Ogre09 said:

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Going to be tight in the morning

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I'm confident it will hold up.

But I have my small generator backup in case the diesel one goes down and the wife filled up buckets for water in case those don't work out, but otherwise, we're totally confident.

ERCOT asked all of us to conserve energy and only the Cowboys listened.

— Arun Rama (@arunformylife) January 15, 2024

Ogre09 said:

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Going to be tight in the morning

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twss








for the mods:
this
weather
seriously
sucks

1982Ag said:

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A (somewhat) related question. Most end users in Texas are able to choose their electricity provider, and their energy comes from the Texas grid. We live here in The Woodlands, and have no such choice - our electricity is provided through Entergy (I have no idea why), and I understand the the power comes out of Louisiana. Any thoughts on why, or how power generation from Louisiana differs from Texas? Thanks.

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Entergy has a brand new, multi unit, combined cycle gas turbine power plant near you in Montgomery County at Willis. Lewis Creek Station 993 megawatts.

Also Entergy has a huge facility at Orange, Tx with 5 gas fueled steam turbines total at 1800 megawatts and construction in progress on another 1200 megawatts of combined cycle gas turbines.

Be very thankful you are in a regulated provider's territory. Unethical politicians screwed us in ERCOT- we got bread & circuses.

FYI High Voltage AC can only be transmitted 250-300 miles.

Why Entergy:
Your area originally had a little local power plant 100 years ago. Eventually before WW2 they interconnected and later merged to become Gulf States Utility.

In 1930s, FDR's administration formed the fore runner of Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Texas didn't want to have federal jurisdiction so the Texas Interconnect ( now ERCOT) was formed. Gulf States Utilities couldn't be part of the Texas Interconnect since half of the company was in Louisiana.

Gulf States Utilities was bleeding money building River Bend Nuclear plant in Louisiana , recession hit the energy business, and GSU almost went bankrupt so they merged with New Orleans based Entergy in 1994.

https://www.power-eng.com/gas/entergys-993-mw-montgomery-county-ccgt-gas-fired-plant-commercially-operational/#gref

Mas89 said:

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Wondering why companies don't build a new gas-fired plant next door or in the vicinity of the natural gas storage domes located in the Houston area. Like around Mt Belvieu or the other salt dome storage plants.

With the Houston area expanding and electricity becoming a problem, looks like a no brainer.
But instead we have dozens of solar farms being built and planned in the area only because of the huge government subsidies.

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Getting Federal permits for Clean Air Act compliance is a big limitation for Houston-Galveston-Brazoria county area.

My understanding is the big LNG export facility at Freeport consumes about 800 megawatts and wanted to build a combined cycle gas turbine power generation facility. But couldn't get Clean Air Act permits.

Instead we the ERCOT consumer paid CenterPoint for a $500 million, 65 mile, 345 KV high voltage transmission line destroying pristine woodlands - to bring it power so grid voltage & frequency could be maintained at it and the Brazosport chemical facilities.

Also I seem to remember a combined cycle gas turbine unit getting permitted near El Campo at Danevang for only 1000 hours run time a year to comply with clean air act. They were considering it a peak producer only if market prices supported the business model.

To answer one of your questions, ERCOT is an Independent System Operator (ISO) which only manages the grid for its part of Texas. Not all of Texas is on ERCOT's grid. See map below for what ERCOT covers. Also, ERCOT is unique in that their grid has no AC connection to other ISO grids surrounding it. There are only a few small capacity DC ties, so the ERCOT grid is not going to get much help from other ISO's in terms of power if the ERCOT grid fails.

Not exactly, there are three main separate grids in the US:



You can still have local issues that affect your ability to get power regardless of which grid you're on.

Close. I'm Bluebonnet. And no, I pushed all the right buttons today. Outside of one big outage this morning, we've done very good overall I'd say. Our MW load has definitely gotten up there though. Tomorrow could be fun.

Brazos Dog- simplified why you need a Grid.

You move into Hooterville and put solar panels on your cabin because no power company exists out there.

You neighbors on the creek all pooled money for a water wheel generator said hey join us. Connect a wire, pay us a few bucks and you can have power night & day.
Yay, now solar and water power providing the community.

Creek runs dry. Everyone is upset.
So the Hooterville Sawmill has a wood fired steam engine with a big generator with surplus to sell. So you work together to put up poles and connect a heavy duty electric wire to it.

But the sawmill generator is from Britain & has different voltage and frequency than your appliances so you agree to pay to standardize voltage and frequency at the sawmill.

Since the sawmill doesn't run at night you hire a staff to operate the equipment 7/24, fix downed wires, and chop more wood.

Soon you have many houses paying to connect to the new Hooterville Electric Company.

Nearby over the hill, the Town Of Buggtussle Light Company has a coal fired steam engine generator that is worn out but they don't have the money to repair it.
So the two companies agree to merge and connect wires to transmit power to the two power grids. All have standardized voltage and frequency with many power sources so business is attracted to this reliable grid.

The new company B&H, continues to grow with only one hiccup when the Buggtussle generator failed causing the whole grid to turn off.
So B&H decides to run a long power line to Pixley Power who is even bigger than B&H.

The two work out agreements for buying and selling power to each other, an interconnect agreement.

They also agree to divide up the territory so they can plan where to put new power plants, transmission lines, etc. Service Territory maps are created.

So if you want to open a new hotel in Bugtussle next to the railroad, you can't buy electricity from Pixley Power, just your local Buggtussle Light Company, a subsidiary of B&H.

Some people aren't happy and complain to their elected leaders that Bugtussle Light Company can't keep the power on, too many outages. Pixley Power never seems to have outages but they can't buy power from Pixley because of the service territory agreement.

So the State gets involved and passes laws regulating the electric power business. Hearings are routinely held to review outage statistics to make sure power is reliable for each utility. B&H has to upgrade equipment or lose their territory in Buggtussle. The B&H CEO is fired and new leadership takes over to improve reliability, otherwise the state won't approve the rate increases for all the reliability improvements. Utility leadership is incentivized to reliably provide power as a main goal.

All goes smoothly for about 50 years.

Then some rich MBAs determine electricity is a commodity just like pork bellies. Since this is Texas and we just know Businessmen are always better at managing than professional bureaucrats.

It can be bought in bulk and sold directly to the consumer much cheaper if we get rid of all those reliability rules those people in Bugtussle insisted on.

Get rid of those territory maps so Bugtussle can be free to choose and buy power brokered by Pixley Power.

Get rid of those pesky reliability hearings only the bureaucrats love.

So deregulation is voted in. But nobody pays attention because for 50 years power was taken for granted. And it's hard to understand. And our great Republican elected officials know best. Lots of expensive ads interrupting the game on Sunday tell us this change is good.
Except the Businessmen and their lobbyists. They paid attention, know the right guys in office, and made billions in profits.
You know the rest.

BrazosDog02 said:

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Ah…so if I lived in the SPP and that tanked for some reason, it's just a matter of picking up assistance from the ISO neighbors to the east and/or west?

Whereas ERCOT relies on…itself only.

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High Voltage AC can only be transmitted about 250-300 miles. So a Generator in Missouri is useless to Texas.
( yes HVDC can go farther but …,,)


The load on the grid is just a big electric brake. To keep the shaft exactly spinning at 60 hertz you either add more power when load increases or reduce power when load is reduced.
When you don't have any more power to add, you get rid of the load, you have to keep that shaft spinning at 60 hertz or in nine and a half minutes all the load turns off instantly.

All generators have an under frequency relay trip at 59.5 hertz with a 9.5 minute timer that protects the generator from an electromagnetic flux phase shift that catastrophically damages the generator. Makes a big boom and releases magic smoke.

In URI Feb 2021, the guys at ERCOT control center were halfway into the 9.5 minutes stripping sections of the grid rapidly. It's a complex process they did very well.

Think of the grid as a 5 giant loaded wagons with a connected hitch being pulled up a steep hill by hundreds of different size horses in a connected harness.

If the little horses directly in front of your wagon slip on ice, the extra big horses barely working in front of my wagon easily and instantly pull the extra weight.
If my extra big horses also start slipping you better start throwing load off the wagons fast or all five wagons are going to crash.

ERCOT is a big grid with lots of power plants. It worked extremely well when the Generation sources were all reliable and regulated utilities were held accountable in rate hearings for their reliability.
Deregulation did away with all those pesky structures and arcane rules.

You are my hero. Just to be clear, I appreciate the explanation in a huge way and thank you for obliging me. It makes a lot more sense and since this isn't my wheelhouse, perhaps that explanation would serve many as well as it did myself. Thanks again, and yes, I'm going to read both posts over again. I work with electricity in terms of what happens at the house, I mess with my generators and I understand 60hz but when I'm at home, as long as I meet my parameters , which my provider does very well, then how it gets to my house is out of sight and out of mind. As such, I've had little cause to question or understand why it works or how it gets there.

Thanks again and that was awesome.

BrazosDog02 said:

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You are my hero. Just to be clear, I appreciate the explanation in a huge way and thank you for obliging me. It makes a lot more sense and since this isn't my wheelhouse, perhaps that explanation would serve many as well as it did myself. Thanks again, and yes, I'm going to read both posts over again. I work with electricity in terms of what happens at the house, I mess with my generators and I understand 60hz but when I'm at home, as long as I meet my parameters , which my provider does very well, then how it gets to my house is out of sight and out of mind. As such, I've had little cause to question or understand why it works or how it gets there.

Thanks again and that was awesome.

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You're welcome. Just an Ag major that luckily stumbled into the Power business. Was a good career.