ERCOT doesn’t have the power to regulate (perhaps that’s part of the problem) and we essentially already have ONE federal regulator for all the other non-tx grids but they are also separate grids. Since we already have only two regulators (federal and tx), it probably isn’t that risky to truly have a single regulator (pulling tx under fed reg). The bigger question is should it be a single interconnected grid - I don’t have enough understanding on pro/con of that, but that sound like a major infrastructure challenge.
The one thing not mentioned much here is the “rolling” black out. The concept there is when demand is greater than supply, we have rolling blackout that is done equally (exemption are critical infrastructure cannot be powered down like hospitals, water plants, etcs). It was a clusterfk. Some went without power for 4 days, some for 1 hours total or none at all. Who is responsible for this and why did it fail? I believe it’s the distributors such as center point energy. Need answers to this also.
What happened there, from my understanding, is that the intent was to roll. But power was going offline so fast that they ended up with only the "critical infrastructure" grids working (and all the people/businesses who happen to live near the hospitals, fire departments, etc) and there wasn't enough power to bring anyone else back online without risking overload. Basically, they just lost a lot more power than they projected, so everyone else had to go down to keep infrastructure running, instead of all those other groups just rolling from one to another. ERCOT was requiring Austin Energy, Centerpoint, etc to keep taking more and more power off the grid as more and more power sources failed. That said, the communication process was a total failure along the way. I'm in Austin, and Austin Water was waaaaaay worse. On Tuesday night, they were telling people NOT to worry about water issues and that everything was fine. Less than 8 hours later, people started losing water, and 24 hours later, there was a city-wide boil water notice. It's understandable that everything went to hell, but they had no business proactively telling people NOT to prepare. And then when talking about low pressure and boil requirements throughout Wednesday, they never addressed the fact that a chunk of the city had no water at all. It wasn't until Thursday afternoon that they really even acknowledged it.
I was listening to a discussion on this on local news here in MN and according to the report I heard MN electricity and gas price are pretty much the national average.
I've read through the last pages and it's another straw man to talk about winterizing TX power generation to MN standards. The point isn't to say that TX has to be the same as MN anymore than MN has to have the same standards as Antarctica. The point is that there is nothing inherent about wind or other renewable energy sources that are prone to failure in inclement weather. In engineering there is the principles of tolerances and robustness. It probably isn't justified for TX to engineer to stand for -0 F for a week but certainly sub freezing temperatures isn't that rare of an occurrence for TX as in the lifetime of all of us here we can recall TX having a statewide freeze more than once. It should've been within the tolerances of engineering in TX for a multiple day situation below freezing. Also there should be enough robustness and redundancy in the system to deal with a failure like this. It sounds to me like this has a lot to do with not being connected to the larger grid where TX could've drawn upon other states to keep the system running. Consider the flip side. If MN suffered a week of above 100 F temperatures. This would be rare but not out of the realm of possibility as I've seen it hit triple digits here before. Chances are the MN grid would go completely down if it was just up to MN to handle it but thankfully we're plugged into a multistate grid and my understanding is even could draw on Canada if needed.
My brother works prime power in the NW. He has explained some of the mechanics of power grids. The East and West are heavily regulated and he has talked about some of the most archaic restrictions. That said he understands and agrees with them. Power grids are mixed with very antiquated infrastructure in some parts and very advanced in others. When there are very severe power outages, there are investigations that go on for months and new regulations immediately put in place. That said, the systems are very robust but also very fragile. If a whole grid fails, it would take months to bring back online. He mentioned that its very very difficult to manually bring down a grid. He always feared mother nature. It doesn't take much when massive egos brag their own state has its own power grid. I wouldn't be surprised if there are calls to join the eastern power grid. Many people don't realize it was on a bring of catastrophe and weeks w/out power.
Thats not exactly true. We have tolerances for a reason. 1/8" off on a 2x4 in a house is not the same as an 1/8" off on a rocket ship...obviously. You should approach the thought of electrical distribution systems are closer to rocketry than carpentry. The source of the energy is the red herring. Millions of people w/out power is the symptom, not the problem. The problem is that the State of Texas almost faced a catastrophic event.
The problem was in the natural gas pipelines apparently. What's interesting or notable that pipelines don't fail in cold weather places where people use a lot more gas. Also, consumer gas stayed on so I'm still not sold w have the whole story It seems when California had rolling blackouts due to high prices. I have a feeling price of gas is the issue
The Texas Power Grid Failure is More Complicated than Green v. Carbon - Bill King Blog The Texas Power Grid Failure is More Complicated than Green v. Carbon by Bill King February 19, 2021 The hyper-partisans have already been using the power grid failure as grist for the renewable energy versus fossil fuel debate. However, while the mix of power sources was played a role in the current crisis, it was not the main culprit. Its origins relate to more fundamental issues about markets versus regulation and that all too common human trait – procrastination. To unwind what is happening this week, we have to begin with the State’s decision to largely deregulate electricity generation in 1999. The legislation, Senate Bill 7, was bipartisan with an equal number of Republican and Democratic co-sponsors. That legislation separated the generation of electricity from the distribution of it. The distribution companies, like Centerpoint in most of the Houston region, were forced to give equal access to their distribution systems to all generation companies. Electricity was deregulated to keep prices down. While there is some debate about how effective it has been at that, it is unquestionably true that Texas has some of the lowest electricity rates in the country. The bill set up the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to manage the flow of the generation into the distribution systems. ERCOT is basically a co-op. Its members are various commercial enterprises engaged in the business of generating or distributing electricity. Its board is controlled by those entities; however, state law gives the Public Utility Commission (PUC) considerable oversight authority, and the PUC Chair is an ex officio member of its board. A retired electricity executive told me a rough way to think about the relationships is to think of ERCOT as Amazon. The generators are the suppliers of “products” to ERCOT and the distribution companies, like Centerpoint, are the UPS/FedExs. According to ERCOT almost all of Texas’ power generation comes from natural gas (46%), wind (23%), coal (18%) and nuclear (11%). The other common sources – hydro, solar and geothermal are de minimis. As nearly as I have been able to sort out, the problems of the last few days boil down to two issues. The first is the cold shutdown of many of the power generation facilities. ERCOT in a press release said at the height of the crisis that about 28,000 MW of fossil fuel power was offline and 18,000 MW of wind power. That was nearly half of the state’s generation capacity. This is where the fossil fuel versus renewables debate has some relevance. While every source was affected, wind unquestionably failed at a much higher rate than did the fossil fuel plants.1 The great thing about wind is that it is very cheap power; the problem is that it is more affected by weather conditions than are fossil fuels, and therefore relatively less reliable. As fossil fuel plants (primarily older coal plants) have been replaced by wind, the system has become less resilient to extreme weather events. The relative reliability of generation sources affects the calculation of something the industry refers to as “reserve margin.” The reserve margin is a calculation of how much extra power is available above what might be demanded. It is obviously affected by both the demand for electricity and the amount available from all generators at any particular time. The more unreliable the sources providing generation are, the greater the reserve margin needed to deal with potential shortages from either a spike in demand or a drop in production or a combination of the two. So, the greater the amount that renewables contribute to our system the larger the reserve margin will need to be. The critical issue to me, however, is that Texas is alone in the country in not having an enforced reserve margin. Instead, Texas relies on the operation of the market to insure there is an adequate reserve. Ironically, just last month consultants engaged by ERCOT did an extensive study on the reserve margin in Texas. This was the most telling statement in the entire study: “ . . . unlike all other electricity systems in North America, ERCOT does not have a resource adequacy reliability standard or reserve margin requirement.” Estimation of the Market Equilibrium and Economically Optimal Reserve Margins for the ERCOT Region for 2024, p. 5. In other words, Texas does not enforce reliability and a minimum reserve requirement through regulation, as does every other state. According to ERCOT, generators must file winterization plans with it, but ERCOT exercises minimal oversight of generators’ compliance with the plans. This study clearly shows the risk of losing power in a severe weather event is possible, although not probable. This Houston Chronicle story documents how previous winter storms had prompted federal regulators to warn that generators should beef up their winterization precautions. This is a place where the market fails to meet the public’s expectation. In an unregulated market, it makes no sense for an investor to spend money to take precautions might be needed only once a decade. If they do, another generator will not and will thus be able to undercut the more cautious generator’s price. This is akin to the concept in economics known as the tragedy of the commons where a cost (in this case of making generation more reliable) is not fully reflected in the production of a good or service but ultimately will be borne by society generally – in this case in form of plumbing bills to fix broken pipes, of example. If every generator is required to meet certain reliability standards, that will be reflected in the cost of all generators and thus no one generator can obtain a competitive advantage from supplying electricity from a less reliable source. Of course, that enhanced reliability will come at a cost, one that I suspect will favor fossil fuels while being more challenging for wind and solar. It is possible that some sources will just be inherently less reliable. In that case perhaps they should pay a surcharge to create extra standby capacity. But whatever mechanism is used to make generation more reliable, it will be reflected in higher costs that will be ultimately paid by consumers. Determining the proper balance between risk and the costs will not be easy. One of the problems with turning it over to a regulatory scheme is that regulators tend to err on the side of caution, driving up costs. But it appears to me that we, at a minimum, are going to have to have a serious conversation about this trade-off. The second issue that has baffled me in this crisis was the failure of the rolling blackout system to function properly. The idea of rolling blackouts is that if demand exceeds supply, enough users will be taken offline to equalize the two. But those who are offline are supposed to be rotated so that everyone gets some level of power during the day. For example, if 40% of the generation was offline, everyone should be getting about 60% of their normal power. So, everyone should have been getting power about 14 hours per day and shut off 10 hours. There are some limitations to rolling the blackouts. Critical infrastructure like hospitals and water treatments plants are supposed to be prioritized and never taken offline, which reduces the percentage available to households and other non-critical users. But in this event, there are many reports of homes going without power for days and some critical infrastructure facilities, especially water treatment plants, also offline. That is not how the system is supposed to work and that is on the distributors, not ERCOT. I have heard informally that the supply got so low that there was only enough to power circuits with critical uses. But we need to hear from distributors, CenterPoint in particular, definitively why the system did not work as planned and what can be done to avoid that problem in the future. I fear that in the toxic, hyper-partisan world in which we live today there will be little serious discussion of the issues that caused this crisis. Instead, we will have a lot of finger-pointing and partisans screaming their tired talking points at the top of their lungs. Solutions are almost always found in exploring the nuance of problems and issues. Unfortunately, nuance does not make good headlines or sound bites in campaign ads. Note 1 – The exact rate at which each source failed is still a little murky. Doug Sheridan at EnergyPoint Research estimates that only about a 33% of gas plants and 25% of coal plants went offline, but over 80% of wind generation did. These are links to a Lium discussion and a Wall Street Journal article which have some data on this issue.
The note 1 there is written to give the wrong impression. Losing 80% of wind generation that was only supplying 7% of the total is not really significant but using the 80% number makes it look like wind power was to blame. Probably written by an O&G guy. Also reading today that one of the significant factors was the inability to remove the water from the gas as temperatures went below freezing: Most of the free water in natural gas is removed with drip valves along the pipelines but the remaining moisture must be removed by further processing.
Note 1 reference this: First Look At Data Behind ERCOT Power Stack Failure - LIUM I think that -10 ngas freefall was the start of extended blackout and panic by ERCOT -------------------- Why It Matters: Data behind the current power crisis in Texas will have far reaching implications on how the state and the U.S. tackle power and renewables going forward. In this update, we have used the power data Lium regularly collects from ERCOT and the EIA to add some perspective on the current electricity crisis in Texas. Initial takeaways have been: All power sources have disappointed to some degree Wind generation has been especially poor and The natural gas ramp has been impressive, despite shortfalls and a big crash early am Monday ERCOT NET GENERATION Early Monday morning, Natural Gas power generation suddenly dropped 10 GW after tripling capacity to over 35 GW the previous seven days Coal generation also deteriorated through Monday morning while Nuclear suddenly lost >1 GW of generation around 7am Wind generation had already been slow the previous weekend and continued to get worse through Monday / Tuesday (down 8 GW vs prior week) Altogether, ERCOT probably needed at least another 17 GW of generation to meet extreme demand over the last two days In a hypothetical scenario, the ERCOT shortfall could have been met if Natural Gas, Coal, and Nuclear were operating at summer peak levels (+9 GW) and Wind was operating at its typical February rate (+8 GW)
I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with here. The fact that states that frequently get colder weather than TX but also with wind, solar, nuclear and gas haven't had the same problems that TX has. This isn't a failure of those as power sources but it's a failure of the engineering.
Yep my house is heated by gas and it's fine even though the outside air temp is currently a balmy 7 F.
Wow... a President from one party helping the governor of the other party? And without making some spurious claim about why the disaster happened?
This must be a mistake. I didn't see a tweet this morning from Biden saying "Governor Abbot of the LAME state of Texasss is so weak and he and his LOSER attorney general tried to steal the election from me and now the want MY HELP!"
About that cost to winterize... 4.5m in El Paso. Rage. https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/n...-texas-grid-power-outages-weather/6774067002/ After that event, EPE spent $4.5 million to repair and better winterize its old Newman, Rio Grande and Copper power plants, EPE officials said. It also resulted in EPE’s Montana power plant and a Rio Grande plant generator, added after the 2011 freeze, to be designed to withstand below-freezing temperatures, Buraczyk said.
And yes, El Paso also needed more supply which they were able to get from Az. A good article on what El Paso did after the 2011 freeze and power outages. https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/el-paso-electric-winter-storm-2021/ El Paso Heeded the Warnings and Avoided a Winter Catastrophe The West Texas city was spared the worst effects of this week’s storms, thanks to its preparations in the wake of a devastating 2011 deep freeze. ... In addition to its local plants, it drew on Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona to meet the surge in customer demand as people cranked up their thermostats.
