Posted on 06/19/2021 7:59:17 AM PDT by fireman15
The nearly simultaneous shutdown of four gigantic power plants in Texas — capable of powering almost 1 million homes — drove the region to the brink of yet another energy crisis this past week as temperatures soared, according to data analyzed by Bloomberg.
All told, generators across the second-largest U.S. state were either down for repairs or running at reduced capacity when triple-digit heat was baking Texas, according to data compiled by Wood Mackenzie Ltd.'s Genscape unit. But the biggest impacts came from just a handful of facilities: a Vistra Corp.-owned 1.15-megawatt nuclear reactor, and three other giant facilities owned by Talen Energy Corp. and NRG Energy Inc.
"We can't really afford to lose a gig of capacity heading into an extreme weather event," said Rebecca Miller, a Wood Mackenzie analyst, using industry shorthand for gigawatt.
For days, officials were pleading with homeowners to turn off appliances and ease up on A/C use, and closely watching supply gauges to avoid a repeat of February's disastrous blackouts. At the peak of the crisis, electricity equivalent to the normal use of almost 2.5 million households was missing from the grid — just when it was needed most.
On June 7, almost a full week before the heatwave, a reactor at the Comanche Peak nuclear plant outside of Dallas dropped offline because of a transformer fire. Although the flames were quickly doused, the reactor is still down, and owner Vistra Corp. hasn't said when it may return.
(Excerpt) Read more at news-journal.com ...
TX shut down 5 baseload coal plants in 2020 alone.
If I remember correctly, ERCOT was designed to operate only within the state of Texas, and not cross state lines. This freed it from US government control. There are a few areas of Texas in other power pools, some in East Texas and part of the panhandle with Oklahoma.
It was found years ago that ERCOT did have a connection with Oklahoma, but this was quickly done away with, and the system modified so no connections could be made again.
I thought they still had a connection. It is a AC-DC-AC substation connection because they are not synchronous. ERCOT is its own island.
And it is apparently not able to produce the power needed by its customers
I’ve read that ERCOT has AC-DC-AC connections with Mexico.
When it comes to energy policy which is the worst? California or Texas?
The company that where I worked for 30 years got out of the generating business, sold off or decommissioned their generating plants so that they could be strictly in sales and distribution.
The deregulation laws passed in the 1980s and 90s separated generation and sales and made so called bidding and contracting for the sale of electricity a thing. In Texas you should be well aware of how well this went.
The EPA made it prohibitively expensive to build or maintain Coal fired plants.
From the 1970 through the 2010 the price of gas made generating with gas to expensive. Then Fracking made gas so cheap that independent companies started building gas turbine generating stations that would compete against the old utilities. Federal Laws required the utilities to permit these startups to connect to their grids.
The financial pressures of all of these Federally mandated changes to their business forced the electric companies to; cut employees, cut money from the budgets for things like line maintenance, right of way maintenance (tree trimming), system upgrades (replacing outdated equipment).
I have seen a lot of changes in the last 40 years and I have to say that I preferred the old system of a regulated electric utility. Certainly their was waste in the old system but part of the deal with the state governments was a reliable grid and the utilities delivered.
Second to last paragraph says that they are planning to retire the tractor and are looking for a place to put it on display.
They were part of ERCOT and were mentioned in 2011/2012 reports, if I remember correctly, as contributing to the destabilizing of the grid back then.
Solar and wind could only keep up with new demand, but never filled the gap left behind.
Thank the EPA for shutting those coal plants down, even though lignite is the cleanest burning coal. Jerks!
Both are pretty bad. One state freezes people. The other overheats the people.
during the recent devastating winter ice storm texas came within a whisker of a total and permanent shutdown as the grid operator had to decide that the number one priority was to keep the natural gas pipeline system compressors running with what little electricity remained, because the system compressors didn’t have proper winter backup power since the “experts” figured it would never get cold enough to lose power ... IF those pipeline system compressors had been denied power, then the natural gas supply would have failed, taking down pretty much everything in the state, including NG-fired generation plants ...
A 1.15-megawatt reactor would be about right for research purposes.
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