[Carl Vehse]

"Could we have built a grid that would have fared better during this time? Of course we could have. But we could also build a car that could survive every crash you could possibly throw at it, but it would be very expensive and not many people would probably be able to afford it."

The ol' false analogy scam. Compare making decisions for a better power grid to making decisions to build a perfect car.

Taking a nuke plant offline for repairs in February was not a good decision. Late March or April (or last October) would be better. Keeping existing plans operational especially in the critical winter and summer months is a good decision. And there are likely other decisions that don't involve paying for and building enough power plants to give 150% coverage for the next Ice Age.

[beancounter13]

Really? Which nuclear plant went offline?

As far as I know nuke plants only shut down for emergency situations (to avoid catastrophe) or for re-fueling (about every 18 months).

[freepersup]

Nuke refueling outages tend to run on 16 month cycles. If the outage is in the spring, then the next one will be a year (plus) in the fall and back and forth it goes.

I participated in 6 refueling outages. No two were alike in down time, but they always kicked off as planned on the 16 month cycle. The one I worked at- when down, lost a million dollars a day net for the inability to produce and sell energy, AND there was the added cost (loss) in the refueling expenses.

I defer to others who might correct me.

[JD_UTDallas]

Reactor one of the STP that tripped offline did not go down for maintenance. STP reactor one had a boiler feed line sensor freeze up and the automatic safety systems turbine tripped the reactor and initiated a shutdown and core cooling event as it was designed too. Those reactors ware never designed nor hardened for freezing temperatures. The last time that area got below freezing was 1989 and barely this time they got a hard freeze. Im in the energy industry I have live data access to ERCOT and Oncor data I watched STP one trip and also watched in horror as the grid lost 30,000 megawatts in a few minutes which caused the grid frequency to drop to 59.2 Hz which should have collapsed it we came within seconds of kissing the whole grid having to black start the grid would take WEEKS to spin up, frequency synchronise and phase match all the generation and sub grids its never been done before because no one in their right mind would test the procedure.