From a democrat family member that lives up north.

Got nothing to do with clean energy. Wind turbines work all year round in Alaska. There is a winterization kit that Texas declined to add. Might have been the right choice from a cost benefit analysis, but then comes the 100 year cold snap. The State's real problem is its underfunded and deregulated energy grid. Going to take some serious investment no matter whether the energy comes from green or black sources. Also, the wide sped nature of the polar vortex means that other states can't transfer any excess natural gas. Nobody has any excess energy.

Usaa is already sending info on how to file claims.

Our grid is deregulated? Seriously? What the hell is ERCOT, then?

Maybe by deregulated they mean "less regulated"?

gonemaroon said:

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Here you go / just remember a lot of the gas power plants which are represented by the flame may not be able to purchase gas right now. The octagon looking thing our coal plants

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Unable to purchase, or unwilling with the spike it NG prices?

Down another roll of toilet paper

When will the blame be placed on Ken Lay? George W. Bush? Enron?

We haven't lost power but everything else is out. Even cell coverage is spotty. I've never missed running water so much. I've gotta go to the gym to shower.

agracer said:

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ebdb_bnb said:

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BIL works for Centerpoint and he said they could turn the power back on but ERCOT won't let them.

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. Why?

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Good damn question. He was on last night so not sure when I'll get a reply.

wessimo said:

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So their extreme outage scenario is 14GW, but, according to gonemaroon and his chart, they've been hovering at 12.5GW offline all month for maintenance? And didn't foresee they'd need to get any of those back online before this storm to have a buffer of greater than 1.5 GW?

So I wonder how long some schools will have to stay closed if they had major pipes burst and lost a great deal of their food storage in the process?

agracer said:

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ebdb_bnb said:

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BIL works for Centerpoint and he said they could turn the power back on but ERCOT won't let them.

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. Why?

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This is straight from ERCOT's mouth from a piece published yesterday:

Quote:

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WD: A big question that people have is when will ERCOT allow local utilities to turn the power back on?

BM: Well, we asked the local utilities to reduce the amount of power they use in order to keep the overall system in Texas operating safely, so each utility like Austin Energy has a proportion of the reduction in the use of power we need to do to maintain that safety balance.

So we are telling each of the utilities in Austin and everywhere else that as soon as we can reinstate certain amounts of megawatts, certain amounts of usage then they go out and take care of that within their communities. They have plans for how those outages are managed within their communities. We just tell them the amount we need from an engineering, from a grid perspective, and they manage the local plan and how it's undertaken.

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Here's the link if you want to read the full thing: https://www.bigcountryhomepage.com/news/ercot-answers-questions-amid-millions-of-ongoing-power-outages-across-texas/

I think that's pretty much BS considering places like Coleman have been completely shutdown for well over 48 hours and ERCOT is telling local to stay off.

Wind in ERCOT now only providing 800 MW and solar providing 400 MW. Pathetic.

Man, what part of non-dispatch don't y'all understand? 12 hours ago solar was zero. Is that a problem?

It cycles, because it is wind. Everyone expects it to cycle. We built the grid with the expectation that it will cycle, even expect it to be zero sometimes. That it cycles is not a failure.

On the other hand, we fully expect that when you dispatch a gas turbine plant or a coal plant that it will run. How's that working out for us?

Zobel said:

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Man, what part of non-dispatch don't y'all understand? 12 hours ago solar was zero. Is that a problem?

It cycles, because it is wind. Everyone expects it to cycle. We built the grid with the expectation that it will cycle, even expect it to be zero sometimes. That it cycles is not a failure.

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I totally understand that. My point is that we cannot rely on it 100% like the liberals want us to in the future. They also want batteries to help solve the unpredictability of the wind and solar. Batteries do horribly in cold weather. On top of that, mining for the materials to make batteries, and also the disposal of used batteries, are both horrible for the environment.

sanangelo said:

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Count your blessings you don't live in Coleman.

Quote:

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COLEMAN, TX -- Power outages have affected all of West Texas and one Texas city is saying enough. In a late-night press release, the City of Coleman condemned the decisions made by ERCOT. The City of Coleman said it has been completely without electricity for nearly two days.

According to officials, city crews spent all afternoon working with AEP repairing the substation and as the power company prepared to "flip the switch" to restore the power. Then, just as relief was to come to the city of 4,400 residents, ERCOT said no.

ERCOT, or the Electric Reliability Commission of Texas, governs what parts of the electrical grid can retrieve electricity.

When the blackouts first began, the city was told they would be placed on rolling blackouts and instead what ERCOT defines as a controlled blackout was put in place with no plan to restore power. A controlled blackout means there's no immediate hope electricity will be restored soon, not even temporarily.

Source: Coleman Says ERCOT Wants the Whole City to Freeze

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This is unacceptable and total bull****, I don't care if it is AEP's or ERCOT or both people should lose their jobs at minimum.

160+ billion for an unreliable, 2.5% of the grid power solution. This seems like an excellent investment. Politicians should be applauded for this decision. Surely nobody got rich on the taxpayers expense, who are now out of electricity, heat, and water...

It is a sad state of affairs that people in Texas have to move to places like Southeast Asia and Mexico to raise their living standards. We now have a government that cannot be relied upon to provide even the most basic resources that are under governmental control.

XXXVII said:

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Wind in ERCOT now only providing 800 MW and solar providing 400 MW. Pathetic.

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Wind is 1496 and solar is over 2000 on the Ercot real time data table. Where are you getting your numbers.
http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_conditions.html

Eh, not batteries but storage in general. Compressed air storage and chemical storage like hydrogen production or even localized pump hydro are all ways to align supply and demand. The problem isn't even really intraday demand misalignment, it's terawatt hours of seasonal misalignment. No adults are advocating for a 100% renewable grid, even in Texas.

It's a convenient bogeyman, but dang guys, our grid should have handled this event with no wind at all. The same cold that is reducing wind output is reducing gas production and power output from thermal.

XXXVII said:

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Looks like wind is doing jack sheet right now. ERCOT serving about 3000 MW less that it has typically been serving the since we've been in this mess.



Wind doing just under 3000 MW and only going to go lower during the day. Any reslibs still think our whole grid should run on this? Not only does it freeze, but the stuff that survives the cold can't be used when needed! Coal and nuclear would have plenty of fuel ready to be used right now.

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We will be told it's ok because they predicted this failure of wind to provide energy to the grid.

It's not 2.5% of the grid. It averages about 20% of the grid. That's how it works.

I managed assets for a long term service agreement on some gas turbines around nine years ago. At that time, those turbines ran around 10 times a year for around 10 hours. That's an average of 1.1% of their capacity. Is that a bad investment? A bad power solution?

You are making an incorrect analysis.

As long as we are doing our part to save the planet......

remember folks its important to worry about future generations that havent been born yet, unless of course they want to be aborted

It isn't our base. ERCOT planned for a 67GW peak Sunday night to be met 100% by thermal power. At the peak, it was 69 GW with 8 GW of wind. So in other words, we planned for 67GW thermal and got 60GW. Now we can't get above 44 GW thermal.

This winter event proved that our grid isn't resilient, in a general sense. Nobody was planning on wind being base load in this event.

Zobel said:

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Man, what part of non-dispatch don't y'all understand? 12 hours ago solar was zero. Is that a problem?

It cycles, because it is wind. Everyone expects it to cycle. We built the grid with the expectation that it will cycle, even expect it to be zero sometimes. That it cycles is not a failure.

On the other hand, we fully expect that when you dispatch a gas turbine plant or a coal plant that it will run. How's that working out for us?

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I think wind is fine as it is understood to be unreliable. But that didn't stop us from letting it squeeze other new generation out of the market. We enjoyed dirt-cheap power for over a decade while there has been close to zero investment in new reliable power. We're in this mess because we don't have enough power plants. We don't have enough power plants because nobody can afford to build them and the idle them half the time.

+1

Our system is designed to meet peak demand with ~4 GW reserve and not one iota more. That's cost effecient.

What's frustrating is that in this event we didn't peak out. Our stuff didn't work. This wasn't a total installed capacity limit, it was a reliability event due to cold weather.

Zobel said:

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It isn't our base. ERCOT planned for a 67GW peak Sunday night to be met 100% by thermal power. At the peak, it was 69 GW with 8 GW of wind. So in other words, we planned for 67GW thermal and got 60GW. Now we can't get above 44 GW thermal.

This winter event proved that our grid isn't resilient, in a general sense. Nobody was planning on wind being base load in this event.

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So how much of this do you think is grid fundamentals whether from maintenance or design versus basically operator error in not having a more orderly takedown early versus something semi nefarious about the pricing?

I would assume that this is one of those situations where a bunch of smaller failures result in an epic disaster

Zobel said:

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It isn't our base. ERCOT planned for a 67GW peak Sunday night to be met 100% by thermal power. At the peak, it was 69 GW with 8 GW of wind. So in other words, we planned for 67GW thermal and got 60GW. Now we can't get above 44 GW thermal.

This winter event proved that our grid isn't resilient, in a general sense. Nobody was planning on wind being base load in this event.

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Understood. I think we pretty much agree on the wind aspect, but for those who argue for shutting down electricity production from ng/coal/nuke facilities and speak for them to be replaced by "green energy" sources, wind is either the largest or one of the largest components in that argument and is proven to NOT be a reliable source for electricity production, which completely negates said argument.

Zobel said:

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Eh, not batteries but storage in general. Compressed air storage and chemical storage like hydrogen production or even localized pump hydro are all ways to align supply and demand. The problem isn't even really intraday demand misalignment, it's terawatt hours of seasonal misalignment. No adults are advocating for a 100% renewable grid, even in Texas.

It's a convenient bogeyman, but dang guys, our grid should have handled this event with no wind at all. The same cold that is reducing wind output is reducing gas production and power output from thermal.

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Wind shouldn't really be a part of the plan then, if it is just a supplement for times/days when conditions are perfect. It's also insane that wind farms are paid based on MW dumped into the grid where they are located; the losses in transmission from west texas out past Abilene to DFW for instance are on the order of 40-60 percent, and I've read estimates of wind transmission losses being up to 11 times worse.

The power sources that are dispatch able, and can be hardened to provide steady, affordable power, are the ones we should be using, namely nuclear (SMR, ideally), gas (with transmission pipelines testing to standard for quality and backup systems), and coal (because we have plenty of it and it works well in the middle of Texas).

These other fanciful flights of government fancy and subsidization should be leveraged against with state subsidies for the above actions/corrections.

I'd happily pay 20 percent more for a secure grid with zero 'green' sources just so that I know I can rely on it. Instead, we're paying at least that to incorporate 'green' energy. 'Wind Farmers' can sell their stuff (and all of the attendant losses) to Californians who think they are saving the planet for all I care (despite SF6 then being 23,000 times worse as a greenhouse gas being used by the ton). The net impact of wind and solar is just to increase the cost of power anyway.

Quote:

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My colleagues Madison Czerwinski and Mark Nelson pulled the data and here is what they found:

• For the U.S. as a whole, electricity prices rose 7 percent while electricity from solar and wind grew from two to eight percent from 2009 to 2017
• In North Dakota, electricity prices rose 40percent while electricity from solar and wind grew from nine to 27 percent between 2009 and 2017.
• In South Dakota, electricity prices rose 34 percent while electricity from solar and wind grew from five to 30 percent between 2009 and 2017.
• In Kansas, electricity prices rose 33 percent while electricity from solar and wind grew from six to 36 percent between 2009 and 2017.
• In Iowa, electricity prices rose 21 percent while electricity from solar and wind grew from 14 to 37 percent between 2009 and 2017.
• In Oklahoma, electricity prices rose 18 percent while electricity from solar and wind grew from four to 32 percent between 2009 and 2017.

What about Hawaii, California, and Nevada states that, Hanger noted, "have 10% solar or more"?

• In Hawaii, electricity prices rose 23 percent, while electricity from solar and wind grew from 3 to 18 percent between 2009 and 2017.
• In California, electricity prices rose 22 percent, while electricity from solar and wind grew from 3 to 23 percent between 2009 and 2017.

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Wind: not reliable, more expensive, and leads to more emissions (CF6), plus 5 to 11 times worse line losses in transmission. Good thing our ERCOT chairwoman, from her home in Michigan (she is also a Whitmer appointee there), is a big supporter of green banking/energy!

If you get really cynical this is exactly what our grid is designed to do. Deliver power for the absolute cheapest average price in the long run. That means by definition you don't have very much reserve, because reserve that never runs is a pure cost with no profit behind it. So you size your grid for peak expected power plus a little. Most of the time its fine because peak and average days are very different, maybe by 20% (I don't know what an average day on ERCOT is right now in terms of load but I'd guess around 60 in summer and winter, much less in spring).

We don't price power in ten year time frames, and corporations make budgets and profit on an annual basis. So why would any company rationally invest capex to prevent a once a decade or once a generation outage? It makes them less competitive.

Take that same approach and use it for our wellheads. They're not designed for cold the way equipment in the north is. And our pipelines. .... and our houses.

Gas pipelines are expensive, we don't build extras just in case. Pipeline demand might have exceeded capacity (I don't know if it did). But it isn't like we just have all of this infrastructure lying around. That's billions of cost.

To me, this is like Harvey. We plan on Houston having heavy rain from time to time, but we never plan for 50 inches in 4 days. We plan on cold weather, but not for the whole state to be freezing overnight.

We could plan for this event, and it will cost xx cents per kWhr on your bill. But that's never going to happen proactively, its a political and economic nonstarter. It happened in 2011 and we didn't do anything about it for the exact same reasons.

Zobel said:

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It's not 2.5% of the grid. It averages about 20% of the grid. That's how it works.

I managed assets for a long term service agreement on some gas turbines around nine years ago. At that time, those turbines ran around 10 times a year for around 10 hours. That's an average of 1.1% of their capacity. Is that a bad investment? A bad power solution?

You are making an incorrect analysis.

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Correct, 800/32000 = 2.5% meaning of wind's total capacity it is only providing 2.5% of its capacity.

I don't care if this was planned for or not, it shows just how unreliable wind energy is and can not be relied upon. Actually if this was planned on it makes the decision to use wind as a source of energy unconscionable.

If you plan on using wind which is very fickle then you must add extra more reliable sources of energy.