Posted on 02/18/2021 5:06:56 PM PST by beancounter13
After winter storms continued to barrage the state Tuesday night, officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the body overseeing the grid that serves 90 percent of the state’s homes, couldn’t offer a timeline for when power for every Texan would be restored. Over the long weekend, the council had advised local utilities to shed energy use with rolling outages in order to maintain the reliability of the electric system after a surge in demand, or otherwise risk uncontrolled blackouts that will take longer to reverse. Some four million homes in the state had been left in the lurch without energy in the bitter cold—many for over fifty hours—and as of Wednesday morning, 2.7 million homes still lacked power.
As Texans have fled for hotels, bunked with friends and family, or, without options, hunkered down in their homes watching pipes burst and the water in toilet bowls freeze, lawmakers have questioned whether the council has mismanaged the response. On Tuesday, Governor Greg Abbott said the situation was “unacceptable” and called for the council’s leaders to resign. State legislators are now planning to investigate what led energy generation to drop off when Texans needed it most.
To help make sense of what led to ERCOT’s trouble handling this energy crisis, Texas Monthly spoke with Joshua Rhodes, an energy guru—who was also frozen out of his South Austin home and had temporarily relocated to a warm location in Dripping Springs. Rhodes is a founding partner at IdeaSmiths LLC energy consulting firm and a research assistant at the University of Texas at Austin whose work focuses on the area of smart grid and bulk electricity systems. The interview has been edited for clarity.
(Excerpt) Read more at -texasmonthly-com.cdn.ampproject.org ...
I’ve heard this is easily going to be the most expensive natural disaster in Texas’ history. By the time business, homeowners and insurance customers get done paying the bill I assure you they’ll be a big appetite for more energy regulation.
>>> “It was the connection between the power plant and outside systems,” Alex Gilbert, project manager at the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, told the Washington Examiner. <<<
freepersup: It’s like pulling teeth to get the straight skinny on what happened at the plant.
>>> “So it certainly is one of many factors but is greatly outweighed by fossil fuel outages,” Gilbert said. <<<
freepersup: Good ol’ reliable fossil fuels.
For what it’s worth, I hope not. I don’t like big brother being involved in everything.
That’s an easy question - windmills don’t work too well in icy weather and solar panels don’t work when they’re covered with snow/
My wife’s uncle sent a subscription to us as a gift. I’ve noticed a decidedly leftward shift over the past couple of years.
Yep its a leftist POS. They will take the AOC veiw that you should build more crap that has no real return on the dollar. Cant have them working if the wind blows too hard and freezes up in the winter. The irony is if they polluted more, they would be warmer right now! Funny how Gore and Kerry go silent this time of year.
“Or we can go deeper and look at our market structure itself. ERCOT is a bit unique from other electricity grids in the U.S. In ERCOT, power plants are only paid if they produce energy. Other grids have what we call capacity markets, in which power plants are not only paid for producing energy, but they can be paid for just existing to have the capacity to provide energy if they’re ever called upon. And theoretically, a power plant could exist in that market, get paid, and never produce energy, ever.”
Or how about having each plant operate at less than full capacity, say 70% so that when more is needed it’s quite easy and fast to ramp up all the plants. That makes electricity a bit more expensive, but you get what you pay for.
Also, I looked at my electric bill (California), the bulk of the bill is the transmission lines and related infrastructures not the fuel/generation itself. Which mean the additional cost would not be that much.
Not having a fair amount of capacity stashed away is like living paycheck to paycheck.
Can you imagine how much worse this would have been if all the cars on the road were electric. as so many idiots are pressing for?
I remember something about eggs and baskets that would be wise to remember... What was that?
Wind and solar began their drop upon 8 Feb 2021. Coal charted full operation from that point forward. The natural gas grid contribution began to ramp to nearly triple by 14 Feb 2021.
Here is a charting from ERCOT:
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/066/046/181/original/76a446dc74842c1f.png
Too bad that 2018 NARUC paper is a pdf, but I’ll try my best to transcribe part of it. It talks about the difficulty of “cycling” a coal plant on/off or up/down as other sources of electricity come on line (solar and wind, highly variable).
“While they are currently being discussed, no specific market mechanisms exist to compensate fossil fuel power plants in the ERCOT and SPP markets...operators with the largest share of intermittent renewable energy resources...
More retirements of coal plants are likely, increasing the risk of potential power outages in states like Texas...
Thoughtful market mechanisms to compensate coal-fired units for providing balancing attributes, such as short-term generation flexibility...helping to ensure reliable operation of the nation’s electric power grid.”
********************************
Comment: Keep in mind that coal is up against increased EPA restrictions, while solar and wind is getting tax cuts and incentives.
Depends on how the contracts were structured.
There is a proposal by an electrical engineer versed in magnetic levitation, to store a reserve of energy in a magnetically suspended iron rotor mass moving at high velocity. For industrial purposes of grid level storage, the device would be of the size scale of a project like the proposed Superconducting Supercollider of Waxahachie, Texas.
From that same paper, ERCOTT retired 5,000 MW of coal energy in just 2018 alone. SPP retired another 2,000 MW.
Utilities are suppliers of last resort. People effed up big time. It has nothing to do with how open the electric market is.
Entities miscalculated the risk of supply sources, piss poor contracts etc.
This was avoidable if responsible people did the responsible things.
I have a Coleman 7000 Watt Powermate generater, and I am hoping there is a tri-fuel conversion kit.
Yes, I have suggested one possible outcome would be to limit how much wind / solar would be received by the grid. That would ensure more fossil plants are actually running albeit no plant (other than nuclear) would be delivering full capacity.
CA is not an electricity market I am familiar with, but it remain regulated so you cannot know for sure what those fees cover. It is all based upon how the regulatory unit views costs and how the utilities bend the rules to maximize return. In other ‘deregulated’ markets like PA, the transmission the fees are grouped almost in reverse of what you just described.
Texas is about as free from regulation as possible. The only regulated part is transmission. Generators bid the energy they sell, and retailers bid what they sell. In such a market, can you really ‘demand’ a generator limit the amount of product they sell?
Some have suggested that if all the cars were electric, we could have used those collective batteries to supply power back to the grid.
Of course I am not sure I know of anyone who would having willingly drained their car battery just to keep the lights on in a distant town.
And add any carbon trading that might become the norm with any Green New Deal, and things snowball very quickly.
At the basest of levels, this has everything to do with an open market.
How do you ‘make’ someone do something they would not otherwise do?
You either take over and control them or regulate them.The only other option would be to incentivize generators to build more capacity. That would inevitably include wind and solar.
Do we really need more wind and solar sitting around, unused, drawing money from our pockets?
Do want to pay for wind farms that do not generate power when we need it?
What does that entail? Finding suppliers who can perform under severe conditions. What does that entail? Finding the suppliers who have the infrastructure to perform, the fuel to perform, and the financial wherewithal to perform under severe conditions. You then have to have the smarts to find those suppliers and then have a legal department and credit department to secure binding contracts that will endure critical times.
We were audited by hired guns a while back and I was interviewed by the auditors. They asked how I knew I was doing a good job. I told them contracts I was responsible for performed under the harshest conditions.
That did not happen in Texas. For some damn reasons idiots (on all sides, energy commissions, suppliers and utilities) allowed 25-40% of the firm portfolios of utilities to be served by interruptible suppliers. Proof of that? No power.
Interesting and focused insight. Thanks.
What was recently shown in one article is that this was about the sixth Texas incident or winter impact on their grid in the last 36 years. So while the media calls this a 500 year event, in truth there is something approaching it once every six years.
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