Nice, yeah hated to see those two shut down and jobs lost, but they had been starving them for years. They were going to put in a new unit and had the stack etc in a lay down yard for years then they ended up shutting down. MPHS or Chapel Hill? MV here.

techno-ag said:

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BurnetAggie99 said:

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Unlike some utilities Austin Energy actually owns and operates our own generation on the grid. We have Gas, Coal, Nuclear plants that produce 4,600MW. Then additionally we have 3 big Chiller Stations, 1.5MW battery storage, & 2,900MW of solar & biomass. So AE is actually one of the utilities that helps the grid with our generation capabilities.

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Texas Municipal Power (which Bryan and Denton are part of) does the same.

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Now that Gibbons Creek plant is shut down TMPA no longer generates power.

Have a natural gas generator. Don't care

The OP is far from a liberal. LOL

Robert L. Peters said:

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Have a natural gas generator. Don't care

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War on Natural is already underway

Charpie said:

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The OP is far from a liberal. LOL

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Be nice if liberals and liberal polices didn't cause 5 or 6 power plants to close down....but lets not talk about that.

BurnetAggie99 said:

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Unlike some utilities Austin Energy actually owns and operates our own generation on the grid. We have Gas, Coal, Nuclear plants that produce 4,600MW. Then additionally we have 3 big Chiller Stations, 1.5MW battery storage, & 2,900MW of solar & biomass. So AE is actually one of the utilities that helps the grid with our generation capabilities.

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I thought AE got out of the STNP a long time ago, and they are trying to figure out how to get out of FPP. I left Austin 20 years ago have they finally got that biomass nonsense working?

D Nauti said:

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BurnetAggie99 said:

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Unlike some utilities Austin Energy actually owns and operates our own generation on the grid. We have Gas, Coal, Nuclear plants that produce 4,600MW. Then additionally we have 3 big Chiller Stations, 1.5MW battery storage, & 2,900MW of solar & biomass. So AE is actually one of the utilities that helps the grid with our generation capabilities.

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I thought AE got out of the STNP a long time ago, and they are trying to figure out how to get out of FPP. I left Austin 20 years ago have they finally got that biomass nonsense working?

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AE is a great utility. The problem is AE is governed by a liberal City Council. AE has made the Council aware multiple times that demonizing fossil fuel generation is a mistake. Until the Texas Legislature, Senate, & Governor take the power away from the local governments that run major utilities in Texas, we going to have the problem that local governments can close down fossil fuel generation for political reasons.

BurnetAggie99 said:

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D Nauti said:

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BurnetAggie99 said:

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Unlike some utilities Austin Energy actually owns and operates our own generation on the grid. We have Gas, Coal, Nuclear plants that produce 4,600MW. Then additionally we have 3 big Chiller Stations, 1.5MW battery storage, & 2,900MW of solar & biomass. So AE is actually one of the utilities that helps the grid with our generation capabilities.

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I thought AE got out of the STNP a long time ago, and they are trying to figure out how to get out of FPP. I left Austin 20 years ago have they finally got that biomass nonsense working?

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AE is a great utility. The problem is AE is governed by a liberal City Council. AE has made the Council aware multiple times that demonizing fossil fuel generation is a mistake. Until the Texas Legislature, Senate, & Governor take the power away from the local governments that run major utilities in Texas, we going to have the problem that local governments can close down fossil fuel generation for political reasons.

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They are pretty much subsidized by tax money

Robert L. Peters said:

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Have a natural gas generator. Don't care

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"Oh look at me! I'm not dependent on the grid because I have a natural gas generator….that's dependent…..on……another grid DOH!"

Picard said:

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Robert L. Peters said:

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Have a natural gas generator. Don't care

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"Oh look at me! I'm not dependent on the grid because I have a natural gas generator….that's dependent…..on……another grid DOH!"

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Especially since Obama's EPA got rid of gas powered pumps on the pipelines. Now if the grid goes down so does the fuel supply.

I'll put some graphs up later, but the massive amounts of load curtailment requests plus the rain over Houston was enough to chop load at a greater rate than we've seen all summer and keep them out of EEA. ERCOT escaped by some random rain luck that hasn't occured all summer, and their requests to curtail loads worked. Today is a new day, looks like they have somewhere between 2-4 more of these days to go until they are out of the woods.

Normal weather patterns and their grid of the future works - obscene weather patterns are a different story.

Should the governor call a special session to deal with infrastructure/the grid?

gonemaroon said:

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...Would have been out of batteries during Uri before the event even occured....

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What's Uri? One of those hurricanes where everybody goes crazy about leaving Houston and then the entire thing goes off to the east?

The Fife said:

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gonemaroon said:

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...Would have been out of batteries during Uri before the event even occured....

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What's Uri? One of those hurricanes where everybody goes crazy about leaving Houston and then the entire thing goes off to the east?

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Its the name given to the winter storm a couple of years ago where there massive outages for several days due to the issues with generation in Texas.

For some reason, every weather event has to have a name now. Not sure if its the media driving that, the government, or both but its great for the media hype machine. Remember the good old days when a storm, other than a hurricane, was just a bad storm?

Relatedly, have you noticed how the bar for declaring a weather emergency has been lowered significantly such that a severe thunderstorms now rate activation of the emergency broadcast network? Years ago, that was only activated for imminent hurricane landfall and nuclear attack.

Martin Q. Blank said:

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All local, state and federal building thermostats shall be set to 82 88 degrees during these events.at all times. The "servants" must suffer first. Why is this not a law?

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FIFY

TexasAggiesWin said:

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TX04Aggie said:

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I grew up in shadow of Monticello, my dad spent his entire career there until it was shutdown and he got severance. Really could use a few of those old beasts again!

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Absolutely, my dad was at Welsh until retirement. I spent my high school summers working there as a laborer

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And you don't have cancer or lung problems?

Oh, the blue norther. Over here in hurricane land those are the only things that pick up a name, but the last real big freeze we had over here where it dropped down to around 10-12 a couple nights was 9 years ago. Maybe they weren't doing that nonsense yet.

Who knows, I kind of tuned out from the media beyond local news a long while back.

I don't really get that they are capable enough to understand the ins and outs of the electric grid. I don't think they understand markets and price formations either. On top of that you have everyone lobbying for different items and so lost in the confusion is is a long-term path forward and one that is short-term path forward.

For example industrials should be against higher prices, but over the past ten years they have made themselves extremely flexible to reduce power consumption or even power producers during highly volitile times so they can profit off of irrational events. So while you'd think - well if I am an industrial and I want to relocated to Texas I need cheap stable pricing - well that's not what it is, but we have the coast so you have all of them building their own infrastrucures and once those are complete and they are isolated then what they care about changes.

All of the retail providors that are independant which is barely any of them lack a voice because they have no capital to donate to politicians and often times are rather fly by night so you don't have a constant voice on the lobbying side.

There's two paths forward that have proven to work - it's a capacity market which is a guarenteed rate of return. I've never ever been for a capacity market I think economics should work itself out but that absolutely cannot work in Texas. And it isn't working currently. So capacity markets give a guarentee revenue payment to the generators to keep them funcational and operational. Second is a regulated market. One of those two need to occur at this rate.

I love being called a liberal - keep it coming folks

What was expected when the shift from cost effective and efficient switched to "green". Bad news when our utilities are being used to virtue signal.

What is a capacity market and how does it guarantee a return?

https://learn.pjm.com/three-priorities/buying-and-selling-energy/capacity-markets.aspx

This roughly explains it but to make it simple - PJM for instance runs a multi-year capacity auction that provides a revenue guarentee. The modeling will also take into affect congestion or hard to get to spots on the grid and if an older plant is needed to stay on-line then the model will take that into consideration and get it the revenue to do so.

Signifantly old power plants and proposing new power plants need a "hedge" so to speak - the auctions provide that ability.

Picard said:

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Robert L. Peters said:

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Have a natural gas generator. Don't care

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"Oh look at me! I'm not dependent on the grid because I have a natural gas generator….that's dependent…..on……another grid DOH!"

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Just like electric cars don't need gas… but they need electricity that is generated by fossil fuels.

What can you say about Texas needs to connect to the national grid talking point. I saw a lot of that yesterday as a solution to avoid moments where we are short, we can take from somewhere else.

ChemEAg08 said:

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Cromagnum said:

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Naming cold fronts is a weather channel thing they started doing for about 10 years now. It's completely absurd.

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Just a method to try to scare people more into watching them (and also push their climate change narrative).

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It's exactly what forced me to give up watching TV a few years ago. It's just channel after channel of garbage meant to stimulate idiots.

Furlock Bones said:

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Coates said:

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XXXVII said:

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TitanAGGIE09 said:

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It's 8:11pm... when are we getting these rolling blackouts all the resident libs were ready to celebrate happening so they could bash Abbott?

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Sorry libs

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Really odd that energy and the trash grid is political. Not sure why either party thinks uses it as a talking point.

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Agreed. Dumbest talking on either side. We need to fix ercot. And that's going to take government action. But I also don't want to lose our separate grid.

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We need new natural gas plants and no more windmills. Too bad the liberals closed the coal plants. If we still had those we would be just fine.

Not sure I have an opinion on that - we added the Panhandle into ERCOT a few years ago. I think it would be more beneficial on the exporting of power side of things since we have so many renewables - during non-peak demand and high renewable times but honestly it would need to be Louisiana and not say Oklahoma they are jacked full of rewewables themselves.

Green energy will eventually be seen for what it is. Something that expends more resources and energy in its creation than it produces.

Texas needs to do what we need to get nuclear power ramped up by spending money used to supplement green energy to actually creat reliable clean energy.

While I don't think this is wrong, I think the reaction stance of "just build more plants" or "should have kept coal" ignores the economic side of things. If a plant can't make money, the company isn't going to keep it open out of altruism. Shareholders of these companies aren't going to put up with losing money. We collectively - through legislation - decided to go to a designed market that has a certain structure. That is 100% producing these outcomes. If it was profitable to keep those coal plants running, they would have kept running. And if it was profitable to build more gas turbine plants, they'd build those too.

We don't have a free market, we have a designed market and it gets messed with like putting a cap on peak pricing etc. If the designed structure isn't giving you the results you need, you have to make changes. In that regard it isn't that different than a regulated power structure, just some of the decision making has been moved one tier down.

In the end it comes back to the state regulatory environment. gonemaroon is 100% right.

Those plants closed because Obama's war on coal made it unprofitable for them. They were doing just fine until he became president.

gonemaroon said:

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https://learn.pjm.com/three-priorities/buying-and-selling-energy/capacity-markets.aspx

This roughly explains it but to make it simple - PJM for instance runs a multi-year capacity auction that provides a revenue guarentee. The modeling will also take into affect congestion or hard to get to spots on the grid and if an older plant is needed to stay on-line then the model will take that into consideration and get it the revenue to do so.

Signifantly old power plants and proposing new power plants need a "hedge" so to speak - the auctions provide that ability.

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PJM generators get capacity payments in exchange for being required to bid into day-ahead markets on a cost-based formula and ultimately producing energy during peak demand events. Unforced outages on a handful of cold days can cost you an entire year's capacity revenue.

Capacity revenues are set in a reverse auction three years in advance and are in place for a single year. It has been years since capacity prices were high enough to justify the cost of new build gas-fired generation.

More correctly "some transmission assets in the Panhandle were added into ERCOT several years ago". The Southwest Power Pool is still very much alive and active.

Almost all the regional grids outside ERCOT were having supply/demand issues yesterday. I had many large clients that are on interruptible contracts curtailed or shut off. Even some clients not on interruptible curtailed or shut off in certain areas in the SPP, WECC, far south Miso. So in theory ERCOT connecting to a bigger areas might give the ability to find some power....in practice that typically isn't the case because they are experiencing what we are.

Why don't they have public issues of people talking about it like TX? Where are the major media outlets in the region......Houston, DFW, Austin, San Antonio. It's easier for them to report on what's happening that affects their viewers rather than throwing in (and some do it) OKC/Tulsa, Baton Rouge, Los Cruces, etc are having similar issues.

I don't think that narrative holds up. There are coal plants in operation, making money, all over the country -- including some still in Texas. What made coal unprofitable is the widespread installation of wind in Texas, combined with cheap natural gas, and the market structure ERCOT runs.

Wind cuts into baseload and also increases variability. In both cases that hurts coal plants, as they can't cycle rapidly. Modern combined cycle gas turbine power plants have very high efficiency, high turndown, and can ramp rapidly relative to a coal plant. That plus the stable low price of natural gas in Texas makes them a direct competitor to coal for baseload, as well as able to pair with wind to meet variability.