Posted on 10/03/2024 6:54:26 PM PDT by Round Earther
The Department of Energy (DOE) announced Thursday that it would provide up to $360 million in public funding to construct a 320-mile line connecting the ERCOT grid to power grids in the southeastern U.S. According to the DOE, the line, called the Southern Spirit, will be used to "enhance reliability and prevent outages" during potentially catastrophic weather events.
ERCOT's grid, which can draw power from other grids but is otherwise contained in its own bubble, infamously failed in February 2021 during a significant freeze that gripped the entire Lone Star State. Also known as Winter Storm Uri, the freeze led to outages in 4.5 million homes across Texas.
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
Tell the DOE to stuff it.
They will only drain power from Texas and will provide nothing in return.
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My guess is that ERCOT takes the cash and connects.
Not like there is any hurricane damage to worry about.
They will only drain power from Texas and will provide nothing in return....
That is their (Obama’s) intent.
Since Texas built and isolated grid and has worked to keep it that way, if they want an interconnect Texas should pay for it. If not, they can continue as they have been.
Nothing good can come from connecting Texas to the national grid.
Yeah well during that disaster Oklahoma and Mexico were having the same problems and didn’t have power to spare. ERCOT is not an Island, it is a huge entity with connectors you shills.
Maybe the ERCOT grid will take down the national grid at a future date.
During the disaster the new head of the EPA forced Texas to set the price at an astronomical rate in order to run the coal and other plants at 100 percent. The EPA caused Texas huge financial pain that we are still paying for that $9,000 / MWh event.
On the national grid it is. They are separate. There was talk of an AC/DC to DC/AC substation in Oklahoma (Because they are synchronized with each other) to allow transfer of power but I don't know if it ever got built.
$9000 per megawatt is the legislated by Republicans in Texas for the last 20+ years maximum rate ERCOT can ALLOW to be charged the market wanted to charge more at the time. The EPA thing was separate it only has to do with turbine derating to avoid NOx and PM2.5 emissions the EPA doesn’t set price only ERCOT does. The EPA said that plants who where already paying the legislature max rate could run flat out and break their EPA caps but plants not subject to the emergency rate could not those were all out of ERCOT area as importers since the whole of ERCOT was at the cap rate due to massive natural gas shortages for 90 hours.
here is the actual data, report and after action review it has all the hard numbers.
https://publications.anl.gov/anlpubs/2021/07/169454.pdf
Texas is not synced with either the Western or Eastern interconnect. The only way to move power is with back to back HVDC connections which Texas has three of they total about 1500 one North one East and the other is called the railroad it also connects North. There is a 100 megawatt variable frequency AC transformer in Laredo to push or pull power from Mexico also not synced to Texas.
This new link would be a 300 mile HVDC line connecting Texas with Louisiana and Mississippi with another 3000 megawatt of flow capacities. So at most 4600 megawatts in or out...Texas has a summer capacity of over 100,000 megawatts and 90000 in the winter so less than ten percent of the ERCOT grid in other words not a significant impact in a Uri level event where 40,000 megawatts of natural gas, nukes and coal froze out. Read the report it shows why the grid went down in cold detail Texas ignored the 2012 and 2013 events when the industry was told to winterize and they didn’t.
Texas could at most with the new link take 4500 megawatts that’s not enough to bring down a grid with 100,000+ megawatts of spinning reserves. You want to bring down a grid freeze out the natural gas supply that’s 43% of the total grid that’s how you bring down a grid.
Yeah, I left out the "NOT synched" in my sentence. What can I say? I misspoke. I'm a knucklehead. And no, I was not at Tienanmen Square during the peace revolt. I've never made 30 trips to China. And I don't own an interest in a Chinese spy balloon company.
Texas only lost the 40K megawatts because the grid itself was failing to keep in sync. That would damage infrastructure, and forced the whole grid to shutdown. A relatively small amount of extra power was all that was needed to stabilize the grid and prevent that from happening.
I’d bet the farm that ERCOT takes the money and runs. What I wonder though, what responsibility do the feds have for decisions made long ago by Texas? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbGFrrifeEs
Nice AI bot reply but there is a letter from the EPA head that says exactly what I stated.
Put this into your AI search and I was wrong on the 9,000 it was no lower than $1,500/MWh for the plants running at capacity.
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