Posted on 02/21/2021 3:58:01 PM PST by FreedomPoster
this completely ignores load management and lets local emergency management officials off the hook. Large amounts of demand could have been truncated by dropping large commercial customers to bare minimum consumption. Energy to homes was being cutoff while skyscrapers and other large commercial entities were lit up like Christmas trees. A proper emergency preparedness plan would have mid to large size commercial entities have designated emergency reduced load plans in place. One call from from the County judge’s office and whoosh, 10 - 15% of the total load drops out.
Excellent point.
Electricity is "magical" to the Eloi, and Eloithink is dangerous.
I saw articles that said they had to keep the feed to downtown areas with hospitals so office buildings were lit up too. Don’t most of med facilities have diesel or gas turbine gen set backups?
Opportunity cost example: "Nah, I'm going to blow off putting that quart of oil in the engine because I can make it one more month, and then I can spend the money on a cup of Starbucks..."
It did eliminate worse events like 1895 and 1899. Those were much worse. Of course that was the tail end of the Little Ice Age.
Actually there are times when Summer heat waves happen under a big high pressure air mass, where there’s very little wind during a Summer peak.
Would have helped a little if their heating was curtailed and they heat with heat exchangers. But they can't tolerate frozen pipes either. The lights on one floor of a skyscraper might add up to 10,000 Watts. That's one residence on aux heat.
That letter is the reason I still have a Facebook page.
Let them try and censor that!
Thanks again for your post. Big fan of Dr. Curry. She's put up with a lot from the crisis-mongers.
Surprisingly coal wasn’t effected much either.
Thanks for that. Wind speed was not the problem last week. “Blue Norther” type winds over TX. Problem was iced-up turbines. 28 gigawatt windmill capacity, 3 gigawatt output last Monday, 2/15.
I live here in the Permian Basin, temps went down to low single digits and in some place below zero. Right now our biggest problem is down power lines from all the ice, many of us are still without power and water. Wind energy production dropped off almost immediately when the front hit. Gas increased their production of electricity as did coal, nuclear pretty much was constant. Around the 15th or early 16th they started throttling down. From the reports I heard from locals with TXU and ONCOR they were faceing near disaster problems with lines down all over the Basin. We had whole cities without power. The end story is, it doesn’t matter how much power you can produce if you don’t have the ability to get it to the customer. There was several times in January and very early February when wind energy was producing more than gas. They throttle up and down as needed but with a storm like this one wind went dead in the water. Texas is covered with thousands of miles of old power lines and poles, they couldn’t handle weather this extreme. Had it not been for gas generator plants almost doubling their output we would have really had a problem. Now our biggest problem is getting water back up and running due to all the water line failures. Some cities in the Basin have no or very little water right now.
Haven’t you heard? It was all Ted Cruz’ fault! At least if you believe the media.
Cold wind mills need Electricity powered heating, plus have a minimum operating temperature. See page 25 of above document.
The average for a February day is 9 GW.
I love Trump and he had good intentions but this is the kinf o stuff he should have takin a wrecking ball to first thing, among many others. Hopefully Desantis with some experience in politics can get in 2024 and from the git-go start undoing stuff with a good group of advisors etc. & Trump can help get the House and maybe Senate back
I have a screen cap from ERCOT’s real time status page for, IIRC, Wednesday AM 2/17, where they were getting a whopping 0.65 GW from wind.
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