OmniscienceFrog
Full Member
Glad all will be well. I guess that means you're paying everybody's repair bills, right?
The Day After....
- Thread starter BedfordFrog68
- Start date
Hoosierfrog
Tier 1
For what it’s worth...
The Texas grid got crushed because its operators didn’t see the need to prepare for cold weather
Will Englund
When it gets really cold, it can be hard to produce electricity, as customers in Texas and neighboring states are finding out. But it’s not impossible. Operators in Alaska, Canada, Maine, Norway and Siberia do it all the time.
How Texas's independent power grid failed under pressure.
What has sent Texas reeling is not an engineering problem, nor is it the frozen wind turbines blamed by prominent Republicans. It is a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service.
It’s a “Wild West market design based only on short-run prices,” said Matt Breidert, a portfolio manager at a firm called TortoiseEcofin.
And yet the temporary train wreck of that market Monday and Tuesday has seen the wholesale price of electricity in Houston go from $22 a megawatt-hour to about $9,000. Meanwhile, 4 million Texas households have been without power.
One utility company, Griddy, which sells power at wholesale rates to retail customers without locking in a price in advance, told its patrons Tuesday to find another provider before they get socked with tremendous bills.
The widespread failure in Texas and, to a lesser extent, Oklahoma and Louisiana in the face of a winter cold snap shines a light on what some see as the derelict state of America’s power infrastructure, a mirror reflection of the chaos that struck California last summer.
Edward Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, said the disinvestment in electricity production reminds him of the last years of the Soviet Union, or of the oil sector today in Venezuela.
“They hate it when I say that,” he said.
Power outages plague Texas, other states amid deadly cold, snow
The immediate question facing the Texas power sector is whether its participants are willing to pay for the sort of winterization measures that are common farther north, even for a once-in-a-decade spell of weather.
Gov. Greg Abbott (R) called Tuesday for reform of the state’s electric grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT.
“Far too many Texans are without power and heat for their homes as our state faces freezing temperatures and severe winter weather,” he said in a statement. “This is unacceptable.”
He said he would work with the legislature to find ways to “ensure that our state never experiences power outages like this again.”
The Republican speaker of the Texas House, Dade Phelan, announced immediate hearings into “what went wrong.”
Fossil fuel groups and their Republican allies blamed the power failures on frozen wind turbines and warned against the supposed dangers of alternative power sources. Some turbines did in fact freeze — though Greenland and other northern outposts are able to keep theirs going through the winter.
But wind accounts for just 10 percent of the power in Texas generated during the winter. And the loss of power to the grid caused by shutdowns of thermal power plants, primarily those relying on natural gas, dwarfed the dent caused by frozen wind turbines, by a factor of five or six.
As the cold hit, demand for electricity soared past the mark that ERCOT had figured would be the maximum needed. But at a moment when the world is awash in surplus natural gas, much of it from Texas wells, the state’s power-generating operators were unable to turn that gas into electricity to meet that demand.
In the single-digit temperatures, pipelines froze up because there was some moisture in the gas. Pumps slowed. Diesel engines to power the pumps refused to start. One power plant after another went offline. Even a reactor at one of the state’s two nuclear plants went dark, hobbled by frozen equipment.
“At a time when the need is the greatest it’s ever been, it’s a strain on the system like we’ve never seen,” said Tom Seng, director of the School of Energy Economics, Policy and Commerce at the University of Tulsa.
See how covid-19 is reshaping the electric rhythms of New York City
Throughout the Southwest, he said, there has been a scramble for gas as sources have gone offline. Most surplus gas is stored underground, he said, and bringing it to the surface becomes more and more difficult in such prolonged low temperatures. March futures for natural gas are selling for $3 per million BTUs in Oklahoma, he said, but the spot price hit $600 over the weekend.
In Texas, production of natural gas Tuesday fell 6 billion to 7 billion cubic feet per day from earlier in the month, Anne Swedberg Robba, head of American gas and power analytics for S&P Global Platts, wrote in an email. Nationally, production has dropped by about 14 percent.
“But this is not the first time we’ve had this issue in Texas,” said Hirs, of the University of Houston.
There was a severe cold spell in the Southwest in 2011, and frigid weather in 1983, 1989, 2003, 2006, 2008 and 2010. A study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. of the 2011 event, which also led to widespread blackouts for much the same reasons, found that “the massive amount of generator failures that were experienced raises the question whether it would have been helpful to increase reserve levels going into the event. This action would have brought more units online earlier, might have prevented some of the freezing problems the generators experienced, and could have exposed operational problems in time to implement corrections before the units were needed to meet customer demand.”
On Tuesday, both agencies announced that they would now investigate the causes of this year’s failure.
Energy won’t be the same when this is over
Texas shares with California an unwillingness to compensate generation companies for maintenance, Hirs said, unlike most of the rest of the country. He said that what happened to California in the heat last summer has now been reflected in Texas’s winter.
“Both Texas and California have failed spectacularly this year,” he said. “There’s a tremendous human cost. People died in California. People died in Texas.”
Texas is unique among the states in having a grid all its own that is almost entirely cut off from the rest of the country. That has prevented Texas from importing much electricity as its power plants went down, but Hirs said that the cold is so widespread across the heart of the nation that no one has any electricity to spare anyway.
Bill Magness, chief executive of ERCOT, said in an interview with the WFAA TV station in Dallas that he thought the state grid was better prepared for winter than it once was.
“In 2018 we had some very cold winter times, but we saw the generation fleets performed very well through that,” he said. “I think we really made some progress getting ready for these winter times. And this storm has been extraordinary. We are seeing a whole lot of units coming off for reasons that have to do with the weather, so certainly winterization is something that constantly needs to be looked at.”
Although temporary, one factor that may have hurt was that the sudden high wholesale price of electricity may have caused ERCOT’s computers to order companies to “shed load” — that is, cut off customers — rather than deal with the spike in costs.
The state’s Public Utilities Commission ordered ERCOT on Monday to allow for those high prices. They almost certainly will not last long, as temperatures are already rising. The cost of that electricity, at least in the short run, probably will fall most heavily on the retail utilities.
The Texas grid got crushed because its operators didn’t see the need to prepare for cold weather
Will Englund
When it gets really cold, it can be hard to produce electricity, as customers in Texas and neighboring states are finding out. But it’s not impossible. Operators in Alaska, Canada, Maine, Norway and Siberia do it all the time.
How Texas's independent power grid failed under pressure.
What has sent Texas reeling is not an engineering problem, nor is it the frozen wind turbines blamed by prominent Republicans. It is a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service.
It’s a “Wild West market design based only on short-run prices,” said Matt Breidert, a portfolio manager at a firm called TortoiseEcofin.
And yet the temporary train wreck of that market Monday and Tuesday has seen the wholesale price of electricity in Houston go from $22 a megawatt-hour to about $9,000. Meanwhile, 4 million Texas households have been without power.
One utility company, Griddy, which sells power at wholesale rates to retail customers without locking in a price in advance, told its patrons Tuesday to find another provider before they get socked with tremendous bills.
The widespread failure in Texas and, to a lesser extent, Oklahoma and Louisiana in the face of a winter cold snap shines a light on what some see as the derelict state of America’s power infrastructure, a mirror reflection of the chaos that struck California last summer.
Edward Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, said the disinvestment in electricity production reminds him of the last years of the Soviet Union, or of the oil sector today in Venezuela.
“They hate it when I say that,” he said.
Power outages plague Texas, other states amid deadly cold, snow
The immediate question facing the Texas power sector is whether its participants are willing to pay for the sort of winterization measures that are common farther north, even for a once-in-a-decade spell of weather.
Gov. Greg Abbott (R) called Tuesday for reform of the state’s electric grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT.
“Far too many Texans are without power and heat for their homes as our state faces freezing temperatures and severe winter weather,” he said in a statement. “This is unacceptable.”
He said he would work with the legislature to find ways to “ensure that our state never experiences power outages like this again.”
The Republican speaker of the Texas House, Dade Phelan, announced immediate hearings into “what went wrong.”
Fossil fuel groups and their Republican allies blamed the power failures on frozen wind turbines and warned against the supposed dangers of alternative power sources. Some turbines did in fact freeze — though Greenland and other northern outposts are able to keep theirs going through the winter.
But wind accounts for just 10 percent of the power in Texas generated during the winter. And the loss of power to the grid caused by shutdowns of thermal power plants, primarily those relying on natural gas, dwarfed the dent caused by frozen wind turbines, by a factor of five or six.
As the cold hit, demand for electricity soared past the mark that ERCOT had figured would be the maximum needed. But at a moment when the world is awash in surplus natural gas, much of it from Texas wells, the state’s power-generating operators were unable to turn that gas into electricity to meet that demand.
In the single-digit temperatures, pipelines froze up because there was some moisture in the gas. Pumps slowed. Diesel engines to power the pumps refused to start. One power plant after another went offline. Even a reactor at one of the state’s two nuclear plants went dark, hobbled by frozen equipment.
“At a time when the need is the greatest it’s ever been, it’s a strain on the system like we’ve never seen,” said Tom Seng, director of the School of Energy Economics, Policy and Commerce at the University of Tulsa.
See how covid-19 is reshaping the electric rhythms of New York City
Throughout the Southwest, he said, there has been a scramble for gas as sources have gone offline. Most surplus gas is stored underground, he said, and bringing it to the surface becomes more and more difficult in such prolonged low temperatures. March futures for natural gas are selling for $3 per million BTUs in Oklahoma, he said, but the spot price hit $600 over the weekend.
In Texas, production of natural gas Tuesday fell 6 billion to 7 billion cubic feet per day from earlier in the month, Anne Swedberg Robba, head of American gas and power analytics for S&P Global Platts, wrote in an email. Nationally, production has dropped by about 14 percent.
“But this is not the first time we’ve had this issue in Texas,” said Hirs, of the University of Houston.
There was a severe cold spell in the Southwest in 2011, and frigid weather in 1983, 1989, 2003, 2006, 2008 and 2010. A study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. of the 2011 event, which also led to widespread blackouts for much the same reasons, found that “the massive amount of generator failures that were experienced raises the question whether it would have been helpful to increase reserve levels going into the event. This action would have brought more units online earlier, might have prevented some of the freezing problems the generators experienced, and could have exposed operational problems in time to implement corrections before the units were needed to meet customer demand.”
On Tuesday, both agencies announced that they would now investigate the causes of this year’s failure.
Energy won’t be the same when this is over
Texas shares with California an unwillingness to compensate generation companies for maintenance, Hirs said, unlike most of the rest of the country. He said that what happened to California in the heat last summer has now been reflected in Texas’s winter.
“Both Texas and California have failed spectacularly this year,” he said. “There’s a tremendous human cost. People died in California. People died in Texas.”
Texas is unique among the states in having a grid all its own that is almost entirely cut off from the rest of the country. That has prevented Texas from importing much electricity as its power plants went down, but Hirs said that the cold is so widespread across the heart of the nation that no one has any electricity to spare anyway.
Bill Magness, chief executive of ERCOT, said in an interview with the WFAA TV station in Dallas that he thought the state grid was better prepared for winter than it once was.
“In 2018 we had some very cold winter times, but we saw the generation fleets performed very well through that,” he said. “I think we really made some progress getting ready for these winter times. And this storm has been extraordinary. We are seeing a whole lot of units coming off for reasons that have to do with the weather, so certainly winterization is something that constantly needs to be looked at.”
Although temporary, one factor that may have hurt was that the sudden high wholesale price of electricity may have caused ERCOT’s computers to order companies to “shed load” — that is, cut off customers — rather than deal with the spike in costs.
The state’s Public Utilities Commission ordered ERCOT on Monday to allow for those high prices. They almost certainly will not last long, as temperatures are already rising. The cost of that electricity, at least in the short run, probably will fall most heavily on the retail utilities.
flyfishingfrog
Active Member
so you are a freaking nut evidently
45% of our fossil fuel and nuclear generation capacity are offline because of unplanned outage - so while renewables don't operate well in these conditions - they are about 10% of our gen capacity and neither do traditional generation assets when you let companies focused on reducing operational costs to increase profit over ensuring the asset will run in extremes own them all.
I know exactly how much it costs to operate a gen plant - down to the cents/kwh hour, maintenance plans, the difference between as designed, as built and as operated, how to utilize 3D models to simulate operational weather and fuel conditions and calculate different generation levels, etc
and I also know how companies cut costs - which is why it should not be done from a profit perspective on the generation end or the retail end - wait until they shut off people who can't pay the $5k bill they get for the last few days because a retailer didn't explain the risk of variable.
Funny how none of the gen plants in other parts of the country are failing left and right even though they have the same or worse weather conditions in most places....
None of that crap you are talking about has a single thing to do with the decision to fake deregulation on the supply and sales side of an industry that is required for our daily lives to continue - there are no options for a homeowner in the end - we have one grid and adding dozens of people to try and fill it or hundreds of people to try and scam you into allowing them to profit from you using the one grid doesn't change anything.
bmoney214
OUCH!!!
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/i...cor-unsure-when-power-will-come-back/2554015/
If you still don't have power, find somewhere to go. It might be awhile.
Chongo94
Active Member
QuilterFrawg
CDR USN (Ret)
I'm not sure what "fixed" or "variable rate" means. Looking at my PEC bill, I can't tell. Under Rate Type it says Residential eDraft. Huh?
Sweat Equity
Tier 1
No, frozen wind turbines aren't the main culprit for Texas' power outages
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/0...13523274&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
Well described, IMO. (Less the political jabs.)
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/0...13523274&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
Well described, IMO. (Less the political jabs.)
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Sweat Equity
Tier 1
You should be fine. If you want to PM me or call me, happy to walk you through it if you are concerned. (Regardless, I will be up all night trying to coordinate that dreaded wind power some seem to hate.)
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QuilterFrawg
CDR USN (Ret)
Class of '75!
Or as one poster in particular on here would say...
Thinking this might be directed at me. Not my feelings at all, just get tired of the over-the-top drama. It'd be nice if people could just get through something like this by just doing the things they need to do to get through it without all the politicizing and social media histrionics.
People all over Twitter saying they are literally scared of freezing to death. Not homeless people, but those in middle to upper class neighborhoods. Give me a scheissing break. A couple I saw even posted pictures of their neighbors homes, with proof that THEY were one of the few unlucky ones in their neighborhood without power. They either aren't that scared of freezing to death or they are such a-holes that their neighbors won't take them in for a day even if they were literally freezing to death.
Go stay at a family members place, a neighbors place, or a friends place for a day or two if you're genuinely worried. It's not all that hard. I agree that this sucks and there are certain people in certain unique situations that are a little desperate right now, but the persistent overdramatization by people who are just looking to complain and get attention wears me out.
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Eight
Member
good for you, neighbor was pulling their kids in an innertube behind a golf cart
nwlafrog
Active Member
I have a highly modified golf cart lol.
Our raft popped so I engineered a 55gallon drum that I cutout, fence posts for skis, and 2x4’s for supports. It has been indestructible.
More Frogs the Better
Full Member
Just got power back this afternoon after 30 hours or so. It was very unpleasant last night. No, I wasn't in danger of freezing but we'll see how the pipes did through all of this. It is not something that should happen in a state with our energy resources and there needs to be full accountability toward the people and practices that allowed it to happen.
Zubaz
Member
Right. It's obviously brutal and there are some at-risk folks that we need to make sure are taken care of, but let's not pretend that Katrina just ran through Texas either.
I've got one frozen pipe for sure and probably two. Just keeping my fingers crossed that they don't burst at this point. Got a pier and beam house so I would think that is the better option for repairs and water damage in instances like this but I know next to nothing about plumbing so who knows, maybe it's worse. Didn't seal off crawl space vents which in hindsight was probably next level stupid. Following all the other normal instructions. Even sat there for awhile in my bathroom like an idiot blowing a hair dryer on the pipe that's frozen where it enters the house which I'm sure was a complete waste of time.
BrewingFrog
Was I supposed to type something here?
Goodness! Your superior knowledge frightens me!
I am sure that, after the Kommisars take over the operation of the generating assets and slaughter the Kulaks who exploit the workers, all will be well.
Moose Stuff
Active Member
I've been blow drying the pipes under our sinks in our master bedroom (they are up against an outside wall) at 12:00/3:00/6:00 AM each of the last two nights. They've been almost completely frozen each time and the hairdryer has worked each time.
Paul in uhh
Active Member
Try licking them
