They got a room full of Ivy Leaguers handling these things.
I just got this T-Shirt a few weeks ago:
Posted on 02/16/2021 4:58:45 PM PST by karpov
Why are millions of Americans in the nation’s most energy-rich state without power and heat for days amid extreme winter weather? “The people who have fallen short with regard to the power are the private power generation companies,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott explained. Ah, yes, blame private power companies . . . that are regulated by government.
The Republican sounds like California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who lambasted private utilities for rolling blackouts during a heat wave last summer. Power grids should be able to withstand extreme weather. But in both these bellwether states, state and federal energy policies have created market distortions and reduced grid reliability.
Mr. Abbott blamed his state’s extensive power outages on generators freezing early Monday morning, noting “this includes the natural gas & coal generators.” But frigid temperatures and icy conditions have descended on most of the country. Why couldn’t Texas handle them while other states did?
The problem is Texas’s overreliance on wind power that has left the grid more vulnerable to bad weather. Half of wind turbines froze last week, causing wind’s share of electricity to plunge to 8% from 42%. Power prices in the wholesale market spiked, and grid regulators on Friday warned of rolling blackouts. Natural gas and coal generators ramped up to cover the supply gap but couldn’t meet the surging demand for electricity—which half of households rely on for heating—even as many families powered up their gas furnaces. Then some gas wells and pipelines froze.
In short, there wasn’t sufficient baseload power from coal and nuclear to support the grid. Baseload power is needed to stabilize grid frequency amid changes in demand and supply. When there’s not enough baseload power, the grid gets unbalanced and power sources can fail.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Disgusting.
Most blame goes to gas plants...coal and nukes may have underperformed but not like gas massively underperformed. Who cost you the game - the running back with 3 fumbles or the running back with 1 fumble?
They’re part of the SPP power pool. There are several regional pools. The problem with SPP is +60% of generation is windmills and if the wind isn’t blowing, they ain’t generating.
I remember some Dem saying that maintaining frequency is not important. Obviously no concept of reality. Actually it’s even more than that. With multiple generation nodes, it’s phase angle in addition to frequency to move energy from one part of the grid to another. That is a whole engineering specialty with a lot of higher math involved. Ignoring such will trip out protection relays. But then math be raciss.
Bkmk
Gas replaced coal. The mistake was shutting down baseload coal plants and trying to replace them with gas and green.
Like I said, those of us with 40 years in the baseload power industry understand and are NOT SURPRISED. It happened in January 2019 too in a different part of the country, and no one paid attention.
Since you’ve got 40 years and I’ve none, let me ask you if my opinion has merit. Ideally, wouldn’t nuclear be the best for baseload with gas for peaking? I can’t think of any major drawback to it.
My area has both gas and nuclear. 1 gas for baseloading, 1 nuke for baseloading, and 1 gas for peaking.
Think about this. With wind performing at about an eight of capacity, what would be the best economic investment to get the most capacity?
If we doubled the wind capacity, we get, what, 8GW? What if we spend that money on other methods? It seems like pushing the blame on Gas is like blaming your best salesman for not selling more.
The weather in Texas would be a nothing-burger for those of us who live in the north and are used to very frigid temps and as our systems and infrastructure are designed to handle such.
No! It would make sense if the power grid was done the old fashioned way. “The Old-Fashioned” Way is the way things are done that works 100% of the time they are tried. You can’t make billions from “credit offsets” or blackmailing countries or continents that way though!
While AC isn’t my specialty, losing frequency is really gonna hertz.
Hi Dilbert, I’m not an engineer either, but if you build an expensive generation plant, it has to be on line enough to pay for it. You can’t sink 100 million into a plant for occasional use. It wouldn’t pencil out.
Chairman Jao needs to jump on this. Sign an EO that prevents the coal and gas plants from starting up again. He can call it a “Green Opportunity” to start fresh with alternative energy sources.
My bet is there mega watts of political donations in this mess.
Power utilities is not my specialty, I am more process control and industrial automation. Frequency mismatches on the same grid will cause cascading failures.
If it was just a single generating node, not so much the case. Motor speed on induction motors would be off. And then there are old systems that use line frequency as clock frequency.
How does a gas plant “under perform’? That makes no sense! My gas plant NEVER under performs...even when I light a match!
Except gas doesn’t work in Texas when it is really cold. But yes wind is not reliable either and it doesn’t take a freeze off for it to not produce. I think answer is to retrofit the gas plants so that they can do fuel switching (heavy fuel oil) and to have oil storage on site for these plants. The big question is how do u modify the ERCOT tariff to facilitate that.
They got a room full of Ivy Leaguers handling these things.
I just got this T-Shirt a few weeks ago:
um, they've known this storm was coming for a week... nobody thought it a good idea to crank some extra generating capacity before going dark?
Each home, each business, each town and city should have it’s own power plant. The grid is a dinosaur inviting of mass turmoil.
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