and was able to catch it in some miracle. It was horrible watching it because the grid had a solid 90 minutes to start rotational outages and didn't and had another 10 minutes to panic before code red and didn't get the damn job done. Had the entire state gone black I wouldn't even have known what to say.
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?
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?
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?
Load was 75,000 forecasted and they only had say 65,000MW of generation so they knew for damn near a week that they would have to do rotational outages. Rotational outages are a big deal, but it's orderly and not a black out. They knew this and were prepared for it, the odd thing is they never alerted the public to the extent of having to curtail and rotate that many people on and off. But that is what it is. In that case since it's basically never been done you know damn effing well the CEO of ERCOT and every brain trust in the entire organization should have been in that room. This is a HUGE HUGE HUGE deal in itself.
From that point / what I am saying is they knew they had to cut load they knew they were going to do it and then they didn't do it on time and when they needed to. Instead they sat there and watched the **** hit the fan beyond a point of repair. This is what happened / they are going to try to blow smoke up everyone's ass.
From that point / what I am saying is they knew they had to cut load they knew they were going to do it and then they didn't do it on time and when they needed to. Instead they sat there and watched the **** hit the fan beyond a point of repair. This is what happened / they are going to try to blow smoke up everyone's ass.
If every plant was green we wouldn't be discussing this - everyone would have power.
The plants are all broke
The plants are all broke
Interesting to consider how/why in addition to the coal ash regulations, we've moved to over 20 percent reliance on wind.
Tough to compete when your subsidized competition can make money paying someone to buy their product, on a windy (warm) day, regardless of demand.Quote: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:Quote:
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.Isaac's post includes a map that shows the prevalence of negative pricing across the U.S.Quote:
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.Quote:
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.
In the summer time I'd say they would start within hours to bring it back piece by piece.
In a 1-100 winter time event good grief I'm not sure / hypothetically speaking the entire state would probably be dark for days. In this current environment put a gun to my head I'd say on Thursday or Friday once it thaws they could turn the generation back on little by little. Black outs like this DO NOT occur, they are trained to prevent them.
My assumption is that everyone at the PUCT and ERCOT will be fired over this one.
In a 1-100 winter time event good grief I'm not sure / hypothetically speaking the entire state would probably be dark for days. In this current environment put a gun to my head I'd say on Thursday or Friday once it thaws they could turn the generation back on little by little. Black outs like this DO NOT occur, they are trained to prevent them.
My assumption is that everyone at the PUCT and ERCOT will be fired over this one.
Oh look the nuke plant is doing fine. Weird.
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
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
you may all go to hell and i will go to Texas
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
reports saying cell phone towers could start going offline after running out of fuel if on generator
hedge said:
ROUND 2 . BRING IT
I'm tapped out. Had enough. Grew up in Chicago in one of the most liberal, horribly run cities and state for that matter. We never lost electricity there because it was cold. Could be -25 below with windchills if -50 and Lake Michigan frozen over but still had power. I'm not smart enough to understand why this happened but if the idiots in Illinois can figure this out, Texas should be able to.
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.
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
Which is totally asinine.I Have Spoken said:
Politically, an event like this could flip the state blue. It would not be better with the other guys, but it is an easy message & people will be pissed for a long time.
Instead of a once in 30 years event, you can have rolling blackouts every year like in California!
Give it another 20 years and we can be like parts of Mexico where the government telsl you that the gas will be on for these 2 hours twice a week for your use, and most of the time it doesn't even turn on.
Brilliant.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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
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.
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.Zobel said:
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.
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.