What went wrong is that the Texas legislature which owns Texas-specific grid process to avoid interference from the Feds didn't figure out how to also ensure Texas generator companies got compensated for weatherizing (and ensuring it was done).
How many of the 24+6 recommendations from the NERC/FERC review of last time this happened in Texas (hint:2011) were taken up by the legislature or those at ERCOT they delegated responsibility to or the power generation providers?
The eye opener to me from skimming the 2011 recommendations is that there was no explicit rating/SLA for a power plant's acceptable temperature operating that could be used by planners for assessing the risks of an upcoming weather event by policy planners. It'd seem pretty basic to be able to ask "How many plants do we lose when temperature drops below X"?
Dunno whether they fixed trying to create such a basic measurement for Texas plants, but it doesn't seem like it.
If you want to know some of the specifics about what "winterization" means in practice for a power plant including natural gas ones, you can read some of the details in that report. It's kinda interesting.
It is annoying when this sort of event happens and everyone starts deciding what they believe to be truth within 48 hours of the outage. It makes more sense to be talking about the 2011 outages in terms of what went wrong than the 2021 ones - because we have actual information on 2011 instead of "things went wrong!" now.
I want to thank you personally for injecting a PDF into the discussion, but also positively assert that it is not obvious what just happened this week. We don't yet know how many of the recommendations were ignored, what happened in the last decade regulator-wise or whether this round of failures are for the same or different reasons.
Speculation is much less useful than waiting a few months for the actual investigations. Emergencies are urgent, engineering (and political) decisions and assessments are never emergencies.
From an engineering standpoint, I agree that you want a true RCA and this event's RCA will be a bit different than 2011's. And this RCA (and its political consequences) will take time, doesn't need to be done right this minute, etc etc.
However, this problem is not at its root an engineering one; it is political. While the public attention is on this, we should point attention as close as possible to the most likely cause given the information we have at the time. It's bayesian truth and bayesian politics.
You'll note I didn't draw conclusions about which recommendations were ignored but having read through them all, there is no way they were all actually followed and we ended up where we are. I think some basics are fairly obvious. While some winterization perhaps was done, there is some degree of winterization that was never done; power plants in other states far north of us and colder than us are not having the same types of problems. Various professors in various cities in Texas who follow this stuff confirm this in various news outlets I haven't cited here. I also wouldn't be surprised if there was were issues with gas transport from wells through pipelines to plants that were noted in 2011 but much more severe this time due to even colder temps and unexpected by all. But still...
At the end of the day, Texas has optimized for cheap power and has not funded the work of reliable power. This is a political decision at the end of the day due to companies not paying for their externalities of poor service. I'm open to saying we shouldn't blame follower-type politicians who were scared of "raising electrical rates" and we should blame ourselves, but let's all acknowledge that some costs that weren't borne should have been borne and some oversight that should have occurred didn't occur. Is that so hard to concede at this early juncture?
This is meta/tangent, but I've had similar conversations a few times recently. Seems to be in the zeitgeist.
Re: everyone starts deciding what they believe to be truth within 48 hours of the outage.
Maybe, hopefully... the epidemic is humbling us. It's been significant and long lasting enough to rub our noses in whatever opinions we so brashly got behind too early. Professors and peasants alike. We're more likely to stop and say "I don't know."
The classic example of this is governments taking credit/blame for economic stuff. Low unemployment, high gdp, etc. Current government decisions are really unlikely to be affecting these, because stuff takes time. Meanwhile, short term data about the economy is both uncertain and fairly useless even if it wasn't. The whole thing is so disingenuous, yet I doubt there has ever been an democratic election where this wasn't a major factor.
Well, looking at the breakdown of electricity generation by energy source [0], it looks like energy generation fell by about 30% around the start of 2/15, with most of the losses being from coal and natural gas. And as Texas's grid is isolated from the the other eastern and western grids, they can't make up the difference. And reports indicate that it's because instrumentation in coal and natural gas plants has frozen, shutting them down.
It kind of feels like the problems are evident, and waiting for time to lull people back into complacency on the issue seems like it will just set up the next such disaster.
People aren't leaping to conclusions here, this isn't speculation. This has happened at least twice, and there were a bunch of clear recommendations from 2011 that weren't followed. The state government and other sources are already providing information on the current crisis and its causes.
I agree and have been feeling this more lately. You know this is already being politicized. Armchair investigators are suddenly becoming power grid experts. The complex reality of balancing a huge diverse power grid is becoming an “easy” problem - if only the evil other side had done what my media source and politician said they should!
It’s tricky - I also have a problem waiting months for a slow inefficient government agency to figure out how to cover their collective asses (or find the right scapegoat). I don’t think it’s unreasonable to make systems we can monitor, analyze and draw conclusions from much quicker.
There needs to be a happy medium- find the problems and “trust the experts” for sure, but do so without being so damn _loud_.
Since the Texas Legislature is in its once every two year session right now, and four million Texans are pissed off, it will be fun to see if new laws result this cycle.
Anecdote: All 7 developers in my Houston team (semi-geographically scattered in the city) lost power; half for >24 hrs (it's 10-25 degrees F here for the last 2-3 days).
Most lost water for some stretch of time and some still don't have it.
I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well.
(I haven't found clear findings on what determines whether your fireplace net-warms or net-cools your house in super-cold weather (by sucking heat out of adjacent rooms and pulling cool air from the outside and sending hot air up your chimney). Pointers welcome.)
> I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well.
American fireplaces in general are a joke. You are just spending way too much energy and not really storing it anywhere except the air around it. They are built to look good, not to actually heat anything properly.
Check any Nordic country, we don't have gas fireplaces nor do we have the silly tiny iron things you have. What we do have is stone fireplaces. [1]
How it works is this: You heat the multi-hundred kg stone mass using any material you want, for us it's usually wood in some form. After the stone is hot enough, you stop wasting wood and close the chimney when the fire has burned out to prevent heat from escaping.
The stone mass will store heat and distribute it slowly and evenly over many hours, keeping everyone warm without electricity. If you want to distribute it, there are fans that operate on the radiant heat coming from the fireplace. A properly installed fireplace (central to the house) will keep a normal home toasty warm for a day or two with one proper heating cycle depending on how cold it's outside.
In 1996 (or thereabouts), I lived in Maryland, and my family lost power for 6 days due to a snow/ice storm that took out a ton of power lines (water froze on them and the added weight pulled them down). We had no natural gas service, and our running water was provided by a well in the backyard that had an electric pump. So no electricity, heat, or running water for 6 days in ~20-30°F weather. (Fortunately we'd prepared by buying many gallons of drinking water, and filling up bathtubs and buckets with water earlier in the week.)
We had two fireplaces in the house, one each in the living room and master bedroom, so we kept all doors closed and all slept in the master bedroom. They did a decent enough job keeping us somewhat comfortable while wearing several layers and winter coats at all times, and sleeping in sleeping bags and with extra blankets. (An oddity of our house was that the chimney ran through the middle of it, not outside an exterior wall, so even some of the heat going up it would warm the house a bit.)
After 4 days my dad felt the roads were clear enough for us to go to a motel where we could shower and experience some heat. Going back to the house after that (before power was restored) was in some ways worse than enduring the first 4 days.
Granted, the reason for that outage was very different from what happened in Texas, but I just wanted to highlight that our power grid everywhere is still very susceptible to bad weather. (Well, ok, this story is 25 years old, but I suspect things haven't changed all that much.)
We had an incident early this AM and of the eight people we paged, only one had power. I’ve been without power, heat, internet, water, or septic more than 90 minutes at a time for two days. My house was 44 degrees this morning when I woke up. Sunday night we were without power or heat for seven and a half hours. Our DR plan didn’t really account for all of our staff being on the same power grid!
I've been out of power since Sunday night. Water out since yesterday. I'm on the seventh floor too. Most of my friends are in even worse situation. I'm a paranoid near doomsday prepped and my batteries are still low.
Walking out of my apartment is indistinguishable from an apocalypse. The emergency system batteries died days ago. Police don't come. The roads are pure ice. Nothing is open. All essential supplies are sold out. Fire systems are all disabled because pipes have burst. Elevators have been gone for a long time. Without a flashlight you might as well be in a cave.
Gas furnaces need power for the circuitry & blower.
My experience with fireplaces is that the house winds up net-colder, but you can warm yourself with radiant heat while it burns. Freestanding wood stoves on the other hand are very capable of warming a large space.
I have seen some fireplaces in US (I am from Poland) and outside of northern states they are all decorative pieces not designed to heat the home.
A good fireplace is completely closed (yes! no fire visible!) and is built to recover and store as much heat as possible.
* the fireplace must be enclosed completely so that it is possible to regulate amount of air going inside and especially to close it completely and SAFELY when you go to sleep. You need to close it so that it does not suck air out of your house. The fireplace stores heat but it does not make any sense if, once it burns out, the air takes all that stored heat out.
* the hot gasses go through a complicated tunnel (not directly into chimney) to heat up a large amount of bricks made from material that has high energy capacity. That's why here in Europe we don't tell silly stories about Santa coming through the chimney, because that would be totally ridiculous. He could just as well be coming through water pipes, it is just as accessible.
* the fireplace is built on a steel bed so that you can easily take out the ash WHILE it is burning. Also, it supplies the fire from beneath which makes for much better heating.
* traditionally, if you made effort to keep fire on throughout the day, you want to make as much use of it as possible. That's why you will see these frequently performing multiple functions: separate space for oven, large top to be able to heat multitude of things, maybe even place to sleep (that especially in really cold climate in Russia, in Poland much less popular).
Here are pictures of traditional fireplaces you could expect to heat well:
The first one is something you would expect heating the kitchen and the main/dining room and provide most of the heating for the house throughout the day.
The second one is something to put in individual rooms that are too far from the kitchen. It is easy to light it up and it heats extremely quickly but also stores absolutely no heat.
>Most lost water for some stretch of time and some still don't have it.
This is extremely problematic. Power going out for periods of time less than 48 hours is one thing, losing water from the utility is a problem 3rd world countries have. You sure these people's pipes didn't simply freeze.
>I don't think any lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well.
I'm curious how they didn't lose heat. Any furnace built in the last 30 years, even gas, has an electronic control board in order to ensure it doesn't accidentally turn on the gas without a functioning pilot light and/or heating element (which would blow up your house).
No electricity = no heat, regardless of natural gas supply.
I've got about a dozen coworkers in Texas, they've all been without power (which means no heat) for two days now. The power comes on long enough to at least warm their houses up to 50ish degrees before dropping back out so they're not completely screwed but I know they're scared.
at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well.
I have a gas fireplace, it's vented to the outside through a chimney.
If you sit right in front of it, you can feel a little radiant heat, but the true warmth comes from the electric fan that circulates air through the firebox that's heated from the gas flames. I'd always figured that if there was an extended power failure, I'd set up a 5V fan from my computer to blow air through the the fireplace.
Some gas fireplaces are "direct vent", which means that they vent the exhaust right into the room. I'd never trust one of those not to fill the room with Carbon Monoxide.
> I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well.
I believe fireplaces in Texas are for decoration. I live in a relatively new house in North Dallas, read open floor plan, and turning on the fireplace make absolutely no difference.
We managed to turn it on by replacing the igniter batteries and turned it back off after an hour because you don't get any heat unless you sit within 1 feet of it.
A "decorative" residential fireplace typically won't do much to provide real heat. If you want something that will make a difference it is usually going to be a sealed unit or something a little more purpose-built. Still, when you compare the burner in the average small fireplace to what you have in a typical furnace, it becomes clear pretty quickly that a fireplace is not likely to be a heat source of much merit, and even if it did have a decent BTU output, it's unlikely to be evenly distributed around the house.
tl;dr - a typical residential fireplace isn't an alternative to a furnace.
Re fireplace - check out a ventless system. They can change existing burner and logs with ventless which gives you lots of heat that a vented system won't. Can get a decent one for 600-1200 bucks.
My brother's house is currently 38°. Inside. Also, gas is not useful for a central, forced air system because it depends on the electric motor driving the blower.
For natural gas you want a sealed one so effluent goes up the chimney but the heat radiates through the glass. But heat rises so you create convection. I think a fireplace is an 80% loss so for $10 spent you get $2 heat.
Parts 15 and 16 of that PDF are, in polished up polite speak, particularly scathing in terms of what's being recommended.
The summary is: Regularly inspect and maintain your equipment, here are the obvious things that must be done. (Unstated: We feel a need to say this, because obviously it didn't happen in at least one place...)
Probably got cut by the bean counters and a cut-throat market that didn't require safety and availability as considerations.
Yes I agree state's legislatures did not prepare. But maybe that shows why a body of politicians is not prepped for engineering nuances. Maybe they should have adequately applied leverage to the power companies to "push" them to better practices rather than trying to fine and inspect and regulate which is an inherently "pulling" option which the companies will always try to weasel out of.
This argument to incentivize rather than punish applies to many issues with legislative bodies across all complex industries like Big Tech and other Engineering fields. You pass a law that drinking water cannot have over 10ppm of XXX carcinogen? There is most likely going to be 9.99ppm because that's the bare minimum.
> Yes I agree state's legislatures did not prepare. But maybe that shows why a body of politicians is not prepped for engineering nuances.
The problem is that Texas is an outlier. Other governments, broadly, get this right. Those FERC recommendations mentioned upthread? They're the work of the government (hell, NERC is even a multinational globalist thing). That argues less that "governments are bad" than it does for "THIS government was bad".
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different outcome. When another option works and the current implementation fails, then it's time to change to the workable option.
Can you clarify what the distinction is that you see here? Ultimately, whether it's fines/regulations ("stick") or bonuses/incentives ("carrot"), you're still going to have a bunch of budget-focused politicians pulling the levers.
Their incentive structure rewards short term budget savings at the expense of long term preparedness. The real fix is to have a non-partisan body staffed by actual engineers setting this kind of policy, isn't it?
The legislature could have done something, but the private utility companies could have also decided to provide a quality, reliable product. In the old days they may have considered it their civic duty. This is just another example of why private utility monopolies don’t work.
They did that in the old days because the public utility commission wielded a big stick. Companies only understand punishment when delivering a commodity service. Power companies care about the dividend.
In my experience running capital projects, you get performance by paying modest performance bonuses and assessing tough penalties for non-performance.
Est. 1970 just in case of unreliability (for utility shareholders), not much of a factor until recently. Given more leeway to disappoint consumers after 2002.
Up until 1995, under the HL&P monopoly the first 675 kWh remained extremely low cost for residential consumers as had been agreed with PUC to allow jacking up further residential kWh, and business accounts, into rates beyond the reach of low-income households. Check your old bills.
Of course 675 kWh is not enough for air conditioning but otherwise a small household could remain within that tier if they could conserve effectively, and had gas heat for the normally mild winters. As soon as deregulation started, HL&P then began the agressive promotion of new plans to all their established customers, similar to the limited number of newly allowed competitors where giving a break for the first bunch of kWh was no longer required. For a while there it was still required for HL&P consumers who had not opted out of their 1980's plan, but they made whatever straight-rate deals were necessary to get this info off of people's bills ASAP.
Headed us in the current direction starting in 2002.
New company Centerpoint took over the energy delivery infrastructure. Transmission assets from HL&P and others, delivery pipelines from gas suppliers, all of it.
As the name implies, pay no attention to a central point of failure. Nothing to see here.
By 1983 in the other most air-conditioned state, FPL the Florida state monopoly in a number of power plants was consuming the same grade of fuel oil as the Houston monopoly. A fuel oil vessel could be loaded from a Houston refinery, and with freight to FL the consumers there were paying half the price as in Houston using the same fuel without the added cost of sea freight.
7. As we have seen, Gov. Abbot has never been good enough for Texas, Lt. Gov. Patrick experienced his high point as a failed sports announcer, and Atty. Gen Paxton has only enough integrity for an uninhabited island.
Don't get me started on the equally compromised Ex. Rep. DeLay who in 2002 became US House Majority "Leader". Left in disgrace over lack of ethics himself.
Forgot to mention the 27-story Houston Public Works building downtown which was built in the 1960's by HL&P still has the nicely air-conditioned parking garage.
No garage doors to keep the cold air in since it didn't really matter to the power company.
No mayor has ever wanted citizens to be very aware of that since the city took over the building in 1999.
Dumping a political talking point like '20% more' without anything analytic to support it is just trash posting.
Interconnect with neighbour grids does not cost 20% more, AC or DC. In fact the huge peaking capability of a state with ~50% gas generation would generate revenue supplying peak demand and variations in renewable supply.
Pricing systems (i.e. market rules) that encourage reliability doesn't automatically lead to gold plating.
The customers unfortunate enough to have signed up for spot pricing are paying 200x more than before. One week of that is enough to erase two decades of 20% savings.
We always get told that <important thing> will result in massive price increases for the customer, even though in practice it's not always true. For example, we're told raising the minimum wage above where it's been for decades will make everything cost absurd amounts, even though there are many cities in the US with a $15/hr minimum wage and prices there aren't much higher than the ones with minimum wages in the $8/hr range.
It certainly could raise your electrical costs by 20% for weatherization, but there's nothing stopping the utility from raising your costs for any other reason. If weatherization doesn't completely eat into their profit margins, they don't HAVE to raise prices at all. The government could also fund it as a one-time expense.
After experiencing that event? I think so. A lot of people on both sides of the political spectrum are very pissed right now. The state of Texas and its Republican rulers have been embarrassed in a big way, as the sham that is “free market” has been revealed for all to see.
Exactly the same thing happened in South Australia in 2016
1) Renewables % of generation mix grows (wind + solar)
2) Base generation sources get pushed out by economics and regulation (coal)
3) Peak generation sources get squeezed by the economics of wind + solar over summer (lots of wind, lots of sun) and begin to be relegated to backup roles
4) Something bad happens (in SA it was software misconfiguration across multiple wind generation sources)
5) The backup generation gets used for the first time, suprise suprise it doesnt work
Sorry, but no. A 2011 FERC report cited problems in Texas gas/coal/nuke plants for failing to weatherize. They didn't fix the problems, and gas and sensing lines froze, taking gas/coal plants offline too.
2/3rds of the power that went offline from the storm was fossil.
Moreover, Texas's independent grid (not connected to the rest of the US) makes it difficult for them to import power from neighboring states.
Stop trying to push political tribalist stories that blame renewables for bog standard failures in traditional systems that could have been avoided.
Yeah, but none of that appears to actually be what happened.
Renewables are down from their peak capacity in Texas, but they're actually performing above what the grid thought they'd do. So it's not like ERCOT got caught with their pants down when it comes to renewable generation.
Instead the issue appears to be that thermal (gas, coal, and nuclear) plants all over Texas are failing in the face of cold weather, and because Texas has its own grid it can't shift enough power from nearby states in order to cover the demand.
And it's not like these plants were off and everyone is surprised that they didn't turn on; Texas gets most of its power from natural gas most of the time. More to the point cold weather specific recommendations from back in 2011 weren't followed with sadly predictable consequences.
Dallas suburb here (Las Colinas). No power since Monday 6am. I had to get room at holiday inn. I actually got the room yesterday, but the hotel lost power after an hour, so I had to go back home and sleep in 5 degree apartment.
Don't believe anything you read about "rolling outages". It's only rolling, if you define that as "out until it's not freezing anymore".
Houston right now, haven't had power, nor water since yesterday. My room is sitting at 20ish degrees and has been all day. I've quite literally been snug under a load of blankets with my wife all day just to stay warm.
My office back in Dallas which is not normally open offered to let people stay the night since they happen to be on the same grid as a hospital and I seriously considered trying to make it there today
Note to readers: If you're not from the US and confused about the 20 degrees (I was), note that it is Farhenheit and not Celsius! So around -6°C, which is of course very cold!
(edit: when you're on the internet, better to specify which unit you use, your audience is international)
20F / -6C indoors? Canadian here, mind blown a little. Are homes in Texas not insulated? They must be, you have really hot summers and run AC all the time..
Hope your power came back already. If not / or for another time: candles are great for heating a single room. Small, safe, but they make a difference.
What? That’s way below freezing and totally unsafe. Why don’t you sleep in your car? (WARNING: Make sure your exhaust is uncovered and you’re not in your shed)
I'm wondering how rolling outages on the proposed schedules were supposed to work in this situation.
If they gave everyone power 50% of the time, everyone would crank everything they have to the max during those periods to get some heat into their buildings. Unless their total ability to consume energy is less than 2x their average consumption, it's not going to help.
To have any effect on overall power consumption, they first have to overcome this effect, and reduce power availability so people can't just shift the load.
Depending on creativity (if you have an electric tumble dryer... that's a fan heater), I bet many people could easily 10x their average power consumption.
If I had power for a short period of time and cold was an issue, I'd be dumping ~10 kW into water immediately (the only energy storage I can improvise on short notice).
You are right if they were trying to reduce load 50%, that's basically impossible
for the reasons you mention. They were only trying to get it down 20% and it might have worked if they could have effectively rolled the blackouts. A lot of people have natural gas heat. It doesn't work when the power is out (no ignition, no thermostat, and no fan), but doesn't put a huge load on the electric grid when it is on. For a well insulated house, you are probably running the heat for much less than 50% of the day. We run on average 6-8 hours in the winter. A rolling blackout where power was off for 1 hour, on for 2 would have exceeded their target savings, and shouldn't have affected heating or demand.
I wonder why it is not possible to reduce the max amount of power each house can draw by 50% instead of doing blackouts. In Italy houses have remotely controlled meters, if you change contract and have a different power allowance your meter gets reporgrammed without the need of an operator on site. This would force people to consume less power to avoid automatic detachment, while still not leaving them completely in the cold.
Don't they have any kind of smart meter in Texas? Maybe reprogramming them is a slow operation that cannot be done to almost every meter in a short timespan?
I was out for 17 hours from yesterday to mid afternoon today. Slept through the 0deg weather without power and yet still kept the house at 43deg internally without a heat source.
Here is our simi-successful attempt to survive.
* boarded up all the windows and doors with sheets, curtains, and heavy drop clothes
* limit going outside to fewest essential trips
* close all bedrooms and abandon them. All pets and occupants sleep in close proximity in a common area
* we have lots of sleeping bags and mink blankets. It’s more about layers
As a Canadian, a few more tips: keep kitchen and bathroom cabinet doors open. To keep water pipes from freezing. They are trouble if they freeze, expand, crack, and then when thaw - start leaking. (Empty toilets if risk of freezing.)(add glycol if you have it, in bowl.)
Also can trickle water from the taps - moving water sure but freeze so fast as still water.
Blankets, in doorways, hallways, Windows - keep warmth in room where you need it.
Rolling outages are when they've got enough power for some neighborhoods, but not all of them. Texas is so short of power right now that they've dropped power everywhere they can, excepting only certain critical facilities (hospitals, police), and continued operation of the grid itself -- a totally cold restart, they say, could take weeks.
Yeah, "rolling outages" is a joke. I went 19 hours without power in GP&L territory yesterday and portions of my house were down below 40F when I went to bed around 9 PM last night. They finally decided to restore power in my neighborhood at 4 AM this morning.
Austin here, staying at a colleague’s place who’s in an over-55 community on the hospital grid (unlikely to be taken down).
Agreed that they’re misusing “rolling outages”. We got an hour of power a day for the last two days and don’t foresee getting even an hour today. I don’t know who they think they’re fooling because everyone here knows exactly that these outages aren’t rolling and is out for ERCOT blood.
My guess why we keep seeing rolling blackouts mentioned is that ERCOT has three alert levels, and the way you would typically deal with number three is with rolling blackouts, so that has become the term everyone uses.
Also, it's up to the power distributors in different cities to cut in the ways that they can. Some are doing rolling blackouts, and others (like mine...) aren't.
You realize ERCOT doesn't specify how rolling outages are implemented, right? That's up to the generating utility/transmission network. Ift you're not getting what you think you should, point your frustration where it belongs at least.
That's terrible. I'm in Driftwood and a touch rural and we've had no hits. The subdivisions up the road have not been doing very well either. Bang for you buck with power probably has them focused on the higher density locations. Stay safe and stay warm. Glad you got some place better for now.
A survival game 'The Long Dark' might be handy to learn how to keep warm. You dont need external heaters, just lots of layers and food, your body is a heat engine.
I'm in Dallas too. What we did was pull out our generator that runs on propane then run an extension cord from the garage to inside the house connected to an electric heater. Close the bedroom door. We were about 75 degrees.
You are crazy to not have a backup generator! It is an essential item to have!
Until recently, I've mostly lived in apartments or condos where a backup generator is not easy to own or operate since there are limited places to store fuel or to put a generator while running. Even if I'm ok with putting it on the balcony and running a cord inside, my neighbor may not want the generator's exhaust in his balcony.
Now I live in a single-family home and have an entire RV parked beside the house (with an on-board generator, and around 100 hours of fuel in the RV's gas tank to run it). I can run an extension cord to power the house furnace as needed, but unless it was below freezing and I was worried about the pipes freezing in the house, I'd probably just let the house stay dark and move into the RV during an extended power outage.
So I can confidently say "You are crazy to not have a backup Recreational Vehicle!". Maybe I should buy a travel trailer to back up the RV.
I hope I'm reading that wrong and you're not saying you actually have the generator in the garage (unless that garage isn't connected to the house), that's a good way to kill your entire family.
Not sure by your comment where exactly you've located your generator, but as a PSA:
Do not run a propane generator in or near your garage if it's attached to your home, since there's a serious risk of CO poisoning. It should be located as far away from the house as possible and away from windows and doors.
Prefarably at least 20 meters, especially if it is a gas-powered generator (OP mentioned theirs is propane, which is not quite as dangerous as gasoline).
Edit: I hope you have battery powered CO detectors on each floor and near the bedroom.
My pets are cold and miserable like us but I don't think they're in any danger of injury. They have thick coats and blankets which go pretty far inside.
The result was "an electrical island in the United States," Bill Magness, CEO of ERCOT, said. "That independence has been jealously guarded, I think both by policy makers and the industry."
This current problems wouldn’t be fixed if Texas wasn’t on its own grid. The Texas grid does have connections to the other grids, and even right now is importing power from both the East and West interconnections.
The problem is that this is a truly regional event and not just isolated to Texas. The entire central US is struggling right now. The SPP (which manages electricity for Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arkansas, and other states) has been struggling with forced blackouts over the last several days as well. They don’t have enough power for their own grid, let alone enough to share with Texas.
If Texas was more interconnected with the SPP, the end result wouldn’t be Texans all having their problems solved. Many Texans would still be without power, but so would many more Oklahomans. The fact that the Texas grid is separate is the only thing keeping OK from having even worse blackouts. Which makes sense, because the entire point of grid isolation is to keep issues localized and not cascade over the entire network. And that’s working to Oklahoma’s benefit right now, but Texas is getting the short end of the stick.
This is not correct. Because the Texas grid is isolated, the frequency is not synced with the two other major grids and cannot import electricity at any meaningful capacity. (See http://fnetpublic.utk.edu/frequencymap.html)
Frequency conversion is a costly and difficult to scale problem. If Texas was part of the Western grid they could be drawing excess hydroelectric power from the pacific northwest right now for example. Texas also could have contributed to help the California power shortages last year.
FYI the Texas grid runs on a different frequency than the other two grids and as a result incurs MASSIVE efficiency penalties for that hubris. If I recall correctly it has to be converted from AC to DC then back to Texas’ AC.
I tried to say the same above. When the entire south is low on capacity, being fully AC interconnected probably doesn't help much even if the DC ties had more capacity.
A few limited connections are not sufficient to fully take advantage of all areas of the country where there may be extra capacity. It wouldn't solve the problem, but would have helped. Oklahoma for example has been able to stop rolling blackouts. Texas is still deep in this.
Texas does have connections to other grids. But the problem is that since the grid frequencies aren't synchronized, you can't just plug one into the other.
Transferring energy between grids requires either converting it from AC to high-voltage DC and back using solid-state electronics, or converting it via mechanical energy using a variable-frequency transformer. With either approach, you need bulky and expensive equipment in proportion to how much power you want to handle. These connections are designed to smooth out (and profit from) short-term capacity fluctuations, not to power the entire state.
Currently, the Texas grid has two DC ties operating at full capacity and drawing about 800MW from the Southwest Power Pool. But that's a drop in the bucket compared to the ~45GW of current demand, or the estimated 70-80GW of demand that would be likely if it weren't for the outages.
TX grid is connected via HVDC, but keep in mind that even if it was "fully" connected there is no hope in hell it would be much better. There wouldn't be enough transmission to transfer 40GW+ from the East or West coast grids to TX. It's an enormous amount of power to go offline. I don't think California for instance has more than 10GW of transmission north to south.
Basically, no amount of grid infrastructure can really help you much when you lose 50%+ of generation capacity on your highest demand days in history.
> Even today, ERCOT is also not completely isolated from other grids — as was evident when the state imported some power from Mexico during the rolling blackouts of 2011. ERCOT has three ties to Mexico and — as an outcome of the "Midnight Connection" battle — it also has two ties to the eastern U.S. grid, though they do not trigger federal regulation for ERCOT. All can move power commercially as well as be used in emergencies, according to ERCOT spokeswoman Dottie Roark. A possible sixth interconnection project, in Rusk County, is being studied, and another ambitious proposal, called Tres Amigas, would link the three big U.S. grids together in New Mexico, though Texas' top utility regulator has shown little enthusiasm for participating.
For the pedantic TX does have connections to other grids but the capacity is so low that it wouldn't have mitigated this event and is under whatever threshold is set for federal oversight.
It would be independent from a practical point of view but from a regulatory one it would become subject to federal regulations, which is the real reason Texas keeps theirs separate.
> Running your own grid seems cool Texas style, until you have a regional problem and have no where to turn.
This cuts both ways, and most of the rest country is often a benefactor - many US/NA companies (and I'm assuming govt/military) have a 3rd DR location on the TX grid precisely because it provides an additional point of redundancy. TX also wasn't impacted by CA mismanagement of it's grid, for example..
I echo the sentiment that federation (in most things) isn't itself a bad thing. It just happens that in the case of electrical reliability, ERCOT has been the root of these issues, given their warnings from years ago.
Currently in ATX we haven't had power for over 24 hours, wood fireplace is saving the house from completely freezing but the whole city of Austin needs to evaluate how they setup their critical infrastructure to allow for rolling blackouts instead of having parts of the city with power and parts without for the entirety of an outage.
Rolling outages work when you need to shed 1% of your load, not when you need to shed 80% of it. If Austin is down to critical loads only (hospitals or whatever) there may not be anything left to rotate.
There are non-critical loads all over that were never interrupted (my neighborhood, north edge of ATX). It's pretty arbitrary.
Even worse: for about the first 24h there were (largely uninhabited!) commercial buildings all over the place that were fully lit up. We're talking skyscrapers. Even some unfinished skyscrapers. I think they've finally begun to address those. The charitable interpretation is that it was simply a massive failure of coordination.
Unfortunately Austin has not done a very good job of designing it's grid. There are many sectors which can't be rotated as they contain one or more critical services, even as they also contain many consumers who are not critical. This means that instead of being able to rotate amoungst the ~80% of non-critical power users, they are only able to shut down about 45% of the power.
Unfortunately in a situation like this that means that 45% have remained off for the past 48 hours (no rotation is possible), while many empty buildings are fully illuminated. It is a technological failure of their ability to shut down specific power users.
True crtical loads have backup generators up to this task, or the maintenance people should be fired for incompetence. Though they could get a break for some failures of the system, but only a handful statewide
I had my wood fireplace going for the first time this weekend when the daytime temperatures were around -12F. It can easily raise the temperature of my living room, dining room & kitchen (one open space) to 80+ but that's with electricity to power the circulation fan.
How are you keeping the whole house warm if you can't circulate the air? I'm genuinely curious.
There's some old school technology to solve that problem. For example, I stayed in a friend's ancient family home in Maine that simply had a bedroom over the living room wood stove, and an open vent between the two floors to let the heat through. There are also non-electric fans to help distribute heat from a wood stove.
From personal experience, a heat-powered fan helps a lot. I used one when I lived in a Franklin-stove-heated cabin in Montana, and while you wouldn't mistake its power for an electric fan, it more than did the job.
Because of what happened in Texas, the higher demand of gas affected electricity generation in Northern Mexico which has been without electricity too. As as I understand it, not only the price of Gas wet up 5,000% but also there were shortages.
The federal government has started doing electricity cuts in most Mexico to control the gas reserves and distribute energy to the Northern states.
Mexico is smart though because they have LNG import terminals. There is an incoming LNG carrier coming in less than 24 hours which will restore their power.
In an apartment in Austin 78702. 47 F / 8 C inside, 22 / -6 outside.
Power out for 2 days now, while west across I-35 has always had power. There's some baloney they're feeding us about "complicated critical loads" while huge swats of hotels and office buildings have power (I can see from north to south since my unit overhangs the frontage and has windows all over, and elevated enough to see over I-35). My fridge food is in a cardboard box outside with a shower curtain liner around it.
Water still working, and there are no plans according to the water company to interrupt service. There's no hot water (which IIRC, condemns a building) because the apartment's water heater needs electricity.
I'm out of battery bank capacity and might have to leave the area. Appears it will go on until Friday or Saturday, so 5-6 days total.
It is surprising that windfarms are freezing. Here in Quebec, we have windfarms that have more than 6 months a year of snow and temperatures much below the freezing point. How can they freeze? they dont use water or gaz or oil.
It is only a fan and dynamo. Did water seep inside and freeze it?
Same reason why the coal and gas plants froze, and pipes are bursting in apparemment buildings, and houses are unable to retain any heat: cheaping out.
Since cold is a rare event, Texans figure they can save a penny by making nothing cold-resistant, then skimp on maintenance, all while bragging they have the cheapest rates of the country.
Natural gas doesnt really freeze, so something else is going on here.
Misleading text in linked article:
"We didn’t run out of natural gas, but we ran out of the ability to get natural gas. Pipelines in Texas don’t use cold insulation – so things were freezing."
Wind turbines have not been the issue here in Texas. They've been delivering more power than expected, despite some of them freezing. The problem is with natural gas/coal plants.
That said, yes, we don't use lubricant for super-cold weather, because we don't normally have super-cold weather. So we use cheaper stuff that is suited for our normal climate, where heat is usually a bigger problem than cold. It's been ten years since the last time it would have been important, and 12 years before that.
I've read that ice can build up on the blades and impede function, just like on airplane wings, and that de-icing mechanisms exist but it's likely they simply didn't spend the money on them because nobody thought they'd ever be needed in Texas.
Quebec has the “winter package” on the wind turbines Texas does not. Keep in mind, these conditions are almost unheard of in Texas and the infrastructure just isn’t designed for it. Like when it’s 95F in Chicago for a week and all hell breaks loose. Different regions are geared for the norms of their climate.
Different choice of lubricants? I have no idea really, I also read they have wind power generation in Antarctica so its not a fundamental problem just a result of certain design/engineering choices.
> just a result of certain design/engineering choices
I think this is the point. Things are engineered for the environment which they are expected to operate, and to be optimized for those environments[0]. I would not expect a wind turbine that operates (and is designed to operate) in Antartica to not fail (potentially catestrophically) when operating in 100 degree Texas heat,
[0] One could (and should) argue that these systems should take climate change and more extreme weather events into account, but that is a political problem more-so than an engineering problem.
If you hunt around a little you will find info on the cold weather packages for wind turbines. Easiest for me to find was info about GE's 'Cold Weather Extreme' package for some of their mid-sized commercial turbines. You are looking at different lubricants, heating systems that use parasitic load on the turbine to warm joints and other critical points of the structure, and systems to prevent icing on the blades.
A nuclear plant stopped generating because the turbine froze; components were exposed to open air because Texas doesn't normally get that cold.
People built to a certain set of assumptions, with an implicit risk, and the risks came due. The only way to avoid another event like this would be to make the generation more resilient to extreme cold, which will cost more.
I would assume they use different technology for different climates, or use different maintenance regimes, or simply their operating procedures have different parameters. (that is to say, it might be "safe" to operate them, but they're not "allowed" to). But those are all just guesses.
Readit News
How many of the 24+6 recommendations from the NERC/FERC review of last time this happened in Texas (hint:2011) were taken up by the legislature or those at ERCOT they delegated responsibility to or the power generation providers?
https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/ColdWeatherTrainingMaterials/...
The eye opener to me from skimming the 2011 recommendations is that there was no explicit rating/SLA for a power plant's acceptable temperature operating that could be used by planners for assessing the risks of an upcoming weather event by policy planners. It'd seem pretty basic to be able to ask "How many plants do we lose when temperature drops below X"? Dunno whether they fixed trying to create such a basic measurement for Texas plants, but it doesn't seem like it.
If you want to know some of the specifics about what "winterization" means in practice for a power plant including natural gas ones, you can read some of the details in that report. It's kinda interesting.
I want to thank you personally for injecting a PDF into the discussion, but also positively assert that it is not obvious what just happened this week. We don't yet know how many of the recommendations were ignored, what happened in the last decade regulator-wise or whether this round of failures are for the same or different reasons.
Speculation is much less useful than waiting a few months for the actual investigations. Emergencies are urgent, engineering (and political) decisions and assessments are never emergencies.
However, this problem is not at its root an engineering one; it is political. While the public attention is on this, we should point attention as close as possible to the most likely cause given the information we have at the time. It's bayesian truth and bayesian politics.
You'll note I didn't draw conclusions about which recommendations were ignored but having read through them all, there is no way they were all actually followed and we ended up where we are. I think some basics are fairly obvious. While some winterization perhaps was done, there is some degree of winterization that was never done; power plants in other states far north of us and colder than us are not having the same types of problems. Various professors in various cities in Texas who follow this stuff confirm this in various news outlets I haven't cited here. I also wouldn't be surprised if there was were issues with gas transport from wells through pipelines to plants that were noted in 2011 but much more severe this time due to even colder temps and unexpected by all. But still...
At the end of the day, Texas has optimized for cheap power and has not funded the work of reliable power. This is a political decision at the end of the day due to companies not paying for their externalities of poor service. I'm open to saying we shouldn't blame follower-type politicians who were scared of "raising electrical rates" and we should blame ourselves, but let's all acknowledge that some costs that weren't borne should have been borne and some oversight that should have occurred didn't occur. Is that so hard to concede at this early juncture?
Re: everyone starts deciding what they believe to be truth within 48 hours of the outage.
Maybe, hopefully... the epidemic is humbling us. It's been significant and long lasting enough to rub our noses in whatever opinions we so brashly got behind too early. Professors and peasants alike. We're more likely to stop and say "I don't know."
The classic example of this is governments taking credit/blame for economic stuff. Low unemployment, high gdp, etc. Current government decisions are really unlikely to be affecting these, because stuff takes time. Meanwhile, short term data about the economy is both uncertain and fairly useless even if it wasn't. The whole thing is so disingenuous, yet I doubt there has ever been an democratic election where this wasn't a major factor.
It kind of feels like the problems are evident, and waiting for time to lull people back into complacency on the issue seems like it will just set up the next such disaster.
[0] https://twitter.com/MikeZaccardi/status/1362038182234251267?...
It’s tricky - I also have a problem waiting months for a slow inefficient government agency to figure out how to cover their collective asses (or find the right scapegoat). I don’t think it’s unreasonable to make systems we can monitor, analyze and draw conclusions from much quicker.
There needs to be a happy medium- find the problems and “trust the experts” for sure, but do so without being so damn _loud_.
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Most lost water for some stretch of time and some still don't have it.
I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well.
(I haven't found clear findings on what determines whether your fireplace net-warms or net-cools your house in super-cold weather (by sucking heat out of adjacent rooms and pulling cool air from the outside and sending hot air up your chimney). Pointers welcome.)
American fireplaces in general are a joke. You are just spending way too much energy and not really storing it anywhere except the air around it. They are built to look good, not to actually heat anything properly.
Check any Nordic country, we don't have gas fireplaces nor do we have the silly tiny iron things you have. What we do have is stone fireplaces. [1]
How it works is this: You heat the multi-hundred kg stone mass using any material you want, for us it's usually wood in some form. After the stone is hot enough, you stop wasting wood and close the chimney when the fire has burned out to prevent heat from escaping.
The stone mass will store heat and distribute it slowly and evenly over many hours, keeping everyone warm without electricity. If you want to distribute it, there are fans that operate on the radiant heat coming from the fireplace. A properly installed fireplace (central to the house) will keep a normal home toasty warm for a day or two with one proper heating cycle depending on how cold it's outside.
[1] https://www.tulikivi.com/en
We had two fireplaces in the house, one each in the living room and master bedroom, so we kept all doors closed and all slept in the master bedroom. They did a decent enough job keeping us somewhat comfortable while wearing several layers and winter coats at all times, and sleeping in sleeping bags and with extra blankets. (An oddity of our house was that the chimney ran through the middle of it, not outside an exterior wall, so even some of the heat going up it would warm the house a bit.)
After 4 days my dad felt the roads were clear enough for us to go to a motel where we could shower and experience some heat. Going back to the house after that (before power was restored) was in some ways worse than enduring the first 4 days.
Granted, the reason for that outage was very different from what happened in Texas, but I just wanted to highlight that our power grid everywhere is still very susceptible to bad weather. (Well, ok, this story is 25 years old, but I suspect things haven't changed all that much.)
Walking out of my apartment is indistinguishable from an apocalypse. The emergency system batteries died days ago. Police don't come. The roads are pure ice. Nothing is open. All essential supplies are sold out. Fire systems are all disabled because pipes have burst. Elevators have been gone for a long time. Without a flashlight you might as well be in a cave.
Pray for us. People are going to die
My experience with fireplaces is that the house winds up net-colder, but you can warm yourself with radiant heat while it burns. Freestanding wood stoves on the other hand are very capable of warming a large space.
A good fireplace is completely closed (yes! no fire visible!) and is built to recover and store as much heat as possible.
* the fireplace must be enclosed completely so that it is possible to regulate amount of air going inside and especially to close it completely and SAFELY when you go to sleep. You need to close it so that it does not suck air out of your house. The fireplace stores heat but it does not make any sense if, once it burns out, the air takes all that stored heat out.
* the hot gasses go through a complicated tunnel (not directly into chimney) to heat up a large amount of bricks made from material that has high energy capacity. That's why here in Europe we don't tell silly stories about Santa coming through the chimney, because that would be totally ridiculous. He could just as well be coming through water pipes, it is just as accessible.
* the fireplace is built on a steel bed so that you can easily take out the ash WHILE it is burning. Also, it supplies the fire from beneath which makes for much better heating.
* traditionally, if you made effort to keep fire on throughout the day, you want to make as much use of it as possible. That's why you will see these frequently performing multiple functions: separate space for oven, large top to be able to heat multitude of things, maybe even place to sleep (that especially in really cold climate in Russia, in Poland much less popular).
Here are pictures of traditional fireplaces you could expect to heat well:
https://images.app.goo.gl/Ka9uiuNTU3LxMHqa6
https://images.app.goo.gl/rWrvoqGxzcJHC5P77
The first one is something you would expect heating the kitchen and the main/dining room and provide most of the heating for the house throughout the day.
The second one is something to put in individual rooms that are too far from the kitchen. It is easy to light it up and it heats extremely quickly but also stores absolutely no heat.
This is extremely problematic. Power going out for periods of time less than 48 hours is one thing, losing water from the utility is a problem 3rd world countries have. You sure these people's pipes didn't simply freeze.
If its the utility, shame on Texas.
I'm curious how they didn't lose heat. Any furnace built in the last 30 years, even gas, has an electronic control board in order to ensure it doesn't accidentally turn on the gas without a functioning pilot light and/or heating element (which would blow up your house).
No electricity = no heat, regardless of natural gas supply.
I've got about a dozen coworkers in Texas, they've all been without power (which means no heat) for two days now. The power comes on long enough to at least warm their houses up to 50ish degrees before dropping back out so they're not completely screwed but I know they're scared.
I have a gas fireplace, it's vented to the outside through a chimney.
If you sit right in front of it, you can feel a little radiant heat, but the true warmth comes from the electric fan that circulates air through the firebox that's heated from the gas flames. I'd always figured that if there was an extended power failure, I'd set up a 5V fan from my computer to blow air through the the fireplace.
Some gas fireplaces are "direct vent", which means that they vent the exhaust right into the room. I'd never trust one of those not to fill the room with Carbon Monoxide.
I believe fireplaces in Texas are for decoration. I live in a relatively new house in North Dallas, read open floor plan, and turning on the fireplace make absolutely no difference.
We managed to turn it on by replacing the igniter batteries and turned it back off after an hour because you don't get any heat unless you sit within 1 feet of it.
tl;dr - a typical residential fireplace isn't an alternative to a furnace.
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Wood stoves and furnaces are pretty advanced these days, some of them have catalytic "converters" (I guess that's the term).
A fireplace looks nice, but doesn't do much else other than that.
Lost water before daylight Tuesday.
Power came back on just before daylight Wednesday, off just over 48 hrs, not as bad as some hurricanes.
Water service unlikely for a few more days, worse than any hurricane this century.
I've been without power for 2 days and it sucks. My house was 34 degrees this morning. No water for 2 days.
Most of my friends are in the same boat.
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The summary is: Regularly inspect and maintain your equipment, here are the obvious things that must be done. (Unstated: We feel a need to say this, because obviously it didn't happen in at least one place...)
Probably got cut by the bean counters and a cut-throat market that didn't require safety and availability as considerations.
This argument to incentivize rather than punish applies to many issues with legislative bodies across all complex industries like Big Tech and other Engineering fields. You pass a law that drinking water cannot have over 10ppm of XXX carcinogen? There is most likely going to be 9.99ppm because that's the bare minimum.
We really need to move from stick to carrot.
The problem is that Texas is an outlier. Other governments, broadly, get this right. Those FERC recommendations mentioned upthread? They're the work of the government (hell, NERC is even a multinational globalist thing). That argues less that "governments are bad" than it does for "THIS government was bad".
Their incentive structure rewards short term budget savings at the expense of long term preparedness. The real fix is to have a non-partisan body staffed by actual engineers setting this kind of policy, isn't it?
In my experience running capital projects, you get performance by paying modest performance bonuses and assessing tough penalties for non-performance.
Local monopoly.
1. Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Utility_Holding_Company...
Limited the profits of a utility holding company, spurring the formation of additional shell companies to each get the maximum allowed.
Overturned in 2005, when today's highly increased risk was cemented.
2. Houston Industries, Inc.
https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/67/HOUSTON-IND...
3. The Public Utility Commission of Texas
https://www.puc.texas.gov
Still exists in more toothless form after 2005.
4. Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_o...
Est. 1970 just in case of unreliability (for utility shareholders), not much of a factor until recently. Given more leeway to disappoint consumers after 2002.
5. Public Utility Regulatory Act (PURA)
https://www.lawinsider.com/documents/5KMbhJATuC2
Est. 1975.
Modified 1995, 1997, 1999, restructured 2007, latest edition effective as of September 1, 2017.
Straight downhill as far as reliability goes.
https://www.electricchoice.com/blog/guide-texas-electricity-...
Up until 1995, under the HL&P monopoly the first 675 kWh remained extremely low cost for residential consumers as had been agreed with PUC to allow jacking up further residential kWh, and business accounts, into rates beyond the reach of low-income households. Check your old bills. Of course 675 kWh is not enough for air conditioning but otherwise a small household could remain within that tier if they could conserve effectively, and had gas heat for the normally mild winters. As soon as deregulation started, HL&P then began the agressive promotion of new plans to all their established customers, similar to the limited number of newly allowed competitors where giving a break for the first bunch of kWh was no longer required. For a while there it was still required for HL&P consumers who had not opted out of their 1980's plan, but they made whatever straight-rate deals were necessary to get this info off of people's bills ASAP.
6. Deregulation of the Texas electricity market
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation_of_the_Texas_elec...
Headed us in the current direction starting in 2002.
New company Centerpoint took over the energy delivery infrastructure. Transmission assets from HL&P and others, delivery pipelines from gas suppliers, all of it.
As the name implies, pay no attention to a central point of failure. Nothing to see here.
By 1983 in the other most air-conditioned state, FPL the Florida state monopoly in a number of power plants was consuming the same grade of fuel oil as the Houston monopoly. A fuel oil vessel could be loaded from a Houston refinery, and with freight to FL the consumers there were paying half the price as in Houston using the same fuel without the added cost of sea freight.
7. As we have seen, Gov. Abbot has never been good enough for Texas, Lt. Gov. Patrick experienced his high point as a failed sports announcer, and Atty. Gen Paxton has only enough integrity for an uninhabited island.
Don't get me started on the equally compromised Ex. Rep. DeLay who in 2002 became US House Majority "Leader". Left in disgrace over lack of ethics himself.
No garage doors to keep the cold air in since it didn't really matter to the power company.
No mayor has ever wanted citizens to be very aware of that since the city took over the building in 1999.
Dead Comment
Interconnect with neighbour grids does not cost 20% more, AC or DC. In fact the huge peaking capability of a state with ~50% gas generation would generate revenue supplying peak demand and variations in renewable supply.
Pricing systems (i.e. market rules) that encourage reliability doesn't automatically lead to gold plating.
Was the 20% cost savings they just stopped winterizing the generators?
It certainly could raise your electrical costs by 20% for weatherization, but there's nothing stopping the utility from raising your costs for any other reason. If weatherization doesn't completely eat into their profit margins, they don't HAVE to raise prices at all. The government could also fund it as a one-time expense.
Exactly the same thing happened in South Australia in 2016
1) Renewables % of generation mix grows (wind + solar)
2) Base generation sources get pushed out by economics and regulation (coal)
3) Peak generation sources get squeezed by the economics of wind + solar over summer (lots of wind, lots of sun) and begin to be relegated to backup roles
4) Something bad happens (in SA it was software misconfiguration across multiple wind generation sources)
5) The backup generation gets used for the first time, suprise suprise it doesnt work
6) chaos
2/3rds of the power that went offline from the storm was fossil.
Moreover, Texas's independent grid (not connected to the rest of the US) makes it difficult for them to import power from neighboring states.
Stop trying to push political tribalist stories that blame renewables for bog standard failures in traditional systems that could have been avoided.
https://www.powermag.com/ferc-nerc-february-blackouts-in-the...
Renewables are down from their peak capacity in Texas, but they're actually performing above what the grid thought they'd do. So it's not like ERCOT got caught with their pants down when it comes to renewable generation.
Instead the issue appears to be that thermal (gas, coal, and nuclear) plants all over Texas are failing in the face of cold weather, and because Texas has its own grid it can't shift enough power from nearby states in order to cover the demand.
And it's not like these plants were off and everyone is surprised that they didn't turn on; Texas gets most of its power from natural gas most of the time. More to the point cold weather specific recommendations from back in 2011 weren't followed with sadly predictable consequences.
> Most of the power knocked offline came from thermal sources, Woodfin said, particularly natural gas.
Don't believe anything you read about "rolling outages". It's only rolling, if you define that as "out until it's not freezing anymore".
My office back in Dallas which is not normally open offered to let people stay the night since they happen to be on the same grid as a hospital and I seriously considered trying to make it there today
(edit: when you're on the internet, better to specify which unit you use, your audience is international)
Hope your power came back already. If not / or for another time: candles are great for heating a single room. Small, safe, but they make a difference.
If they gave everyone power 50% of the time, everyone would crank everything they have to the max during those periods to get some heat into their buildings. Unless their total ability to consume energy is less than 2x their average consumption, it's not going to help.
To have any effect on overall power consumption, they first have to overcome this effect, and reduce power availability so people can't just shift the load.
Depending on creativity (if you have an electric tumble dryer... that's a fan heater), I bet many people could easily 10x their average power consumption.
If I had power for a short period of time and cold was an issue, I'd be dumping ~10 kW into water immediately (the only energy storage I can improvise on short notice).
Don't they have any kind of smart meter in Texas? Maybe reprogramming them is a slow operation that cannot be done to almost every meter in a short timespan?
The only real power consumption anyone does above usual is plug in their phones. And obviously their heaters run full blast.
Here is our simi-successful attempt to survive.
* boarded up all the windows and doors with sheets, curtains, and heavy drop clothes
* limit going outside to fewest essential trips
* close all bedrooms and abandon them. All pets and occupants sleep in close proximity in a common area
* we have lots of sleeping bags and mink blankets. It’s more about layers
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Agreed that they’re misusing “rolling outages”. We got an hour of power a day for the last two days and don’t foresee getting even an hour today. I don’t know who they think they’re fooling because everyone here knows exactly that these outages aren’t rolling and is out for ERCOT blood.
Also, it's up to the power distributors in different cities to cut in the ways that they can. Some are doing rolling blackouts, and others (like mine...) aren't.
Dead Comment
You are crazy to not have a backup generator! It is an essential item to have!
Now I live in a single-family home and have an entire RV parked beside the house (with an on-board generator, and around 100 hours of fuel in the RV's gas tank to run it). I can run an extension cord to power the house furnace as needed, but unless it was below freezing and I was worried about the pipes freezing in the house, I'd probably just let the house stay dark and move into the RV during an extended power outage.
So I can confidently say "You are crazy to not have a backup Recreational Vehicle!". Maybe I should buy a travel trailer to back up the RV.
Do not run a propane generator in or near your garage if it's attached to your home, since there's a serious risk of CO poisoning. It should be located as far away from the house as possible and away from windows and doors.
Prefarably at least 20 meters, especially if it is a gas-powered generator (OP mentioned theirs is propane, which is not quite as dangerous as gasoline).
Edit: I hope you have battery powered CO detectors on each floor and near the bedroom.
Have the water pipes been emptied as a precaution? Otherwise they’ve all exploded due to being frozen, right?
Dead Comment
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/16/texas-power-...
Maybe it’s time to rethink that. HaI has an interesting take on something similar: Japan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo88zA5nq4Q
Running your own grid seems cool Texas style, until you have a regional problem and have no where to turn.
The problem is that this is a truly regional event and not just isolated to Texas. The entire central US is struggling right now. The SPP (which manages electricity for Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arkansas, and other states) has been struggling with forced blackouts over the last several days as well. They don’t have enough power for their own grid, let alone enough to share with Texas.
If Texas was more interconnected with the SPP, the end result wouldn’t be Texans all having their problems solved. Many Texans would still be without power, but so would many more Oklahomans. The fact that the Texas grid is separate is the only thing keeping OK from having even worse blackouts. Which makes sense, because the entire point of grid isolation is to keep issues localized and not cascade over the entire network. And that’s working to Oklahoma’s benefit right now, but Texas is getting the short end of the stick.
Frequency conversion is a costly and difficult to scale problem. If Texas was part of the Western grid they could be drawing excess hydroelectric power from the pacific northwest right now for example. Texas also could have contributed to help the California power shortages last year.
Edit: Here is a map of the grid interconnects in Texas with capacity. As of the time of this comment the total importation capacity is less than 1% of demand. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/22095643/49019079-...
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Transferring energy between grids requires either converting it from AC to high-voltage DC and back using solid-state electronics, or converting it via mechanical energy using a variable-frequency transformer. With either approach, you need bulky and expensive equipment in proportion to how much power you want to handle. These connections are designed to smooth out (and profit from) short-term capacity fluctuations, not to power the entire state.
Currently, the Texas grid has two DC ties operating at full capacity and drawing about 800MW from the Southwest Power Pool. But that's a drop in the bucket compared to the ~45GW of current demand, or the estimated 70-80GW of demand that would be likely if it weren't for the outages.
http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...
Basically, no amount of grid infrastructure can really help you much when you lose 50%+ of generation capacity on your highest demand days in history.
> Even today, ERCOT is also not completely isolated from other grids — as was evident when the state imported some power from Mexico during the rolling blackouts of 2011. ERCOT has three ties to Mexico and — as an outcome of the "Midnight Connection" battle — it also has two ties to the eastern U.S. grid, though they do not trigger federal regulation for ERCOT. All can move power commercially as well as be used in emergencies, according to ERCOT spokeswoman Dottie Roark. A possible sixth interconnection project, in Rusk County, is being studied, and another ambitious proposal, called Tres Amigas, would link the three big U.S. grids together in New Mexico, though Texas' top utility regulator has shown little enthusiasm for participating.
https://www.kvue.com/article/weather/texplainer-why-does-tex...
For the pedantic TX does have connections to other grids but the capacity is so low that it wouldn't have mitigated this event and is under whatever threshold is set for federal oversight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation
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This cuts both ways, and most of the rest country is often a benefactor - many US/NA companies (and I'm assuming govt/military) have a 3rd DR location on the TX grid precisely because it provides an additional point of redundancy. TX also wasn't impacted by CA mismanagement of it's grid, for example..
Most companies that have and need DR put them in locations with independent power, not based on which grid they are in.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26137893
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26146945
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138213
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26144560
Even worse: for about the first 24h there were (largely uninhabited!) commercial buildings all over the place that were fully lit up. We're talking skyscrapers. Even some unfinished skyscrapers. I think they've finally begun to address those. The charitable interpretation is that it was simply a massive failure of coordination.
Unfortunately in a situation like this that means that 45% have remained off for the past 48 hours (no rotation is possible), while many empty buildings are fully illuminated. It is a technological failure of their ability to shut down specific power users.
How are you keeping the whole house warm if you can't circulate the air? I'm genuinely curious.
https://www.amazon.com/PYBBO-Improved-Fireplace-Magnetic-The...
https://www.amazon.com/heat-powered-stove-fan/s?k=heat+power...
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The federal government has started doing electricity cuts in most Mexico to control the gas reserves and distribute energy to the Northern states.
Edit:
Here is an article about this in English:
https://www.8newsnow.com/news/international/mexico-suffers-a...
Apparently one of the issues in Texas is that they use just-in-time gas delivery from their wells .... which just froze.
Power out for 2 days now, while west across I-35 has always had power. There's some baloney they're feeding us about "complicated critical loads" while huge swats of hotels and office buildings have power (I can see from north to south since my unit overhangs the frontage and has windows all over, and elevated enough to see over I-35). My fridge food is in a cardboard box outside with a shower curtain liner around it.
Water still working, and there are no plans according to the water company to interrupt service. There's no hot water (which IIRC, condemns a building) because the apartment's water heater needs electricity.
I'm out of battery bank capacity and might have to leave the area. Appears it will go on until Friday or Saturday, so 5-6 days total.
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Since cold is a rare event, Texans figure they can save a penny by making nothing cold-resistant, then skimp on maintenance, all while bragging they have the cheapest rates of the country.
Misleading text in linked article: "We didn’t run out of natural gas, but we ran out of the ability to get natural gas. Pipelines in Texas don’t use cold insulation – so things were freezing."
It's probably that theirs are cheaper because why pay for more hardened tech if the typical range isn't this?
That said, yes, we don't use lubricant for super-cold weather, because we don't normally have super-cold weather. So we use cheaper stuff that is suited for our normal climate, where heat is usually a bigger problem than cold. It's been ten years since the last time it would have been important, and 12 years before that.
I think this is the point. Things are engineered for the environment which they are expected to operate, and to be optimized for those environments[0]. I would not expect a wind turbine that operates (and is designed to operate) in Antartica to not fail (potentially catestrophically) when operating in 100 degree Texas heat,
[0] One could (and should) argue that these systems should take climate change and more extreme weather events into account, but that is a political problem more-so than an engineering problem.
People built to a certain set of assumptions, with an implicit risk, and the risks came due. The only way to avoid another event like this would be to make the generation more resilient to extreme cold, which will cost more.
That’s not true. The plant tripped because of a false alarm. The operators said the reactor would be back online shortly after safety checks.
A whole turbine doesn’t freeze. The turbines are in buildings, not outside.
Edit: Apparently, South Texas has its turbines outside. But these didn’t freeze but pressure-sensing lines failed. Source: https://atomicinsights.com/south-texas-project-unit-1-trippe...