It appears that wind and solar power produced more electricity this week than they were expected to produce, but at this time of year, that’s a relatively small part of the expected statewide generation. Generation from gas and coal plants was far below expectations, causing supply to fall as demand rose. How much of that is bad design — a case where the system should be reworked — and how much was operator error is still to be sorted out.
As someone in the Houston blackout and hearing a bit of the initial blame-game: I’d like to find out what failure modes were gamed out, what likelihood’s were assigned to each and how and what mitigation was chosen with the knowledge that between time, money and people not all failure scenarios can be covered.
For example: water vapor in methane (natural gas) freezes and causes sensor and valve problems which have shut plants down. That seems predictable to a point, something that operators with experience in other climates would know about. On the other hand, the mitigation strategy for that failure may run counter to fixes for hot weather problems.
Well, apparently this was all reviewed in 2011, after a million Texas homes lost power due to a cold snap, so indeed most of the problems today were not only foreseen long ago, they were experienced.
Since then I guess nobody bothered to do anything? Supposedly it's all described in this here document (I can't actually open it, probably because someone in ERCOT is real scared of GDPR): http://www.ercot.com/content/meetings/other/keydocs/2011/201...
> Since then I guess nobody bothered to do anything?
The folks in the El Paso area (which is not regulated/managed by ERCOT) are going just fine it appears:
> El Paso Electric said they always try to prepare for the future and after a winter storm in 2011, the utility company worked towards replacing and upgrading their equipment. Many generators now have antifreeze protection.
The strong arctic front that arrived in North Texas on February 1, 2011 was the most intense cold wave for the majority of the state of Texas since December 1989. The event was so severe that the National Weather Service issued a rare Wind Chill Advisory for much of the state. The arctic front reached deep into Texas and sustained below freezing temperatures as far south as Corpus Christi. Much of North Texas experienced record setting sleet and snow, producing blizzard conditions and temperatures well below freezing for up to 100 hours. Snowfall occurred as far south as San Antonio, with snowfall totaling up to seven inches in North Texas. This winter storm was also accompanied by sustained winds of 30-40 mph with gusts as high as 51 mph.
The icy conditions of this winter storm resulted in the closing of both DFW Airport and Dallas Love Field. In addition, Dallas-Fort Worth area water utilities reported hundreds of water main bursts during the event, compared to expected four to five on an average winter day. ERCOT also reported a new record winter peak of 56,334 megawatts.
The winter weather event of February 1-5, 2011 was determined to be a one in ten year event for some regions of Texas in terms of low temperature extremes and duration. Lows during the period were in the teens for five consecutive mornings and there were many consecutive hours below freezing temperatures throughout Texas. Taking these temperature extremes into account, and coupling them with the sustained winds of this event, it is estimated that the resultant convective heat loss (wind plus ambient temperature) event suffered by many Texas generation facilities approached a one in 25 year severity. (Reference: Weatherbank, Inc.)
Generating unit issues that affected reliability were mostly attributed to frozen instrumentation due to convective heat losses greater than instrumentation design, faulty instrumentation heat tracing or compromised insulation. It is normal practice for the operating units to add incremental protection against these extreme winter weather events. Typical examples are wind breaks and heat sources applied to high risk areas.
In addition, the cold and wind affected the units that were not operating. Units in cold start status are less prone to derates/trips if they are dispatched to minimum stable load (MSL) before the onset of extreme winter weather. Bringing all units to MSL gives ERCOT maximum flexibility in responding to grid emergencies.
HOW IT AFFECTED ERCOT
The high load demand, coupled with generation issues within ERCOT, resulted in actions from ERCOT that triggered an Operating Condition Notice (OCN) issued for cold weather at 08:55 on February 1. The event level escalated to an EEA2A (Energy Emergency Alert) declaration at 05:18 on February 2 to deploy responsive reserves, followed quickly by an EEA3 declaration at 05:58 on February 2 to begin shedding firm load to maintain system frequency at 59.8 Hz or greater. The event continued until ERCOT cancelled the EEA at 09:58 on February 3.
"
I suspect that it wasn't the mitigation was too challenging, just costly. Someone looked at the map and said, "Texas? You'll never need to be handling subzero temperatures over a long time period."
I don't even necessarily believe it was malicious (unless you consider cost cutting to make a profit malicious, which, maybe you'd have an argument there), just potentially lazy.
This is the sort of thing we should have some baseline regulations to support -- critical infrastructure should be designed to support a temperature range of X to Y, where X is a record cold times some factor and Y is a record heat times some factor.
> This is the sort of thing we should have some baseline regulations to support -- critical infrastructure should be designed to support a temperature range of X to Y, where X is a record cold times some factor and Y is a record heat times some factor.
Meanwhile the folks in the El Paso area (which is not regulated/managed by ERCOT) are going just fine:
> El Paso Electric said they always try to prepare for the future and after a winter storm in 2011, the utility company worked towards replacing and upgrading their equipment. Many generators now have antifreeze protection.
The first step is making sure you have regulators who are somewhat clued in.
Of course being hooked up to the national grid could be useful as well, so as to allow for energy inputs when your own infrastructure is having problems. Though that would mean dealing with the Feds, which seems to be undesirable:
> Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry says that Texans find massive power outages preferable to having more federal government interference in the state's energy grid.
> I don't even necessarily believe it was malicious (unless you consider cost cutting to make a profit malicious, which, maybe you'd have an argument there), just potentially lazy.
Playing devil's advocate here: It might not have been malicious or lazy, but actually just good judgement in avoiding unnecessary waste and getting those services deployed sooner for less cost to the customer.
Of course it looks bad now that the situation they didn't expect to happen has happened, but in the long term, were the losses worse than what they saved by not implementing extreme cold weather mitigations?
Methane melts at -295.6 F (It's cold in Texas, but not that cold!) so if NG facilities are having freeze ups it is absolutely due to the presence of water or hydrates.
Because people have died, and the energy industry is heavily to blame, you're extremely unlikely to get any information to confirm or even satisfy your curiosity until a federal investigation has completed.
Wells freeze in all the time. Around a decade ago I was working with an in law that was dealing with a frozen dewatering unit on a very large compressor. We also measure the water tanks get pumped back into the earth. High output wells need their water emptied every day or two. Guess what an ice storm prevents. On, and the water tanks will freeze and cant be emptied.
There are two ways to look at the Wind numbers. Texas was expecting 6 gigawatts from wind, and only got 1.5-2.5 gigawatts. So wind generation dropped 60-75%. That's a much bigger failure in percentage terms than from gas powered production. Gas was a majority of energy production, so it was much bigger in absolute numbers, but by no means did wind perform well.
Texas has taken a very "free market" approach to regulating electricity. I lived there during de-regulation and whatever else happened it didn't lower the price of electricity very much. In my opinion it was an excuse to line some pockets.
At any rate there has been zero investment in grid interconnects which could have been much more helpful. ERCOT only has the capacity to source sub-1% of load over the interconnects which is not meaningful. That's one of the ultimate failures in my mind: A relatively small investment in HVDC interconnect upgrades would have allowed the grid to import power - especially from the US Western grid which has not been impacted the way some parts of the US Eastern have.
ERCOT is fairly toothless as well. I'm not sure they bothered to issue any requirements for weatherproofing prior to the freeze but they wouldn't be able to do much about it if the generating plants refused to comply. And the Texas Railroad Commission regulates Natural Gas. And by "regulate" I mean let them do whatever they like.
How fully was it de-regulated? An advantage of regulation is that it generally shields you from lawsuits. If you follow the rules, you generally can't be successfully sued for negligence. If there are no rules more of the responsibility falls on the courts. If things were fully deregulated the producers should be hit with some massive lawsuits from the families of those who died.
The trick is that a natural gas furnace needs a decent chunk of electricity to operate, and we’re not very good at shedding all non-critical residential load. So it’s really not an either-or proposition for as long as we use natural gas for power, it’s a both-or-none situation.
The majority of the energy use in a natural gas furnace is still the core heating of air functionality. The electric ignition and fan aren’t most of the energy to my knowledge, although “decent chunk” is a fuzzy term.
Natural gas fireplaces don't need electricity to work, though, and they are fairly common in some parts (maybe not Texas, but Ontario). But they're not very efficient, either.
Which seems crazy to me. How is it cheaper and/or more efficient to create an entirely new system of gas pipes to every home so consumers can each inefficiently burn gas than simply converting the gas to electricity in a highly-efficient centralized plant and send the energy over the existing electrical infrastructure?
A modern gas furnace is very efficient, 95% or so. Really efficient gas power plants are only about 60% efficient. If you use the electricity to run an electrical resistance heater, it's more efficient to burn the gas directly for heat.
If you use a heat pump, you might get a COP of 3 or 4, which is effectively 300-400% efficiency. It's able to do this because it makes the outside colder while it makes the inside warmer.
Overall, the electric/heat pump system can be more efficient, but it has a lot more complex and expensive machinery, both in the home and in the power plant, and it's only been in the past 20 years or so that this has been practical. Many new homes are being built without gas hookups and use heat pumps instead.
A central generator plant may be more efficient than a house furnace. But electric heat is 1/3 as efficient as natural gas. I suspect it's a net win for gas heat, as modern furnaces are 80+ percent efficient.
You’ve got it backwards on the efficiency front. Burning gas for heat at home beats out most forms of electric heat efficiency wise.
A basic gas furnace is 80% efficient, with a nicer condensing unit being 96-98% efficient. Meanwhile most gas turbines hang out in the 32-38% efficiency range, plus transmission losses. Maybe if you’re using a heat pump and your local power plant is a triple pressure high efficiency model (~60% efficient) you might end up ahead, but for most users in most municipalities it’s actually better to burn the gas at home directly rather than at a power plant, at least for heat.
I’d call them semi -complementary from a consumer perspective and have different strengths and weaknesses, similar to phone and cable before.
My long term view is gas will go away first as electric costs go down and reliability goes up with local caches such as the PowerWall. Eventually usage will be light enough to cut the cable from long distance generation for close range neighborhood nukes.
I recently submitted an article, which after I read it, made me think the same thing. We could’ve had cleaner indoor air and fewer points of failure if just used electricity.
> According to a paper from Pecan Street, an Austin-based energy research organization, the transition would reduce climate-warming pollution, save Texas households up to $452 annually on their utility bills, and flip the state from a summer-peaking to a winter-peaking system. And that winter peak would be “nothing the grid couldn’t evolve to handle,” according to co-author Joshua Rhodes.
I couldn't believe the WSJ Editorial Board came out with an article saying otherwise. Wouldn't being blatantly factually incorrect about business analysis hurt their reputation among their target audience?
The target audience of the WSJ has learned long time ago to treat the editorial board as the crazy uncle you ignore at Christmas gatherings. The WSJ has arguably the best news gathering organization in the US. Their editorial board is a joke in comparison and nobody takes them seriously. They usually take the side of the rich against anybody, so I am sure most old school WSJ readers appreciate that but that does not mean one should go as far as believing them.
It is not unusual for the news section and the editorial section to take completely opposing positions on an issue. (I think they did that this past summer on the issue of effectiveness of masks.)
I don't currently pay for news. I would be willing to pay extra for a subscription to a reputable newspaper if they would assure me that the money wouldn't go to the editorial board.
You need to mentally downgrade your expectations of the WSJ editorial board; this isn’t new behavior at all. If you look for it, you’ll notice the naked contempt that the WSJ news side has for their editorial board, and occasionally post “yeah, those were all lies that the editorial board just said” pieces.
> I couldn't believe the WSJ Editorial Board came out with an article saying otherwise. Wouldn't being blatantly factually incorrect about business analysis hurt their reputation among their target audience?
Who do you imagine the audience is for the editorial pages of the WSJ?
Even long before Murdoch took it over, that part of the paper has a very different reputation and appeal than the rest.
Editorial board's audience is "my tribe", and I don't believe that "my tribe" ever really has much of a factual requirement. I know I unconsciously support the positions of my tribe more those of not my tribe.
I suspect that the target audience of WSJ is inclined to like WSJ no matter what the editorial board pursues as long as they stay within their tribal lane.
That's true to some extent, but when it hits people in their wallets, it starts to break down somewhat. Taking the wrong side of this bet could lose businesses really large amounts of money.
It’s not clear to me who to believe. This fact check claims only 4 GW of wind power was down but the link that precedes that claim doesn’t actually state that. Meanwhile the WSJ article (https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-deep-green-freeze-11613411002) claims 42% of power came from wind in the week before the freeze but there’s no sourcing of that either.
Believe primary sources that you can read and understand yourself. That’s it. Sad that we’ve come to this, but I had to adopt that policy last year for obvious reasons.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it a ton and we ban that sort of account. We're trying for something a bit different here.
You should always be doubtful of the thesis from editorial articles, but you could be less contemptuous... and more correct.
>...between the mornings of Feb. 7 and Feb. 11, wind as a share of the state’s electricity fell to 8% from 42%, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
>Gas-fired plants produced 43,800 MW of power Sunday night and coal plants chipped in 10,800 MW—about two to three times what they usually generate at their peak on any given winter day—after wind power had largely vanished. In other words, gas and coal plants held up in the frosty conditions far better than wind turbines did.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-spins-into-the-wind-11613...
so wind power cratered and other sources are running at 2-3x their normal despite problems from the cold like equipment freezing and water at water intake facilities freezing. this is despite a just in time operational mindset that is causing shortages of natural gas. power plants are shutting down because they don't have gas to burn.
so you can't blame it on wind power really. but your comment is fantastically derisive.
Texas relies heavily on natural gas power because the price of natural gas went very low in the past decade [1], and Texas has historically favored low average electricity prices over other electrical system attributes. Modern gas generating plants are cheaper to build and cheaper to run than modern coal plants. Coal-generated electricity used to dominate over natural gas in the US and Texas because coal was so much cheaper as a fuel that it was worth building more expensive, maintenance-intensive plants to use it. But that's no longer the case. Every coal plant in the continental US is a legacy plant whose construction started before natural gas prices reached the low levels of recent years.
The same price forces caused Texas to install a lot of wind and (more recently) solar. The federal production tax credit makes wind-generated electricity very cheap for Texans, if somewhat less cheap for all Americans.
There are other historical factors for methane utilization in TX.
By the early 1970s, the artificially low price set by the federal government had created a shortage, but only of interstate gas. Gas consumed within the state where it was produced was plentiful, but more expensive
So it's not clear that relying on other electricity sources would have been better, if those other sources also failed to plan for operating in prolonged cold weather.
Presumably nat gas and coal can perform fine in cold weather as they are major sources of electricity in northern climes that get much worse weather much more often.
I was more commenting on the gap in the articles logic that suggested wind/solar was off the hook because nat gas went down worse. I really don’t know the systems well enough to fill that gap on my own.
Yes typically Gas generation are used in combination with wind power as their up and down cycle are fast compared to other sources. Secondly, Texas is overflowing with natural gas due to fracking.
Maybe, but only in a sense that doesn't really mesh with the right wing criticism. The adoption of wind and solar isn't because it is green, it's because it is cheaper. And then natural gas is the cheapest make up for when those fall short (or really, it's profitable to build capacity that can come online when energy prices rise).
In any case, the current generation mix isn't particularly dependent on wind/solar (a couple percent of predicted winter generation).
I guess my main point is that this article doesn’t do a good job of arguing one way or another for _weather adjusted_ results for energy production. Effectively all of the energy sources in Texas were impacted by this weather event.
The article takes one position (weakly) that renewables weren’t to blame. The Texas governor for instance has taken a very strong position that renewables are to blame. It seems likely that the real answer is between (and on the side of this articles position) these points. But to just arbitrarily judge based on what solar did vs “expectations” compared to what nat gas did, ignores the idea that solar demands more nat gas than other energy sources.
I’m good with the answer “we’d have adopted solar/wind/nat gas mix in the same proportion given the same risk modeling we had for this sort of event in comparison to coal/nat gas/etc”
Here in Spring Texas, I’m seeing rolling blackouts since Tuesday pm. Few hours on. Few hours off. Having a gas fire and stove is killing it for us. I’m planning on switching one of our water heaters to gas so we can be covered for hot water in power outages.
I’ve gone tankless and have a gas tankless water heater on a battery backup and I can also power it from a generator if needed... so from the battery I get around 90 mins of usage... highly recommended
It sounds like you're one of the relatively lucky ones. From what I've heard "rolling" blackouts are a misnomer for large swathes of the state, unless by "rolling" you mean "the blackout rolled in and never rolled out".
Good luck. I'd be glad to suffer short blackouts here if the grid were interconnected so we could share power with your state.
Why all the competing narratives? We can actually measure power produced and where the gaps occurred. Seems to me like this is a simple case where facts can be verified and corrective actions deployed. Political spin will not keep anyone warm.
It's important to know who in government caused this so we can assess their performance on the next election day. It's the entire point of voting in the first place. In this case, all available evidence points to the Republican officials in the government of Texas, so keep that in mind if you're a resident of Texas.
Readit News
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/17/texas-power-outage-a...
It appears that wind and solar power produced more electricity this week than they were expected to produce, but at this time of year, that’s a relatively small part of the expected statewide generation. Generation from gas and coal plants was far below expectations, causing supply to fall as demand rose. How much of that is bad design — a case where the system should be reworked — and how much was operator error is still to be sorted out.
As someone in the Houston blackout and hearing a bit of the initial blame-game: I’d like to find out what failure modes were gamed out, what likelihood’s were assigned to each and how and what mitigation was chosen with the knowledge that between time, money and people not all failure scenarios can be covered.
For example: water vapor in methane (natural gas) freezes and causes sensor and valve problems which have shut plants down. That seems predictable to a point, something that operators with experience in other climates would know about. On the other hand, the mitigation strategy for that failure may run counter to fixes for hot weather problems.
Since then I guess nobody bothered to do anything? Supposedly it's all described in this here document (I can't actually open it, probably because someone in ERCOT is real scared of GDPR): http://www.ercot.com/content/meetings/other/keydocs/2011/201...
Here's a twitter thread by some rando who remembered what happened in 2011 and dug out the report: https://twitter.com/kidstatic/status/1361914818307981314?s=2...
The folks in the El Paso area (which is not regulated/managed by ERCOT) are going just fine it appears:
> El Paso Electric said they always try to prepare for the future and after a winter storm in 2011, the utility company worked towards replacing and upgrading their equipment. Many generators now have antifreeze protection.
* https://kvia.com/news/el-paso/2021/02/15/el-pasos-not-seeing...
https://twitter.com/JesseJenkins/status/1361691683222654980
"THE EVENT
The strong arctic front that arrived in North Texas on February 1, 2011 was the most intense cold wave for the majority of the state of Texas since December 1989. The event was so severe that the National Weather Service issued a rare Wind Chill Advisory for much of the state. The arctic front reached deep into Texas and sustained below freezing temperatures as far south as Corpus Christi. Much of North Texas experienced record setting sleet and snow, producing blizzard conditions and temperatures well below freezing for up to 100 hours. Snowfall occurred as far south as San Antonio, with snowfall totaling up to seven inches in North Texas. This winter storm was also accompanied by sustained winds of 30-40 mph with gusts as high as 51 mph.
The icy conditions of this winter storm resulted in the closing of both DFW Airport and Dallas Love Field. In addition, Dallas-Fort Worth area water utilities reported hundreds of water main bursts during the event, compared to expected four to five on an average winter day. ERCOT also reported a new record winter peak of 56,334 megawatts.
The winter weather event of February 1-5, 2011 was determined to be a one in ten year event for some regions of Texas in terms of low temperature extremes and duration. Lows during the period were in the teens for five consecutive mornings and there were many consecutive hours below freezing temperatures throughout Texas. Taking these temperature extremes into account, and coupling them with the sustained winds of this event, it is estimated that the resultant convective heat loss (wind plus ambient temperature) event suffered by many Texas generation facilities approached a one in 25 year severity. (Reference: Weatherbank, Inc.)
Generating unit issues that affected reliability were mostly attributed to frozen instrumentation due to convective heat losses greater than instrumentation design, faulty instrumentation heat tracing or compromised insulation. It is normal practice for the operating units to add incremental protection against these extreme winter weather events. Typical examples are wind breaks and heat sources applied to high risk areas.
In addition, the cold and wind affected the units that were not operating. Units in cold start status are less prone to derates/trips if they are dispatched to minimum stable load (MSL) before the onset of extreme winter weather. Bringing all units to MSL gives ERCOT maximum flexibility in responding to grid emergencies.
HOW IT AFFECTED ERCOT
The high load demand, coupled with generation issues within ERCOT, resulted in actions from ERCOT that triggered an Operating Condition Notice (OCN) issued for cold weather at 08:55 on February 1. The event level escalated to an EEA2A (Energy Emergency Alert) declaration at 05:18 on February 2 to deploy responsive reserves, followed quickly by an EEA3 declaration at 05:58 on February 2 to begin shedding firm load to maintain system frequency at 59.8 Hz or greater. The event continued until ERCOT cancelled the EEA at 09:58 on February 3. "
Deleted Comment
I don't even necessarily believe it was malicious (unless you consider cost cutting to make a profit malicious, which, maybe you'd have an argument there), just potentially lazy.
This is the sort of thing we should have some baseline regulations to support -- critical infrastructure should be designed to support a temperature range of X to Y, where X is a record cold times some factor and Y is a record heat times some factor.
Meanwhile the folks in the El Paso area (which is not regulated/managed by ERCOT) are going just fine:
> El Paso Electric said they always try to prepare for the future and after a winter storm in 2011, the utility company worked towards replacing and upgrading their equipment. Many generators now have antifreeze protection.
* https://kvia.com/news/el-paso/2021/02/15/el-pasos-not-seeing...
The first step is making sure you have regulators who are somewhat clued in.
Of course being hooked up to the national grid could be useful as well, so as to allow for energy inputs when your own infrastructure is having problems. Though that would mean dealing with the Feds, which seems to be undesirable:
> Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry says that Texans find massive power outages preferable to having more federal government interference in the state's energy grid.
* https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/rick-perry-says-texans-woul...
Playing devil's advocate here: It might not have been malicious or lazy, but actually just good judgement in avoiding unnecessary waste and getting those services deployed sooner for less cost to the customer.
Of course it looks bad now that the situation they didn't expect to happen has happened, but in the long term, were the losses worse than what they saved by not implementing extreme cold weather mitigations?
Texas runs its own power grid specifically to avoid doing that
This stuff isn’t rocket science.
Because people have died, and the energy industry is heavily to blame, you're extremely unlikely to get any information to confirm or even satisfy your curiosity until a federal investigation has completed.
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/shows/town-squar...
Deleted Comment
At any rate there has been zero investment in grid interconnects which could have been much more helpful. ERCOT only has the capacity to source sub-1% of load over the interconnects which is not meaningful. That's one of the ultimate failures in my mind: A relatively small investment in HVDC interconnect upgrades would have allowed the grid to import power - especially from the US Western grid which has not been impacted the way some parts of the US Eastern have.
ERCOT is fairly toothless as well. I'm not sure they bothered to issue any requirements for weatherproofing prior to the freeze but they wouldn't be able to do much about it if the generating plants refused to comply. And the Texas Railroad Commission regulates Natural Gas. And by "regulate" I mean let them do whatever they like.
IANAL.
You can use it to heat your home, or you can send it to a power plant to convert it into electricity and heat your home at a 3x markup.
But regardless, you are relying heavily on a single resource in a single state.
If you use a heat pump, you might get a COP of 3 or 4, which is effectively 300-400% efficiency. It's able to do this because it makes the outside colder while it makes the inside warmer.
Overall, the electric/heat pump system can be more efficient, but it has a lot more complex and expensive machinery, both in the home and in the power plant, and it's only been in the past 20 years or so that this has been practical. Many new homes are being built without gas hookups and use heat pumps instead.
A basic gas furnace is 80% efficient, with a nicer condensing unit being 96-98% efficient. Meanwhile most gas turbines hang out in the 32-38% efficiency range, plus transmission losses. Maybe if you’re using a heat pump and your local power plant is a triple pressure high efficiency model (~60% efficient) you might end up ahead, but for most users in most municipalities it’s actually better to burn the gas at home directly rather than at a power plant, at least for heat.
Deleted Comment
https://www.calculator.net/voltage-drop-calculator.html
I’d call them semi -complementary from a consumer perspective and have different strengths and weaknesses, similar to phone and cable before.
My long term view is gas will go away first as electric costs go down and reliability goes up with local caches such as the PowerWall. Eventually usage will be light enough to cut the cable from long distance generation for close range neighborhood nukes.
Deleted Comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26128180
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/a-texas-sized-g...
> According to a paper from Pecan Street, an Austin-based energy research organization, the transition would reduce climate-warming pollution, save Texas households up to $452 annually on their utility bills, and flip the state from a summer-peaking to a winter-peaking system. And that winter peak would be “nothing the grid couldn’t evolve to handle,” according to co-author Joshua Rhodes.
Deleted Comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26159680 - "What went wrong with the Texas power grid?", 2021-02-16, 1010 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26146945 - "Texas’ power grid crumples under the cold", 2021-02-15, 35 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26137893 - "Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid", 2021-02-15, 568 comments
It is not unusual for the news section and the editorial section to take completely opposing positions on an issue. (I think they did that this past summer on the issue of effectiveness of masks.)
Who do you imagine the audience is for the editorial pages of the WSJ?
Even long before Murdoch took it over, that part of the paper has a very different reputation and appeal than the rest.
I suspect that the target audience of WSJ is inclined to like WSJ no matter what the editorial board pursues as long as they stay within their tribal lane.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>...between the mornings of Feb. 7 and Feb. 11, wind as a share of the state’s electricity fell to 8% from 42%, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
>Gas-fired plants produced 43,800 MW of power Sunday night and coal plants chipped in 10,800 MW—about two to three times what they usually generate at their peak on any given winter day—after wind power had largely vanished. In other words, gas and coal plants held up in the frosty conditions far better than wind turbines did. https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-spins-into-the-wind-11613...
so wind power cratered and other sources are running at 2-3x their normal despite problems from the cold like equipment freezing and water at water intake facilities freezing. this is despite a just in time operational mindset that is causing shortages of natural gas. power plants are shutting down because they don't have gas to burn.
so you can't blame it on wind power really. but your comment is fantastically derisive.
The same price forces caused Texas to install a lot of wind and (more recently) solar. The federal production tax credit makes wind-generated electricity very cheap for Texans, if somewhat less cheap for all Americans.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44337
By the early 1970s, the artificially low price set by the federal government had created a shortage, but only of interstate gas. Gas consumed within the state where it was produced was plentiful, but more expensive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_in_the_United_Stat...
https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/counties/matagorda_county/n...
So it's not clear that relying on other electricity sources would have been better, if those other sources also failed to plan for operating in prolonged cold weather.
I was more commenting on the gap in the articles logic that suggested wind/solar was off the hook because nat gas went down worse. I really don’t know the systems well enough to fill that gap on my own.
From ERCOT’s winter weather best practices:
http://www.ercot.com/content/meetings/other/keydocs/2011/201...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_National_Laboratory#Nucl...
Deleted Comment
In any case, the current generation mix isn't particularly dependent on wind/solar (a couple percent of predicted winter generation).
http://www.ercot.com/news/releases/show/216844
The article takes one position (weakly) that renewables weren’t to blame. The Texas governor for instance has taken a very strong position that renewables are to blame. It seems likely that the real answer is between (and on the side of this articles position) these points. But to just arbitrarily judge based on what solar did vs “expectations” compared to what nat gas did, ignores the idea that solar demands more nat gas than other energy sources.
I’m good with the answer “we’d have adopted solar/wind/nat gas mix in the same proportion given the same risk modeling we had for this sort of event in comparison to coal/nat gas/etc”
But that’s not what the article actually argues.
Good luck. I'd be glad to suffer short blackouts here if the grid were interconnected so we could share power with your state.