That's fine and dandy. I'm against wind energy as well. But it's simply irrelevant to use this time to explain how wind energy is unreliable. All our energy is apparently unreliable and it's just kicking the can down the road and not holding those responsible who should be.

My friend, I agree about market distorting subsidies. But we should oppose them with correct facts.

Wind, or any other resource, is not paid regardless of location. ERCOT uses Locational Marginal Pricing which factors in location and congestion to the price. All things being equal if a closer / less congested supply source is the same price as a distant one, the closer one will have a lower bid.

I am fine with saying we should have a reliable base and let wind cycle. But those dispatchable sources need to work when dispatched. We had failures in thermal power in every single power source due to cold - including nuclear. We have plenty of thermal to get us through this event without wind. On paper. Maybe we didn't have enough gas infrastructure to do it with the increased demand for heating. I'm not sure. I'm sure there will be a report about it (that no one will read).

We should not fight subsidy with subsidy. That only distorts more, and state interference will inevitably and always reduce reliability.

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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.

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Maybe you would, but most people won't. Most people have no idea how the grid works, and want cheap power. Well, we got cheap power. But cheap has a time scale - cheap moment to moment, cheap month to month, cheap year to year, and cheap decade to decade. Your last electric bill didn't price in this event. Your next one might, I'm not sure.

Your analysis didn't include Texas. What have Texas electricity prices done between 2009 and 2017 as wind supplanted coal fired generation? I suspect you'll find that prices got cheaper.

Here, I looked it up.

Man, on average wind produces 20% of our electricity. We plan accordingly.

Some of our gas assets (simple cycle peakers) are only used 10% of the time, so their capacity factor is 10%, while wind is 35%. That doesn't make them bad investments, it makes them a tool with an appropriate use.

Wind is not reliable in the sense that you can tell it what to do, and was never considered to be reilable in that way. It is called non-dispatchable.

What is unconscionable is that our dispatch power failed, and failed in the same way it failed ten years ago, for the same reasons.

We do plan on using wind, and we do have more reliable sources of energy. Those reliable sources failed because they were not designed to meet this cold, just like they did in 2011.

Zobel said:

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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.

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Great take on the situation. Blue star.

Do you know where the generation is located? I wonder if there is some sort of transmission constraint?

gonemaroon said:

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Generation is ramping and they aren't turning load back on currently / sitting here watching it.

They have 3000MW of excess right now they could rotate load back on. I'd love to know what they are doing

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Thank you for all your posts...helpful to try and understand what is going on and when we can expect things to improve. Essentially what you're saying is currently there is excess capacity they're not utilizing? Any reason why? Would love to know your take on the current state of things and what we should expect over the next day or two. Thanks!

It looks like pretty much all of the additional generation that is currently ramping up is coming from wind and solar. Basically no change to thermal generation. Is that correct?

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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I'll stick with my original, correct analysis... The big point that you seem to be missing is someone "chose" to run those turbines that often. Likely, the more wind, the less they get to run as wind gets priority and gets to "come and go" as it chooses with no penalty to the producer. Additionally, I worked at GE Power for many years and I drank tang as a kid.

Spending this kind of money for something that reliably produces this much (or this little) power in emergency situations is terrible. It would be one thing if we could "turn them on" when needed, but we can't.

And for those saying X amount of gas generation is down, at least with some prior planning we have the possibility of bringing this generation on-line. We can and should be able to predict a certain % of NG plant failure, and build in additional plants as the inefficiency. Currently the backup plan is the backup plan for a known failure (wind).

If you worked for GE power you should know better than to say what you're saying, then.

Those turbines today run more than they did ten years ago because - as you surely know - wind power increases the variability of the net load, which makes peaking gas turbines run more often.

We have enough dispatch to cover us without wind. Wind was not the backup plan - dispatchable thermal power was the backup plan. That backup plan didn't run. At peak in an all-hands-on-deck event that we had weeks to prepare for we were only making 60GW of thermal power! That is nowhere near our thermal capacity!

Zobel, or others...
I've seen plenty of references to the 10GW of thermal power offline before this kicked off. Obviously, yes ERCOT approved it. Do we have any idea why they were off? What work, what maintenance was being done?

I fully realize that even if it was simple, and not horribly disruptive work it can still take an extended period of time to bring a larger plant online. Especially if it's cold and black. On the other hand, if they're servicing bearings for example deep inside the turbine and overhauling a boiler, you can wish in one hand well you know, before that plant comes back online.

I don't know why they were down, sorry.

No worries, thx!

Zobel said:

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I don't know why they were down, sorry.

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Ercot approved annual maintenance in prep for Spring/Summer loads??

This isn't surprising to me, but wasn't linked in the article (I don't work for Forbes), and doesn't prove your point at all; it merely correlates with our transition to natural gas.

No other state listed (in my post) I believe has moved to natural gas as fast as Texas in the past 10-12 years.



Thus, while our prices for energy have been relatively flat, net we are paying more despite the collapse of natural gas prices (thanks to our own domestic Texas industry, largely), precisely because we've put in so much green energy (wind).

If our energy costs just tracked coal and natural gas (vs. reflecting our incorporation of 20+ percent wind), my suspicion is maintenance on thermal turbines/facilities would have been kept up with more (not competing with federal wind subsidies), and we'd have more dispatchable power this week than we do.

Counterfactuals are hard to prove. It's likely that instead of replacing coal with wind we would have replaced them with more gas. And we'd be right back to where we are today. The 32GW of wind on the grid represents about 10-12GW of thermal. When the grid took a dump thermal was making 60. Peak demand Sunday or the even colder Monday probably would have been close to all time, which was 74 GW in August 2019.

I don't think *for this event* it would have mattered. But, again, hard to prove.

AggieLostinDallas said:

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AustinAg008 said:

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I have the large 7500W that the entire neighboorhood can hear. Stays on the side of the house in protective shell I built for it, but I can get about 10 HRS on 5-6 gallons of gas at 50% load.

We run pretty much everything we need to off of it.

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Are you running extension cords or did you have it hooked up to the house?

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We are just running extension cords to space heaters, water heater, fridge etc.

80sGeorge said:

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Zobel said:

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I don't know why they were down, sorry.

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Ercot approved annual maintenance in prep for Spring/Summer loads??

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Maintenance is usually performed in the Spring, which is traditionally the most temperate with the lowest demand. The question has been why these facilities were offline during what is capable of being the coldest month of the year.
So the question is were they rolling the dice to get ahead of the spring maintenance season, is this a bigger operation that required a longer offline period before peak summer demands, or were these emergency repairs that forced them offline.

Power back out.

Off for 49 hours. On for 8 hours.

Fun while it lasted.

See the red line generation roofing? They can turn on 5000MW of load right now free and clear

gonemaroon said:

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See the red line generation roofing? They can turn on 5000MW of load right now free and clear

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Real Time prices are the lowest I've seen since I learned about the ERCOT website.

http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/contours/rtmLmp.html

That's crazy. I mean that chart is on their website...the level of incompetence required to not add 5GW of load when there is available capacity seems impossible to me. Surely there is something else going on, right?

They are still pegged at $9k at the settlement point

Is that in the "Real Time Price Adder" table on the chart?

Sorry, I'm a pure green noob trying to dissect all of this.

gonemaroon said:

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See the red line generation roofing? They can turn on 5000MW of load right now free and clear

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Turn the flippin lights on Ercot!!

gonemaroon said:

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They could be rolling folks on the grid right now for several hours why they have the generation -

This is straight ****ing bull****

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Agreed.

This is from Austin Energy

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Austin Energy hasn't been rotating outages because the demand for load shedding from ERCOT was so high that it required Austin Energy to drop every piece of the grid not servicing emergency services (hospitals, police, fire, etc.).

ERCOT is currently telling Austin Energy that they expect the power emergency to extend as far as Tuesday.

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gonemaroon said:

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They could be rolling folks on the grid right now for several hours why they have the generation -

This is straight ****ing bull****

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Playing politics with whose constituency gets relief?

gonemaroon said:

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See the red line generation roofing? They can turn on 5000MW of load right now free and clear

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Immoral to do nothing even if power has to roll off around sunset.

It's unconscionable to have 6 GW of power available in these conditions and not distribute it. What are these guys thinking? Are they expecting a large plant to go down?

The 5200 Acres said:

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It's unconscionable to have 6 GW of power available in these conditions and not distribute it. What are these guys thinking? Are they expecting a large plant to go down?

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Easy, that looks to be the solar and wind that is now available, and I guess ERCOT is smart enough in this case to not rely on it too much right now.

That's not how it works. It doesn't go on and off in a second. A MW is a MW. They need to be doing everything they can to get power to homes within the confines of preventing another low frequency trip event.

Zobel said:

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That's not how it works. It doesn't go on and off in a second. A MW is a MW. They need to be doing everything they can to get power to homes within the confines of preventing another low frequency trip event.

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Even for just a few hours from a 8 hour window?