Only In Texas....

[seahawk]

Texas showed the enw normal after the Green deal enforced by the left. #Resist

[Adam Peter]

13 hours ago, Ivanhoe said:

NBC 5 Investigates has also learned that ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, did not conduct any on-site inspections of the state's power plants to see if they were ready for this winter season.

Why should they do that in the most capitalist state of the world? Every power plant owner knows that the market will kill them if they not deliver.

Are you asking for more taxpayer money directed at nursing the citizens?

[Adam Peter]

2 hours ago, Ivanhoe said:

And the bullcrap barrage it trying to snow over the fact that 1/3 of the lost generation was wind.

And 2/3 was the trusty, non-green deal fossils, so maybe the problem was more the lack of reading the tea leaves of Global Climate Change than the source?

 

[Ivanhoe]

3 hours ago, MiloMorai said:

wind is 20%. 1/3 is 33.333%

NG is 47.7%

coal is 20.3%

nuke is 10.8%

Texas’ Electricity Resources

Read it again. 1/3 of the lost generation was wind.

As of Wednesday, 46,000 megawatts of generation were offline, with 185 generating plants tripped. ERCOT officials said 28,000 megawatts came from coal, gas and nuclear plants, and 18,000 megawatts were from solar and wind. From the article;

[sunday]

1 hour ago, Adam Peter said:

And 2/3 was the trusty, non-green deal fossils, so maybe the problem was more the lack of reading the tea leaves of Global Climate Change than the source?

 

Wut?

[DKTanker]

On 2/18/2021 at 7:38 AM, R011 said:

This is a once in a decade issue in Texas.  In California, it's just another day.

More like once in more than a century.  The sub-freezing temperatures, freezing rain, and then drifting snow effected a huge portion of Texas all at one time and for an extended time.  Normally when we get freezing temps it's just an overnight thing, at the worst two or three days before warming up again.  This time we started having 24 hour freezing from the 10 of February through the morning of the 19th.  Many of us also experienced sub-zero (-18C) earlier this week.

So yeah, it was cold, wear warm clothes.  And that works but, with a frost line of 6" or 15 cm, there was potential for a lot of freeze damage that hasn't really hit the news.  For instance, at least of the four nuke plants in TX wasn't able to ramp up to full power because feed water lines had frozen.  Some of the NG and coal fired power plants also experienced frozen water supply lines.  Many municipal water mains across TX failed after having frozen. 

Stock tip.  Invest heavily in swimming pool plumbing and construction supplies.  Come April swimming pool owners in TX start getting their pools ready for the season, many are in for some surprises.

[Mikel2]

😄

https://babylonbee.com/news/media-immediately-stops-covering-ted-cruz-scandal-after-he-puts-on-andrew-cuomo-mask?fbclid=IwAR3g3Vu24MaQPLbM3psFWcG-jZNCFQA5hXWmjNIPZWjfs0vhQ8C6X7qBABI

[DKTanker]

On 2/19/2021 at 12:43 PM, Ivanhoe said:

No reports of downed power lines anywhere in TX, TMK. 

Power outages are due to ERCOT telling the distribution companies to cut off customers to ensure demand < supply.

 

 

A number of plants experienced frozen water lines.  If there is no water to turn to steam there will be no electricity forth coming.

[Ivanhoe]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58knkKQuTP8

[sunday]

1 minute ago, DKTanker said:

A number of plants experienced frozen water lines.  If there is no water to turn to steam there will be no electricity forth coming.

More likely secondary o tertiary circuits water carrying circuits. If this is a one in a hundred years event, then that is not a weird occurrence, nor nothing that could cause a nuclear incident, of course.

[DKTanker]

5 hours ago, Ivanhoe said:

the bullcrap barrage it trying to snow over the fact that 1/3 of the lost generation was wind.

 

Yes, even with the one nuke plant going off line and several NG and coal plants having difficulties because of frozen water lines, both the nuke sector and fossil fuel sector increased their output whereas "green" energy fell off significantly.

[Ivanhoe]

Oregon; 7% without power

Texas; 15% without power

rough numbers, of course.

 

[Ivanhoe]

2 minutes ago, DKTanker said:

Yes, even with the one nuke plant going off line and several NG and coal plants having difficulties because of frozen water lines, both the nuke sector and fossil fuel sector increased their output whereas "green" energy fell off significantly.

The point being that the pols and journos are pushing the narrative that, since wind wasn't the largest loss, it had no responsibility for the outages.

As always, folks looking for the one guilty party, when its a wee bit more complex.

As for Annual Rate of Occurrence for risk management calculations, these types of weather events do occur in Texas. This time was a black swan to a large extent because Texas intentionally and unintentionally imported a whole flockload of black swans. More people, more renewables, less coal, less NG generation (on a per capita basis), less investment in NG production, no NG storage (how's JIT working for ya, pal?), etc etc etc.

To put on my Tom Sowell hat for a moment, had the NG producers, pipeliners, and power generators spent an additional 5% on CapEx for Minnesota levels of winterization, and baked those expenditures into bulk power rates charged to the gridders, 9 years out of 10 we'd be hearing about how Texas hates poor minorities. Tradeoffs, tradeoffs, tradeoffs.

 

[Ivanhoe]

This is interesting;

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/el-paso-electric-winter-storm-2021/
 

Quote

 

The other big difference for El Paso Electric is that all of its power plants were outfitted for a deep freeze. After that February 2011 storm, hundreds of thousands of the utility’s customers were left without power for extended periods. In the years since, it has spent millions to prepare for the next extreme winter event, including $4.5 million on adapting many of its existing facilities for prolonged operation in freezing temperatures. The winterization of a power plant is similar to preparing your house for winter, except much more expensive. Valves, transmitters, and pipelines, along with other areas of a plant that could be affected by freezing temperatures, have insulation added or heat lamps installed nearby.

The company also built the Montana Power Station, completed in 2016, which can continue to operate in temperatures as low as -10 degrees Fahrenheit. On normal days, the $380 million power station uses natural gas to power about 160,000 homes. But during emergency situations, the station has the capability as well to burn fuel oil when natural gas supplies might be limited. 

 

 

Quote

Being part of the Western Interconnect, El Paso Electric has an additional incentive to winterize because it’s part of an interstate network and can sell excess energy out-of-state during winter months, says Ramanan Krishnamoorti, the chief energy officer at the University of Houston, who is an expert on energy systems. On the other hand, most Texas power generators actually have a disincentive to make expensive modifications to prepare for a once-in-a-blue-moon winter storm. “Winterizing is a significant cost. Moreover, if you make energy a scarcity, then you can charge more,” Krishnamoorti said. “It’s a very cynical way of looking at it, but in the end, it is a marketplace.”

But its a marketplace with the federal and state governments having their thumbs on the scale.

[Simon Tan]

Thumbs? They have an elephant on the scale.

[Josh]

12 hours ago, Mikel2 said:

 

Cruz represents Texas in Washington and had already requested (and obtained) a state of emergency for Texas. He's not in charge of any of the state functions. What was Cruz supposed to be doing?

As far as Beto and AOC are concerned, I would have much more respect for their actions if they hadn't been surrounded by cameras as they fed hungry babies.  Cruz is clearly not as savvy as these people.

Well we can at least fail Cruz for not pretending to care, yes?

[Stuart Galbraith]

10 hours ago, Ivanhoe said:

Read it again. 1/3 of the lost generation was wind.

As of Wednesday, 46,000 megawatts of generation were offline, with 185 generating plants tripped. ERCOT officials said 28,000 megawatts came from coal, gas and nuclear plants, and 18,000 megawatts were from solar and wind. From the article;

From what ive read, the 66 percent of coal and gas was the significant bit. If that had held up, the shortfall in wind production would have been irrelevant.

It does strike me as a bit odd blaming the minority contributor to the power production as being the problem, when it was clearly the greater share. And its the greater share they have been told to harden against extreme tempertures since 1991 and kept ignoring.

 

[Adam Peter]

1 hour ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

It does strike me as a bit odd blaming the minority contributor to the power production as being the problem, when it was clearly the greater share.

This, plus against the narrative, the 1/3 loss from wind energy was widely reported by MSM, so it reached Europe, too. If they calculated wind power as base power then failing to winterize was not the only error.

[sunday]

54 minutes ago, Adam Peter said:

This, plus against the narrative, the 1/3 loss from wind energy was widely reported by MSM, so it reached Europe, too. If they calculated wind power as base power then failing to winterize was not the only error.

Too much time writing, too little time reading and learning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure

[Adam Peter]

38 minutes ago, sunday said:

Too much time writing, too little time reading and learning.

Yes.

1) They operate a meteorology service.

2) Their wind turbines freeze for 30 years.

3) Do this cascading happens in windless or stormy days, too?

Quote

While some wind turbines have been forced to shut down due to the extreme cold weather, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which operates the state's power grid, said Tuesday that failures in natural gas, coal and nuclear energy systems were the cause of significantly more power outages.

...

Renewable sources, meanwhile, accounted for around 16,000 megawatts of the power that was offline. Wind energy in particular was responsible for less than 13 percent—between 3,600 to 4,500 megawatts—of the total outages, Woodfin said, according to Bloomberg.

MSM source

Quote

So why did this happen, and how do turbines operate in locations where severe cold is much more likely?

...

Samuel Brock, a spokesman for the American Clean Power Association, told Forbes on Tuesday it "hasn't been necessary" to install such kits in Texas where the climate is generally warm.

MSM source

So we are back to square 1, please calculate with Climate Change.

And ask Canada how to do. Tell Canada how to do, they need the knowledge in a few years.

[sunday]

@Adam Peter, please go earn a degree in Electrical Engineering, then start to try to pontificate.

Those kinds of network collapses are usually complex in nature, and usually require deep and lengthy investigations to elucidate the causality chains, thus discarding the usual shooting from the hip that should be expected from the kind of noob journos whose priority is to feed a 24h entertaintment news cycle instead of providing actual information.

Edited February 21, 2021 by sunday

[DB]

One place to look for an understanding of complex failures is to look at "Byzantine fault". Wikipedia focuses on computer systems, but given that the problem is originally described in the "Byzantine generals problem", it's obviously not purely a computer problem, but is an issue associated with complex systems and imperfect information.

More generally, it is theoretically possible to design systems that are robust, but in practice it's only possible to establish a high confidence in that robustness when you know what the threats are and can design mitigations for them. Once you have your list of credible threats, then you have to deal with them according to your resources.

When resources (money, time, etc.) are limited, the analysis of potential threats is prioritised and defences are placed in accordance with a cost-benefit analysis (risk assessment). If you expect pipes to freeze due to poor weather one time in 100 years, and you expect tornado damage once every ten years, and they cause the same effects, but you have money only to fix one of these, you'd be a fool to pick the freezing threat over the tornado threat. 

For Texas, maybe the more likely threat isn't tornadoes,  I'm just picking two examples of threats for comparison.

[sunday]

For the interested persons, here is the report on a 2006 Europe-wide blackout initially caused by the temporary disconnection of two 380kV transport lines in Northern Germany.

Edited February 21, 2021 by sunday

[Ivanhoe]

1 hour ago, DB said:

For Texas, maybe the more likely threat isn't tornadoes,  I'm just picking two examples of threats for comparison.

For most of Texas, tornadoes are in fact the primary weather risk. Down along the Gulf coast, hurricanes.

[Ivanhoe]

6 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

From what ive read, the 66 percent of coal and gas was the significant bit. If that had held up, the shortfall in wind production would have been irrelevant.

It does strike me as a bit odd blaming the minority contributor to the power production as being the problem, when it was clearly the greater share. And its the greater share they have been told to harden against extreme tempertures since 1991 and kept ignoring.

 

So, according to you, 33% loss is insignificant. Ooookay.

And lets revisit the concept of economics being the distribution of resources under scarcity. Money spent on renewables isn't getting spent on reliability mitigations of fossil/nuke.

Blaming the whole thing on renewables is dumb, especially in the context of national news. Failing to thoroughly explain things is really dumb. Pointing out that replacing fossil/nuke with renewables is foolhardy is, OTOH, quite rational.