What went wrong is that the Texas legislature which owns Texas-specific grid process to avoid interference from the Feds didn't figure out how to also ensure Texas generator companies got compensated for weatherizing (and ensuring it was done).
How many of the 24+6 recommendations from the NERC/FERC review of last time this happened in Texas (hint:2011) were taken up by the legislature or those at ERCOT they delegated responsibility to or the power generation providers?
The eye opener to me from skimming the 2011 recommendations is that there was no explicit rating/SLA for a power plant's acceptable temperature operating that could be used by planners for assessing the risks of an upcoming weather event by policy planners. It'd seem pretty basic to be able to ask "How many plants do we lose when temperature drops below X"?
Dunno whether they fixed trying to create such a basic measurement for Texas plants, but it doesn't seem like it.
If you want to know some of the specifics about what "winterization" means in practice for a power plant including natural gas ones, you can read some of the details in that report. It's kinda interesting.
It is annoying when this sort of event happens and everyone starts deciding what they believe to be truth within 48 hours of the outage. It makes more sense to be talking about the 2011 outages in terms of what went wrong than the 2021 ones - because we have actual information on 2011 instead of "things went wrong!" now.
I want to thank you personally for injecting a PDF into the discussion, but also positively assert that it is not obvious what just happened this week. We don't yet know how many of the recommendations were ignored, what happened in the last decade regulator-wise or whether this round of failures are for the same or different reasons.
Speculation is much less useful than waiting a few months for the actual investigations. Emergencies are urgent, engineering (and political) decisions and assessments are never emergencies.
From an engineering standpoint, I agree that you want a true RCA and this event's RCA will be a bit different than 2011's. And this RCA (and its political consequences) will take time, doesn't need to be done right this minute, etc etc.
However, this problem is not at its root an engineering one; it is political. While the public attention is on this, we should point attention as close as possible to the most likely cause given the information we have at the time. It's bayesian truth and bayesian politics.
You'll note I didn't draw conclusions about which recommendations were ignored but having read through them all, there is no way they were all actually followed and we ended up where we are. I think some basics are fairly obvious. While some winterization perhaps was done, there is some degree of winterization that was never done; power plants in other states far north of us and colder than us are not having the same types of problems. Various professors in various cities in Texas who follow this stuff confirm this in various news outlets I haven't cited here. I also wouldn't be surprised if there was were issues with gas transport from wells through pipelines to plants that were noted in 2011 but much more severe this time due to even colder temps and unexpected by all. But still...
At the end of the day, Texas has optimized for cheap power and has not funded the work of reliable power. This is a political decision at the end of the day due to companies not paying for their externalities of poor service. I'm open to saying we shouldn't blame follower-type politicians who were scared of "raising electrical rates" and we should blame ourselves, but let's all acknowledge that some costs that weren't borne should have been borne and some oversight that should have occurred didn't occur. Is that so hard to concede at this early juncture?
Is this power outage truly such a bad thing? It seems like a decision that the elected representatives of Texas have chosen to make. They basically said we would rather have much lower utility costs on a regular basis and have a risk that we lose our power every 9 or 10 years in a big storm. Everything is cost vs benefit trade off, and this just seems to be a different decision than most make.
This outage is undoubtably causing 10's of billions of dollars of property damage as we speak (the internet is being flooded with pictures of burst pipes, not to mention rather stark conditions for everyday people that will almost certain result in many deaths in outlier populations).
If the utility company had a disclaimer on their bills, or a billing option to pay more or less depending on if you wanted to run this type of risk - maybe it would be a tradeoff people could make?
Instead this seems to be a complete failure of the regulated utility and it's governing political apparatus resulting in an entirely preventable 'major hurricane' level crisis.
The deaths and impacts on the poor make it, to me an unacceptable tradeoff.
I don't see why others states can do it and Texas couldn't or shouldn't. This is hindsight, but out past strategy, if it was intentional, was not optimal.
Even just numerically, I would bet money that the lost productivity and sales will be much more than the "ounce of prevention" costs, even ignoring the humanitatian aspects.
My friends have been unable to drive, without water or electricity for a few days now. Their house is slowly losing all residual heat, making its way down to ~18 degrees.
They're young and prepared, so they'll be fine. I expect there to be a lot of deaths. And then a wave of burst pipes and property damage. Many people may be going without running water for weeks or months to come.
Is this lowering cost or just shifting cost, given the huge amount of property damage being caused due to lack of power? The “stitch in time” would apply here. Not to mention how to calculate the cost of human suffering caused by trying to survive in freezing temps with no power for multiple days.
This is meta/tangent, but I've had similar conversations a few times recently. Seems to be in the zeitgeist.
Re: everyone starts deciding what they believe to be truth within 48 hours of the outage.
Maybe, hopefully... the epidemic is humbling us. It's been significant and long lasting enough to rub our noses in whatever opinions we so brashly got behind too early. Professors and peasants alike. We're more likely to stop and say "I don't know."
The classic example of this is governments taking credit/blame for economic stuff. Low unemployment, high gdp, etc. Current government decisions are really unlikely to be affecting these, because stuff takes time. Meanwhile, short term data about the economy is both uncertain and fairly useless even if it wasn't. The whole thing is so disingenuous, yet I doubt there has ever been an democratic election where this wasn't a major factor.
Nah, it’s very easy to selectively forget what you ended up being wrong about and remember what you got right (or close enough to pretend it was right).
I was wearing an n95 mask in the grocery store starting March 1st last year, there was no reason at that point to think it wouldn’t help and I still can’t comprehend why someone like Fauci who said in no uncertain terms not to wear a mask, it won’t help never faced any repercussions. I probably got a lot of things wrong that I don’t really remember. I still am a bit ocd about hand washing and hand sanitizer even though covid seems not to spread via surfaces very much, except for when it does, and I’ll probably keep doing that until the pandemic is over just because I have been.
My takeaway from this past year is certainly not that humans are rational or good at accountability.
> I still can’t comprehend why someone like Fauci who said in no uncertain terms not to wear a mask
I thought the general assumption was they were afraid of dramatically affecting supply for the people who were risking their lives taking care of sick patients.
The hard part for me, was in the same breath of saying that, they said 'All health care workers need to wear a N95 or better rated mask.'. It was a clear lie to mislead the public, and so transparent it could not possibly accomplish the task of avoiding hoarding, while also torpedoing any trust anyone paying attention might have had in the CDC.
That set of statements probably cost almost as many (or more) lives as the (very misleading) 'no such thing as asymptomatic spread' comments from WHO.
The opposite of saying "yes, everyone should wear a mask" is not "no, nobody should wear a mask, it doesn't help". It's extremely common in public statements for authorities, especially in crisis management, to avoid saying something simple because they know it to be false but at the same time they can't acknowledge that it's false (because that would endanger their efforts). All Fauci and his commission should have done is avoid giving a statement on the matter while they're working on ensuring health care providers do receive their masks.
If you're in a position of authority and you DO come out and say something you know to be false then don't be surprised at having to deal with long running consequences for making such a statement.
And in the process lost a significant portion of trust in public health measures. Saying the don't work is very different than saying they are short in supply and blocking sales temporarily or something. Second one is much easier to reverse without teaching public to second guess every public health directive from there on.
> On February 19, Fauci told USA Today, “In the United States, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask.” On March 8, as scientists estimated tens of thousands of undetected Covid cases in the US, Fauci told 60 Minutes, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.”
You can decide for yourself, but to me he was pretty clearly trying to make people think masks don't work masks don't work while leaving a small sliver of plausible deniability.
This whole article makes a compelling case that he's really just as much of a calculating politician as anyone in Washington https://www.thedriftmag.com/the-case-against-fauci/. And he's done a great job branding himself because most people seem to think the opposite, until you look at him closer.
The problem is the premise that government officials can ethically lie to the public to do things such as protecting a supply chain. So what else are they lying about that they haven’t yet revealed? The trust relationship between people and government is broken.
Okay, well let's start with firing, and let's assume since his bad advice was in march 2020 then any repercussions would happen within the next few months when it became obvious that masks should definitely be worn.
The two people with the power to fire Dr Fauci are the NIH director, and the president (via his power over the NIH director). In fact by summer 2020 Dr Fauci had earned the ire of the White House, but for essentially the opposite reason (this was when the White House was still trying to underplay the pandemic as not-that-bad, going-away-soon, it'll be an Easter miracle, etc). As such the NIH director aligned with Dr Fauci against the White house, and Fauci was seen as the "defender of wearing masks" or somesuch. For example, consider the following article:
I don't think it's impossible to have seen Fauci fired if that's how Trump played it politically. But it's not.
Consider the following:
> Trump, in particular, has openly disagreed with Fauci’s guidance on whether fans should attend professional football games in the fall [...]
> In recent weeks, as the U.S. outbreak has spiraled out of control, Fauci has urged Americans to wear masks and to practice social distancing. The White House, however, has refused to amplify his advice, and instead has escalated its attacks on him.
The white house was trying to stimulate the economy by reassuring people it's okay to go out and spend money. Attacking Dr. Fauci for not being serious enough about masks sends the opposite signal. Hence, Fauci became the "wear a mask" guy (as viewed in opposition to the White House). Thus, everyone forgot / didn't care that early on he was wrong about masks.
He wasn't exactly wrong, as not wearing masks was still the general scientific consensus at the time, right? It was a WHO guideline, if I'm not mistaken.
I would say it is Americans that are not rational or good at accountability from a cultural perspective.
If you ever have the opportunity to visit Japan and see people wearing masks when they have a cold or flu on normal days. We don't do that. Heck, we are in a work culture where it is a bad thing to take days off when you are ill.
If you look at other countries where the government and the populace take pandemics seriously and lock down.
You see governors here being proud about not adhering to COVID-19 Protocols. You see Police in major cities of the country REFUSING to wear masks or intentionally wearing them wrong. You hear of them refusing to get the vaccine, when they are prioritized to do so.
You see a Pandemic become politicized because an incompetent man was President and it was part of his brand to not deal with it or set an example.
You have certain epidemiologists telling school teachers to get back to work and teach his daughters because, well only a small number of them will die from COVID, so get the fuck back to work.
> I still can’t comprehend why someone like Fauci who said in no uncertain terms not to wear a mask, it won’t help never faced any repercussions.
This is actually a perfect example of the difficulty of scientific communication to a large audience. You need to communicate concise easy to understand guidance about complex topics. Asking “are masks effective” isn’t a simple question and the answer is, it depends. The first part is “effective at what task”, the second is “to what extent”, third is “in what situation”, fourth is “with what risks and tradeoffs”. I’ll be talking about the non-N95 masks unless specifically stated, to avoid any confusion.
Masks are not very effective at preventing an uninfected person from contracting Covid when in proximity to someone infected with Covid. The masks do not form a seal around the mouth and nose, allowing significant amounts of air around the mask when breathing in, as well as not being able to prevent being infected through the eyes. They do provide some protection, including possibly reducing the severity of the infection if contracted while wearing the mask, but that is not their primary benefit.
Mask are effective at preventing the spread from an infected person (either asymptomatic or symptomatic) to others. Breathing out directly into a mask allows the material to catch and trap the majority of the virus carrying condensation, and what gets out around or through the mask is slowed down significantly, allowing the droplets to be pulled down by gravity before traveling as significant distance (or fog up your glasses). Especially when combined with social distancing, this is very effective at prevent the spread of the virus. This is the masks primary benefit and is effective when there is large scale adoption, so that people that have the virus but are not aware, don’t unknowingly pass it. Its effectiveness comes as an aggregate effect similar to herd immunity, rather than an individual effect, since the vast majority of transmission comes from people unaware they are carriers.
Mask come with risks. People tend to touch their face more while wearing masks, and contracting the virus by touching your face is a primary infection mode. People tend to relax other more effective protection methods when wearing a mask, both unconsciously and due to a false belief in the protective capabilities of a mask.
So, in March we had a situation where we were running a shortage of masks. We had people wearing masks (either homemade or surgical) because they believed the mask provided good protection from contracting the virus, which is not true, and may cause people to engage in risky behavior that would put them and others at more risk. We also didn’t have enough masks to be used for their actual benefit of “herd immunity”. The assessment was that non sick people wearing masks was likely to put the individual at greater risk, and deplete the resource from places it was needed, without providing a medical benefit to the individual greater than the risks. In March, the average non sick person should not be wearing a mask.
Now, we have a situation where we do not have a shortage of masks. We have a situation where the public has been educated through awareness campaigns on how masks work, like the “My mask protects you. Your mask protects me” campaign, so people are less likely to use the masks incorrectly and put themselves and others at greater risk. The assessment is that high compliance of mask wearing will have a greater positive effect through “herd immunity” to outweigh the risks and tradeoffs. But make no mistake, the risks are still there. Now the average non sick person should be wearing a mask.
If you don’t understand the underlying medical complexities of the situation, it seems like they can’t both be true. And when an expert organization is trying to provide a clear, short, easy to understand list of recommendations from analyzing and evaluating all those data, they can’t go into to a 45 min presentation every time. Dr. Fauci even tried to add context in March. He talked about how the masks don’t provide protection in the way people think they do, how it can cause people to put themselves at greater risk, both through a false sense of protection and other behaviors like face touching, and how masks primarily protect you from infecting others, not the other way around. If you go back and look at his quotes at the time, he consistently tries to bring that additional context into it, but since it is a complex issue of competing risks and benefits, it’s hard to convey how masks can be good in some cases and bad in others.
> Dr. Fauci in March. “When we get in a situation where we have enough masks, I believe there will be some very serious consideration about more broadening this recommendation of using masks. We're not there yet, but I think we're close to coming to some determination. Because if, in fact, a person who may or may not be infected wants to prevent infecting someone else, one of the best ways to do that is with a mask, so perhaps that's the way to go.” [1]
> And of course his 60 Minutes interview. “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”
I have yet to see any of my friends and definitely not politicians (of any stripe) humbled about anything pandemic. If anything there’s a doubling down and mental gymnastics to explain away inconsistencies or hide lack of knowledge. I’d love to share your optimism- seriously- do you have an example in mind?
Test the waters again maybe. I've been feeling this change pretty recently.
I'm not predicting any kind of revolution, and this is all at the margin. I don't expect TV takestars or politicians to be the vanguard. That said, I have noticed people pondering the unknowability of it all. More interest in margin or error equivalents. Stuff like that.
Example: Covid conversations (the one I have in mind was with my aunt) 6 months ago were along the lines of "the government did X, Y happened." Now, it's wondering whether X impacted Y... counterfactual thinking.
I have yet to encounter this in my work/corporate life though, and honestly, that's where it's most needed.
Well, looking at the breakdown of electricity generation by energy source [0], it looks like energy generation fell by about 30% around the start of 2/15, with most of the losses being from coal and natural gas. And as Texas's grid is isolated from the the other eastern and western grids, they can't make up the difference. And reports indicate that it's because instrumentation in coal and natural gas plants has frozen, shutting them down.
It kind of feels like the problems are evident, and waiting for time to lull people back into complacency on the issue seems like it will just set up the next such disaster.
People aren't leaping to conclusions here, this isn't speculation. This has happened at least twice, and there were a bunch of clear recommendations from 2011 that weren't followed. The state government and other sources are already providing information on the current crisis and its causes.
I agree and have been feeling this more lately. You know this is already being politicized. Armchair investigators are suddenly becoming power grid experts. The complex reality of balancing a huge diverse power grid is becoming an “easy” problem - if only the evil other side had done what my media source and politician said they should!
It’s tricky - I also have a problem waiting months for a slow inefficient government agency to figure out how to cover their collective asses (or find the right scapegoat). I don’t think it’s unreasonable to make systems we can monitor, analyze and draw conclusions from much quicker.
There needs to be a happy medium- find the problems and “trust the experts” for sure, but do so without being so damn _loud_.
This country politicizes everything, rather than dealing with it, because you have some people who have financial interests that make money off the existing situation. For many, it is part of a belief system, rather than dealing with it from policy and engineering perspectives.
We don't deal with school shooting massacres here right after they occur. We don't deal with them after they happen.
What stopped school shootings? Not having children in schools.
You just had a group of militias, white supremacists et al, invade a branch of government, terrorize they staff, representatives and security--and nothing comes of it in terms of accountability and responsibility by Trump.
You have those on the political right saying nothing big happened. You have people whining why is the national guard still there?
As a nation, we don't prioritize efficiency, competence and reaction time.
We don't want to measure and improve our infrastructure and policies.
The right to protest should be important to you, regardless of your political persuasion. 2020 saw a very great many more violent protests, including the construction of autonomous zones that rejected the authority of all elected United States government. To say that a person’s voice should not be heard because they are dangerous to your beliefs is itself the most dangerous thing.
What happened at the Capitol was way past the point of simple protesting. It's unfortunately people who have been sucked into a cult. They reject reality and got violent because of it.
Since the Texas Legislature is in its once every two year session right now, and four million Texans are pissed off, it will be fun to see if new laws result this cycle.
Continuing my theme from above; if legislators took a 6 month recess after every major crisis before starting to debate it the quality of law would probably be a lot better. Democracies naturally tend to deadlock anyway, stuff everyone agrees on got waved through years ago. Most of the time in session is grandstanding and making a fuss without achieving much.
Legislators have a terrible habit of using a crisis to:
1) Make something that was already illegal super-dooper illegal (see: terrorism).
2) Mucking up traditional safeguards against bad government - like evidence requirements, reasonable process, human rights in some cases, debating the legislation, reading the bill before voting on it, etc.
In emergencies, legislators are just going to rubber-stamp things technical experts wave under their nose/hand power to some executive. They aren't needed.
That just leaves plenty of time for all the sundry industry lobbyists, gladhanders and sleeve-tuggers to capture all the legislators and their advisors, ensuring the status quo is maintained and nothing ever gets fixed.
Anecdote: All 7 developers in my Houston team (semi-geographically scattered in the city) lost power; half for >24 hrs (it's 10-25 degrees F here for the last 2-3 days).
Most lost water for some stretch of time and some still don't have it.
I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well.
(I haven't found clear findings on what determines whether your fireplace net-warms or net-cools your house in super-cold weather (by sucking heat out of adjacent rooms and pulling cool air from the outside and sending hot air up your chimney). Pointers welcome.)
> I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well.
American fireplaces in general are a joke. You are just spending way too much energy and not really storing it anywhere except the air around it. They are built to look good, not to actually heat anything properly.
Check any Nordic country, we don't have gas fireplaces nor do we have the silly tiny iron things you have. What we do have is stone fireplaces. [1]
How it works is this: You heat the multi-hundred kg stone mass using any material you want, for us it's usually wood in some form. After the stone is hot enough, you stop wasting wood and close the chimney when the fire has burned out to prevent heat from escaping.
The stone mass will store heat and distribute it slowly and evenly over many hours, keeping everyone warm without electricity. If you want to distribute it, there are fans that operate on the radiant heat coming from the fireplace. A properly installed fireplace (central to the house) will keep a normal home toasty warm for a day or two with one proper heating cycle depending on how cold it's outside.
Why would most places bother with the expense of a fireplace really designed to heat a room?
I can assure you that most new construction in Oslo (pretty much only apartments these days) don't include fireplaces. And why would they? With steam pipes running through much of the city, there's no need for the expense and pollution involved with a fireplace except for show anyway.
The fact is that cities in the US, like in Europe, generally have very reliable power and gas supplies, so they don't need to build fireplaces designed to actually heat the place, and we don't want to encourage people in cities to burn wood to heat their place anyway. So showplace fireplaces, especially the gas ones, are a better solution for allowing people to have the cozy feeling when they want it.
Cities in the US and Europe have very reliable power and gas supplies, until suddenly they don't. The trouble is that people have started to take the reliability of the power grid for granted and stopped thinking about what happens when it inevitably fails.
We take metric shit tons for granted in our everyday lives. The risk that we will be out of power for more than a few hours where I live is very small, so I chose to save the about $10000 that it cost to install a fireplace and a chimney, so I’m instead prepared if I get long time sick, unemployed, or the car breaks down. All of those risks are order of magnitude higher than that we would be without electricity for any extended period of time.
For that matter, as someone who lives in New England, if I wanted to install backup for extended power outages (which do happen where I am now and then), the sensible thing to do would be to get a propane-fueled generator installed because that would work if I were traveling (to keep pipes from freezing) and would also keep refrigerators running in a summer outage. (Added: Maybe a Powerwall-type thing would make sense today.)
I do have a fireplace and a wood stove which provide something of a backup but won't heat the whole house and only work if I'm there.
We've started taking it for granted because it works. It's ~35 years or so since last time I experienced an outage longer than a few minutes, and enough years since I experienced any outage that I can't remember when it was.
Of course apartments in city centres shouldn't have wood burning fireplaces in them. This discussion wasn't about multi-story apartments, but about the uselessness of American-style fireplaces in detached homes.
Except they're not useless. They simply have a different use than heating the home. You may not agree with the use case, but that doesn't change the fact that they work fine for what they were designed to do.
Jøtul [1], one of the the largest manufacturers of fireplaces in Norway has been around since 1853, manufacturing mostly cast iron fireplaces.
The considerations are different, though. Cast iron is great if you want to radiate as much heat as possible as fast as possible or need to heat a small area (e.g. single room per heater). There's a reason small cast-iron Jøtul fireplaces used to be the stereotypical heater for cabins etc. in Norway.
Sterotypical for the United States also! While brands like Vermont Castings have become quite common (founded 1975 after Middle East oil embargo), we often see old Jøtul in New York cabins, hunting lodges, etc.
Jøtuls are fairly readily available in the US as well. When I wanted to put a small woodstove in a new sunroom a few years back, the local woodstove dealer recommended the small Jøtul over the equivalent Vermont Castings because they said it drew better.
Or you know, instead of having a whole fireplace, just get a kerosene heater? Enough to heat a whole room in case of power&gas outages, last long enough through the night on one fill, and kerosene can be had at a gas station.
I am not sure why you got downvoted, this is a good backup strategy.
I have natural gas heating and a combi smart boiler which runs on electricity. Even if I still have the gas link operational, if my power goes down then my heating is dead.
This news of Texas actually reminded, that I should have some sort of emergency winter heating backup, and a boat or camping kerosene heater is a actually a pretty solid idea for emergencies.
The whole prepper community isn't completely crazy. Everyone really should have a Bug Out Bag or a Bug In Bag ready or at least under construction.
You don't need to go overboard with tons of dried food and a nuclear fallout shelter. Just a cheap multi-fuel camping stove and some canned food will last you a few days easily.
Bug out/in bag seems like a weird term, kinda adds to the “crazy” of preppies. here it’s just called your emergency/ earthquake kit - 1-2 weeks of food and some amount of water.
Pretty much anything actually built to heat stuff is better than the all-looks-no-function "fireplaces" the Americans seem to be in love with. The ones they like to mount their TVs over, despite the neck pain.
I don't think you can generalize American fireplaces. Every fireplace I've personally encountered has been traditional wood burning and absolutely heats up the room well past the time the fire is actually lit (American Northeast). I haven't actually been in a home with a gas-burning fireplace.
But more importantly - the gas fireplaces are intended to look nice with minimal effort. They are explicitly not intended to change the indoor climate much if at all. They're usually built in very new homes that have dedicated, reliable climate control systems or in cities that don't require much heating.
I can agree with that last statement. Every house I've seen has had a gas fireplace, but I live in the metro area of a city that (in)famously only owned a single snowplow.
You have a slightly condescending tone here that I'm not sure is necessary. Perhaps they're "all-looks-no-function" because they're mostly meant to be decorative rather than functional?
Here, in Central Texas, my home has three fireplaces. Each designed to accommodate wood, but all have gas feeds that make it possible to run them without the smoke of wood fires. We don't run them for heat nor decorative effect. The are just architectural features of the house that some people might choose to utilize for the mood that a fire can convey.
They are a bit like windows: not energy efficient but nice to look at/through.
During the historic cold weather going on this week, I have no confidence that they would help if the power went off.
You are stereotyping a country of hundreds of millions that spans climate zones ranging from Hawaiian tropics to the arctic circle.
Yeah. There are decorative fireplaces. The Norwegian company Rais sells some great decorative ones.
There are also incredibly efficient cast iron stoves that some people use for heat. You made fun of them in another comment, but they are much more efficient than a fireplace, and can use a variety of fuels like pellets or gas in addition to wood.
Of course, there are also people that have a standard wood fireplace that you imply is in every Norwegian home. Most people don’t use them here since they are so inefficient, dangerous and illegal in cities due to the pollution.
You can do a hybrid approach with the hot metal burn chamber for wood gas and earthen materials to slowly radiate the heat. This is called a rocket mass heater. The exhaust temperature is usually below 100C and often smokeless (a complete burn). Using a fan to extract heat from the final vertical stack (pipe around the exhaust with air running by) can give you an exhaust temperature of around 40C. Here's a quick 3 minute video that explains the concept; there's other YouTube videos that go into greater details if you wish to research this topic more. https://youtu.be/fwCz8Ris79g
In 1996 (or thereabouts), I lived in Maryland, and my family lost power for 6 days due to a snow/ice storm that took out a ton of power lines (water froze on them and the added weight pulled them down). We had no natural gas service, and our running water was provided by a well in the backyard that had an electric pump. So no electricity, heat, or running water for 6 days in ~20-30°F weather. (Fortunately we'd prepared by buying many gallons of drinking water, and filling up bathtubs and buckets with water earlier in the week.)
We had two fireplaces in the house, one each in the living room and master bedroom, so we kept all doors closed and all slept in the master bedroom. They did a decent enough job keeping us somewhat comfortable while wearing several layers and winter coats at all times, and sleeping in sleeping bags and with extra blankets. (An oddity of our house was that the chimney ran through the middle of it, not outside an exterior wall, so even some of the heat going up it would warm the house a bit.)
After 4 days my dad felt the roads were clear enough for us to go to a motel where we could shower and experience some heat. Going back to the house after that (before power was restored) was in some ways worse than enduring the first 4 days.
Granted, the reason for that outage was very different from what happened in Texas, but I just wanted to highlight that our power grid everywhere is still very susceptible to bad weather. (Well, ok, this story is 25 years old, but I suspect things haven't changed all that much.)
>Granted, the reason for that outage was very different from what happened in Texas
There are actually a lot of ice/ freezing-rain downed powerlines happening simultaneously with the rolling blackouts, and that's a huge part of the problem.
The grid/supply is being blamed for both. Of course if the lines weren't down, it would increase demand and there wouldn't magically be any more supply to feed them... but it does explain why a lot of people's blackouts aren't "rolling."
We've had a ridiculous cold snap in northern U.S. the last couple of weeks, where every day is at least -15f and every night -30f, not including wind-chill. So much so that 8f out feels warm now.
Have not had even a blip of outage for anything. Last year I believe something damaged a large power pole and we were out for 3 hours.
If warmer states took notes on how north states do it we wouldn't be in this pickle I assume. Also warm states need to bury their water lines deeper.
Interior or central chimneys make more sense to me than ones against an exterior wall, and they seem common enough in houses of a certain vintage at least. If your chimney is on an outer wall, doesn't it radiate heat to the outdoors?
Chimneys on outer walls are worse on every measure compared to internal ones.
They loose heat to the outdoors as you say and since they cool down a lot faster than the internal chimneys it is also generally harder to get the fire going when re-lighting. The chimney on my house is on an outer wall and when it's below 0C I have to light a fire every day or it becomes too much of a hassle to get it going.
Old houses in New England were built with internal chimneys for the same reason (less heat loss).
Houses in southern states were built with external chimneys which made sense for a couple reasons. Back in the day people would keep a fire 24/7 for cooking and that fire + southern heat is uncomfortable. Because of the shorter cold season the chimney was on the outside of the house. Also, in the case of chimney fires you could tie a chain around an external chimney and rip it down with a horse, hopefully saving your home.
The ones on the outside can use outside air to go up the chimney, avoiding the problem listed above. Harder to do with inside chimneys.
Last place I rented with a fireplace, there was a metal door in brickwork below it in the basement. It wasn’t until after I moved out that I realized what it was for.
Wood ashes also collect in the small chamber in the basement under the chimney. As a child in Michigan, one of my hamsters escaped his confinement. Poor little Pinky couldn't be found in the house, but a couple of days after disappearing my Mom found him in the chamber covered in ashes that had cushioned his fall. (He made a full recovery from his adventure.)
I think if you're having to worry about makeup air cooling the house down than your fireplace heats it, that's less to do with chimney placement and more with how the fireplace is designed. I.e a gas flame in a fireplace with no appreciable thermal mass and a chimney that pipes the heat straight out is where I'd look to first as a problem.
A massive stone fireplace that's heated with a single load of fuel, then has its chimney flaps closed to keep the heat from escaping, is going to be much more efficient. I wonder if maybe the fireplaces in many parts of the USA are actually designed to not heat the house too much, given the usual weather in e.g. Texas.
No, due to ventilation. Even an indoor fireplace for example is -always- vented, so the gasses can escape via the chimney. If you close the damper with a fire blazing, you'll not have a good time.
Outdoor fires well, are outdoors, so there's plenty of oxygen.
People die nearly every year in the brutal cold from getting desperate and bringing grills and such indoors to light, which is a big no no.
Not all indoor fireplaces are ventilated in the US, actually. (Source: have one unventilated fireplace that is probably mostly for aesthetics and not to be used for extended perios of time)
AFAIK it's not illegal to run your grill indoors, either. Being legal isn't the same as being a good idea. Ventless fireplaces are also not legal in a lot of places in the US, for good reason.
Legality is a signal for safety for most people. The natural gas industry, and the manufacturers of indoor gas ovens, stoves, fireplaces, etc all claim that what they sell is safe for indoor use. People have an expectation that the federal government will regulate things which are bad for us. In my opinion, they're failing miserably in this particular area.
Technically, I believe the problem is the CO concentration and exposure time, not displacement of oxygen. CO binds to hemoglobin more effectively than oxygen, preventing enough oxygen from getting to the body's tissues. CO poisoning is common: 20,000 hospital visits per year in the United States, and in many countries is the most common form of poisoning. [1]
We had an incident early this AM and of the eight people we paged, only one had power. I’ve been without power, heat, internet, water, or septic more than 90 minutes at a time for two days. My house was 44 degrees this morning when I woke up. Sunday night we were without power or heat for seven and a half hours. Our DR plan didn’t really account for all of our staff being on the same power grid!
I’m in Austin, without power for almost 48 hours now. There’s ice in my roommate’s bedroom. It’s my birthday tomorrow, and I’m hearing that we won’t have power until Thursday at the earliest. I’ve gone beyond furious to just horribly depressed.
Good luck, and here's some advice from a midwesterner that has dealt with cold, ice, and snow forever. If it's cold enough to start freezing things inside then make sure you have some water flowing in your pipes. Keep your kitchen sink running on a low (very tiny) dribble. Maybe even keep a shower/bathrub running at a very low rate too. You do NOT want to be dealing with frozen, broken flooding pipes on top of no power. Can find more tips here: https://www.redcross.org/get-help/how-to-prepare-for-emergen... Good luck (and happy birthday)!
Also, leaving water trickling when you’re on a septic system can ruin your grinder pump because it stirs up the solids in the first separating tank. And, as I learned the hard way this week, even if all the faucets are dripping, there’s no way to trickle a toilet. The supply lines for both of our toilets froze while the sink next to them kept right in dripping. And then there’s the question of how to keep your water heater from bursting when the power goes out and it can’t heat anything.
If you have a tank toilet you might be able to adjust the floater (bend the rod upwards) so it never quite turns off the supply valve. Failing that, you can just manually prop the flap open with something.
If you have a flushometer, remove the nut over the valve and adjust the screw underneath until the valve never quite shuts off.
Warning: Take careful note of exactly how things were before. A toilet that never stops running can be just as hard on the spirit as a toilet that doesn't work at all.
I guess that’s true. But the alarm on our septic starts screaming after about six hours of a trickling toilet. The alarm is pretty much there for that specific condition and the installer really hammered on the need to fix a leaking toilet
Immediately. I guess in the grand scheme of things a new grinder pump and a visit from the honey wagon are cheaper than a condemned house, though...
For a couple of cents, couldn't the grinder circuit include a basic 555 timer de-bounce circuit to suppress multiple triggers within, say, 30 minutes? That seems a lot cheaper than an alarm.
Alternatively, why doesn't the grinder have a higher minimum triggering flow rate? It seems it's falsely detecting potential solids arrival.
It’s not that it “stirs up solids,” it’s that a continuous leak causes the pump to cycle on more frequently. Your pump might cycle a few times a day normally; a running toilet could cause that to be every 30 min, and at that rate you could need a new pump in a year or two instead of 10.
Trickling your faucets (just a drip-drip-drip) for a few days is a small amount of extra wear on your pump in exchange for not rupturing pipes.
Why don't pipes in areas prone to this sort of thing have some of cheaply replaceable burst disc relief valve, given how catastrophic an uncontrolled failure of the pipework is?
I don't think relief valve will help with freezing pipes. Freezing pipes burst because ice is less dense than water, so water expands as it turns into ice. Pipes freeze on the outside first, resulting in remaining water being entrapped in ice. As remaining water freezes, it can't move into relief valve.
I'm not thinking of a mechanical valve - a burst disc essentially is an engineered weak point, designed to fail first. It would have enough clearance for the ice to be forced out through it, and be in a location with sufficient drainage that water damage would be minimised when the ice melts.
It sounds like the answer is that to be effective, you'd have to put too many of them along the length of the pipework.
Water expands about 9% when it freezes. It's not a question of pressure relief, it's a question of the pipe bursting in multiple locations as it freezes end to end if you have lost heat in the house. The pipes don't leak until the ice melts.
Consult your local regulations of course. But frozen pipes are no joke and can turn a brand new, perfect home into a condemned tear-down, rebuild in a matter of hours.
For those in that situation, turn off the water to your home and drain the pipes. Bursting pipes can do massive damage to your home and make it uninhabitable during the rehab.
Two units in my apartment building already flooded because they didn't trickle their water. Trickle means a tiny trickle of drops, not leaving the tap running. Use common sense, not FUD.
You would think so but there were rolling blackouts during the bay area/socal fire season last year and nobody seemed to change course. I wonder if it’s because a lot of companies in the Bay Area already had remote workers?
Some septic systems require power for a lift, essentially a pumping station. When the ground is too flat, you need to pump the waste higher than the drain field.
If you've ever seen a septic system with an audible alarm, this is probably why.
If you don't have sewer service, you'll usually have a septic tank instead. It's basically a mini waste treatment plant in your backyard, eventually the water will flow into the ground. Modern systems have pumps and such that depend on electricity to function.
I’ve never heard of a below ground septic system that required pumps. The only pumps for drainage are for sub level bathrooms such as in basements.
There is a significant overlap of septic installations and wells and most modern wells run on electric. But if you’re toilet’s basin is full, it doesn’t need any power to flush and drain. It just won’t fill again.
They're common used in multi stage septic systems that have a perc field above the tank level. If this pump is without power for a significant time, it will cause quite a problem. However usually your tank will have enough free capacity for some hours. You don't see pumps in single tanks very often due to solids blocking the intake.
When one of the pumps on my aerobic system died a few years back it was less than 24 hours before the drains were backed up. If your soil won't pass a perc test I guess you can just go with aerobic which allows you to build pretty much anywhere. The final stage sprays effluent on your yard.
If you have a pressure fed (septic) sewer system, you need electricity for it to work. Usually if you avoid excessive water use, your holding tank has a bit of reserve.
I've been out of power since Sunday night. Water out since yesterday. I'm on the seventh floor too. Most of my friends are in even worse situation. I'm a paranoid near doomsday prepped and my batteries are still low.
Walking out of my apartment is indistinguishable from an apocalypse. The emergency system batteries died days ago. Police don't come. The roads are pure ice. Nothing is open. All essential supplies are sold out. Fire systems are all disabled because pipes have burst. Elevators have been gone for a long time. Without a flashlight you might as well be in a cave.
Gas furnaces need power for the circuitry & blower.
My experience with fireplaces is that the house winds up net-colder, but you can warm yourself with radiant heat while it burns. Freestanding wood stoves on the other hand are very capable of warming a large space.
A tight wood stove in the hands of an experienced user is a remarkable thing. The amount of heat that can be extracted from a large oak log is nothing short of remarkable.
Sadly, most wood stoves are not tight, nor are most users experienced.
Best fireplace in terms of efficiency is a rocket mass heater. It burns the wood gas in a secondary burn chamber and then routes the exhaust through a lot of thermal mass. One 2 hour fire a day will usually heat 2000 sq feet of house. 3m video explains the concept; longer videos will better explain it https://youtu.be/fwCz8Ris79g
This is 50% of the reason why pellet stoves were created, with the other 50% being you can burn scraps instead of large oak logs that could be used for furniture etc.
Pellet stoves sound nice in concept but my experience with them (n=2) has not been good. The hoppers break and jam, the fans die, and they’re generally just a pain in the rear. Usually happens right when you need them most, too.
I only have n=1 experience here, but I've been using a pellet stove for years, burning a ton (50 bags) of pellets each year. I buy quality pellets which avoids having clinkers and keep them dry in the garage.
It does require yearly maintenance to grease the motor and I had to undergo some repairs when we bought it (used, it came with the house) because the previous owners did some really dodgy stuff like using a completely wrong sized fuse and taping it in with duct tape, mangling the fuse holder, but it has been reliable for over a decade now.
Cold climate here (Quebec) and we heat with electricity usually. Many people have an electric furnace (forced air) or even baseboard (what I have for example). We also have a heat pump (heats the upstairs very well until about -15C and provides awesome AC for the entire house in summer).
For Power outages and also coz its just awesomely warm: propane fireplace. All the benefits of a wood fireplace with none of the downsides.
What this means is that we don't worry about "oh how about we all go ice skating" just turn the fireplace off without worrying about a fire. No indoor air quality issues. Electricity is out? Sure no fan but who cares. Still warm (and some have battery backup fans). Have to start it up without electricity? No problem, pilot lights w/ piezo starter. Propane delivery isn't that different from having to stockpile the firewood.
LPG or Propane is awesome down until -42 celsius. Then it’s basically useless as it won’t vaporize. Live in Quebec too and my backup is a dual fuel generator. Propane and then regular fuel if it’s too cold or I’m out of propane. Never too careful!
You do have us on the regular fuel backup :) don't have that but we also don't have a backup generator in general. I wanted to last time we had a >12 hour outage but couldn't get the expense approved by the "finance minister" (i.e. the SO). When the electricity goes out for more than an hour or so the neighborhood is suddenly very loud though coz several next door neighbors go and bring out their generators so I'm not too worried about our survival and there's always the firewood pile in the backyard.
I haven't downvoted you, but it's perhaps because the LPG tank is usually outside with a rather large surface area, so if -40 degree days are rare, insulating the tanks and providing a heater might not be very cost-effective vs. having multiple fuel jets in your burner for multiple viscosity fuels.
Also, either the "way to keep the tank warm" would probably be an electric heater (which would fail in these corner cases) or else a small burner... next to your tank of highly flammable gas with lots of no-smoking signs around.
Though, I would guess in colder climates, if you really wanted to use LPG, you could put an electric fuel pump in your tank (so it doesn't rely on vapour pressure to feed) and have a burner that pre-warms the fuel and includes a small electric heater for starting.
> it's perhaps because the LPG tank is usually outside with a rather large surface area, so if -40 degree days are rare, insulating the tanks and providing a heater might not be very cost-effective vs. having multiple fuel jets in your burner for multiple viscosity fuels.
It's more or less a one-time cost and you might want the simplicity. Tradeoffs rather than it being inevitable.
And multiple fuel jets aren't enough. If you can't depend on the propane, then you need a lot of backup fuel.
> small burner... next to your tank of highly flammable gas with lots of no-smoking signs around.
You have fire that's not very far anyway. It's not hard for an expert to design something that's safe, since you don't need all that much heat.
> Though, I would guess in colder climates, if you really wanted to use LPG, you could put an electric fuel pump in your tank (so it doesn't rely on vapour pressure to feed) and have a burner that pre-warms the fuel and includes a small electric heater for starting.
If you prefer keeping the tank design the same, that sounds fine. A tiny pump would take barely any power, so a cheap solid-state generator attached to the burner could run it and charge your phone too. You don't even need a battery to get things going; a 1 pound tank could be warmed by hand if everything else goes wrong.
They also change the composition of at least Diesel at the pump. Not sure on fuel oil which is essentially the same as Diesel at the pump, save for possibly things like that (definitely the color)
Yes, most of my relatives on my mom's side are farmers in the upper Midwest. They have separate (gravity fed) tanks on their farms for #1 and #2 diesel, and the tank they use for filling the tractors depends on the season.
(Farmers buy diesel in bulk and don't pay road tax on it. It's illegal to put the untaxed diesel into a pickup that ever leaves the farm.)
What's a good place to learn the art, do you know? I'm not in Texas, but I have two woodstoves now, and my one experiment with them thus far has taught me only that I have a lot to learn.
Other poster covered it well, but one thing to add. There are the kinds of wood burning stove. Old simple, pre EPA mandated high efficiency stove, efficient stoves with a catalyst to provide the clean burn, and efficient stoves that use secondary air injection to provide a clean burn. The new efficient stoves are a bit more forgiving for throttling them down for long burns without producing too much creosote they can cause chimney fires.
I just replaced the old stove in my house with a new catalyst model and I burn 30% less wood while providing more steady even heat. I am heating 4000 sqft 2 story with only wood heat, one load every 12 hours, house between 80 and 64 degrees depending on location.
Are you aware of any high-efficiency wood burners that don't require electrical power for the secondary air injection? If they do all require electrical power for secondary air injection, if power is lost, do they quickly foul the burners with soot, or do they just gracefully degrade to running at a lower efficiency?
The secondary air combustion for wood burning stoves usually doesn't require electricity. At least, we shopped for an EPA 2020 compliant replacement wood stove a couple years ago, and I don't think I came across that needed electricity for combustion. Pellet burning stoves often do, and there are often add-on kits for wood stoves to provide greater air circulation for the room, but the primary and secondary combustion use the natural "draft" from the chimney. I guess it's possible that even higher efficiency would be possible for bulk wood with a forced air design, but I don't think they are common. We ended up with a Progress Hybrid Soapstone, and have been happy with it.
Other reply covered it nicely. I am not aware of any conventional high efficiency wood stove that requires electricity to run. I do have blowers on mine to circulate air over the convection deck, which also reduces clearance requirements to the rear of the stove.
I opted for a blaze king catalyst stove. It’s probably the nicest stove utilitarian stove you can buy if you want to heat a large space and want to control temp outputs. Downside is cat replacements every 5 or so years, but that’s not a big deal and worth the benefits.
Wood stoves are charcoal breeder reactors powered by their own vaporized wood gas. The re-radiated heat from the ironwork is what gives them their extreme warmth. They are like many other fuel burners — stage one vaporizes the fuel and stage two burns the vapor — it’s just that both stages are in the same iron firebox.
When you start a fire you want to quickly get the stove up to temperature. Use small split logs and kindling sticks along with some kind of “candle” that burns long enough to get the flames going. Commercial fire lighters (kerosine wax bricks) or even just a bit of kitchen towel with a tablespoon of vegetable oil will do.
The kindling and your first log will burn hot and bright with an attractive yellow flame — like a campfire. At the end of this first burn you will build up a layer of red hot wood embers in the base of the firebox and the ironwork will be about half way to temperature.
The next stage and each stage after that is to put on a much smaller load — often I will just use a single large log — and leave the air intake or door ajar, temporarily. The hot embers will rapidly get the new log hot and the whole thing will instantly go from glowing red to an inferno in under a minute.
At that point you have achieved a self sustaining reactor. You can leave it running full throttle if you want the pretty yellow flames. It will only last 20 minutes though and all the energy will blast up the chimney.
Much better, and indeed the whole reason for having a wood stove over an open grate, is to now shut off almost all of the airflow to the firebox. Low airflow means the combustion goes right down — you may not even see any flames if you go super low — but it also means the stove isn’t being constantly cooled by a high volume of airflow.
If you balance it just right then the flame front of burning wood gas will sit above the logs and permeate the whole chamber. It looks like a cross between Aurora borealis and a Backdraft (1991) slo-mo sequence — a deep red wraith that flaps around slowly, completely unlike the sooty yellow flames you began with. You get a real feeling for how it’s the gas not the wood that’s burning. (Having a stove with a glass viewing window really opened my eyes to their operation.)
A single 10” log — quarter split from a 20” diameter ash tree and air dried for 18 months to <20% moisture content — will now produce 10kW for an hour or more and stay burning for eight. The fire will “keep” overnight and in the morning you can put on a new log, fire it up with the door ajar, and be back at full capacity in minutes.
What’s interesting is that if you run the stove in pretty mode — like a cartoon open fireplace with crackling and burning and yellow flames with the vents or even the whole front door open — you’ll notice that parts of the stove might not even get hot. The iron air intake grill on mine will remain at room temperature because although the flames are vigorous, the airflow is so fast it keeps the stove body cool.
Conversely, once the stove has been running for an hour in slow burn mode, the entire body is practically glowing and requires thick gloves to handle. It is wonderful.
Exactly this. Wood stoves operated in this manner are extremely efficient, and generate particulate emissions comparable to an oil-fired furnace, maybe 100x less than an open-hearth fireplace.
> It looks like a cross between Aurora borealis and a Backdraft (1991) slo-mo sequence — a deep red wraith that flaps around slowly, completely unlike the sooty yellow flames you began with. You get a real feeling for how it’s the gas not the wood that’s burning. (Having a stove with a glass viewing window really opened my eyes to their operation.)
Would love a video if you can find one to see exactly what you're talking about.
After a quick search on YouTube I was somewhat unsatisfied; the few videos I looked at showed the effect only partially. People do sometimes like to bias the burn towards the yellow flame, either for entertainment or to keep the temperature of the stove down. Also it's hard to capture. My own attempts to photograph the effect haven't been successful due to the movement of the flame and the gentle low red glow that it gives off.
I've never seen it before (so I'm not 100% this is the same thing), but did find a picture that I think is similar to what they're describing - the red glow in the top window of the picture here: https://commonsensehome.com/masonry-heaters/
The trick is to start it up hot and then reduce down the airflow to near zero. The knowledge was passed down in the tribe, so I don't know where one learns the art.
Right, if you think about it almost all of the heat from the fire goes right up the chimney. The brick of the firebox & chimney are generally built outside the building envelope for safety reasons, so any heat in the brick doesn't warm the house. The only heat that actually makes its way into the house is the radiant heat cast from the fire itself, which is small.
The smoke is poison, and unlike a furnace, gas fireplace, firebox, or wood stove, there is no heat exchanger, so you can't capture any of the heat out of the flue gasses.
It's counter-intuitive, I know. But this is why everybody congregated around the hearth in the days of fireplaces.
This is why russian-style stoves have a whole labyrinth for the air to blow through, warming up the large brick structure. It can hold heat for a while even after it's done burning.
Even worse, all that exhaust gas that goes up the chimney has to be replaced. And it's replaced by cold air from the outside coming through all the little books and crannies of your house.
There are many different designs that have tried to solve the issue. Both from capturing the heat lost up the chimney and supplying combustion air from outside. They all come with downsides and ultimately forced air heating won out.
The 180 year old house I grew up in has a central brick chimney for this reason. When you put the fire out before going to bed you have a column of brick radiating throughout the night. It’s still pretty chilly in the morning but it works quite well.
Right, but it turns out the mortar fails more often than you would like and you'd get smoke & carbon monoxide leaking into houses from that central chimney, which is why that went away (or so I've heard)
Almost without comment. All I will say is that we have some friends in Germany living in the 'countryside' (as much as that's still a thing in densely populated Germany) that heat their main living area with one of these (way less elaborate design lol). My grandma had one of these sitting in the wall between kitchen (right next to the eating area) and the living room.
My parents have one of these in their holiday house by the sea (essentially an old farmhands dwelling). I can confirm that it heats the house up to blistering temperature even in the coldest winter if one wants. Other friends use a more modern design in their house which essentially heats up the whole house (I don't think they have any other heating except water heating)
The house I grew up in in Scotland did exactly this.
We had fireplace powered central heating -— radiators throughout the house linked to pipes behind the firebox. In the morning I’d wake up to ice on the inside of the windows, and by my teenage years it was my job to head downstairs and light the coal fire first thing in the morning. It worked well once the fire was up and running.
This is a very old problem and there are solutions, like the Franklin stove [1]. However, we don’t really use fireplaces as a primary source of heat anymore. Their use is really more decorative. If they were really intended for heat generation, so one of the other posts mentioned, we would use a completely different design.
Wood boilers are common enough. Pipes and radiators won't do all that much good if you aren't moving the water, and at that point it makes sense to optimize the whole thing for heating water with the minimum required fuel.
My father did that a long time ago in a house that had baseboard heat. Made a fire grate out of plumbing pipe, ran the baseboard water through that. It worked, when it did. It would also somehow get air in the lines and start banging from time-to-time. I was a kid, so I don't know if the monetary savings offset the pain in the arse, or not.
In parts of Europe (definitely Germany) heating with water based radiators throughout the house is normal. And that goes from individual houses to big apartment complexes (I lived in a 52 unit one with a central furnace). It's totally normal to let the air out of your radiator from time to time. And they (or you in the individual house case) fill up the water in the 'closed' system from time to time.
Different places, different 'customs' i.e. systems we are used to. All have their pros and cons and sometimes it's just that we don't know that different systems exist.
Radiative heat actually makes you feel significantly warmer, so you can set your heating to a lower temperature and still feel the same warmth compared to airflow heating. This is the reason why floor heating is very efficient, because you have a large heat mass with radiative heat that sits at your feet (which typically get cold first). So it provides the same comfortlevel at significantly lower temperature.
Which is why it is better to make a quick but strong draft in your home than keep window constantly slightly open. With a quick exchange of air, your walls remain warm and continue to radiate heat. Having a window constantly slightly open means air exchange is slow but constant and the area of the wall around the window cools down significantly.
It takes very, very specific conditions (you'd have to go out of your way to minimize radiant heat transfer) for a fireplace to put less heat into a room than it removes with airflow.
Back in the day (i.e. 1700s) everyone heated with fireplaces. And many of them (e.g. 2nd floor ones) weren't that big.
The problem, in my experience (grew up spending significant time in a 3 story country house made of stone with only one fireplace for heating), is that it gets warm close to the fire and whatever is touching the chimney, but the rest of the house gets colder because of the cold air drawn in by the fire. So very likely a net gain, but depending on where you sleep, it could get interesting at night.
Fireplaces typically draw air from the house to sustain the fire, then up the chimney or out a vent. That creates negative pressure, which draws cold, unconditioned air from outside into the house from wherever air can leak in.
How this works out in terms of net heat gained/lost will depend on the fireplace design, but, from what I hear, it's not uncommon for this to be a net-loss type of situation.
Not if they are in the attic. Also, my house has a subfloor. When the furnace and water heater were inside the part of the house you live in, they both had vents on the floor, so air used for combustion came from outside.
No, the issue is that the draw of the heated air up through the flue creates a negative pressure inside the home, which gets made up through all the little nooks and crannies around the house.
As a result, the room where the fireplace is will be warmer but the rest the house is typically colder.
Probably to a small extent but the more pronounced effect is the heat gradient. The rest of the house becoming quite a bit colder just sends you back to the fireplace, which is generally not a bad place to be, so overall it's not a major issue.
It does, and it creates a floor on the outside temperature where the heat from the stove is overcome by the losses of sucking in the cold air. This depends on the design of the stove. Some wood stoves pull down the firebox air from the outside to avoid this problem, but it is fairly unusual. There is a second heat exchanger with its own fan that circulates the inside air. The problem with this is that you still lose a lot of heat up the chimney.
> Some wood stoves pull down the firebox air from the outside to avoid this problem, but it is fairly unusual.
AFAIK in europe having outside air intake in stove is mandated by law. You can not use it, but all newly built houses have outside intake if someone was planning on adding wood stove. You also need to have proper vent near your stove, so even if it uses inside air, it will typically get it through that. I have automatic pellet burning furnace in basement for normal heating needs (it starts automatically when needed, uses 3 temperature sensors on floors and in basement) and wood stove for "romantic" purposes, but when it's fired, it heats up almost whole house and pellet stove sees that no more heating is needed. I have lots of leftover wood from construction phase, so wood stove will pay itself back from reduced use of pellet.
As for losing heat through chimney - properly mounted and operated wood stove doesn't lose that much heat through chimney. Most of them have long enough steel pipe from stove to chimney, which reuses some heat from exhaust and ventilation channels in chimney, which are heating incoming air.
Many fireplaces that HSE outside air sometimes put hot smoke out the intake. The intake probably wasn't designed for this so it is a fire hazzard. This can be avoided, but if you don't know how you probably didn't.
Then again Ben Franklin figured out how to make a fireplace that worked yet most don't.
I doubt this net-loss is the case for most new gas fireplaces with direct-vent exhaust systems, in which case the combustion air comes from the outside. This is what I have. Not sure how common these would be in Texas. It can also be used in the event of a power outage. (Minus the fan) [1]
Yes. You’ve got a big hole in the wall/ceiling with a pressure differential blowing most of the heat up & out while sucking cold air in. Balanced improperly, you get a radiant heat area with rest subject to cold air.
Seems like they should divert a small part of their output to keeping a small battery backup just in case of emergencies. Then in an emergency the battery could reignite the system and run the blowers with the furnace again diverting some output to keeping things charged.
You would need the generator to provide about 100 watts to run the electronics and blower. Something passive like a thermoelectric generator would require a large amount of surface area to get this much power. Something more active like a traditional generator would require significant maintenance. If you’re really concerned your best bet is to get a couple Powerwalls and limit what you run off them. You could go a week running just the furnace and charging cellphones.
Power walls are pretty expensive. Much cheaper-- if you're primary concern is keep heat going and maybe a few other basics-- would be a low-maintenance dual fuel generator. Unlike the powerwall it's run-time isn't limited. Prolonged blackouts will run the powerwall dry, but with a dual fuel generator as long as you can get gasoline or propane you're good to go.
I suppose if you can afford it, go for both and have multiple reduncancy.
I have seen some fireplaces in US (I am from Poland) and outside of northern states they are all decorative pieces not designed to heat the home.
A good fireplace is completely closed (yes! no fire visible!) and is built to recover and store as much heat as possible.
* the fireplace must be enclosed completely so that it is possible to regulate amount of air going inside and especially to close it completely and SAFELY when you go to sleep. You need to close it so that it does not suck air out of your house. The fireplace stores heat but it does not make any sense if, once it burns out, the air takes all that stored heat out.
* the hot gasses go through a complicated tunnel (not directly into chimney) to heat up a large amount of bricks made from material that has high energy capacity. That's why here in Europe we don't tell silly stories about Santa coming through the chimney, because that would be totally ridiculous. He could just as well be coming through water pipes, it is just as accessible.
* the fireplace is built on a steel bed so that you can easily take out the ash WHILE it is burning. Also, it supplies the fire from beneath which makes for much better heating.
* traditionally, if you made effort to keep fire on throughout the day, you want to make as much use of it as possible. That's why you will see these frequently performing multiple functions: separate space for oven, large top to be able to heat multitude of things, maybe even place to sleep (that especially in really cold climate in Russia, in Poland much less popular).
Here are pictures of traditional fireplaces you could expect to heat well:
The first one is something you would expect heating the kitchen and the main/dining room and provide most of the heating for the house throughout the day.
The second one is something to put in individual rooms that are too far from the kitchen. It is easy to light it up and it heats extremely quickly but also stores absolutely no heat.
There is a difference between a fireplace and a wood-fueled heater. You have described the latter. No one would ever call what you have shown in those images a 'fireplace' in English. There are wood-fueled heaters but they have mostly been replaced by ones that use composite wood pellets, these are popular for off-grid heating in the US.
That's exactly the point. Here this is the fireplace.
You will find western style "fireplaces" in some new homes which are nothing more than show pieces to have cosy atmosphere but are utterly impractical for the task of heating the home.
Now, what what we would call "heater" is usually placed in the basement for practical purposes. The ones I showed above are placed directly in living area and are way more efficient.
Traditionally, you did not heat entire home, only the area where you live which contracts during winter. There might be other rooms which you only heat in the evening before you go to bed and then it gets extremely cold (but that's fine, you just put good enough featherbed to keep warm). This is practical aspect because heating entire home requires huge amount of resources.
There are plenty of manufacturers making glass fireplace inserts that are designed to be combined with a heat accumulating flue systems. Romotop or Hoxter are examples of fancier ones. The finished stoves typically are specced to retain 50% peak heat output after 12h, 25% after 24h. Combined with automated dampers you just load the firewood, light it and can then basically forget about it as the automation takes care of regulating primary and secondary air and shutting air supply off once the fire is done burning.
Anyway, just as you mentioned, this requires enclosing the fireplace (even if with glass) and it requires that the heat is routed somewhere else rather than directly to chimney.
This is 101 of building a functional fireplace designed to heat the house.
No one in the US builds or uses functional fireplaces to heat the house. We have not done so for over 100 years. Any fireplace you see in the US is a decorative feature designed to look nice and set a 'mood' for a room. There are some off-grid wood-heated homes, and some places will have fireplaces designed to efficiently heat a room or two, but statistically these are so close to 0% as to not exist and in many locations it has become illegal to install wood-burning fireplaces due to the air pollution they cause.
This isn't really true. My parents build a house with a large fireplace in the living room. True enough it actually sucked warm air out of the house (tall chimney) and made the whole house colder.
My folks simply bought a really nice fireplace insert. It works extremely well. These are not uncommon, even in the south, and my parent's place is far from 'off grid'. They absolutely do use it to 'heat the house', and we only supplement with radiant heaters in the far bedrooms.
I think you should visit small town/rural New England. A good part of the population around here heats exclusively with wood but usually with a free standing stove or insert.
I think I went back and forth about adding a footnote to 'no one' to quantify before deciding against it. There are still some left who heat with wood, but only a percent or two. It seems pellet-based units are slowly taking over the biomass-heating niche, but I am sure old guys in flannel with a couple of cords of wood up against the side of the house will never disappear from the northeast.
I think you misunderstood. I don't have anything against fireplace as a completely decorative element. Just don't expect it to perform the function of heating the house.
Where I previously lived (in Switzerland), we had a fireplace/stove very similar to the first picture. A bit similar to this: https://artoffire.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Kachelofen-s... On the other side of the wall was the kitchen, and this was where you actually set up the fire, inside an ancient iron cooking stove. Using some kind of a "flap" you could allow the heat from the stove (for cooking) to go to the tiled stove in the living room (for heating).
In my current appartment (also in Switzerland), this is the stove we have: https://imgur.com/a/SVKahw5 We also have an oil based central heating system, so it's not really needed anymore, but on very cold days it allows to get the living room warm and cozy.
>Most lost water for some stretch of time and some still don't have it.
This is extremely problematic. Power going out for periods of time less than 48 hours is one thing, losing water from the utility is a problem 3rd world countries have. You sure these people's pipes didn't simply freeze.
Having worked at a water treatment plant in the past: if the power is out for a sufficiently long time, then your water is going to go dry. The time it takes is dependent on the distribution system (and time of year, you consume about twice as much water in summer as in winter), but where I worked, it was about 12 hours.
Also, we had no generators. Why? Because a) power outages of that length are extremely uncommon (2 in 70 years, IIRC) and b) the power draw of a large water treatment plant is insanely high. The water company was literally the largest consumer of power in the entire state, and turning on some of the pumps require the power company's permission because it draws that much power. It's not very feasible to keep a backup power system for such a large facility when the need for it is so very low.
Even if your pipes didn't freeze, the upstream pipes could have frozen, or enough of your neighbors' pipes could have frozen, burst, and gotten thawed again, allowing water to flow freely out of the system.
>I don't think any lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well.
I'm curious how they didn't lose heat. Any furnace built in the last 30 years, even gas, has an electronic control board in order to ensure it doesn't accidentally turn on the gas without a functioning pilot light and/or heating element (which would blow up your house).
No electricity = no heat, regardless of natural gas supply.
I've got about a dozen coworkers in Texas, they've all been without power (which means no heat) for two days now. The power comes on long enough to at least warm their houses up to 50ish degrees before dropping back out so they're not completely screwed but I know they're scared.
The big issue isn't just the control board-- most forced-air furnaces (at least, of the type used in the southern US) use an electric blower to actually distribute hot air to the rest of the house.
End result's the same, though-- no electricity = no heat, regardless of natural gas supply. (But, at least in this case, a relatively small generator can provide enough power to get the furnace up and running and heat the house; the electric furnaces and heat pumps that are most common in places like Texas would need something quite a bit beefier to run without grid power).
My gas fireplace has a valve mounted flush with the floor. You use a special key-like wrench to turn it on.
Even with the valve barely open you have maybe 3 to 5 seconds to get it lit in a normal fashion. Heh mess around too long and you’re in for a big woosh and plenty of singed arm hair.
My gas fireplace still requires electricity to run. I know I can start it with a match if needed (and it has a pilot of course) but I'm not 100% sure if I can manually override the gas valve to open. It opens when I flip an electric switch.
Does it? Mine opens when I flip an electric switch, but it's self-powered via a thermopile on the pilot-- no AC connection whatsoever.
Some other models (from the same manufacturer as mine) don't have a standing pilot, but either use a battery as the primary ignition source, or use AC power but take batteries as a backup.
I've seen both styles. If it is a regular switch in the wall it uses mains to open the valve. If it has a switch on it, or a thermostat on the wall it probably is thermocouple powered. Though there are exceptions both ways.
Even with the switch on the wall nothing is certain. See my sibling post to parent. We had a wall thermostat but all it did was send a trigger current. If the thermo pile wasn't generating enough current nothing would happen :)
Sooo many different systems and many are just not well thought out. Especially in climates where it usually doesn't matter.
Here in Quebec it does matter so the one we have works in all conditions with various levels of manual intervention. We don't even have the one with a battery operated fan but even that exists.
Being close to the gulf a lot of people have generators that are likely big enough to power at least their fridge and one or more window/portable AC units. (For hurricanes.)
That size is usually big enough to run a blower and control board (and maybe a few other circuits), but it wouldn't come close to powering an electric heating element. But having a gas heater makes it all doable.
Though with a generator that big and some ingenuity you can plumb the radiator into the house and get heat from the engine. The more load on the genererator the more heat.
Very much true. I didn't touch on safety which is a real issue.
That doesn't make the idea bad though. There have been attempts to do this in commercial furnaces before, but the details are hard, and ultimately of questionable value in general. In this particular situation it might be useful, but that is a lot of complexity for something that only makes sense for a week every 10 years.
It's more an explanation of how you can have gas heat without power. Also, even heat pumps use a heating element at some point below 28~30 degrees. If you rely on the pump only below that, it'll start to freeze up into an ice block itself at some point.
Plus having a continuous plug-in (natural gas) fuel source is a big advantage over refilling a gasoline generator, which most portable generators are.
> No electricity = no heat, regardless of natural gas supply.
You're confusing furnaces and fireplaces.
A fireplace is soemthing that sits in a living space usually with a visible flame behind glass and is designed more for aesthetics than function. They typically run using a millivolt valve for the gas supply, with the voltage generated from a thermopile sitting in the pilot flame. They're often controlled by a regular light switch or a simple two-wire mechanical thermostat.
There's natural gas and propane models, and they'll run so long as you have gas flowing.
I upgraded mine to use an older wifi thermostat, but kept a light switch on a small cable underneath so I could always use it in case of a power outage, and it's come in handy a couple times. [1]
Mine also has a mains-powered blower fan built in (that's the plug on the left), but electrically it's completely separate and controlled by its own thermostat. It turns on when a certain temperature is hit -- usually about 5-10 minutes after the fireplace is on -- and stays on for some time after the flames are off. Obviously the blower doesn't work when there's a power outage but the fireplace still generates a usable amount of heat for the room.
On the other hand, my gas forced-air furnace -- which distributes heated air via ducts around the house -- is, as you describe, entirely useless without electricity. Even if it was running without the main blower fan, it would just be heating up the air sitting in the duct coming out of it. At best it might get some heat into the house via convection but I suspect it would cut out on thermal overload before actually doing anything useful.
They used go make furnances that didn't have a blower, hot air raises which gives circulation. You need bigger pipes and can never get high efficiency (went out of style before about 1960 is my guess ). If the furnace looks like it belongs in a horror film it might be this style.
I have a gas-only fireplace less than 20 years old that does not require power to function. There's a mechanical spark generator for lighting the pilot, but in colder months I keep the pilot on all the time. I believe the opening/closing of the valve for the gas to the main flame area is powered by a thermopile once the pilot is on.
Maybe it's changed lately, but most of the medium sized gas heaters (thinking fireplace inserts, fake wood stoves, etc.) have a feedback loop where the pilot light heats a thermocouple that opens the pilot light valve, plus a thermopile for opening the main valve when the thermostat switch closes. The fan won't run, but you'll still get radiant heat without main electricity.
Good question. I am unclear about heaters but I do think some of them are out for some team members and you may be right on that. Ovens also are commonly gas but ones since 1990 require an electric light. But... stovetops which are gas do not require electronic ignition. The risk is of course carbon monoxide poisoning; hopefully you have such detectors as part of your in-home fire detectors.
The problem is not so much the deliberate rotating blackouts who can get restored after a time, but large groups of people for whom power is out due to some other weather-related outage issue; there are large swaths of them in Houston at least according to the Centerpoint Energy outage map which distinguishes between the two (but does seem to be not the most timely updated data per various people I have talked to whose status has changed during today: http://gis.centerpointenergy.com/outagetracker/ )
This seems to be a problem specifically with whole house furnaces. I don't quite get why but I'm guessing cheap companies. Our gas fireplace has no such problems. Piezo electric knob to start the pilot (like your Coleman camping stove but it actually works - ask me how I know) and the pilot generates the electricity needed to actually let the gas flow. If the pilot isn't able to generate the electricity to open the gas valve then no gas ever enters the burn chamber. Again ask me how I know - yes those things gunk up and then can't supply the current you need to open the valve. Easy fix tho. Zero electricity needed and the upstairs stays warm. Also no cold air sucked into the house. The whole system is closed off towards the house. Love this thing!
I haven't seen a gas oven that can work without electricity. A gas stove, yes, you can simply turn on the gas and quickly use a kitchen lighter to ignite the gas manually and hope not too much poisonous gas escaped the stove. But ovens? How?
Older gas ovens used a standing pilot light. They would work without electrical power. Really old ones you light with a match.
My kitchen has a gas range, the oven uses electical resistance/incandescent ignitors so it won't work without electrical power. The top burners have spark ignitors but of course I can light them with a match.
Gas heaters still require electricity for basic management.
I'd imagine heaters have batteries for specifically this case. If they don't, it's frankly a miracle if we don't lose anyone, and someone needs to get prosecuted.
It is not feasible to run a gas furnace off a battery (short of a "whole house" battery like a Powerball). It's more than just basic management. You need to run either a blower or a pump to distribute the heat throughout the house. You'd need a substantial battery to run a 1/3 HP motor for any length of time.
A gas boiler furnace with steam radiators typically only requires power for the thermostat and solenoid valve, which can indeed be powered by a small battery. This is assuming you have a pilot light, which many older furnaces do.
Residential steam boilers are pretty rare these days. Generally hot water heat uses circulation pumps (which draw less than a forced air blower, but still have a non-trivial continuous current draw)
Furnaces don’t come with batteries because a 12v 100Ah battery that costs $180 will run a 1/3rd HP (700w) fan for 2 hours. To sustain the fan for 3 days, you’d need 36 batteries. Lead-acid batteries have a limited lifespan. You would also need a transfer switch and enclosures and at that point you may as well buy a UPS or a natural gas generator to provide backup power.
One thing the NEC 2020 update allowed is bi-directional power between an EV and its charger, you can set up an EV to provide backup power your house, with a transfer switch and everything.
Radiant heating systems with boilers require electricity for the pump, even if they’re gas fired. Electric resistive heating needs electricity. Forced air heating needs electricity to run the fan. All heating systems require electric power, even if the heat is generated by burning natural gas.
We're talking about forced air furnaces here, I think. Something has to force the air. A big blower motor that takes hundreds of watts.
Forced air heat is not great in terms of comfort, but in Texas you already have all the ductwork and the blower motor and so on for AC, so it's simplest just to add a gas burner to that.
at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well.
I have a gas fireplace, it's vented to the outside through a chimney.
If you sit right in front of it, you can feel a little radiant heat, but the true warmth comes from the electric fan that circulates air through the firebox that's heated from the gas flames. I'd always figured that if there was an extended power failure, I'd set up a 5V fan from my computer to blow air through the the fireplace.
Some gas fireplaces are "direct vent", which means that they vent the exhaust right into the room. I'd never trust one of those not to fill the room with Carbon Monoxide.
> I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well.
I believe fireplaces in Texas are for decoration. I live in a relatively new house in North Dallas, read open floor plan, and turning on the fireplace make absolutely no difference.
We managed to turn it on by replacing the igniter batteries and turned it back off after an hour because you don't get any heat unless you sit within 1 feet of it.
A "decorative" residential fireplace typically won't do much to provide real heat. If you want something that will make a difference it is usually going to be a sealed unit or something a little more purpose-built. Still, when you compare the burner in the average small fireplace to what you have in a typical furnace, it becomes clear pretty quickly that a fireplace is not likely to be a heat source of much merit, and even if it did have a decent BTU output, it's unlikely to be evenly distributed around the house.
tl;dr - a typical residential fireplace isn't an alternative to a furnace.
Re fireplace - check out a ventless system. They can change existing burner and logs with ventless which gives you lots of heat that a vented system won't. Can get a decent one for 600-1200 bucks.
My brother's house is currently 38°. Inside. Also, gas is not useful for a central, forced air system because it depends on the electric motor driving the blower.
For natural gas you want a sealed one so effluent goes up the chimney but the heat radiates through the glass. But heat rises so you create convection. I think a fireplace is an 80% loss so for $10 spent you get $2 heat.
Parts 15 and 16 of that PDF are, in polished up polite speak, particularly scathing in terms of what's being recommended.
The summary is: Regularly inspect and maintain your equipment, here are the obvious things that must be done. (Unstated: We feel a need to say this, because obviously it didn't happen in at least one place...)
Probably got cut by the bean counters and a cut-throat market that didn't require safety and availability as considerations.
If the penalty for ignoring scathing words is hurt feelings, then there's no reason to be scathing or not. (Well, except it might look good in an investigation someday.)
What's needed is real incentives, carrots and/or sticks, with real enforcement and follow-through. Speak softly, and all.
Yes I agree state's legislatures did not prepare. But maybe that shows why a body of politicians is not prepped for engineering nuances. Maybe they should have adequately applied leverage to the power companies to "push" them to better practices rather than trying to fine and inspect and regulate which is an inherently "pulling" option which the companies will always try to weasel out of.
This argument to incentivize rather than punish applies to many issues with legislative bodies across all complex industries like Big Tech and other Engineering fields. You pass a law that drinking water cannot have over 10ppm of XXX carcinogen? There is most likely going to be 9.99ppm because that's the bare minimum.
> Yes I agree state's legislatures did not prepare. But maybe that shows why a body of politicians is not prepped for engineering nuances.
The problem is that Texas is an outlier. Other governments, broadly, get this right. Those FERC recommendations mentioned upthread? They're the work of the government (hell, NERC is even a multinational globalist thing). That argues less that "governments are bad" than it does for "THIS government was bad".
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different outcome. When another option works and the current implementation fails, then it's time to change to the workable option.
> Under 10 ppm you get a carrot. Then drinking water will still be 9.99.
But also the company decides that they're okay with only getting that carrot 95% of the time because filtering costs money. So 5% of the time it's much worse.
The real power of a stick over a carrot is the incentives can be much bigger. If you're selling widgets, and 1% catching on fire just means you're paid 1% less, you don't care very much. If you're fined 50 times the purchase price for each widget that catches fire, you care a lot.
Can you clarify what the distinction is that you see here? Ultimately, whether it's fines/regulations ("stick") or bonuses/incentives ("carrot"), you're still going to have a bunch of budget-focused politicians pulling the levers.
Their incentive structure rewards short term budget savings at the expense of long term preparedness. The real fix is to have a non-partisan body staffed by actual engineers setting this kind of policy, isn't it?
The legislature could have done something, but the private utility companies could have also decided to provide a quality, reliable product. In the old days they may have considered it their civic duty. This is just another example of why private utility monopolies don’t work.
They did that in the old days because the public utility commission wielded a big stick. Companies only understand punishment when delivering a commodity service. Power companies care about the dividend.
In my experience running capital projects, you get performance by paying modest performance bonuses and assessing tough penalties for non-performance.
Est. 1970 just in case of unreliability (for utility shareholders), not much of a factor until recently. Given more leeway to disappoint consumers after 2002.
Up until 1995, under the HL&P monopoly the first 675 kWh remained extremely low cost for residential consumers as had been agreed with PUC to allow jacking up further residential kWh, and business accounts, into rates beyond the reach of low-income households. Check your old bills.
Of course 675 kWh is not enough for air conditioning but otherwise a small household could remain within that tier if they could conserve effectively, and had gas heat for the normally mild winters. As soon as deregulation started, HL&P then began the agressive promotion of new plans to all their established customers, similar to the limited number of newly allowed competitors where giving a break for the first bunch of kWh was no longer required. For a while there it was still required for HL&P consumers who had not opted out of their 1980's plan, but they made whatever straight-rate deals were necessary to get this info off of people's bills ASAP.
Headed us in the current direction starting in 2002.
New company Centerpoint took over the energy delivery infrastructure. Transmission assets from HL&P and others, delivery pipelines from gas suppliers, all of it.
As the name implies, pay no attention to a central point of failure. Nothing to see here.
By 1983 in the other most air-conditioned state, FPL the Florida state monopoly in a number of power plants was consuming the same grade of fuel oil as the Houston monopoly. A fuel oil vessel could be loaded from a Houston refinery, and with freight to FL the consumers there were paying half the price as in Houston using the same fuel without the added cost of sea freight.
7. As we have seen, Gov. Abbot has never been good enough for Texas, Lt. Gov. Patrick experienced his high point as a failed sports announcer, and Atty. Gen Paxton has only enough integrity for an uninhabited island.
Don't get me started on the equally compromised Ex. Rep. DeLay who in 2002 became US House Majority "Leader". Left in disgrace over lack of ethics himself.
Forgot to mention the 27-story Houston Public Works building downtown which was built in the 1960's by HL&P still has the nicely air-conditioned parking garage.
No garage doors to keep the cold air in since it didn't really matter to the power company.
No mayor has ever wanted citizens to be very aware of that since the city took over the building in 1999.
Also HL&P changed to numerous versions of "Reliant" as it was heading toward "spinning off" Centerpoint:
>Reliant Energy Inc.--formerly Houston Industries Inc.--operates among the top five power and natural gas marketers in the United States. With over $32 billion in assets, the company serves nearly four million customers in the southern United States and Minnesota. After the Texas Electric Choice Act was passed in 1999, Reliant Energy rolled its non-regulated operations into Reliant Resources, a majority owned subsidiary with power plants it the United States as well as the Netherlands. Reliant Resources also markets and trades energy in Germany, the United Kingdom, and in the United States. Reliant Energy Communications, an Internet-related division, provides Texans with Internet, data, voice, and other telecommunications services.
Dumping a political talking point like '20% more' without anything analytic to support it is just trash posting.
Interconnect with neighbour grids does not cost 20% more, AC or DC. In fact the huge peaking capability of a state with ~50% gas generation would generate revenue supplying peak demand and variations in renewable supply.
Pricing systems (i.e. market rules) that encourage reliability doesn't automatically lead to gold plating.
The customers unfortunate enough to have signed up for spot pricing are paying 200x more than before. One week of that is enough to erase two decades of 20% savings.
It would be interesting to see a plot of price vs. uptime in the face of unlikely events for electric grids, and which spot on the curve has been chosen here.
There are definitely points on such curves, of course, where you've exhausted the sweet spot and just have the option of paying e.g. 3x as much for a very modest marginal decrease in risk. But that doesn't sound like the case here.
I haven’t found a detailed comparison, but I learned today that El Paso, TX requires utility operators to winterize. Comparing El Paso to similar cities in Texas should provide a more definitive answer.
20% is about what energy deregulation supposedly saved customers. Utilities regulated under rate-of-return regulation tended to overbuild and maintain large safety margins, because they could pass those costs along to the customer.
We always get told that <important thing> will result in massive price increases for the customer, even though in practice it's not always true. For example, we're told raising the minimum wage above where it's been for decades will make everything cost absurd amounts, even though there are many cities in the US with a $15/hr minimum wage and prices there aren't much higher than the ones with minimum wages in the $8/hr range.
It certainly could raise your electrical costs by 20% for weatherization, but there's nothing stopping the utility from raising your costs for any other reason. If weatherization doesn't completely eat into their profit margins, they don't HAVE to raise prices at all. The government could also fund it as a one-time expense.
After experiencing that event? I think so. A lot of people on both sides of the political spectrum are very pissed right now. The state of Texas and its Republican rulers have been embarrassed in a big way, as the sham that is “free market” has been revealed for all to see.
Exactly the same thing happened in South Australia in 2016
1) Renewables % of generation mix grows (wind + solar)
2) Base generation sources get pushed out by economics and regulation (coal)
3) Peak generation sources get squeezed by the economics of wind + solar over summer (lots of wind, lots of sun) and begin to be relegated to backup roles
4) Something bad happens (in SA it was software misconfiguration across multiple wind generation sources)
5) The backup generation gets used for the first time, suprise suprise it doesnt work
Sorry, but no. A 2011 FERC report cited problems in Texas gas/coal/nuke plants for failing to weatherize. They didn't fix the problems, and gas and sensing lines froze, taking gas/coal plants offline too.
2/3rds of the power that went offline from the storm was fossil.
Moreover, Texas's independent grid (not connected to the rest of the US) makes it difficult for them to import power from neighboring states.
Stop trying to push political tribalist stories that blame renewables for bog standard failures in traditional systems that could have been avoided.
No, it's because natural gas got cheaper, and they switched to the cheaper source.
"The report also addresses the interdependency of the electric and natural gas industries. “Utilities are becoming increasingly reliant on gas-fired generation, in large part because shale production has dramatically reduced the cost of gas,”
In 2011 when this happened before, Texas had even less renewables. I realize you're trying to hard to sell an ideology to blame renewables for what is really, gross mismanagement of the Texas grid, including fossil and nuclear power, but the reality is much more complex than your simple narrative.
Which fossil source is cheaper also largely depends on individual markets. The way carbon offset and carbon pricing is implemented in Germany for example, means coal got cheaper than natural gas for electricity. Despite being bad at ramping up quick and being really worse for the climate and environment. Gas would also be a good companion to renewables, simply because a gas turbine is very reactive, something a coal plant is not.
Natural gas got cheaper if you don't include the cost of the power grid going down in the case of weather like this. I do wonder if it would still be cheaper if you do... it's not just the power plants that failed, apparently the pipelines and the natural gas production infrastructure couldn't cope either, and that sounds potentially really expensive to fix.
That doesn't explain why coal and nuclear plants failed. Or why gas power plants in other states are still running. All of which is in line with the 2011 report about TX not winterizing their power plants properly.
Frankly, it seems like you've decided that the issue is renewables and you're searching around for an argument to justify a conclusion you've already come to. Because what you're saying is simply not actually supported by the evidence or consistent with the current situation.
Yeah, but none of that appears to actually be what happened.
Renewables are down from their peak capacity in Texas, but they're actually performing above what the grid thought they'd do. So it's not like ERCOT got caught with their pants down when it comes to renewable generation.
Instead the issue appears to be that thermal (gas, coal, and nuclear) plants all over Texas are failing in the face of cold weather, and because Texas has its own grid it can't shift enough power from nearby states in order to cover the demand.
And it's not like these plants were off and everyone is surprised that they didn't turn on; Texas gets most of its power from natural gas most of the time. More to the point cold weather specific recommendations from back in 2011 weren't followed with sadly predictable consequences.
backup generation (gas) is not working. As mentioned. When your only on-demand source of generation is only profitable in peak periods its a recipe for disaster.
Again, this is not what is actually happening. Texas has heaps of on demand natural gas generators. They froze up with the storm and failed to turn on. Has nothing to do with renewable.
Strangely the rules under which some of them operate involve them paying for gas at spot prices (or at least during peak demand), and with spot gas prices being so high (due to pipeline failures limiting supply, and gas for heating having precedence) they had the option to stop generating...
Dallas suburb here (Las Colinas). No power since Monday 6am. I had to get room at holiday inn. I actually got the room yesterday, but the hotel lost power after an hour, so I had to go back home and sleep in 5 degree apartment.
Don't believe anything you read about "rolling outages". It's only rolling, if you define that as "out until it's not freezing anymore".
Houston right now, haven't had power, nor water since yesterday. My room is sitting at 20ish degrees and has been all day. I've quite literally been snug under a load of blankets with my wife all day just to stay warm.
My office back in Dallas which is not normally open offered to let people stay the night since they happen to be on the same grid as a hospital and I seriously considered trying to make it there today
Note to readers: If you're not from the US and confused about the 20 degrees (I was), note that it is Farhenheit and not Celsius! So around -6°C, which is of course very cold!
(edit: when you're on the internet, better to specify which unit you use, your audience is international)
I mean -6°C isn't very cold either. Its not every year you see temperatures like that, but its also not exactly uncommon. We had -17°C (1.4 °F) and lower here in Germany. We had some problems here and there, especially the railway, but afaik there were no major problems regarding power outages and heating.
But obviously we're much more prepared for temperatures like this here.
Sure, it isn't that cold when you have heat and proper clothing.
The power is out - there is no heat. For a lot of folks, this is more akin to camping without proper gear, during the winter, and without a fire.
There isn't much infrastructure to deal with snow and ice, either, nor are most folks going to be prepared to deal with frozen pipes.
The folks in Texas don't have the same sort of house insulation either: Since it doesn't get that cold, but it does get hot, the houses are designed to keep the house cool. And since this cold is very rare, folks aren't likely to have actual winter coats. What makes the cold tolerable for me - in Norway - is that I'm fairly prepared for it. They aren't.
20F / -6C indoors? Canadian here, mind blown a little. Are homes in Texas not insulated? They must be, you have really hot summers and run AC all the time..
Hope your power came back already. If not / or for another time: candles are great for heating a single room. Small, safe, but they make a difference.
What? That’s way below freezing and totally unsafe. Why don’t you sleep in your car? (WARNING: Make sure your exhaust is uncovered and you’re not in your shed)
(Just to make it clear I didn't mean to downplay this. Obviously to survive in your house at -10c you do need preparations which I understand many people don't have not being used to these temperatures. It's easy to forget as someone who lives a bit further up north that it's not a given that people have thick air tight walls and heavy down filled blankets to help them through. So to answer my own question: It would be unsafe because they might not have the things they need to be safe.)
I've found that it's much easier to sleep in this temperature than the rest of the day. You just bundle up under several blankets and it doesn't feel that different. Living in a 30 degree house does take some getting used to though.
A texan? I didn't buy anything below a 20* sleeping bag until I started camping in the desert and even 20* was super low for TX, most go with 40. I've got a -30 now but I never knew they went that low until I needed one.
The major highways are pretty good but it’s snowing more tonight so it’s gonna take another day to clear up. By that time, it’ll be over 40 so power will likely be restored in short order.
I'm wondering how rolling outages on the proposed schedules were supposed to work in this situation.
If they gave everyone power 50% of the time, everyone would crank everything they have to the max during those periods to get some heat into their buildings. Unless their total ability to consume energy is less than 2x their average consumption, it's not going to help.
To have any effect on overall power consumption, they first have to overcome this effect, and reduce power availability so people can't just shift the load.
Depending on creativity (if you have an electric tumble dryer... that's a fan heater), I bet many people could easily 10x their average power consumption.
If I had power for a short period of time and cold was an issue, I'd be dumping ~10 kW into water immediately (the only energy storage I can improvise on short notice).
You are right if they were trying to reduce load 50%, that's basically impossible
for the reasons you mention. They were only trying to get it down 20% and it might have worked if they could have effectively rolled the blackouts. A lot of people have natural gas heat. It doesn't work when the power is out (no ignition, no thermostat, and no fan), but doesn't put a huge load on the electric grid when it is on. For a well insulated house, you are probably running the heat for much less than 50% of the day. We run on average 6-8 hours in the winter. A rolling blackout where power was off for 1 hour, on for 2 would have exceeded their target savings, and shouldn't have affected heating or demand.
How does the thermostat work? I've had the old mercury switch style thermostats before, but those work by completing a circuit, so I assumed they were dependent on power being on.
Googling tells me it’s “a pilot millivolt system”. I guess the downside of this design is that the pilot* is always lit, consuming a certain amount of fuel. Neat old quick start guide for a similar thermostat: http://nebula.wsimg.com/b2bc334b6de3591406ddd01974f01830?Acc...
* pilot is manual piezoelectric; doesn’t require electric power
Not very well, I lived in an apartment with one of those in the hallway, had to set up a fan to blow warm air to the living room or bedrooms or it got way too cold on cold nights. (which fortunately, were rare where I lived). It'd definitely be better than nothing in an extended power failure, but forced air heat is more comfortable
It’s a wall furnace in the center of the apartment, I guess it blows via convection, outward on both sides of the wall.
These heaters are super common in California, and some larger homes have multiple of them. I assume they’re not as efficient as more modern solutions, but they are certainly reliable and low-maintenance.
1) Natural gas has been a problem because the moisture in it has been freezing pipes
2) The cold has caused the pressure in propane tanks to drop, impairing their functionality.
None of this might have been a huge problem if Texas didn't keep its power grid almost completely separate from the rest of the country. That has meant they can't easily bring in capacity to cover their own lack. Though even moderate winterization would probably have significantly reduced the problems. It's not like they have to prepare for continuous -10 F.
I don't know what the geographic distribution is, but overall the state is split evenly between between natural gas and electric heat (45% each), with the remainder being misc sources like propane.
I wonder why it is not possible to reduce the max amount of power each house can draw by 50% instead of doing blackouts. In Italy houses have remotely controlled meters, if you change contract and have a different power allowance your meter gets reporgrammed without the need of an operator on site. This would force people to consume less power to avoid automatic detachment, while still not leaving them completely in the cold.
Don't they have any kind of smart meter in Texas? Maybe reprogramming them is a slow operation that cannot be done to almost every meter in a short timespan?
I suspect smart meters are optional / being lazily phased-in. I've been out of the US for a decade, but I know my dad gets a discount on his electricity because he opted-in to a smart meter.
I was out for 17 hours from yesterday to mid afternoon today. Slept through the 0deg weather without power and yet still kept the house at 43deg internally without a heat source.
Here is our simi-successful attempt to survive.
* boarded up all the windows and doors with sheets, curtains, and heavy drop clothes
* limit going outside to fewest essential trips
* close all bedrooms and abandon them. All pets and occupants sleep in close proximity in a common area
* we have lots of sleeping bags and mink blankets. It’s more about layers
As a Canadian, a few more tips: keep kitchen and bathroom cabinet doors open. To keep water pipes from freezing. They are trouble if they freeze, expand, crack, and then when thaw - start leaking. (Empty toilets if risk of freezing.)(add glycol if you have it, in bowl.)
Also can trickle water from the taps - moving water sure but freeze so fast as still water.
Blankets, in doorways, hallways, Windows - keep warmth in room where you need it.
Rolling outages are when they've got enough power for some neighborhoods, but not all of them. Texas is so short of power right now that they've dropped power everywhere they can, excepting only certain critical facilities (hospitals, police), and continued operation of the grid itself -- a totally cold restart, they say, could take weeks.
A rolling outage would be relatively short in duration, and "roll" from one area to another. No roll happened here, just a bunch of areas off for long periods of time, and others not off at all.
Yeah, "rolling outages" is a joke. I went 19 hours without power in GP&L territory yesterday and portions of my house were down below 40F when I went to bed around 9 PM last night. They finally decided to restore power in my neighborhood at 4 AM this morning.
Austin here, staying at a colleague’s place who’s in an over-55 community on the hospital grid (unlikely to be taken down).
Agreed that they’re misusing “rolling outages”. We got an hour of power a day for the last two days and don’t foresee getting even an hour today. I don’t know who they think they’re fooling because everyone here knows exactly that these outages aren’t rolling and is out for ERCOT blood.
My guess why we keep seeing rolling blackouts mentioned is that ERCOT has three alert levels, and the way you would typically deal with number three is with rolling blackouts, so that has become the term everyone uses.
Also, it's up to the power distributors in different cities to cut in the ways that they can. Some are doing rolling blackouts, and others (like mine...) aren't.
You realize ERCOT doesn't specify how rolling outages are implemented, right? That's up to the generating utility/transmission network. Ift you're not getting what you think you should, point your frustration where it belongs at least.
The ERCOT website say they "manage the flow of electric power to more than 26 million Texas customers -- representing about 90 percent of the state’s electric load. As the independent system operator for the region, ERCOT schedules power on an electric grid that connects more than 46,500 miles of transmission lines"
This makes it seem like they would have at least some influence on the rolling outages, no?
If you hit the About section and watch their videos, you learn of ERCOT's role as a market facilitator and administrative body. They don't actually own any of the infrastructure, they are just a mediating influence through which granular activities are coordinated. They have the highest level view of activity as a whole on the grid, but there is no centralized control room or intimacy with utilities systems that allows ERCOT any semblance of fine grained control beyond being a message dispatcher and info propagter. Powerful and influential? Yes. Top down driver of day to day operations? No.
If anyone is interested in more about the Midnight Connection scandal, I highly recommend
That's terrible. I'm in Driftwood and a touch rural and we've had no hits. The subdivisions up the road have not been doing very well either. Bang for you buck with power probably has them focused on the higher density locations. Stay safe and stay warm. Glad you got some place better for now.
That’s rough. I’ve bundled up without power with little ones for 4 day, but it was mid 20’s. Keep warm however you can, safely...and good luck, don’t wait and cross fingers, take action.
While you (and siblings) are all correct, I don't get the down voting of the poor guy trying to make a joke while being considerate-ish and hoping that you guys were actually warmer than you were.
That said, I've been out in the hammock in 0F here, including snow and wind chill on top and been warm (oh wait, I'll be down voted too). It's all about insulation, which actually helps in both warm and cold weather. You can see that in Spain for example, where they have very warm weather (like Texas) in summer. It's a fallacy to believe though that there's no insulation used and that there's no heating in Spain.
The more time I spend on Hacker News, the more it just seems like Reddit to me. All the worst impulses are still here. The dog-piling, the comments that were made without opening the article, the low-effort jokes. At least there's no pun threads.
The catch is that it can't be a low-effort joke. People on reddit run jokes into the ground so far that they need to bring a passport to be prepared for their arrival in China.
You could be a Canadian living in TX. You could be an American who prefers the metric system. And OMG I had no idea it had gotten that cold down there, please accept my condolences.
A survival game 'The Long Dark' might be handy to learn how to keep warm. You dont need external heaters, just lots of layers and food, your body is a heat engine.
I'm in Dallas too. What we did was pull out our generator that runs on propane then run an extension cord from the garage to inside the house connected to an electric heater. Close the bedroom door. We were about 75 degrees.
You are crazy to not have a backup generator! It is an essential item to have!
Until recently, I've mostly lived in apartments or condos where a backup generator is not easy to own or operate since there are limited places to store fuel or to put a generator while running. Even if I'm ok with putting it on the balcony and running a cord inside, my neighbor may not want the generator's exhaust in his balcony.
Now I live in a single-family home and have an entire RV parked beside the house (with an on-board generator, and around 100 hours of fuel in the RV's gas tank to run it). I can run an extension cord to power the house furnace as needed, but unless it was below freezing and I was worried about the pipes freezing in the house, I'd probably just let the house stay dark and move into the RV during an extended power outage.
So I can confidently say "You are crazy to not have a backup Recreational Vehicle!". Maybe I should buy a travel trailer to back up the RV.
I hope I'm reading that wrong and you're not saying you actually have the generator in the garage (unless that garage isn't connected to the house), that's a good way to kill your entire family.
Not sure by your comment where exactly you've located your generator, but as a PSA:
Do not run a propane generator in or near your garage if it's attached to your home, since there's a serious risk of CO poisoning. It should be located as far away from the house as possible and away from windows and doors.
Prefarably at least 20 meters, especially if it is a gas-powered generator (OP mentioned theirs is propane, which is not quite as dangerous as gasoline).
Edit: I hope you have battery powered CO detectors on each floor and near the bedroom.
Not for long. Temperatures like the ones you're having will "solve" the homeless problem in days, unless they've got proper winter gear, winter-rated sleeping bags and the skills to keep a fire burning...
Morbid, yes, but you guys should really get into housing-first for taking care of homelessness.
My pets are cold and miserable like us but I don't think they're in any danger of injury. They have thick coats and blankets which go pretty far inside.
I'd be surprised if a 150 year old house was insulated and sealed as well as a 20 year old house, even in Texas.
Though you're right that the old house likely had a wood burning heat source, but I'd imagine that there were times when wood was scarce. And that 150 year old fireplace would have sucked air out of the house, bringing in cold air through every air gap.
I looked it up, and wood has an R-value of around 1.4 per inch, so a log cabin with 6" walls would have an R-value of around R8, current building codes in Texas specify R15 for walls, R38 for roofs.
Single-pane windows have an R-value of around R1, energy efficient double panes, around R4 (triple paned can hit R9) so even though there are a lot more windows in a modern house, they have better insulation.
Nope, simply bad housing standards leading to no isolation. Passive houses work in the Scandinavia. This is coming from a Swede who lived for a while in Texan suburbia.
You can definitely get a passive house in the US; but it's fairly expensive and takes quite a bit of time to pay off.
It also requires somewhat specialized (read: niche and expensive) heating and cooling equipment, since there is so little air movement into and out of the house, and requires so little energy.
Oh, and ironically, when the power's out in a passive house, you need to open a window to ensure you don't over-humidify the house with your breath.
Just better building standards will get you a long way. I live in a house with rather poor energy rating by Swedish standards (E on an A to F scale), yet with 4 people and some sunshine we keep 75m2 (half the house) heated to 20c with -5c outside.
They had wood burning heat sources and they didn't have indoor running water. So, as you say, people could gather around fireplace(s) and there were no actual issues associated with the rest of the house being cold.
But for those being very casual about other people sitting around in 25 degree temperatures, that's actually fairly chilly especially if you don't have the clothing and bed coverings for it. And I say that as someone who lives in New England and has done winter camping.
Could I manage modulo piping concerns? Sure. (And I know you can drain pipes but I'd hate to be in a situation where I felt I had to do so in an emergency situation without electricity and then fire things up again when the electricity came back on.) But you're talking about huddling under covers if you don't have wood burning heat.
We had a heater outage recently, with temperatures at about -20c. More than half the house was heated by our fireplace. It churns out something like 7kw when used properly, which is more than enough for that part of the house.
The other part was fine with one 2kw heater for the night. The whole thing was pretty scary. I'll make sure our next house has 2 fireplaces. One m3 of firewood will keep you going for a couple of days, and more importantly: your pipes won't crack.
I have about a 200 yo house in Massachusetts. I've had a lot of work done to tighten it up but it still is very drafty in many spots. It has smallish windows and low ceilings but it's definitely not what you would call well-insulated overall.
Millions of people don't live in suburban homes with grills.
They live in apartments that don't allow grilling so they never thought to buy one. And it being the winter, not many people who do grill in the summer have charcoal for winter grilling.
So when the power goes out, they can't cook anything on their electric ranges. If the water shuts off, that's even worse. Frozen food is useless if you can't even thaw it, let alone cook it.
Initially the weather reports I read said the winter storm warning only extended to Monday afternoon and now it's to Thursday, so lots of people didn't think to extend their emergency supplies to Thursday, and most probably didn't think they'd be without water and power.
I'm really lucky in that I have both water and power, but many are not. You really should not be judging people according to what the most privileged suburbanites can adapt to.
Insulation works in both directions. If you use AC a lot in summer, the same insulation is doing you good
Without adding heat, you're still not going to stay warm for long though. my window may have been bent so it couldn't close in winter throughout child hood, but we still had a heater on.
Watch out for your windows. Hanging stuff to act like curtains will help
They died, you fucking ghoul. People rely on things now to live that people would have just died without 150 years ago. They had warmer clothes 150 years ago. They had houses with fireplaces and blankets and coats. We can't deal with this because we are not set up to function when this happens any more. People didn't have the same pets 150 years ago we have now. Reptiles or birds? Dead. I just can't imaging the callousness of this comment. People are literally dying and you're telling them to toughen up. Fucking fool.
A "reality" TV show that selects for people capable of handling the show through rigorous medical examinations is not going to provide an accurate picture on what the average person can handle.
I dug through this dudes post history out of pure morbid curiosity and 9 months ago he claimed that COVID-19 was blown out of proportion because, and I quote, “there haven’t been millions of deaths.”
9 months later and there have been millions of deaths. So, take that how you will.
We’re not ready for this kind of weather here in Texas. I’d you’re so smart you should know people 150 years ago lived differently and built their houses differently
Are you without power? I don’t think so. Real easy to talk shit when you’re warm and comfortable. It’s not like you built any infrastructure or built your house, so don’t take credit for keeping it warm
What’s more is that it’s not only hackers and engineers in this situation. There’s a lot of elderly people, sickly people, families with babies, small animals, and so on, that are far more at risk. I made it the two days but I know some of my neighbors didn’t
The real question is why are so many people rubbing their nuts till they pop with schadenfreude, it’s not just you
Yeah, living here in Canada, when I read the temperatures I had to rub my eyes in disbelief. Temperatures of -30,-40C are by no means unheard of here but we know it will come every winter. I can't imagine a prolonged, unprepared for infrastructure failure, with houses getting down to minus territory indoors. Sounds terrible.
Exactly. Several of us here in Houston are taking refuge at a friend’s house and one person in the group is from Minnesota. She says that even though it’s not so terribly cold outside she still wouldn’t want to repeat this, that it’s much easier in Minnesota because the power doesn’t go out or if it does it’s something that can get fixed quickly rather than be prolonged over several days.
I Finland the electric network companies have spent years and billions of € digging our electric grid underground after we had a few high-profile cases of electricity being cut off during winter because of snow-logged trees crashing on remote power lines.
That happened a lot here, plus tons of burst water pipes and carbon monoxide poisonings. Seriously, nothing here is built for the kind of cold you guys live with.
The first day without power is doable, but that second day is just killer.
Hate to be an insensitive jerk because people are suffering, but kinda agree.
There was a 3 hour long line at trader Joe's in downtown Austin today. Uber eats has been down maybe 24 hours.
Like....the human body can absorb a 3 to 5 day water only fast reasonably well in most cases and its even becoming trendy in certain longevity circles.
On one hand it points to society getting soft. On the other hand who knows maybe in this pandemic some people really got hit at bad time. As long as no one dies it will all be fine.
It has been a day or two, right? (Former Minnesotan, now living in Hong Kong, so slightly out of it, but familiar with -20F/-30C and occasionally -40F/-40C.)
I think enough air circulation to avoid your breath causing mildew everywhere will mean without a ton of thermal mass, your house is going to get within a few degrees of the daily high within a day or two.
The result was "an electrical island in the United States," Bill Magness, CEO of ERCOT, said. "That independence has been jealously guarded, I think both by policy makers and the industry."
This current problems wouldn’t be fixed if Texas wasn’t on its own grid. The Texas grid does have connections to the other grids, and even right now is importing power from both the East and West interconnections.
The problem is that this is a truly regional event and not just isolated to Texas. The entire central US is struggling right now. The SPP (which manages electricity for Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arkansas, and other states) has been struggling with forced blackouts over the last several days as well. They don’t have enough power for their own grid, let alone enough to share with Texas.
If Texas was more interconnected with the SPP, the end result wouldn’t be Texans all having their problems solved. Many Texans would still be without power, but so would many more Oklahomans. The fact that the Texas grid is separate is the only thing keeping OK from having even worse blackouts. Which makes sense, because the entire point of grid isolation is to keep issues localized and not cascade over the entire network. And that’s working to Oklahoma’s benefit right now, but Texas is getting the short end of the stick.
This is not correct. Because the Texas grid is isolated, the frequency is not synced with the two other major grids and cannot import electricity at any meaningful capacity. (See http://fnetpublic.utk.edu/frequencymap.html)
Frequency conversion is a costly and difficult to scale problem. If Texas was part of the Western grid they could be drawing excess hydroelectric power from the pacific northwest right now for example. Texas also could have contributed to help the California power shortages last year.
Nothing I said in my comment is incorrect. Texas has 5 different connections with the other grids and can import/export through them. But they are irrelevant right now because the other grids do not have enough spare capacity to send to Texas.
>If Texas was part of the Western grid they could be drawing excess hydroelectric power from the pacific northwest right now for example. Texas also could have contributed to help the California power shortages last year.
No. That’s not how the grids work. Just because Oklahoma and Washington are part of the same interconnection, that does not mean that people living in Tulsa can pull power as needed from a dam in Washington, which is why Oklahomans are struggling with power outages today as well. Most power still must be generated locally. Long distance transmission is difficult and inefficient, and often requires converting to DC just like a grid-to-grid connection requires, so you have the same issues as you have when you’re on separate grids.
This does not seem to be true at all. If you look at a power outage map of Texas you can actually see exactly where the ERCOT boundaries are. Everyone else in Texas that's on the other, federal, grids, are not experiencing widespread power outages.
Per your comment about long distance transmission, that doesn't matter in a situation like this. If you're on a large grid you don't necessarily need to transmit power to Oklahoma all of the way from the PNW.
You need the areas surrounding OK to supply excess power to them, then those surrounding areas can get whatever excess they may need from slightly further areas. This needs less and less excess as you go further since every area is over provisioned.
Eventually at some point, yes, the PNW may be supplying excess power to states around them as a result of Oklahoma having outages, but that power isn't going straight from PNW to OK.
Oklahoma has been dealing with rolling blackouts for the past several days. Tell me why this is, since apparently you think Oklahoma is able to magically get power transferred to them all the way from Washington? If WA has the excess capacity, why are Oklahomans still without power?
> Everyone else in Texas that's on the other, federal, grids, are not experiencing widespread power outages.
Completely wrong. Eastern Texas (eg Orange), which is under MISO, and is dealing with blackouts. And parts of the Texas panhandle like Lubbock, which is also not part of the Texas grid, is also struggling with power outages.
I'm sure you can see that a rolling outage affecting 200k people for 4 hours is quite different than an outage affecting four million customers for 3 days.
Check out the map. It's pretty clear that what you said is wrong. ERCOT territory is all broken, panhandle, east Texas, and El Paso area are not having problems. https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas
The site you are referencing is a crowdsourced site. It takes five seconds of looking at the numbers to see that it has incomplete data. Most major public utilities are saying that they are not tracking these storm-related blackouts as “outages” and therefor do not show up on most utility outage maps.
I have family and friends in every place you just said is “not having problems” and I can assure you that you are entirely incorrect.
> I'm sure you can see that a rolling outage affecting 200k people for 4 hours is quite different than an outage affecting four million customers for 3 days.
The 200k customers mentioned is only talking about the numbers from one relatively small provider. If you want to only look at one provider in Texas: Austin Energy, the provider for all of Austin, is currently reporting only 200k customers affected as well. But obviously that’s not the whole picture in Texas, just like 200k isn’t the whole picture in the SPP.
All other providers in the SPP are affected, not just the one in the article. Many more than 200k people were affected, and the blackouts have been happening over the past three days, not four hours.
You've got it basically 180° the wrong way around. "I know people in all these places" is literally crowdsourcing. It is anecdotal. PowerOutage.us is plugged into the API of every utility provider in America. It's the existence of the APIs that is crowdsourced, not the data itself.
Do you not realize that utility providers outage maps are updated based on crowdsourced information from customers?
And as I mentioned in my comment, utility providers do not consider blackouts due to capacity constraints to be “outages”, and thus are not reporting them as outages on their outage maps, which means this website does not have the correct information on blackouts. They are tracking outages only if the outage is due to something like a downed power line. Please attempt to read the full comment and understand it before replying.
Nope, if you even took five seconds to read up on how the OMSes at power utilities work, you’d know this isn’t the case. Utility companies are not even close to having their grids fully automatic, and most OMSes are manually updated by human operators whenever customers call in with outage reports.
This is an area that you clearly do not have any experience in, yet you insist on being an armchair expert. Quite frankly, we don’t need armchair experts, especially ones that are blatantly incorrect and refuse to educate themselves even when information is put right in front of you. Please reflect on this.
As for your “newcomer” comment, lol. I have been on HN for years longer than your account. Apparently you’ve never heard of the ability to create new accounts, though. GTFO of here with that ridiculous gatekeeping bullshit, it’s not welcome on HN.
wow, this is one of the most pathetic comments I've read on HN. You've clearly stepped beyond your area of knowledge and are trying to cover it with ego.
I feel I am doing right by our community when I say to you: You are not as knowledgeable and important as you think you are.
>I'm sure you can see that a rolling outage affecting 200k people for 4 hours is quite different than an outage affecting four million customers for 3 days.
I am not sure it's that simple, I read some where else yesterday that at least one of the non-ERCOT grids had paid to winterize their local power plants after the last ice storm so their plants have been operational throughout this storm and as a result had no outages. I have no idea how accurate that is though, I don't know anything about the electric grid...
There is a 3.6GW DC line that goes from about an hour East of Portland, Oregon, down to LA. Its 2 wires. Texas doesn't have any interconnections with the west. But even if they did, 3GW would not be nearly enough to solve their problem could could replace many natural gas plants that are currently down.
AC transmission absolutely does work over large distances. It’s just not a point-to-point system.
Imagine four cities in a row, all connected with AC. City A generates extra power, which gets sucked up by city B, whose power goes to the next city down the line, to city Z.
Sure, it’s not actually that simple, but when was the last time NY literally had no power? They benefit from being highly connected.
TX is paying for being isolated.
Their handful of DC interconnects do not have the capacity to power their mini grid. They’re short 35GW of generation, and I assume the DC ties are at capacity.
> when was the last time NY literally had no power? They benefit from being highly connected.
Do you not remember the blackouts of 2003? Multiple entire states went dark for hours, and the “highly connectedness” was a huge part of the problem. The only reason it wasn’t even worse is specifically because grid isolation stopped it from propagating further, just like what’s happening here.
Just look at the first image on the Wikipedia page, showing the extent of the blackout. This is far smaller than the footprint of the eastern interconnect. The control software at the time made some simplifying approximations which left the grid vulnerable to problems cascading between operators. I do not think they have quite the same problem anymore.
There is another problem here. Texas generates as much power as the second and third states on the generation list. The outage Texas had would have sagged most of the US.
Separate grids are great for other kinds of emergencies, if we get a big solar flare then the splits save each grid.
We need a east to west DC long distance interconnect to haul power across the country.
> that does not mean that people living in Tulsa can pull power as needed from a dam in Washington
Not directly, but by way of demand shifting, effectively yes. Northern California is fed by Washington, SoCal by NorCal generation, etc. until you get excess capacity closer to the demand sink.
You do still need generation closer to Texas that works, but as a whole the grid can balance the generation and output a bit depending on the gradient between the sources.
Imagine a 'bouncy castle' with several input fans. Texas is like an entry ramp that isn't hooked up to either of two big banks of fans and sinks next to it. If it were just ganged in with one of those other two groups even though Texas is having a bad time the other blowers could compensate in aggregate.
FYI the Texas grid runs on a different frequency than the other two grids and as a result incurs MASSIVE efficiency penalties for that hubris. If I recall correctly it has to be converted from AC to DC then back to Texas’ AC.
Yes, that’s correct. Texas has 5 ties to the western/eastern US interconnections as well as with the Mexico grid. But none of that matters right now because those grids don’t have excess capacity to send to Texas anyway.
It's not really a matter of whether the grids have capacity; the ties themselves can only handle a limited amount of power.
As per ERCOT's status page, both of the high-voltage DC ties between Texas are currently operating at >99% of their rated capacity, and they have been every time I've checked since yesterday. They're not being limited by the availability of power from the other side.
You’re missing the point. Even if the ties had more capacity, the supply of power on the other side of the ties is not there. It’s a two-pronged issue, and you won’t solve the problem by only focusing on one of the prongs.
This is incorrect. MISO, the system to the north and east of TX, has capacity. The DC ties cannot handle it. You can see this by checking the price signals on their page. Right now, the TX hub is about $1,000 but the MS hub is about $60.
MISO does not have the capacity either. Sections of eastern Texas, such as Orange, are under MISO, and they too have been dealing with blackouts due to lack of capacity. Parts of Louisiana under MISO are also being told that they will see blackouts soon.
Again, just because you have excess power in Missouri does not mean that power can magically transfer hundreds of miles away where it is needed. Energy transfer does not work like that.
It seems highly unlikely that exactly 100% of the capacity of the interconnects is, coincidentally, precisely equal to the amount of excess power available to be fed into the interconnects at the moment. Do you have anything to back up this extraordinary claim?
> As per ERCOT's status page, both of the high-voltage DC ties between Texas are currently operating at >99% of their rated capacity
So as of that comment, either the amount of power available on the other side was equal to >99% of capacity, or it was greater than capacity.
The situation has changed now and neighboring states have had to drop the amount provided to interconnects, but as of the earlier comment, more interconnects would have helped.
But there's a limited capacity for Texas to bring in power over just 5 connections, combined with their choice that makes conversion to something compatible with the Texas grid much less efficient.
By isolating & not focusing on compatibility they have made it very difficult to have more robust redundancy in their grid.
Do the other grids publish their generation/demand statistics live? I remember being able to check the CalISO page during the rolling blackouts in California during the summer.
I tried to say the same above. When the entire south is low on capacity, being fully AC interconnected probably doesn't help much even if the DC ties had more capacity.
A few limited connections are not sufficient to fully take advantage of all areas of the country where there may be extra capacity. It wouldn't solve the problem, but would have helped. Oklahoma for example has been able to stop rolling blackouts. Texas is still deep in this.
Texas does have connections to other grids. But the problem is that since the grid frequencies aren't synchronized, you can't just plug one into the other.
Transferring energy between grids requires either converting it from AC to high-voltage DC and back using solid-state electronics, or converting it via mechanical energy using a variable-frequency transformer. With either approach, you need bulky and expensive equipment in proportion to how much power you want to handle. These connections are designed to smooth out (and profit from) short-term capacity fluctuations, not to power the entire state.
Currently, the Texas grid has two DC ties operating at full capacity and drawing about 800MW from the Southwest Power Pool. But that's a drop in the bucket compared to the ~45GW of current demand, or the estimated 70-80GW of demand that would be likely if it weren't for the outages.
Electricity networks are a really fascinating hole to dive in. I did software and firmware for Smart Metering solutions for a half decade and know more about that stuff than I'll ever need.
TX grid is connected via HVDC, but keep in mind that even if it was "fully" connected there is no hope in hell it would be much better. There wouldn't be enough transmission to transfer 40GW+ from the East or West coast grids to TX. It's an enormous amount of power to go offline. I don't think California for instance has more than 10GW of transmission north to south.
Basically, no amount of grid infrastructure can really help you much when you lose 50%+ of generation capacity on your highest demand days in history.
If your gap is 40GW, and you could get another 8GW. That's enough to give everyone an extra hour of electricity every 5 which would be game changing. The different between a 33 and 45 degree house is enormous.
Seems like CA might has 15-20GW of spare NatGas generation capacity. Looking back at the summer peak (9/6/20) I see 25GW generated at the peak, while we are currently only needing to generate about 8-9GW from NatGas (looking over night when solar drops off).
The parent said there is not enough transmission capacity not generation capacity. Generation needs to be near loads. If not then transmission lines are required to bring current from generators to loads. Transmission lines have fixed capacities, like your internet connection can only transmit so much data/s, they can only transmit so much power.
I thought they were saying there wasn't enough transmission capacity but it wouldn't matter anyways since the rest of the grid didn't have any to spare. Maybe I misinterpreted or responded to the wrong comment.
It's likely that the transmission lines are less of a bottle neck than the frequency conversion. Power lines are pretty darned efficient, and given the cold weather, theyd be more efficient than usual too
Electrical engineers wouldn't build a power line to Texas with a capacity of 5000 MW and then put intertie hardware such as phase shifters or ac-dc-ac converter with capacity of 1000 MW on the end of it. So it is likely that the transmission capacity and intertie capacity are exactly the same!
They make long distance DC innerconnects, while expensive they are resistant to particular types of problems and can connect to multiple different grids at the same time.
The Chinese have an amazingly ambitious plan to shift power from one part of the country to another with UHV DC. It has its own challenges, but it is definitely the way to shift massive amounts of power without grid interconnect (and the resulting frequency stability issues). Much lower loss, even with DC-AC converters.
> Even today, ERCOT is also not completely isolated from other grids — as was evident when the state imported some power from Mexico during the rolling blackouts of 2011. ERCOT has three ties to Mexico and — as an outcome of the "Midnight Connection" battle — it also has two ties to the eastern U.S. grid, though they do not trigger federal regulation for ERCOT. All can move power commercially as well as be used in emergencies, according to ERCOT spokeswoman Dottie Roark. A possible sixth interconnection project, in Rusk County, is being studied, and another ambitious proposal, called Tres Amigas, would link the three big U.S. grids together in New Mexico, though Texas' top utility regulator has shown little enthusiasm for participating.
For the pedantic TX does have connections to other grids but the capacity is so low that it wouldn't have mitigated this event and is under whatever threshold is set for federal oversight.
It would be independent from a practical point of view but from a regulatory one it would become subject to federal regulations, which is the real reason Texas keeps theirs separate.
> Running your own grid seems cool Texas style, until you have a regional problem and have no where to turn.
This cuts both ways, and most of the rest country is often a benefactor - many US/NA companies (and I'm assuming govt/military) have a 3rd DR location on the TX grid precisely because it provides an additional point of redundancy. TX also wasn't impacted by CA mismanagement of it's grid, for example..
I echo the sentiment that federation (in most things) isn't itself a bad thing. It just happens that in the case of electrical reliability, ERCOT has been the root of these issues, given their warnings from years ago.
Currently in ATX we haven't had power for over 24 hours, wood fireplace is saving the house from completely freezing but the whole city of Austin needs to evaluate how they setup their critical infrastructure to allow for rolling blackouts instead of having parts of the city with power and parts without for the entirety of an outage.
Rolling outages work when you need to shed 1% of your load, not when you need to shed 80% of it. If Austin is down to critical loads only (hospitals or whatever) there may not be anything left to rotate.
There are non-critical loads all over that were never interrupted (my neighborhood, north edge of ATX). It's pretty arbitrary.
Even worse: for about the first 24h there were (largely uninhabited!) commercial buildings all over the place that were fully lit up. We're talking skyscrapers. Even some unfinished skyscrapers. I think they've finally begun to address those. The charitable interpretation is that it was simply a massive failure of coordination.
Do grid operators really have controls at that level? In California they can shut off a substation or not, and that's as low as they can go except in the special case of industrial customers with demand-responsive equipment installed. If those empty skyscrapers were on the same local circuits as a hospital, perhaps it simply wasn't possible for the electric company to turn them off.
Around 2010 or so I worked for a skyscraper in downtown Seattle. There was a heat wave and the utility needed to shed load. The mechanism for doing that was someone calling our front desk and saying "Hello, please shut off your lights."
(Commercial lighting runs at 277v, so it's all on separate circuits from wall outlets. You can shut off the lights in a building without killing the servers, for example)
We had remote-controlled breakers, so doing that was a couple clicks of the mouse. But if nobody had picked up the phone, they would have needed cops to break into the electrical room on each floor and start flipping breakers by hand.
It's more that they needed to communicate with the owners of the buildings to shut off massive systems that weren't even being used, while the minority of residents who still have power are being asked to "live as if we didn't" and navigate by candlelight, etc.
Keep in mind: the details of how generators shed load is not ERCOT's decree. If there is unfairness in how liad shedding is taking place, you need to look at the entities generating/transmitting it. Not ERCOT.
Bluebonnet has done a great, if annoying job. They converged to a near 50/50 duty cycle I think between two trunk lines.
I've heard Austin Energy is epically failing some of it's customers though.
The people getting dangerously cold in their own homes don't care about the nuances between ERCOT and Austin Energy and their city government and county and state and federal governments and this private organization and that. The system as a whole has failed. In tragic fashion. Period. Modularize your organizations if you want to, but it is not an excuse for passing the buck.
There are people at the top of the whole pile. And they have the authority and the responsibility to make sure the whole thing works, at the end of the day, no matter the implementation details. And the whole thing doesn't work.
This is what the American system is chronically worst at. We delegate, and we contract out, and we federalize, and we privatize, and we divide responsibilities. We avoid centralizing things at all costs. And then when put under pressure, those separate pieces often fall apart. Communication fails. At best nobody knows what's going on, at worst they willfully ignore responsibility because somebody else will end up with some or all of the blame. This keeps happening over, and over, and over again. I can't help but feel our society is crumbling.
>The people getting dangerously cold in their own homes don't care about the nuances between ERCOT and Austin Energy and their city government and county and state and federal governments and this private organization and that. The system as a whole has failed. In tragic fashion.
Mayhaps if they did, they'd have seen warning signs that such an eventuality was inevitable in coming as they'd have a firm grasp of who was responsible for what, and had their hope of someone getting it just right wiped from their minds and replaced by the grim fact that the best tool they could employ to their own survival is that matter within their own head.
>Modularize your organizations if you want to, but it is not an excuse for passing the buck.
Part of Modularization is clearly defining and delineating roles and responsibilities. ERCOT's is to be the tracker and issuer of EEA's. That means having the authority to instigate, not implement, instigate, rolling blackouts. Make it happen; not how, just that it needed to. It isn't ERCOT's business other than to keep everybody dancing to the sane tune, and to keep track of the numbers.
Each provider went and did that; Some to great success. Even mine. I, in fact had to make some extra clever use of those times I had power to put it to the best use to stabilize the situation in our household.
>There are people at the top of the whole pile.
Funny thing about being on top of a pile, you're just as clueless as to what's actually on the bottom unless you actively go look into it, which is a calculated tradeoff that may distract you from doing something only you can see to do from where you are.
>And they have the authority and the responsibility to make sure the whole thing works, at the end of the day, no matter the implementation details
Oh, you sweet summer child. You think it's just a case of hup, two, three, four, and there you go, ERCOT makes your problem go away?
ERCOT owns nothing. It's a platform. A glorified clearinghouse. A market in which a bunch of private entities sell their wares, in this case, generation of power, usage of transmission infrastructure, etc.
There's no authority to magically make it all work. There's process, a whole lotta tooling, hopefully a pretty good chunk of people smart enough to use it well and sensibly, and a common agreement as to who has final say. In ERCOT's case, that jurisdiction and authority is well defined, and limited in scope.
>This is what the American system is chronically worst at. We delegate, and we contract out, and we federalize, and we divide responsibilities, and when put under pressure those pieces tend to fall apart.
Welcome to the real world. Where people like me, and now you too have come to the epiphany that there's some level of "inevitable failure" at play because companies act like bored people more than happy to pass the buck, and are fundamentally flawed, collective creations, of implicitly flawed beings. Mistakes will always happen, as will miscommunication. We contract out in good faith, it isn't always recipricated perfectly. We delegate, and we have to accept what we get back even if it only sorta marginally resembles what it was we asked for. We federalize, generally to make some common thing formally a common thing, but we also open ourselves to abuse by doing so.
There is a solution though. That's for people to get dead serious about doing damn good business. Something which can't happen in an environment of natural monopolies or industrial monoliths, a concept enshrined in the architecture of the Texas Grid, and enshrined in American system as a whole, though you have to rip off a few decades here and there of astonishingly bad ideas that are best characterized as cranial rectal insertions to see it.
Competition -> innovation -> newfound possibilities propagate through the competitive environment -> repeat
The last thing anyone needs is more conglomeration, if anything we need more people cranking on the same problems, cross checking everyone else to figure out if anything has been missed, and to ensure there is enough overall fault tolerance in the system.
Texas is, and will remain, what it is. We rebuild, but better. We try, and make it work as best we can. You may not like it, but a not inconsequent number of them do.
Unfortunately Austin has not done a very good job of designing it's grid. There are many sectors which can't be rotated as they contain one or more critical services, even as they also contain many consumers who are not critical. This means that instead of being able to rotate amoungst the ~80% of non-critical power users, they are only able to shut down about 45% of the power.
Unfortunately in a situation like this that means that 45% have remained off for the past 48 hours (no rotation is possible), while many empty buildings are fully illuminated. It is a technological failure of their ability to shut down specific power users.
This is essentially the crux of the problem, multiple friends/and coworkers are staying in islands of power that have been interrupt free due to proximity to Fire/Police/Hospitals and others have been without power for extended periods of time, if 60% of a grid is essential you can't roll non essential loads because simply maintaining the critical loads takes up 100% of capacity. More granular control could significantly help alleviate this issue which is specific to Austin Energy.
True crtical loads have backup generators up to this task, or the maintenance people should be fired for incompetence. Though they could get a break for some failures of the system, but only a handful statewide
I had my wood fireplace going for the first time this weekend when the daytime temperatures were around -12F. It can easily raise the temperature of my living room, dining room & kitchen (one open space) to 80+ but that's with electricity to power the circulation fan.
How are you keeping the whole house warm if you can't circulate the air? I'm genuinely curious.
There's some old school technology to solve that problem. For example, I stayed in a friend's ancient family home in Maine that simply had a bedroom over the living room wood stove, and an open vent between the two floors to let the heat through. There are also non-electric fans to help distribute heat from a wood stove.
This is exactly why old farmhouses here in the Midwest were T shaped. There was a chimney in the center of each long arm of the T. Then vents through the floor right above the heaters to warm the second story. With good placement they did not need to blow the heat around.
From personal experience, a heat-powered fan helps a lot. I used one when I lived in a Franklin-stove-heated cabin in Montana, and while you wouldn't mistake its power for an electric fan, it more than did the job.
Because of what happened in Texas, the higher demand of gas affected electricity generation in Northern Mexico which has been without electricity too. As as I understand it, not only the price of Gas wet up 5,000% but also there were shortages.
The federal government has started doing electricity cuts in most Mexico to control the gas reserves and distribute energy to the Northern states.
Spot prices are up dramatically. Futures seem to only be up slightly.
Maybe a natural gas supplier that was prepared could have done something, but could an investor have profited from this without being able to do physical delivery?
Mexico is smart though because they have LNG import terminals. There is an incoming LNG carrier coming in less than 24 hours which will restore their power.
In an apartment in Austin 78702. 47 F / 8 C inside, 22 / -6 outside.
Power out for 2 days now, while west across I-35 has always had power. There's some baloney they're feeding us about "complicated critical loads" while huge swats of hotels and office buildings have power (I can see from north to south since my unit overhangs the frontage and has windows all over, and elevated enough to see over I-35). My fridge food is in a cardboard box outside with a shower curtain liner around it.
Water still working, and there are no plans according to the water company to interrupt service. There's no hot water (which IIRC, condemns a building) because the apartment's water heater needs electricity.
I'm out of battery bank capacity and might have to leave the area. Appears it will go on until Friday or Saturday, so 5-6 days total.
It is surprising that windfarms are freezing. Here in Quebec, we have windfarms that have more than 6 months a year of snow and temperatures much below the freezing point. How can they freeze? they dont use water or gaz or oil.
It is only a fan and dynamo. Did water seep inside and freeze it?
Same reason why the coal and gas plants froze, and pipes are bursting in apparemment buildings, and houses are unable to retain any heat: cheaping out.
Since cold is a rare event, Texans figure they can save a penny by making nothing cold-resistant, then skimp on maintenance, all while bragging they have the cheapest rates of the country.
Natural gas doesnt really freeze, so something else is going on here.
Misleading text in linked article:
"We didn’t run out of natural gas, but we ran out of the ability to get natural gas. Pipelines in Texas don’t use cold insulation – so things were freezing."
Natural gas doesn't freeze, but the pipelines that supply the gas have valves and other control components that can and do freeze during severe weather. Also, the wells supplying the natural gas can suffer temporary shut-ins due to the commingled water freezing and effectively shutting in the well. That drops overall supply.
Natural gas wells and pipelines in other parts of the country are designed to handle extreme weather so they don't have these problems. This is entirely a problem caused by Texas' unwillingness to regulate that wells, supply lines, and generators be able to handle extreme cold.
It's not the natural gas itself that's freezing and the article never claimed it was. Things aren't misleading just because you didn't know about it - that's the point of articles in the first place.
Natural gas right out of the well does freeze, and the dewatering systems freeze. Been out on a site trying to get one working in 10F weather a number of years ago.
Yep, LNG boiling point is around -160C so Texas weather would still have to cool a fair bit before you even get to the previous phase change that comes before solid form.
Wind turbines have not been the issue here in Texas. They've been delivering more power than expected, despite some of them freezing. The problem is with natural gas/coal plants.
That said, yes, we don't use lubricant for super-cold weather, because we don't normally have super-cold weather. So we use cheaper stuff that is suited for our normal climate, where heat is usually a bigger problem than cold. It's been ten years since the last time it would have been important, and 12 years before that.
I've read that ice can build up on the blades and impede function, just like on airplane wings, and that de-icing mechanisms exist but it's likely they simply didn't spend the money on them because nobody thought they'd ever be needed in Texas.
Quebec has the “winter package” on the wind turbines Texas does not. Keep in mind, these conditions are almost unheard of in Texas and the infrastructure just isn’t designed for it. Like when it’s 95F in Chicago for a week and all hell breaks loose. Different regions are geared for the norms of their climate.
Different choice of lubricants? I have no idea really, I also read they have wind power generation in Antarctica so its not a fundamental problem just a result of certain design/engineering choices.
> just a result of certain design/engineering choices
I think this is the point. Things are engineered for the environment which they are expected to operate, and to be optimized for those environments[0]. I would not expect a wind turbine that operates (and is designed to operate) in Antartica to not fail (potentially catestrophically) when operating in 100 degree Texas heat,
[0] One could (and should) argue that these systems should take climate change and more extreme weather events into account, but that is a political problem more-so than an engineering problem.
As far as I can tell weather like this happens once in a while even without climate change, something like once in ~25 years or so (just guessing the number).
Given the serve effects it can have infrastructure should always be build to still be operational.
But if you are a company and there are no regulations you might be very tempted to ignore something which normally happens "just" around 4 times in hundred years. (Again guessed values could be a bit more or a bit less, with climate change likely more then just a bit more in the future).
A car is engineered to operated in multiple climates through the use of specific fluids designed for the operating temperatures of the climate they are used in.
Further, power plants operate on error margins significantly more narrow than your average consumer automobile. The temperatures, pressures and mechanical stresses are orders of magnitude higher.
If you hunt around a little you will find info on the cold weather packages for wind turbines. Easiest for me to find was info about GE's 'Cold Weather Extreme' package for some of their mid-sized commercial turbines. You are looking at different lubricants, heating systems that use parasitic load on the turbine to warm joints and other critical points of the structure, and systems to prevent icing on the blades.
A nuclear plant stopped generating because the turbine froze; components were exposed to open air because Texas doesn't normally get that cold.
People built to a certain set of assumptions, with an implicit risk, and the risks came due. The only way to avoid another event like this would be to make the generation more resilient to extreme cold, which will cost more.
This is wild - they built a nuclear plant that has its generator sets just sitting out in the open? This seems like a bad idea regardless of what is generating the steam.
I would assume they use different technology for different climates, or use different maintenance regimes, or simply their operating procedures have different parameters. (that is to say, it might be "safe" to operate them, but they're not "allowed" to). But those are all just guesses.
The Texas-only grid was definitely part of it, and should be a lesson to people who thought the lesson from Covid is "do more locally." No, having stronger, longer distance connections is what makes you more resilient, at least when there are local problems.
On the flip side, the fact that we're talking about a Texas-specific outage means that the system actually worked as designed, in a degraded state.
We generally try to incorporate redundancy and decentralization in systems design for the purpose of antifragility and graceful degradation. If something bad happens, best to isolate it so that it doesn't afflict everyone globally.
At the time of this writing, every State in the contiguous US except Georgia, Alabama, Florida are covered in snow; for many of those States, the snow is catastrophic and generally unplanned. The fact that, in the face of that black swan event, it was "just" Texas that had degradation means that, collectively, the US is better off. Obviously we should learn from this and improve Texas's grid to be resilient to such a failure in the future, and that's exactly how a healthy system that "localizes" implementations should function over time.
Well, there's also a cost to connecting the other two major grids, and Texans have collectively decided that this cost is not worth it. Energy sovereignty is a concept we talk about in the context of nation-states, but it's also applicable in the context of States.
Most Texans have a different idea of what energy production should look like than Californians or New Yorkers. They get to enjoy the upside of that independence, but they should also suffer the consequences. The vast majority of people that might disagree with them likely don't live in Texas, and are most likely unaffected by that decision themselves.
The irony is that longer distance connections is also what spread covid from one community to another. I think it's often just a combination of things that gives us resilience. Both longer distance grid connections could help, but so could more off-grid solutions. Maybe just designing more fail safes at various levels.
I think it's probably not that clear cut. What happens in a cascading blackout scenario? If you are part of a larger pool are you more exposed to have a service disruption now when there is a problem in another part of the grid of the pool that you don't directly control?
You can isolate yourself from cascading blackouts while still being able to share power. This is why they may cross several states, but never hit nationwide.
Funny how this was actually caused by a planned shutdown of a specific line to let a ship pass. Something that had been done before :)
> In total, over 10 million people in northern Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, and Spain lost power or were affected by the blackout
It's especially funny how while this was less total people affected, it spread much more so to speak. I would tend to believe that this is actually due to the fact that Europe's power grid is way more interconnected, meaning that they could power more people more quickly again by just routing electricity differently than they would usually do.
That US blackout was completely isolated to the Northeast Power Coordinating Council (NPCC), all other regional grids where unaffected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss.... “The regions are not usually directly connected or synchronized to each other, but there are some HVDC interconnections.”
It’s just a question of cost. Regional grids could have more resiliency internally, but large blackouts are rare enough it’s not considered worth it.
Yep, they do. But that doesn't mean they don't exist or that they're impossible to do.
From what I can tell, each DC tie to the Eastern Interconnect is 800MW max, while apparently the normal draw for this time of year on the Texas Interconnect is something like 45GW.
So those two interconnects can only provide 3.5% of total power usually being consumed by the grid, which was obviously not nearly enough for this Black Swan event.
I'm not sure how true this is. There are DC ties that allow Texas to import from both the East and West interconnection, but power is scarce everywhere now. So even if their region was fully AC connected, all the other nearby regions were scrapping the bottom of the barrel as well.
The West is having crazy snow too, so I assume it is just as bad. Just east of ERCOT is SPP which was also in an EEA3 and very low on capacity. Northeast of them is MISO which is also in an EEA3 event (ready to curtail load) and very low on capacity. So even if they weren't as islanded, they'd still be in a lot of trouble. Both SPP & MISO have also curtailed load which is always the last resort. This thread is focused on the Texas grid being isolated as a primary cause, when natural gas supply and low wind are much bigger problems to me.
> If every house had solar panels this would likely be a non-issue.
I doubt this. That would mean a lot of power plants were taken offline as solar ramped up, and I doubt that enough solar to cool a house from 105 to 75 can heat it from 15 to 70.
The latest thinking is that with the seasonality of solar insolation and the current demand curve, a complete move to solar will require massive overprovisioning. (5x, 10x capacity at solar noon?) The price curve in 2050 or so would look funny to modern eyes: power would be free around noon, but expensive at night. Charge your car for nothing during the day, and enjoy endless hot water, but the minute the sun sets you'd cut your own throat rather than run anything power hungry.
I wonder what a similar cold snap would look like in the future. Long distance HVDC lines ramping up to full capacity. Strident alerts on your phone as KWh spot prices triple, then trigintuple. Water heaters and EV charges passing stop loss triggers and shutting off. A wood stove in every home. I see Texans in this thread talking about using space heaters, and boy will they regret that when they see the bill. Electric blankets and heat pads are dozens of times more efficient: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/03/home-heating-for-the-hard...
Agree on the point about Texas extreme stance on having their own power grid. I don’t known if there’s enough micro grids in Texas to determine how well, or not, they worked in these conditions.
You're describing why Texas having its own grid isn't localized insanity, but for the uninitiated, it still seems like insanity. Why not connect (and be able to draw from) other grids?
If Texas were more connected to other grids and transmitting above a certain threshold of electricity across state lines, they'd become subject to federal regulations. They might have to ensure that their electrical system was built to handle a 10-year cold weather event, and that would cost money.
This way, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) can write a report after the 2011 Texas cold snap that took down the Texas power grid. FERC can recommend that companies which generate or distribute power be required to verify that their systems are weather-proofed before every winter and before every forecasted cold snap. And Texas can simply ignore it.
My point is that there are many different grids, and the Texas Interconnection is large enough that (if properly ruggedized) you could easily avoid the situation of this week. Too small and even proper ruggedization won't necessarily give you enough breathing room.
In response to "why doesn't the TI join another grid?", I would have to ask "why don't the Eastern and Western Interconnections join together?"
Of course it could have been avoided: much of the rest of the country has much colder weather regularly than this "extreme" Texas cold weather event. And the solution is to winterize the power generating facilities. And this type event regularly happens in Texas every couple decades or so. Look at what happened in 1989 for example.
I'm not sure this is a truly "black swan" event. Cold fronts that bring snow and cold temperatures to Texas are becoming more and more frequent. This is simply the worst one so far.
Apparently its not, there was one in the 1940's that was worse. So its the usual "ignore any outlier we don't like" attitude that seems common in so many things. Plus, its not like this is unusual. The random unexpected heat wave in oct -> rolling blackouts. Unexpected storm during hurricane season -> power goes out for a week due to unmaintained power lines, etc.
Its why you need engineers running your grid, not some politically connected organization which seems to prioritize free market theories above delivering power.
> Its why you need engineers running your grid, not some politically connected organization which seems to prioritize free market theories above delivering power.
Why do engineers seem to think that it's possible to do things at scale without politics being involved? A statement that boils down to "trust this group of people that I am affiliated with because we know better" is an inherently political statement, even if you really do know better!
What I'm trying to say is that electricity is a life/death situation, not only when it freezes but during heat waves too. We go to extremes to engineer airplanes (and we have recently seen how that can fail too). Weighing once in 80 year events as inconsequential and failing to properly design/maintain backup generators (Fukushima), or NG holding tanks/heaters or whatever it takes to secure the supply isn't generally the function of the guy doing the engineering unless he has been given some kind of financial constraint. Same at it was some bean counter who allowed the 737MAX to be sold without redundant sensors or decided to skimp on the training requirements to save some $.
So, who was it, who didn't size heaters on the wind turbines correctly despite turbines being installed in far colder places, or didn't build NG holding tanks sufficient to supply the peaker generators for any length of time? Most of those decisions come back to free market financial pressures that are prioritizing cheap over reliable.
The grid is a giant redundant system, designed to correct for errors on the part of individual actors. Its only when the system is systematicaly undermined does it fail like this.
>Why do engineers seem to think that it's possible to do things at scale without politics being involved?
Because they're only a stone throw away from physicists in when it comes to the "I know X therefore I know everything higher level than X" flavor of hubris.
It'll be interesting to see how the damage stacks up to a California wildfire season or an active hurricane season.
And yeah, politics is involved. Unless the engineers want to work for free and fundraise for infrastructure, they need to compete for limited resources.
Power is different. You get to pay the price it takes to produce and distribute even if it happens to be slightly inefficient. Its only when short term MBA/Politics get involved do the engineers who size capacity, maintenance, etc get overruled to save money. Or you can go the free market route, and just let everyone race to the bottom, which means cheap service that fails when it gets cold, hot, traders decide to screw people, or a storm blows through.
CA is the same problem in reverse. There the politicians think they can regulate both the price and the product. Vs TX where they think the bean counters can solve everything.
Nowhere do the engineers have a voice in what actually works. So of course they are both dumpster fires.
Edit: BTW: if you remember your history a lot of CA's power problems a couple decades ago were caused by free market experiments, which were promptly exploited by TX energy traders. The fixes haven't really helped CA.
That would be a benefit to following the federal regulations - more of the country gets failures in unique modes, and you get the learnings from all of them, rather than having to experience each one for yourself
Also thinking longer term, climate change is making the polar vortex more unstable and more prone to "freak" incidents like this. Of course there has been zero thought put into any of the effects of that.
Not much discussion here of the fundamental problem: why is Texas so energy intensive? In the last decade ERCOT energy generation has expanded 20%, which is much faster than the population of Texas has grown. Why? Just gigantic, detached houses for everybody? I think this is why people say the California housing crisis is such a calamity for the environment. A person in Texas consumes 150% more energy.
I don't know why power demand is up in TX generally, but I do know that right now a big reason for the demand is because a lot of residences have electric resistance heat only-- which is great for electric blankets, but not so much for heating all the air in your home when it's extremely cold.
Lived in TX all my life. Every residence I’ve seen has had a heat pump for decades. The the thing is though it switches to resistive heat at something like 20F when they are no longer efficient. Rarely a concern in TX, most of the time we’re complaining it’s over 100F!
Why is it not good for heating? I'm sure resistance based electric heating is very efficient. I've lived in very cold places and the heat has almost always been electric or water heated by electric. You just need radiators. Northern European countries for example use that a lot and the temperatures are often as low as -22F. Of course they build to optimize for low temperatures unlike TX.
It’s more efficient to burn natural gas directly for heat than to use it to generate electricity which is then used for heating. Typical gas turbines are around 40% efficient, plus a few percent for transmission loses. Though apparently there are some cutting edge turbines that are 60% efficient.
Heat pumps don’t work particularly well below 25F. Our heat pump switched to auxiliary heat (electric resistance heating) with how cold it’s been in Texas.
Resistance heating is 100% efficient and therefore basically the least-efficient method. Heat pumps have coefficients of performance well over 1.0, even when the outside air is below zero degrees.
Increased A/C adoption? I mean, presumably the same thing is happening in other areas of the Southwest (nobody's ripping out their air conditioners and throwing them away, and some are installing new ones). The reductions in per-capita electricity consumption in CA must be made up by great efficiency increases, since no doubt A/C usage is going up at the same time. OTOH, if power was as cheap at is in Texas, perhaps investing in efficiency wouldn't be worth it.
Also, it sounds like Texas' population has increased by 3.8 million to 29 million from 2010 to 2020. That sounds like pretty darn close to 20%.
I think you hit on the real truth: this is an electric grid optimized for cost, not for resilience. Electricity in Texas is much cheaper than in California. California grew 7% from 2010 to 2020, but electricity consumption fell from a peak of 302 TWh per year to 277 TWh.
Well, yeah, the populated areas of Texas happen to be insanely cold right now at this moment we've cherry-picked, and the populated areas of California happen to be.. checks thermometer between 55-65f right now. (Bay Area, Sacramento, LA, San Diego).
Also, Texas heating is HEAVILY reliant on electricity (heat pumps), since they're used as air conditioners in the summer. Presumably this means CA has a lot more forced air natural gas, like my house. Of course, I keep hearing ads encouraging me to replace my polluting "methane gas" furnace with a clean, efficient electric heat pump....
Yas, there are heat pump systems designed to work at fairly low temps. Those aren't the ones they install in TX, where its just a cheap reversing valve on a stock R410 system. AFAIK they don't even necessarily have aux heat (my mother's in FL didn't) and even if they do, after a decade or two it might not even work and no one would know.
Wondering if the large number of semiconductor fabs has anything to do with this? These fabs like to be in flat areas with stable temps and access to water. Places like Arizona and Texas are the best places for these types of facilities and they use boat loads of electricity.
Haven't look up the numbers but it's possible that this and other industrial facilities consume a large amount.
Large energy intensive businesses have been moving to TX too because our governor(s) runs around telling people TX is open to lax regulation. Heavy industry is frequently also very energy intensive.
So its not just a statement of per capita consumption. Toyota, Tesla, Samsung, etc moving their factories are not insignificant.
Because "muh hyper efficient heat pump system" that a huge fraction of Texas uses for heat during their typically mild winters has an electric heating system cobbled on to provide heat when the temperature is lower than what the heat pump likes running at.
Did the utility companies ask for voluntary reduction in power consumption ahead of time?
We had a situation here where extreme weather and a natural gas pumping station that exploded caused real problems in our natural gas supply. The utility asked everyone to lower their consumption by turning their heat down to 65.
Afaik, the way abnormal situations like these are handled in northern Europe is that the grid suppliers have agreements with the very large industrial consumers (think aluminium smelters) who agree to shut down immediately when the grid frequency goes below a certain trigger level.
The way I understand it, this is useful both in time-critical emergencies (like keeping the grid at 50 Hz when a nuclear plant suddenly goes offline for some random safety reason) and when things are moving a lot slower, like during periods of extreme colds and extreme electicity demand from heating houses.
So, this approach is useful in removing the need for rolling blackouts, at least until demand reaches some very extreme level, but it does require ahead of time investments in shutdown agreements.
Perhaps Texas hasn't been in this extreme situation before, and they simply don't have enough industrial shutdown agreements in place?
Isn't it immensely difficult to restart an aluminum smelter? Also, my vague memory of these is that in North America most of them are in areas with abundant hydro power.
They're immensely difficult to restart once the aluminium solidifies: difficult enough that the answer is throw it out and make a new one. But there's a big enough difference between operational temperatures and solid that you can deprive them of electricity for e.g. 8 hours while you restart your other power generation infrastructure.
IIRC for some aluminium smelters you can even run the reaction in reverse briefly if you need to jump start something.
(citations needed.... I'm recalling this from a story someone told me ~15 years ago about the Alcoa plant in Victoria, Australia)
I recently watched a documentary about aluminum smelting and this topic came up. An engineer said that they have a 6 hours time frame. If the power doesn't come back on, the aluminum hardened too much and all smelters are lost forever. There is no possibility for on-site generators because the required generator would be the size of a power plant.
Probably. I just picked something at random that I know uses a lot of power - I think in the order of one nuclear reactor for a typical installation. Should have known better than to do that here.
You can refresh your vague memories - all of Alcoa's west-coast aluminum industry is long-gone.
The waves of Enron took out most of them decades ago when its destruction rolled through the energy markets. IIRC, the last NW aluminum smelter closed a few years ago.
ERCOT does have shutdowns agreements in place, but there’s a limit to what you can do when simultaneously facing record demand and having ~30,000 MW of capacity go offline. For comparison, on Sunday evening demand was roughly 70,000 MW.
I would guess that there is an ~0% chance any bitcoin mining operation, who's main cost is power, is still operating with power prices as astromonically high as they currently are.
Technically yes, but they went from "stage 1" alerts (voluntary conservation) just after midnight on Sunday night, all the way to "stage 3" (rolling blackouts) by 1:30 AM.
It was posted as it's own story here, but it's mildly fascinating to watch the demand versus supply figures from Ercot. And the demand, I assume, doesn't include those places currently without power. http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...
As I post this, demand is 99+% of supply, and the outside temps are dropping.
I read ERCOT predicted "real" demand was estimated to be at least 75 MW at one point Monday. I imagine it's not much better with everyone needing to reheat their entire homes now either.
I got caught in the storm and have been without power 24 hours and counting. Thankfully there is a hotel downtown that has their own power generators for the same amount of time that I've been staying at and have been staying safe. My thoughts and prayers to those without power who have not been able to find shelter in these trying times.
I've lived through years of load-shedding. The biggest difference was we were entirely decoupled from the system - well/handpump, gas cylinder, overhead tank to store water, ..etc. It's not by choice - we just can't rely on any of the city provided services.
Even today, homes are built with an overhead tank and anyone who can afford it has a UPS capable of powering the home for a few hours under load or a few days if used sparingly.
My municipality is planning to replace the majority of the water supply infrastructure this spring, so I am planning for extensive outages and boil-water advisories.
I plan to have a water tank or two with several hundred gallon capacity and a pump to service the house.
I would be curious to see a recommendation for a whole home UPS.
I am always amazed how well the "market" regulates resilience... when, for example, regulators used the Wienerberger winter-proof brick with much better isolation as standard for building regulations in some regions of Europe with cold seasons, businesses and builders sued. Two years later, the same regulation helped people come through a cold winter... I fear it needs regulations for infrastructure resilience...
Can somebody explain as if I were a kindergartner why exactly natural gas is down by such a large amount in the state? Did the pipes freeze? Does natural gas not burn efficiently in snowy conditions? How will raising the spot price dramatically help with these physical conditions of the pipelines/other power production/distribution apparatus in such a way that providing power becomes available more quickly (if at all)? [1]
Has Texas never had weather like this in 350ish years and there was no reasonable justification for preparing for something like this?
> The systems that get gas from the earth aren't properly built for cold weather. Operators in West Texas’ Permian Basin, one of the most productive oil fields in the world, are particularly struggling to bring natural gas to the surface, analysts said, as cold weather and snow close wells or cause power outages that prevent pumping the fossil fuels from the ground.
> “Gathering lines freeze, and the wells get so cold that they can’t produce,” said Parker Fawcett, a natural gas analyst for S&P Global Platts. “And, pumps use electricity, so they’re not even able to lift that gas and liquid, because there’s no power to produce.”
> Texas does not have as much storage capacity as other states, experts said, because the resource-laden state can easily pull it from the ground when it's needed — usually.
1. So basically, this is the worst winter in the history of Texas to such an extent that nobody could have possibly predicted this?
That sucks.
2. Can you answer my question about the spot price increase? What does that accomplish in immediate terms?
As a sub-question, the article that I'm asking about says that electricity generators haven't been able to make money for over a decade. Why have they been providing this for free (or worse at a loss!) for so long? That sounds like some top-notch philanthropy! Is this an issue of the private company providing electricity at a loss statewide for so long that they can't stand the financial hit of maintaining their systems when strained for more than a couple days?
> So basically, this is the worst winter in the history of Texas to such an extent that nobody could have possibly predicted this?
It's a bad winter, but not "nobody could have possibly predicted this" bad. Some cities are breaking records, but quite a few haven't. For example Austin's Tuesday low of 7F is cold, but not quite as low as the record from December 23rd 1989 (6F). San Antonio recently tied their all time low from December 22nd 1990. Obviously "coldest winter in 30 years" is quite the statement, but it's still well within living memory and not the distant past. Chances are most of the policy makers and system designers for the TX energy system personally remember the winters of 1989 and 1990.
There's also a 2011 report recommending that TX winterize its power systems in case this exact thing happened. So at least back in 2011 energy experts saw this as a distinct possibility.
>So basically, this is the worst winter in the history of Texas to such an extent that nobody could have possibly predicted this?
More like "to the extent that people who were actually accountable for how money was spent couldn't justify spending the money to hedge against it".
Could you justify to your boss spending 5% per year on a project to hedge against something that happens every 50-100yr and has a 10% chance of really screwing you when it does? Exactly this but applied across every utility in an entire state.
Know-it-alls on the internet, love to tell other people how to spend their money but the real world is more complex and doesn't have the luxury of hindsight.
Plus they are not really screwed, they lost 5 days revenue from not being able to pump/generate, surely at elevated prices - but these businesses will not feel this event in a negative way on their annual report
This weather is CRAZY, I've NEVER seen something quite like this. I've seen it dip down to the teens, before, but I haven't seen: sub 20, with snow, for more than 2 days... across the entire state.
I'm not entirely certain why we are sucking hard at making electricity, but here is what I've heard:
Nat Gas pipelines "close to the well" are "freezing" because they have a lot of impurities (like water) that are literally freezing amd clogging the pipes. I'm not sure why wind is down (maybe bad lubricant???). I'm also not sure why the power plants designed to run on oil (or Nuclear!!!) aren't sufficient.
This is how I put it 2 days ago, right before the failure here:
>Crude natural gas is usually saturated with water downhole at warm temperatures and high pressures, some of which condenses as it is produced at the surface.
>At many points in a pipeline further water removal can be essential too.
>Even when not liquefied like LPG, when passing through a restriction valve or orifice, there is still additional cooling due to the product acting a bit like a refigerant.
>The water content may be small but the quantity of cold gas passing through a narrow point which is well below 0C eventually can build up kilos of ice and block the flow until the ambient temperature rises enough to open it back up.
Wind turbines that are not built for cold weather operations will have problems with lubricants for joints and bearings and icing on the blades. The icing does the same thing to turbine blades as it does to plane wings (i.e. makes them suck in terms of aerodynamics and kills lift) and as the blades slow the friction and load from the lubricant failure means that eventually the turbine will stop spinning and then just freeze up.
I would suspect that Coal and Natural Gas generation plants use a lot of water for cooling. When the plant is designed to dump as much extra heat as possible, as cheaply as possible (for 100-degree days and ~200-degree hot water), things start to fall over when the cooling water freezes in the uninsulated cooling lines.
Or, it's pretty much lack of winterization and lack of a plan for this kind of cold.
The way the natural gas issue has been explained to us over the last two days is there are two issues. First: natural gas is prioritized for home usage, which has understandably skyrocketed over the last several days. There was not enough left in the gas market for the standby power plants to buy up to burn; and what was available was inaccessible due to price and price caps. Second: The standby generating plants themselves suffered failures due to excessive cold. This also affected coal and nuclear plants (one of the reactors at the South Texas plant shut down automatically after the intake water in its cooling pond froze).
The emergency charges for the spot prices changes from that order are recent news that I've not had time to digest yet and as such can't reply to.
Apologies for not providing sources - barely have cellular data service at the moment and have only had electric back for a handful of hours. (Edit: And I jinxed myself there... back in the cold dark again.)
Maybe its time for people to stop treating electricity like essentially an unlimited cheap resource and instead something they consciously try not to waste.
I've been working in an off-grid office where I am limited by solar and battery capacity and it really puts into perspective what really needs to be plugged in all the time and how much
running a large appliance affects capacity.
Maybe electricity should be sold in blocks that have to be refilled, set daily/monthly quotas or limit current draw. Or even just significantly raise "2nd block/high usage" kWh prices.
I think most would rather pay an e.g. +10% premium for the plants to handle more extreme conditions once a decade than think about what has to be plugged in all day every day.
I'd be surprised if they will. If provider A is selling power at 10 cents/KWh and says that they can handle a once every decade cold spell, and provider B is selling power at 9 cents/KWh and isn't taking cold weather precautions, I'd bet that most people will use the cheaper provider. They'll tell themselves that if the extreme event happens again, they'll switch to another provider, or they'll tough it out, or get a hotel or whatever, then they'll be in this same situation where there's no where to go and no where else to buy power from.
It needs to be mandated so all power producers incur costs to handle the weather.
It's quite easy to mandate providers have certain winterization requirements, lots of other power grids do it. For that matter, it's exactly why insurance is so tightly regulated, because government wants to ensure companies have the resources to handle rare but predictable events.
Electricity is unlimited and cheap when people do not fear to build nuclear power plants.
> Maybe electricity should be sold in blocks that have to be refilled, set daily/monthly quotas or limit current draw
Or maybe there should be realtime electricity price and fines for outages, so both providers and consumers would be incentivised to optimize consumption, and market will make the electricity available.
Yes, but no. Nuclear power plants are extremely costly because they lack prefabrication-level standardization. This is the main cost driver. And this is simply because there's no economies of scale. Because we're not building enough. Classic vicious cycle. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> because they lack prefabrication-level standardization
It is not the only reason. Another reason is too many regulations and unpredictable government. As a private investor, you get lower ROI because you'd need spend several years fighting bureaucracy with no predictable outcome, and after the project started, it can be shut down in a couple years.
This is true for almost any energy project nowadays. EPA regulations change and bam, you're out of business.
> too many regulations
I don't think there's "too many", but I'm very far from an expert on this. What seems evident is that a prefab reactor/plant can amortize the cost of getting approved, whereas template plants, like the AP1000 are unique every time, even if they are fundamentally very-very similar, they are not identical. Hence the need for going through all the site specific differences, and their effects on the whole system.
I just got power back a couple hours ago. What happened is that they finally started to cut power away from business and industrial users. Empty ass Downtown was lit up like an Xmas tree yesterday, and so was dell, ibm, and so on.
It’s a scandal
San Antonio was able to do rolling blackouts, Austin really messed them up
I keep thinking, that from an engineering standpoint, maybe it's better to look at:
What went right?
Look at all the processes that worked, and continued to work in spite of high demand and stress. Those are the systems that should be studied, copied, and understood.
That doesn't scale because physical infrastructure can't be "copied" as easily. It's better to fix what failed (everything from "use winterized oil for wind turbines" to "insulate above ground pipes" to "better granularity on local power grids" to "better insulation for homes" to "don't have steam turbines at nuclear power plants in the outside air").
Basically TX doesn't required electricity generators to cold-proof their assets so they fail. That's the low regulation low cost route.
Lots of folks in these comments seem to want to use this event to litigate wind vs. solar vs. gas vs. nuclear vs. coal, but it seems like, across the board, power generation facilities in Texas were simply unprepared to operate in such low temperatures.
All of these technologies can and do work well in very cold climates.
> All of these technologies can and do work well in very cold climates.
The technologies can work, but only if measures are taken to make them work that way, and those measures are expensive. Texas' grid, like most of the nation's grid, is optimized to keep prices low for consumers and profits steady for generators and distributors, and it's worked amazingly well at that.
But "running lean" is great and everyone wins until you get hit with a highly consequential long-tail event (Taleb's Black Swan), and then you sometimes get caught without any backups.
If California is a guide, the "optimization" is for share holder dividends. PG&E in particular, in the last twenty years in particular, gutted needed repairs, a gutting which has lead to periodic shutdown due to different bad weather (high winds). I don't know the exact situation of Texas but if this is a similar situation, I would be unsurprised.
All of this is somewhat conditioned by advancing global warming, which known to lead to more severe weather conditions (more specifically, with the slowing of the jetstream, the polar vortex migrates South, has been doing so for the last few years).
In southern california too, once So Cal Edison discovered the risk of liability for fires, power has been shut down more and more for frequent high wind events.
I don't know what people expected. You provide an entity with certain incentives and it will tend to follow those incentives to their logical conclusion. If you make fires much more expensive for power providers, and you prevent them from charging any more money for the service they provide, they are going to have to reduce risk elsewherre. They'll do this either by cutting service when fire risk is the highest or by doing more maintenance, whichever is least expensive.
The power companies muscled into place a system where they could scrimp in improvements and pocket the savings.
The disastrous result was devastating fires. The system of civil courts still existed so they wound-up liable for their despicable maneuvers and has to pay a bit back from gains. So their next maneuver was turning off their lines when winds got high rather than engaging in the now even great expense of repairing them.
PG&E is a literally criminal enterprise, found criminally (not civilly) liable for the death of more than 100 people (29 gas explosion, 85 fire, etc).
The well-known Judge Alsop rightly denounced their vicious chicanery but sadly failed to put them in receivership and forfeit the value of their shareholder's assets (IMO, shareholder assets should be forfeit and previous dividends clawed back but natural they can do that to people in nursing homes and Madoff shareholder but they can't do it to these shitheals).
It's a matter of externalized costs - the company could have taken slightly less profits - accounted for the known coming of climate crisis weather shifts in the decades they've had and made the proper decisions. By deciding the way they have, they bring higher regulation on themselves.
I expected the correct maintenance costs to be taken on to maintain a better than third-world power grid availability.
They aren’t that expensive, seeing as probably most states can operate their power grid at reasonable cost at these temperatures. They definitely aren’t expensive compared to the economic damage of an event like this every 15 years.
"Expensive" is all relative. If it costs say ... 2% of the utility shareholder dividend, would shareholders be ok with that?
Before this happened, what exactly were the incentives that led them not to prepare? Was it really an unforeseeable event? Was the risk understood but downplayed (like the oil industry with climate change)? The answers to these will hopefully come out in time.
I've had power out for over a day and am fine. I would not pay any more money to avoid this once every thirty years, or even once a decade, for a few days. Mostly because paying the cost to prepare for one of these is reasonable, but preparing for all of them would be very expensive and I will trade cheap power for the occasional inconvenience.
When I was living in California (no, not a large scale event - just a suicidal squirrel and power to 8 small houses)...
The mother in law of the guy who handled the property would fuss at him about his RV. She didn't like it and would have loved to have him sell it.
And one day, there was a suicidal squirrel. Took out power for six hours. She only has two tanks (1h each) of backup oxygen... and shortly into the outage when we found out that PG&E would be awhile before repairing it he powered up his RV and plugged her oxygen into the RV.
She didn't fuss about the RV after that.
If you don't have an inverter and a long lasting source of power, an outage like this can (and probably has) kill many people who depend on the consistent power to keep their medical devices working.
Isn't it reasonable to expect people reliant on powered medical devices to include a plan B in case the grid goes down? It's not like the grid is perfect. Even in high-reliability countries like the USA there are unforseen events.
You can expect whatever you like. But the reality is that lots of people don't. Maybe they're short-sighted, maybe they're poor, maybe their backup plan wasn't tested to best-practice standards.
I'm sure everyone has seen the bit about half the country lacking a $400 emergency buffer. You can blame them for their own plight if it makes you feel better. Or you can blame a skewed economy. Or god, or me.
You're still left with a grid buckling due to underinvestment, and a future that's likely to demonstrate that this was just a warning.
California has rolling blackouts every summer (and winter) with power that cost about 3x more than Texas. Rolling blackouts also affect hospitals. I think OPs sentiment is that overall Texas is a better system. Compared to CA I agree.
Now that doesn’t mean that it can’t or shouldn’t be improved, but spending 3x more and looking more like California is a huge net loss.
It seems unlikely and reductionist to think that taking Texas' existing power system, and investing more money in reliability, would make it LESS reliable. But this is what happens when you compare two very complicated things (different states' utilities) and consider price of service to be the only relevant factor.
I'm not familiar with rolling blackouts in the winter in CA. And, in fact, I've never been part of a rolling blackout, period, in my 20 years in CA.
But the rolling blackouts that some areas experience now are by and large due to (fire) risk avoidance by the utility, not by generation issues.
> Well, one thing you know is that poster knows no one reliant on powered medical devices.
No, this is simply a baseless assumption made by you, with an effect similar to poisoning the well. I know people on medical devices, and one day of power loss per 30 years is absolutely acceptable to them, give that they arranged to have backup power.
The real issue is frozen pipes which can be pretty expensive/catastrophic. As someone in New England, if it weren't for that, I wouldn't find a power outage all that big a deal--at least for a couple days. But frozen pipes can lead to $10K's of damage.
> Operations in Texas have stumbled because temperatures are low enough to freeze oil and gas liquids at the well head and in pipelines that are laid on the ground, as opposed to under the surface as practiced in more northerly oil regions. The big question now is how quickly temperatures return to normal.
> First, Representative Gene Wu, Texas House of Representatives District 137, walks us through the “cascade” of problems that caused multiple generators to go out without back-ups in place. Including, water vapor inside natural gas generators that condensed and froze shutting down the machines and nuclear power plants whose cooling ponds froze, setting off automatic shutdowns. Rep. Wu also advocates turning off all non-emergency electronics to reduce the strain on the energy grid.
Imagine the fun of having those pipes freeze (this is the cooling loop - not the reactor loop so "just" power down the reactor - it's not the loop that deals with the water that passes through the core).
I have a colleague where an upstairs neighbor had a pipe freeze and leak because of a crack in the outside brickwork. Had to move out for a year. And, for many people, insurance won't really fully cover this sort of thing.
I often debate if I should get a generator for outlier events in a house.
I get that cold isn't fun, but if that's something you're worried about, why not get a small generator or back-up heater ahead of time? We had a close call with this back in 2011. Unless you're really saying that you want to socialize the cost of keeping your toddler warm.
All that aside, I hope y'all stay warm. I know many cities are opening warming facilities, so maybe check if there's one near you.
This seems like one of the whole points for having a society. Ensuring basic necessities like this are covered at a marginal cost. But I guess the neoliberal capitalist haven of America thinks it's "socialism", and thus evil.
It may be true in a lot of places that we should step back from 100% coverage as the cost is just too high, and it is better (cheaper) to put the resilience in housholds than in utilities.
But your anecdote is just that - a anecdote. We need to carefully weigh those options.
Elected politicians have a bad reputation for making these trade offs sensibly. I have heard it said (by a fictional character I think - no source) that (in popular opinion) the present trumps the future every time
Really it means that many many people end up paying for safety measures individually - if they can afford them. The total social cost is likely higher than building adequate infrastructure in centralized places.
The parent stated their experience (one day without power) and the willingness to pay more for a specific change, they didn't say anything about longer time frames. If a single day of power outage will cause a person to die, such as those with certain medical issues, you must make preparations for backup power. I hope you can agree at the extreme that treating the entire power grid as if it were a hospital's internal power network would be absurd.
They didn't invest in the weatherproofing needed for these extreme events. It wasn't worth the expense for them to ensure that people would have heat if we had a record-breaking cold snap (only have to go back 30 years to match the one we are in now). I wonder if that equation will change once the state is back up and running again.
It will. You can bet on it. The Texas Legislature is currently in session (it only meets every other year). Maybe a quarter of them will have personally experienced this power outage and all of them will have a parent, sister, son, neighbor, friend who suffered through it. And while these people may not know much about same sex bathrooms, a lot of them know a lot about energy. When this session is out weatherpfoofing will not be "suggested" or "recommended", it will be law.
Seriously, there are already disinformation agents hard at work across the internet, at least one in this thread. By November this cold snap will be tied to Benghazi and a pedo ring run out of a pizza joint.
The issue is that the plants weren't built to handle these temperatures, and the deregulation and political climate in Texas makes it difficult to incentive those plants to make those changes. (Pre-pandemic) you'll see some random electric company setup outside of a grocery store asking everyone who walks in what their rate is, and offering to beat it.
>Also: I live in Texas and have 100% renewable energy
Are you living off the grid, or living on the grid but paying for a "100% renewable" provider? If it's the latter it's likely that you're only being 100% renewable on a net annual basis, and still using non-renewable sources during peak hours. https://energy.stanford.edu/news/100-renewables-doesn-t-equa...
But at this moment people aren't so whether it's actually helping the environment is debatable. It's like selling a vegan burger that's made with beef but claiming it's totally fine because that's offset by some other guy eating a plant burger.
Just an FYI, unless you’re off the grid you aren’t actually 100% renewable. I live in Texas and found this to be super confusing when I signed up for power for the first time. If you think about it for a second it makes sense that you’re getting the same energy as the rest of your neighbors and the grid is made up of many many different types of power plants. The “100% renewable” bit means that when the power broker gives a cut to the state that money is used to fund only renewable projects. Hope you learned something new today!
Think of it like you pay for grain harvested by well paid workers. But you don't get that grain directly. Instead all the grain harvested by everyone, even underpaid near slaves, is put in one big pile. When you go get your 5 pounds from the pile you are getting the mix from everyone, but the well paid workers are the ones earning the money.
The people down the street from me in Houston are currently powering their house with their solar panels, actually. They were able to loan their generator to their neighbor. We had to abandon our house.
Last year, I went on vacation to Alaska. Me and my friends airbnb'd an off-grid home/cabin in Talkeetna, about several hundred miles north of Anchorage. It was powered entirely on solar panels on the roof and right by the house. Water from the rivers. Granted, it had a wood stove, like most cabin/homes are in the north. Just want to chime in and say that renewables are absolutely very prevalent in colder, remote climates.
Live in MN. We have a lot of solar and wind here. In fact solar gets a boost from ground cover snow based on the reflective property. Do panels lose out on snowy days or some accumulation? Yes, but there's a solar farm a mile from my house that covers probably 40 acres with solar - and I've never seen the panels covered.
As for the wind turbines - they work fine in cold weather. It's just that with ice build up on the blades the operator will force the unit to lock down so it doesn't become unbalanced and destroy itself.
Edit:
To add some additional color I know Texas is not the only state dealing with some rough weather over the last few days / week - but for context, where I live, today was the first day we broke 0F since February 10th. Yesterday morning it was -27.6F in my backyard (Ambient weather station - air temp). I'm curious to see what the actual root cause of the outages really was in Texas. Curious if it was all naturally related or if we see any inklings of strategically timed cyber related events.
But yeah, cleaning off solar panels is a totally doable bit of maintenance in snowy conditions, or even just tilting and coating them so snow falls off. A human with a broom could make rover solar panels work for decades on Mars, we can do it in Minnesota.
I've never seen anyone cleaning them anywhere. Pretty sure the solar farms either have slightly warmed panels that will reduce the friction of any coverage enough to leverage the panel tilt - or since a lot of the installs will follow the sun anyway they probably have a mode of operation to "dump" the panels clean.
I have someone coming out to go over a solar quote I had done, so have some new questions to ask!
The solar panels in my roof shed snow way faster than the shingles do. I suspect it's a combo of the angle plus them being slick glass rather than rough asphalt paper.
Maybe they're warmed too, I've never actually touched them.
If they're still producing any power, they'll have some self heating just through waste.
I'm fairly certain that solar panels catch some power off of infrared and the like, so they should still be getting a little bit warm. Snow is a great insulator, so that heat has nowhere to go but melt base layer of snow off.
After that I imagine it's like a glacier, slipping on a small layer of water
Turns out you can actually design around that. Heck, my solar panels cleared themselves of the foot of snow we received (Idaho) without any intervention on my part. If necessary I could’ve gotten up there with a broom and ladder.
Solar panels provide less than 1.5% of Texas electricity generation, so the fact that they can't be used under snow isn't the cause of the deficiency today.
Texas is pretty large and their solar resources are way the hell out in Pecos County where it hasn't been snowing. This is actual ideal to have your solar power plant far to the west of your population centers, to handle the evening load peak. If Texas had California-scale solar power installations, they would be warm and happy right now.
In cold climates, solar panels will have builtin heaters that makes the snow slide off, but it seems likely that they didn't bother to install that for a solar plant in Texas.
Can someone explain how the ninth largest economy in the world where it is dominated by the largest energy companies in the world failed so miserably? This is all self-inflicted.
1/4 of the mix is wind, and turbines were frozen. Maintenance in extreme condition not done, because either they didn't think it was needed, or because they didn't want to pay for it.
I would say the situation is getting bad. Many of my colleagues don't have heat. Water pipes are bursting everywhere. I never imagined this would happen in Texas, which from my observations was well run compared to other places I've lived
Pipes bursting has absolutely got to suck right now. No power, no water, probably not the greatest of roads still, and getting everything fixed is going to take quite a while.
Please help me understand this. Why is deregulation causing suppliers to be unable to charge enough to cover their costs? I should think that would be the opposite. “ Ed Hirs, an energy fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, blamed the failures on the state’s deregulated power system, which doesn’t provide power generators with the returns needed to invest in maintaining and improving power plants... ‘For more than a decade, generators have not been able to charge what it costs them to produce electricity.’” How could that be correct?
When HL&P owned the power plants, distribution infrastructure, and customer accounts there was concentrated incentive for better reliability and that's what we had.
Now many deregulated retail providers hold the customer accounts, and depend on Centerpoint (now sole owner of power & gas lines only) to deliver from their third-party wholesale provider, who contracts with one or more generators for ultimate supply. Plus of course ERCOT is involved and has been intentionally configured to take blame for things like this so there's another entity to participate in the finger-pointing.
Not an expert, but if it was a purely deregulated market, wouldn't you expect the cheapest supplier to win? The power grid is a shared medium, and you get a "tragedy of the commons" situation. Everyone profits from a resilient grid, but no single supplier has an incentive pay the cost to stabilize it for everyone else.
I don't know the specifics, but decreased regulation and increased competition can have the affect of a race to the bottom. Without regulation that imposes certain standards, you can't afford to protect your business against rare events because none of your competitors are doing it either.
Sure, they claimed that they turned it off, but there will always be someone who doesn't turn it off, especially when the bitcoin prices are going up astronomically. Rising electricity price doesn't matter.
Also, they hold up the "floor price" for electricity and push it up, meaning that electricity prices will never be cheaper.
Even if all of the bitcoin mining in the world happened in TX and 0% of them shut down it'd still just be 1/4 the normal power draw in the state (121 TWh vs 429 TWh), far less than the demand increase due to the cold or current production/demand gap.
Still keeps the floor price of electricity up as some would probably not bother turning off in the case of an astronomical bitcoin price. (Read the article Yahoo, they are in fact keeping some on!)
Also I'm assuming 429 TWh is when it's at full capacity. You have to quote the number for the current crippled capacity for a fair comparison.
429 TWh is average yearly usage, current "crippled" usage is 77% the yearly average usage, so 100% worldwide bitcoin usage would only account for ~1/3 the current "crippled" power delivery.
Worldwide mining would have to pull a hell of a lot more than ~1/4 (of TX) of ~1/10 (TX of the US) ~1/7 (US of world) to be setting the price floor of electricity.
A Bitcoin miner is not more or less efficient than a resist backup heater attached to a heat pump. I guess it would be bad for them to be somewhere that's not in a house, though.
All electric heaters are all considered to be 100% efficient. A bitcoin miner is an electric heater, not a heat pump. Although much more noisy, expensive and breaks more often, plus it requires an internet connection. So it makes more sense to get a normal heater. Mining bitcoin only makes sense on an industrial scale. Which is why these things are usually found in data center like facilities.
(Meanwhile heat pumps can go up to 300% efficiency.)
My sister lives in Rockwall and she’s been without power since Sunday with no service expected until Friday.
I’m in Dallas and thought I made it through unscathed. Power and inet have been stable with gas furnaces doing their best. However today at about 430pm a water pipe burst in an exterior wall. I shut off the water, found the break, cut a hole in the wall all set to repair. I get to home depot and they closed early! Closing a hardware store early during a major weather event seems wrong to me.
I called a couple plumbers but they’re booked for weeks (not surprising)
I guess you can say it was because they didn't go all in on renewable energy but you can also say they weren't prepared for the inevitable result of the renewable regime's agenda.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37814
Maybe having more nuclear power plants instead of wind would have helped? It sounds unrealistic for the energy generators to sell electricity at a loss over a 10 year period. It would be nice to see some of the data that the professor is referring to.
> Maybe having more nuclear power plants instead of wind would have helped?
No. Most of the missing production was not wind, and several nukes went out (unclear whether that was because the grid was dying though).
What would have helped was proper standards (avoiding emergency being much of the reason why Texas still has its own grid) and properly winterising.
The wind thing is just a bullshit excuse, the vast majority of the missing generation is in fossil power plants. Even with half the turbines frozen over (which still has to do with Texas’ lack of proper winterization, those things work fine in Canada, Washington State, Montana, etc…) wind performed above expectations for the period.
Gigawatt scale nukes would need to go down in an unreliable grid. They have virtually no demand response compared to LNG and other fossil fuels. Frequency stability is the ultimate constraint.
I think a really good question to ask: Why was there missing generation in the LNG and other fossil fuel plants? Was it because they all froze over at the same time, or was it because the price of LNG went to the moon on Sunday night? Was this price increase caused by natural supply-demand mechanics, or was there an artificial component as well?
The way I see this - LNG generation providers shutdown to avoid incredibly expensive fuel costs, which they were unable to pass onto the customer. PUCT did make a change last night to try and alleviate this market model issue. Fundamentally, the whole thing is broken. I was looking for some historical precedent for all of this, and you would probably not be surprised to know this has happened before and would certainly not be surprised to find out which company was involved:
Now, I am not alleging that the current situation has any sort of malicious or criminal element, but there are some direct quotes from sources in that above article that trouble me as a Houstonian going through this exact kind of hell right now:
Almost all nat gas storage in Texas is very short term when demand is high. Texas already had 3 days of cold weather before this even and stored supplies where low. This means most gas will come straight from the field or from wet storage, this is having a high water content, so it needs dewatering before burning.
A number of years ago I was helping a relative attempt to restart one of these wells/dewatering units because it froze in at somewhere between 10-15F. And that was the next day when the temps had warmed up to around 25.
It's been far colder than that in the last two days so these units are staying frozen and its icy so techs cant get to them easy. I've not seen wells in colder climates, I guess they equip them so they dont freeze.
I’ve read that the tussle between opec and Russia dropping the prices of fossil fuels also lead to many producers halting production, which in turn led to difficulties filling up reserves, so Texas didn’t / doesn’t have much headroom there.
What is "proper winterizing" for a state where the 99th percentile design temperature is mostly 25-30ºF? Properly sized heating systems should run 24 hours a day when the temps are well below the design temp.
If almost all of those systems are electric (because they are simple and cheap to install and don't get a ton of use), you get a lot of constant demand for electricity. Smart load-shedding (to dump large 240VAC loads in rotation) would allow the grid to survive these periods, while keeping houses livable but chilly.
I agree the wind excuse is (almost entirely) BS. Some amount of production is offline all the time, at least enough that you have to design for that.
as long as they're an independent grid, optimizing for the 99th percentile isn't really acceptable. that's only two nines.
if you have a contingency plan for winter storms, then it makes sense to skip the winterization. but it appears their plan for a winter storm was just to fail.
You’re conflating two things. The 99th percentile design temp for winter heating systems only implies a steady load would be imposed on the grid. Optimizing HVAC systems for the 99th percentile load is proper engineering. A higher powered electric resistance heating plant would make the grid problem worse right now (as houses could draw enough energy in a day to maintain temp rather than only drawing enough energy in a day to not quite maintain temp).
It doesn’t mean you design the grid to only sustain the loads 99 percent of the time. This is going to turn out to be a grid implementation problem, not an insulation or a renewables problem.
Yep, this is the thing no one is talking about. Dallas has easily added 10k apartment units in the past 5 years. Almost all of them are all electric (no gas heating).
Considering it’s more energy efficient to cool with Air Conditioning on the hottest summer days than it is to heat with electricity in the winter, it’s no wonder the grid collapsed when the region was below freezing for several days and some generating capacity was lost.
I don't know enough about importing capacity in that other grid since they're hooked up to the western half supposedly but I agree with your points. TX being hooked up to the rest of the US could have saved them and this other regional grid appears to be managing it better than TX.
That is debatable. Close grids could not have supplied 30GW of power, they were also under near record loads. You would have had to pull from many states away which is insanely inefficient.
Also people miss how big the TX grid is. FL and PA are the #2 and #3 power generation states. TX produces as much as both added together.
That’s a cherrypicked low point, which is unsurprising given wind is not a permanent energy source. 30GW nameplate capacity is nowhere near the production you’d expect of wind (hell even nukes are not expected to come close to 100%).
Texas’ electric mix is 75% thermal, and that’s what shat the bed, at peak 34GWe of thermal was offline. Even if wind actually accounted for 6GW missing dieting the entire event it would have accounted for a small minority of the missing production.
And more specifically Texas gas is 66% of expected winter capacity. That’s also where most of the outages are.
Nuclear tripped too, just like gas, because of a pump failure in the cold.
In the 2011 cold snap, the problem was all about frozen lines like the pressure sensing line that caused a problem yesterday for the nuclear reactor. Likely similar things are causing problems for natural gas.
The answer is weatherization of all these sources. Wind turbines work great in other settings with icing wind, you just have to have the hardware for it. Just like you have to have the hardware to keep your pressure sensing lines from freezing.
We are likely to experince more events like this before a single nuclear plant could be built. And the idea of building 30GW of new nuclear, the amount of gas/coal/nuclear that was lost, is so daunting that not even China is trying to build that much nuclear, and they're pretty much the best at doing it of anyone out there.
Honestly, building 60GW more of wind and solar, and 10GW/40GWh of storage would be a lot easier and cheaper than building 30GW of nuclear. Solar delivered an extra GW when it wasn't expected, wind dropped 4GW from what was expected, and gas/coal/nuclear dropped 27GW.
Adding more wind capacity doesn't help because you still need a substitute for when it isn't windy.
As far as I can tell we still don't have reasonable grid-scale power storage and until we do increasing the ratio of intermittent generation capacity (wind, solar) to non-intermittent generation (hydro/gas/coal/nuclear) will increase the probability of not being able to meet demand at times (all other things remaining unchanged).
> 60GW more of wind and solar, and 10GW/40GWh of storage
These all complement each other, not sure why you pulled out only wind from that.
We do have reasonable grid-scale power storage, last year there were 17GW of batteries in the interconnection queue for ERCOT alone, from independent investors. The major holdup from this happening, say, 5 years ago, were ERCOT regulations that made it hard to be both a generator and a consumer on the grid. But there are huge arbitrage opportunities on ERCOT because of the huge price swings, which make it a perfect place for batteries. Other energy markets, like PJM, which have capacity markets in addition to energy markets, will also see huge amounts of batteries installed since FERC order 841 forced all grid operators to allow batteries to compete.
Other regulated utilities will only install batteries when they are forced to by their regulators. As a money-saving device, it's generally bad for utilities' profits, and it also requires them to learn something new. Far more profitable to rate-base unnecessary transmission or another natural gas plant that will never be fully used.
> These all complement each other, not sure why you pulled out only wind from that.
I wasn't trying to call out wind. I just should have said "intermittent'
17GW seems like a strange unit for storage. That should be GWh I think. So my question would be for the demand that exists right now in Texas, how long would those batteries been successful in providing power to delay the rolling blackouts?
My understanding is that batteries are mainly used in grids to react to short term demand changes and not to continuously feed energy into the grid.
Totally willing to be educated on this though. I'm not an expert.
As I got heavily downvoted a month or so ago for saying. In TX the wind backup is NG plants. The storage is really only there to cover tiny glitches, and its quite expensive. Which I why I keep pointing out that the price of wind conveniently ignores the storage costs and NG generators required to back it up.
At least part of the problem here seems to be the fact that the NG plants can't start due to lack of gas because the supply is frozen.
The other problem is of course that backing up wind with NG means that its not actually "green" anymore. Its reduced the carbon footprint, but at the growth rates in TX its only slowed the increase in CO2 output, not decreased it.
The economics are changing quickly, and storage is replacing gas plants. There are now more GW of battery backup in the pipeline than gas plants, and many multiples of solar and wind GW for each new gas GW.
Texas is experiencing the interchange first because it's one off one of the few places where independent operators can connect and undercut those who have made bad long term capital investments.
There is nobody who is saying "let's fix the grid and design a system that will be reliable" in Texas. It's just people raising money to build projects that they think can make money.
Right now, there's more and more people thinking they can make money with batteries, and fewer and fewer people thinking that gas can make money on the grid.
Which, if we are to believe the hypothesis that markets make good capital allocations decisions, says that they future of the grid is battery backup, and no more gas backup.
This is a process of transition, so pointing at the current amount and saying "that's not enough" is going to be obvious.
It was just an offhand number, there's already 17GW of storage in ERCOT's interconnection queue for the next few years, which is 40GWh - 70GWh. By 2035, the soonest we could expect to see a new nuclear reactor powering on, we will have many multiples of 70GWh. Not sure if TWh will every be needed for a grid that only peaks at 80GW. The cheapest solution will be a tradeoff between excess renewables capacity and storage, it will be interesting to see what the market picks for Texas.
70 GWh of battery storage would have kept the lights on for an extra 2 hours during this event - assuming the batteries themselves aren't affected by temperature. While battery storage might be nice to increase the capacity factor of a solar or wind farm it isn't going to make a difference in an event like this where a weather system moves in for a week.
The current grid took a looot longer than 2-4 years to build, and that 17GW/50GWh is just 2-4 years of replacement equipment at the very beginning of a transition. So I'm not sure why this amount of batteries needs to power the entire grid, or how that's a helpful or even interesting comparison.
The article clearly states that many natural gas plants were knocked out due to the cold.
So why aren't you asking "maybe having more nuclear instead of natural gas would have helped?"
Since nuclear uses water, which freezes, the reason why the gas plants were knocked out, maybe the problem isn't the power source itself but the lack of weatherization?!
I suspect that the water involved in the steam generation (heavy water or otherwise) wouldn't freeze since it's inside/near the core, and constantly temperature regulated.
The water used for cooling would go through heat exchanging and would also not freeze, especially if it's underground, or deep in a lake somewhere.
I had trouble finding articles detailing how the nuclear plant was brought down, but then I found this:
> On Monday, Feb. 15, 2021, at 0537, an automatic reactor trip occurred at South Texas Project in Unit 1. The trip resulted from a loss of feedwater attributed to a cold weather-related failure of a pressure sensing lines to the feedwater pumps, causing a false signal, which in turn, caused the feedwater pump to trip. This event occurred in the secondary side of the plant (non-nuclear part of the unit). The reactor trip was a result of the feedwater pump trips. The primary side of the plant (nuclear side) is safe and secured. […] We evaluated Unit 2 and have confirmed that we do not have the same issues that caused the feedwater pump trips in Unit 1.
and subsequently, an answer to my question of 'how':
> Some people have wondered how “pressure sensing lines” for a feed water pump could have been affected by cold outside air temperatures. There are no turbine halls at STP, both of steam turbines are out in the open air. I’m sure there is a design reason for this choice, but it isn’t apparent.
Water related to the main cycle of the plant? Or something non-essential like the toilets, or some valve froze shut because water froze on the outside of it?
I imagine the person in the article is griping about the downward pressure wind and solar can put on energy prices (so maybe you lose money operating a traditional plant, but less money than you'd lose by walking away; operating at net that doesn't cover the up front investment).
Where would one build them? Since the USA has no long term nuclear waste storage plan, the current plan is to store at the plants for the most part which is a huge NIMBY issue.
IIRC Texas went mostly in on gas/wind because of prevailing prices for the different fuel/plant options. This article gives a bit more data about current generation sources in Texas. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/02/16/tex...
Also, the alternative coal plants had pretty big waste/cleanup issues with existing plants in addition to costing more based on projections last time I remember reading about this.
NIMBYs are not an impediment to building nuclear. The first impediment is finding a funding for a project of a class that has a huge chance of being a multi-billion dollar economic disaster. If you can find the money, the problem is actually completing it, and continuing to find new funding as build times go to 2-3x initial estimates, and costs balloon to 2-5x initial estimates.
There are plenty of sites that welcome new nuclear, usually any existing nuclear site would welcome more as its an economic engine for towns. The issue is it's just really poor and overly complicated technology, requiring miles of precision welds, the failure of any of which could cause big problems, and which must last for 50 years. It shouldn't be a surprise that this is hard to do well.
Nuclear energy is insanely efficient from a "materials that need to move around" perspective. That's why not having long term storage and just cobbling together short term on-site storage hasn't caused a crisis. The maintenance department at a plant generates more waste by volume.
Finding the space isn't the issue. Anywhere we could fit a couple container ships is fair game if you're looking for a national level solution. Politics is the problem. People are more scared of "magical glowing toxic waste" than normal toxic waste for whatever reason.
Cutting costs on the cold-proofing of wind turbines in Texas is somewhat understandable. But as far as under-investment due to lack of profit goes, nuclear isn't much better off.
The economics of building a traditional nuclear plant right now don't work out: they are incredibly expensive to build and tear down, take a decade to plan and another decade to build. In the time until a new nuclear plant is built and has paid back the investment you could have built a wind park, made back the investment, made a profit, decommissioned it, built a new one and made back the investment for that one.
Maybe small-scale nuclear will help somewhat, but properly weather proofed wind and gas would work just fine too.
With 2 70MW reactors these fall squarely into "small-scale nuclear". A traditional nuclear power plant has reactors with 10-20 times the power output.
I think these kinds of applications have a lot of potential, and are the future of nuclear energy production. But using these kinds of small reactors outside the military (or Russian icebreakers) is an idea that only recently gained traction (at least since it was originally abandoned around the 60s).
If this happens once every 10 years, it means that each year there is 10% probability of happening. I would happily pay a 10% premium knowing that measures are in place to not let my family freeze to death when the temperature slightly drops.
Choice quote from the article: “The ERCOT grid has collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union,” said Hirs. “It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances.”
Which confuses me, as it follows a statement about how energy has been deregulated.
Of course, deregulation would also reduce some of the incentives for maintaining preparation for "100 year winter" storms. Much like how hospitals reduced the number of beds based on their average case loads, not the uncommon-but-not-unheard-of peaks.
Can't really say it's a regulation vs deregulation issue. I've worked for both and it's incredibly difficult to get anyone to do anything other than a broke fix. Once something breaks or someone dies, that's when it's taken seriously. I wish I had a problem statement and a solution to go with it.
How's the line go? If a coin comes up heads twice in a row, that's normal. If it comes up heads ten times in a row, it's abnormal. If it comes up heads a hundred times in a row, it's probably not a fair coin.
Or maybe it hasn't been deregulated enough? From the article
>Wholesale electricity sold are near the $9,000-per-megawatt hour maximum in power markets across the state Monday as the system struggled to meet demand, according to ERCOT.
Why bother spending millions on preparing for a once in a century event when your upside is capped? This is further compounded by the wholesale rates not being passed to consumers, which removes a lot of backpressure from the system. If turning on the heater costs $100/hr to run you're going to find alternatives (eg. co-habiting with your inlaws).
> Why bother spending millions on preparing for a once in a century event when your upside is capped? This is further compounded by the wholesale rates not being passed to consumers, which removes a lot of backpressure from the system. If turning on the heater costs $100/hr to run you're going to find alternatives (eg. co-habiting with your inlaws).
If it's a once in a century (or once every 10 year) event, consumers aren't going to pay $100/hr to run their heater. They're going to refuse to pay the bill.
Especially given the household dynamic I see most, where only the person who actually pays the energy bill is actually considering the cost of heating.
Compound that with the fact that, unless utility billing has changed a lot in the last decade (I haven't been a master tenant in a while), people won't see how much more expensive that power is until after they've used it.
...and subsequently get their electricity cut off in a few months for non-payment? Besides, it isn't too hard to impose a cap on the rate you pay and requiring a credit card to be on file if you want to lift the limit. In other words, by default the maximum rate you'll pay is $2/kWH, but if you have a credit card on file you can put in whatever rate you want. If the wholesale price goes above the maxmimum rate you can pay your electricity gets cut off. If the utility thinks the rate is too high and you aren't going to pay, they'll pre-authorize your card for the amount. At that point they can let the credit card company/banks worry about chasing after the customers.
This regulation utterly defies economic common sense. It’s like saying that, if we allow too many people to sell groceries, the cost of groceries will go up. That’s not how a functioning market works.
Of course, medicine in the US is not a functioning market.
TIL. That's... it makes sense in one fashion (keep health care cost reasonable (reasonable health care costs in the US… kek)), but it utterly defies the idea of being ready for disasters.
This confused me as well. In the article, there's the criticism that by not being allowed to charge for electricity what it cost to generate, producers have fallen behind on maintenance of their plants. But I don't see how that follows from deregulation. When I think deregulation, I think something more akin to, "Alright boys, you're on your own. Ya'll will live and die by your ability to profitably generate the power people need and want, and deliver it how they need and want. Don't get lazy now, or some whippersnapper will buy your infrastructure for pennies on the dollar after they bankrupt you because all your customers went for their better customer service."
Not being allowed to charge actual cost of production strikes me as something that would come of price controls, which are a kind of regulation, not deregulation.
Or somebody cheaper can generate since they didn't bother building their plants to withstand low temperatures so the more expensive plants to run go out of business or lose that expensive to maintain ability and then here we are
I'm sure that Texas could have prepared for this cold weather better. However, to be fair, its a rare for the weather to be this cold in Texas.
Even in climates where there cold weather is common, cold weather disasters still happen. The 1998 North American Ice Storm caused power outages that lasted weeks. It affected Ontario, Quebec and Main. It left 4,000,000 people in Canada and 700,000 in Main without power for weeks. Twenty-five people died from the cold, 12 more from related flooding caused by Ice. [1]
There was a rather morbid photograph on one of the local news sites the other night of Austin looking south along I-35 during the rolling blackouts. The East Side was more or less pitch black. The west side - downtown, the capitol, the stadium, the Frost Bank building etc - was lit up like a Christmas tree.
The east side was created by redlining policies put in place 100 years ago, and is where much of Austin’s lower income population lives.
It wasn’t meant to be a comprehensive statistical analysis but it was a pretty stark photo.
The blame doesn’t lie on the power grid but on the power sources.
Texas has only four nuclear reactors, it should have many more as only nuclear is able to deliver power under virtually all weather conditions (yes, I know that South Texas 1 tripped but that was due to a false alarm).
It’s because of renewables and gas power plants that electricity became scarse. Many wind turbines in particular froze because of the low temperatures.
The situation in Texas reminds me of the situation during a blizzard in East Germany 1978/79 where all lignite-fired power plants came to a hold due to the lignite freezing while the two nuclear power plants delivered electricity without any problems.
Renewables had nothing to do with this and performed better than expected. A nuke plant tripped off and natural gas production and de-watering froze starving the plants. The vast majority of capacity loss was nat gas.
Natural gas follows all rollouts of renewables, though. In fact I'm not even sure you can separate the two. Grids with renewables would absolutely collapse without natural gas.
The only thing capable of replacing natural gas is batteries, which are extremely expensive and aren't exactly renewable, either.
Renewables may create demand for more natural gas on the grid, but you seem to be saying also that if Texas hadn't expanded renewables, they wouldn't have built so many natural gas plants. What would they have built instead to supply their power?
A social political decline is what happened and continues to happen.
When California encountered power issues, it was easier for Texas politicians (and many of their followers) to espouse malicious soundbites about Commifornia than to empathize, offer support and self reflect on what lessons can be learned and applied locally.
Now that Texas is reaping its own fruits of decades of anti-"other side" politics and political mismanagement it's all too easy for whatever "other side" to treat Texas with the same derision and malice instead of empathy and support.
The government run Texas grid is ill prepared because the responsible parties are more interested in playing division politics than in governing.
Cold and snow are not novel, it's not a technical problem.
Governing is hard. Owning the libs/cons is fun and easy!
Anyway seems like this storm is so bad Texas would be in trouble no matter what, but letting utilities under-invest in winterizing and not joining either of the major grid corridors just made a bad situation 100x worse.
The good news is this is fixable going forward, and hopefully Texans will demand their politicians address it.
>Anyway seems like this storm is so bad Texas would be in trouble no matter what, but letting utilities under-invest in winterizing and not joining either of the major grid corridors just made a bad situation 100x worse.
The weather in Texas is in the single digits. The weather in Minnesota is in the double digit negatives.
Texas would not be in trouble "no matter what" if they had bothered to spend the money on winterizing their power plants. They chose not to, and this is the end result.
The roads shut down due to lack of snow removal is completely understandable - and quite frankly most people should be perfectly capable of surviving in their homes for a week if they have heat and water.
The lack of updating power plants so they can function in below-freezing weather is just straight incompetence. This type of weather isn't some 1,000 year storm. They have extended below freezing temperatures on a fairly regular basis.
From what I understand the average low temperature in Texas around this time usually doesn't go below 30-35 degrees. Meanwhile the average high temperature around this time doesn't get above 20-35 degrees in Minnesota.
To demand every state spend the same resources that Minnesota does to winterize their infrastructure is completely unrealistic.
>This type of weather isn't some 1,000 year storm.
Not according to this professor of meteorology:
>“We’re living through a really historic event going on right now,” said Jason Furtado, a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, pointing to all of Texas under a winter storm warning and the extent of the freezing temperatures.
>From what I understand the average low temperature in Texas around this time usually doesn't go below 30-35 degrees. Meanwhile the average high temperature around this time doesn't get above 20-35 degrees in Minnesota.
To demand every state spend the same resources that Minnesota does to winterize their infrastructure is completely unrealistic.
I don't recall saying every state, I said Texas. Because this type of weather happens on a somewhat regular basis.
>Not according to this professor of meteorology:
I guess finding a soundbite from one individual isn't very interesting to me. The entire state of Texas was told in a report in 2011 after a similar storm that they needed to winterize their power plants and chose not to. If by "historic" you mean "first time in 10 years" - I guess? I don't really consider that "historic".
>Ed Hirs, an energy fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, blamed the failures on the state’s deregulated power system, which doesn’t provide power generators with the returns needed to invest in maintaining and improving power plants.
The most bizarre part is people referring to this as a once in a century storm. It’s more like a once in a decade or 15 years storm, seeing as similar temperatures were seen in 2011 and 1989. Things that happen on that cadence shouldn’t result in people freezing for days in their homes.
Stop giving cover to politicians that think government always sucks and private business is always better?
I think that's true most of the time, but not when it comes to things like this. Preparing for a once in decades event is something private business has a hard time doing without getting eaten by more aggressive competitors. The only way to get this kind of preparedness is to have it be part of the level playing field (i.e. regulation/government).
That goes both ways. It seems like you can’t live in CA without shitting on the middle of the country despite the govt here being in worse shape generally.
Couldn't agree more. It's like "where can I vote for a political party that just wants government to work." I know that's kind of an amorphous statement, but I do feel like both sides are more interested in tribal warfare and ideological battles than functioning government. Republicans have long derided "government is the problem", until they find out citizens really want government to work when it comes to things like ensuring reliable power delivery or distributing vaccines during a pandemic. On the flip side, I feel like Democrats are so keen on social justice issues that they ignore policies most people actually want to keep in their cities, like a functioning police force and streets not covered in homeless encampments.
It's just so depressing that the extremes control more and more of the political discourse.
Nuclear is the cheapest, cleanest, safest form of electricity generation.
Do some research into who pushed FUD propaganda about Nuclear industry, (Big oil) and who paid off the shrill environmental FUD lobby, (Bug oil).
Nuclear power is used safely in aircraft carriers and submarines for decades. It's time to build more nuclear power and build the cleaner, safer, cheaper electrical energy future.
I get the sentiment but it’s just not useful to tell people not to heat their homes. Fly less. Go veg. Downsize. But asking people to freeze? You sound like a lunatic.
You could have a better insulated and much smaller home, but clearly this person has never lived in <30F weather, you obviously need to heat your home to have any modicum of comfort. Its unconformable if you are well prepared and healthy, life threatening otherwise to young, old and infirm.
A single cold snap is no more evidence for climate change than it is against global warming. The earth is huge, climate is chaotic and oscillatory with large variance, you need many data points over, at a minimum, decades (though centuries or millennia may be more appropriate) to determine with certainty that the climate is changing.
This cold snap is due to the polar vortex destabilizing and pushing arctic air down South. Normally the polar vortex stays stable and that arctic air oscillates at higher latitudes. But with warmer temperatures in the higher latitudes that stability has been disrupted and a large part of the vortex air has been pushed South.
The arctic is warming much faster that the rest of the planet, so these events will probably become much more common. Other sorts of extreme weather events are also going to become more common with climate change
Okay but we do have that. Nobody is saying that this is the entirety of the evidence, just that this could be the wakeup call where people realize it affects them personally and they should do something about it.
The reason this might be 'climate change' related is because the warming Arctic is impacting on the jet stream, which then leads to these unexpected hot/cold events:
No, it was prédictions of occasional extreme weather events. The prediction was that the impact of global warming on the poles would destabilize air circulation patterns and increase the frequency and magnitude of such weather events.
The destabilizing event which is the change in air circulation patterns related to the poles is here to stay.
Ha. I love how ‘global warming’ transmogrifies into ‘climate change’ to suit the argument.
Not everything is as big of a crisis as your Facebook posts make out.
A few days without power... big woop. The power goes down longer in most coastal cities every summer during hurricane season. Not to mention the usual outages of a day or two due to tornados and ordinary storms. And the cold? Who cares? Kids are playing in the snow, most everyone in my neighborhood had been grilling out, if it’s been a wake-up call for anything, it would be to maybe buy a quieter diesel generator.
Jesus H... can’t we have a winter storm any more without using it as grist for ideological arguments?
It will be 70f in a few more days. All this will be forgotten.
Climate change _is_ a result of global warming. It's not that complicated, so let me try and explain: climate patterns will change as the earth warms up. Jet streams change, hurricanes get more powerful and occur more frequently, etc.
As for "no big deal", I don't know what else to say other than 15 people have already died. When it's below freezing and people are without heat, they will freeze to death. Not to mention people who have medical equipment they need to stay alive that requires electricity.
Many areas see this temperate every year and they're prepared for it. It's not the same thing in Texas.
Give me a break. Actually, the whole reason for this series of outages is because Texas took the bait and installed a bunch of solar and wind instead of taking the safe route and doubling down on coal. Peak energy consumption in Texas is almost always in summer when there's a lot of AC units running -- which just happens to be when solar and wind work best. They gambled on green, paid the price in the past few days, and you're sitting here on the internet saying that they're a bunch of rednecks who don't understand science or climate change. Pretty rich.
This is a black swan event -- this is the coldest it's been in over 100 years.
edit: to be clear about what I'm claiming, I'm saying that if Texas invested in coal instead of making the large investments they made in solar and wind, this never would have happened. I don't see how anyone can dispute that. This is not the time to be gloating about green energy.
> This is a black swan event -- this is the coldest it's been in over 100 years.
While everyone else is taking you to the woodshed for the rest of the comment, I'd like to take a moment to address this, because I think it's a misunderstanding of the term and a misreading of the book.
The point of "Black Swans" was that an over-reliance on standard distributions derived from historical data generates predictions and confidence intervals that misrepresent the underlying phenomenon by assuming away "fat tails" and ignoring changing circumstances. If there's not some good reason why an event can't happen, any forecast or plan which precludes that event is necessarily flawed.
To describe this as a "black swan" event assumes nobody could've seen it coming, there was no reason to suspect it would happen, and it's unlikely to happen again. All of those are false. Every bit of climate forecasting over the last ~decades has pointed towards increased weather variability and increased likelihood of extreme weather events. Specific to this case, increasing the overall energy levels in the atmosphere increases the variability of the polar jet stream and increases the likelihood of polar vortex events like the one Texas is currently experiencing.
So, no, this wasn't a "black swan" event, this was a predictable - and predicted - outcome of climate change, which is a predictable outcome of burning as much coal and carbon-based fuels as we have over the last couple generations.
It's even worse than that, because it's not even that there's no historical data to draw from! It got just as cold as this back in December 1989, resulting in power shortages and rolling blackouts, because of increased demand and reduced generation capacity.
And then it happened again in February 2011, for almost exactly the same reasons, despite the weather not being quite as severe.
It got down to -1F in Dallas on December 23 1989. Houston saw 7F on the same day. Houston saw sub-freezing temps during December of 1985 (25F), 1989 (7F), 1983 (11F), 1979 (26F), and 1996 (21F), among others. And that's just December.
So yeah, it happens. Not often, but at least a half dozen times in living memory
I listed half a dozen times when it got well below freezing in Houston in December alone. Don't move the goal posts to snow, you said that freezing temps in Houston were unprecedented in the modern era, which is just simply not true.
> I said that it doesn’t get below freezing in Houston every year. Certainly not for days at a time.
Yeah, but you did not say that.
You said:
> It gets below freezing every year in Texas. But in the biggest city in Texas -- Houston, with a metro population of 7 million, it does not. This is unprecedented in the modern era.
If you want to change that to say "this is an unusually long and wide freeze across the entire state", or "this is an unprecedented power outage" that's arguably true. But you didn't actually say that, you said that freezing temps in Houston were unprecedented, which is objectively not true.
Heck, a long freeze knocking off the Texan power grid isn't even unprecedented in this century. A similar thing happened back in 2011[0].
> the whole reason for this series of outages is because Texas took the bait and installed a bunch of solar and wind instead of taking the safe route and doubling down on coal.
That’s an outright lie. The vast majority of the missing production is in fossil plants.
Wind only accounts for about 20% of nameplate capacity, and has been performing above expectations for the period. And that’s with Texan wind being as un-weatherised at the rest (hint: when wind turbines work just fine in Montana or Washington State, if they freeze over it’s not because they’re wind turbines).
How do you reconcile with the fact that at the worst wind only provided 0.7GW on 30GW installed. Don't you understand that people are going to blame wind because it only provided 2% of its total capacity. Also even taking into account the dangerously overestimated capacity they count on during winter peaking events for wind of 6.2GW it is way worse, only 11%. Comparatively gas is at worst at 50% of 56GW installed and nuclear at 75%.
…but the primary reason for the current outages is that fossil fuel plants failed. Wind power etc has also failed but is a rounding error in terms of lost production.
> if Texas invested in coal instead of making the large investments they made in solar and wind, this never would have happened.
If they invested that money in coal and failed to winterise it in the same way they failed to winterise the other plants then there would be absolutely zero difference.
This is kind of a meta point and probably sounds patronising, but you’ve just said a bunch of stuff that’s flat out wrong. It’s time to start questioning your information diet. Where are you being fed disinformation from? What can you do to diversify your sources of news?
> to be clear about what I'm claiming, I'm saying that if Texas invested in coal instead of making the large investments they made in solar and wind, this never would have happened. I don't see how anyone can dispute that.
If I remember the statistics correctly, there is more coal power offline right now than wind power offline. If that is true, that rather debunks your theory, doesn't it?
What I'm interested in, and what I'm talking about, is judging each method of power production from its total current output relative to nameplate capacity.
All I'm really arguing is that non-renewables are able to accommodate bursty and unpredictable demand much better than renewables. For every dollar spent on solar and wind, if that built X amount of coal or NG plants, they would have such an excess of capacity that the few plants that have gone offline would be completely irrelevant.
My point isn't that Texas shouldn't have invested in renewables. It's just that this is really not an appropriate time to be lecturing Texas about renewable energy, because had they invested their money in non-renewables instead of renewables, they would likely not be in this situation.
The problem is not a lack of regulation. It gets below freezing every single year in Texas. The problem is that it doesn't get this cold in Houston every year, and they misjudged demand.
As I understand the situation, the problem is that several coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants had to shut down because it was too cold. It's not that there isn't sufficient baseload capacity to deal with the demand, it's that the baseload capacity wasn't sufficiently winterized to handle the situation. Many wind farms were also insufficiently winterized to handle the extreme cold.
With the exception of natural gas (where some plants shut down to allow the pipeline capacity go to people who heat their homes with natural gas instead), the primary driver of the lack of capacity appears to be a failure to winterize for what is objectively a pretty rare situation, combined with an unwillingness to draw the power from those places where production isn't so heavily impacted by the weather.
> All I'm really arguing is that non-renewables are able to accommodate bursty and unpredictable demand much better than renewables.
You do realize that all of this is happening because a bunch of non-renewable power plants failed, right? You're making an argument that's literally countermanded by the exact situation we're discussing.
1) There are wind turbines in Antartica. There's nothing inherently bad about wind turbines in the cold.
2) This might be a black swan event, but we've seeing a lot of "once in a 100/500 year" weather events in the last decade. Which is exactly what climate scientists predicted would happen if we continued ignoring climate change.
3) and as everyone else said, the fossil fuel plants are also offline.
This is technically true, but kind of irrelevant to the big picture. Solar beat expectations, which is great until you realize how little it was expected to produce in the first place. Solar and wind do not scale to demand as well as non-renewables.
And look, I'm not saying that Texas should have invested in coal, I'm saying that it's tone deaf to admonish them for not embracing green energy when they did embrace green energy pretty strongly, and when their lack of capacity currently is mostly about their lack of production in renewables.
The core problem is that you can almost always burn more coal or NG and get more juice out of the coal and NG plants. But you can't make the wind go faster, and you can't make the sun shine brighter or longer. Had they invested in an abundance of non-renewables, people would not be freezing in their dark homes right now. It's not Texas fault, proponents of green energy need to have a better answer for this.
Isn’t the whole thing about climate change that it makes black swan events more likely (less black?)? It was well known that the most immediate effect would be weirder, stronger weather events.
No, it really is someone's fault this time. Texas has had these events occur multiple times in the past, and they had grid failures in almost the exact same way. This happened because the Texas legislature decided to put their head in the sand and avoid doing what was necessary to ensure that their grid, and subsequently their constituents, would be safe in these kind of storms.
We have great ways of storing electricity, it's just that they're only getting built right now, and they're getting cheaper so fast that waiting a few years will get you a 30%+ discount off the price.
There are currently 17GW of batteries in the ERCOT interconnection queue for the coming years, for a grid that's only ~80GW. The ERCOT of 2025 will be massively different from the ERCOT of 2021, and it's going to mean a lot less gas, a lot more storage, and a lot more solar.
Not for batteries since a battery that can deliver 17 GW for an hour is much smaller than one that can deliver 17 GW for a week. Usually grid connections are measured in power since you could use it at 100% indefinitely - not so with a battery , so hours matter.
Regardless, the interconnection absolutely does not care about the MWh of the battery. It has no concern, no care, no need to know. So when talking about interconnection queues, only the GW are reported.
As far as 17GW of battery, the only technology shipping at that scale is lithium ion, and all lithium ion grid batteries are designed for 30 minutes to 4 hours of duration at maximum discharge.
The idea of a week long battery is not a realistic one at this stage. With Texas' excellent solar resources, it may never need long-duration storage, whenever/if that tech gets developed.
So bringing up battery storage on an article about a blackout caused by a multi day storm might lead some people to believe that batteries would make a difference in this situation, when they wouldn't, regardless of the GW.
> we haven't figured out a good way to store electrical energy.
Before batteries solve all the problems in the grid, they get installed in smaller amounts. We are in the "smaller" amounts, even though small isn't that small actually. And even 17GW with 2 hours duration can help massively with congestion on transmission lines.
That's not really true. The grid has worked just fine for decades. We also do have "good" means of storing electrical energy, they're not as economical as just running at sufficient capacity and managing the grid properly.
Texas had blackouts due to extreme cold as recently as 2011. The findings from the investigation after that event were ignored and we are now seeing a repeat of it exactly 10 years later. It has not worked "just fine" for decades.
Should always include what's needed in the deployment and cost modeling, including whatever is needed so the South Texas nuclear plant doesn't have to shut off the reactor due to the extreme cold.
The problem here is not being prepared for the cold not the choice of energy production method.
Texas is so so so overwhelmingly single family homes. How do these folks not have generators? This is supposed to be independent rootin’ tootin’ Texas.
Would take one hell of a generator to heat a home, even then you'd need to get fuel to them - which is what many of the power plants are having trouble with.
The incompetence of the Texas ERCOT is mind blowing. A relative works in a semiconductor fab in the Austin area. Apparently the utility gave the fabs an entire hour of warning that their power was going to be shut off. These plants can't shut down properly in an hour.
The problem is simple really. Green energy can’t handle bad weather. Texas has made a huge green energy investment and fossil fuel energy sources have been on the decline since...2008. Atomic energy has also been demonized. While the article states that ‘Most of the power knocked offline came from thermal sources’ that is a number based on total wattage output, not total production sources, and those outages were caused not only by weather but by cascading failures related to wind sources. The article attempts to assert that the failures were due to lack of investment but truly the failures were caused by relying on wind energy that isn’t ready for prime time and will never be resilient enough in the face of dramatic weather events.
You'd probably be more comfortable if you left your house and went winter camping. Surprisingly, it's not that difficult to stay warm while winter camping, you just have to be doing something: cooking, eating, exploring, talking.
Learn neat skills like: keep your water in a cooler so it doesn't freeze; pee in a nalgene rather than go outside to pee, then keep the nalgene in your sleeping bag to retain heat; eating to stay warm; changing clothes to stay warm; covering your neck to stay warm; which clothes will actually keep you warm and which just look neat; what fabrics are best in winter; layering; what stoves work below freezing; how to stay positive ("hey, my toes still work!"); how to remove ice from your socks in the morning; how to keep icicles from forming in your tent; how to anchor a tent in a blizzard; how to find a tent in a blizzard; how to help your friend find his tent that blew away in a blizzard; how to pick snacks (two things that don't freeze hard: fat and alcohol); how to pick snacks so you don't need to poop often; staying hydrated and warm.
Not many people are talking about home solar but its a real problem. Its nice to have your own solar power and then use the grid only when you need it. However that means you need idle power plants and transmission 90% of the year just for those cold un-sunny days. If power prices are regulated its a mugs game.
I see bans on home solar coming. Maybe if you can disconnect from the grid with batteries it solves the problem too - but those people would be suffering right now.
If you downvote me please tell me what is wrong and if you have ideas on how to solve the problem.
I think the point that was trying to be made is that wide-spread deployment of residential solar isn't a panacea.
You still need to provide sufficient grid capacity to serve the customers when there is no sun. And you have to pay for that standby grid capacity whether you are using it or not. That isn't a problem when the residential solar is a tiny percentage of the customer base but it is a problem with wide-spread deployment.
The same problem exists at the grid-level as you ramp up grid-scale wind/solar -- that doesn't mean you can decommission the other generating capacity and so total cost of the grid goes up, not down.
You only have to shut off if you don't have the ability to disconnect yourself from the grid. Automatic switches are fairly expensive ($500-2k), so unless you also have battery storage, you generally opt out to save money.
People aren't talking about it because it's something like 0.2% of summer energy production in TX, a sunny state, so a very far off problem compared to pretty much any other power related issue or concern to solve for.
This whole episode also reminds us how far we are from going 100% renewable.
In winter all renewables are inhibited and at risk. Wind: frozen/disabled turbines. Water: low water levels, small hydro plants often have to shut down. Solar is obvious.
I'm not a fan of nuclear - externalities that last thousands of years are horrible. But until fusion arrives (if ever), nuclear and gas sadly are the baseline providers we have to rely on for the foreseeable future.
It is even weirder than you find it. When you read towards the end of the article, it says
"Most of the power knocked offline came from thermal sources, Woodfin said, particularly natural gas."
So natural gas and other thermal sources (i.e., coal and nuclear) created most of the problem.
Wind power is actually potentially a very good solution for occasional cold spells, because extreme colds usually comes with high winds. Of course you have to design your turbines not to freeze.
> Of course you have to design your turbines not to freeze.
While true (and I'm not saying you don't know this, more just pointing it out), wind works great in cold climates. We've done our homework on this one already.
It's not "weird", it's the result of deliberate enemy action. There's a propaganda machine running full-tilt as we speak to paint this as the fault of wind power, when wind was actually overproducing compared to ERCOT's models.
There are a number of countries with very high renewable usage that are in cold climates. Denmark comes to mind, where, on average, it's right around freezing for months at a time. Hell, they have turbines in the extremely corrosive oceans, getting blasted by freezing rain and they make it work.
Last I saw they got something like 50% of their power from wind.
Anyone who is using this event to say that renewables are a bad idea is selling a completely false narrative.
I’m definitely not saying renewables are a bad idea, but I think there are some flaws in your comparison. For one, the delta from 32F (right around freezing) to 65F (heated home temp) is much less than 0F to 65F. Second, I’d imagine that buildings in Denmark are designed for this kind of cold. Unlike Texas where many homes have much less insulation because it rarely gets this cold. Both of these issues would compound the energy demand issue Texas is seeing right now.
> For one, the delta from 32F (right around freezing) to 65F (heated home temp) is much less than 0F to 65F
Not sure what you're trying to say with this point, the average low of e.g. Dallas is 39F not 0F. I'm quite sure the record low in Denmark is going to be lower than the record low in Dallas if that's what you intended to compare instead.
The second issue is valid logic for why you need higher peak generation not why renewables can't supply it. Wind was overproducing estimates, the problem wasn't wind couldn't provide during the load period it was that the plants of all types weren't prepared to operate in the cold.
.
I think the main differences are:
- Denmark is part of a larger grid system instead of independent
- Denmark pays more for electricity
- Denmark prepares its equipment for extreme conditions
and I think these are all true for all power sources.
if you actually look at the data, this has nothing to do with renewables. Wind is actually producing more than expected at this time of year, while traditional sources (nuclear, natural gas, coal) are underproducing what they are expected by 40%. This is due partly to these plants operating outside of their designed temp tolerances, and partly due to a natural gas supply crises in texas.
The US as a whole is about ~11% [1], and Texas is ~25% [2]. Considering Texas makes up a decent chunk of the total US energy consumption, it's a bit more lopsided than it seems.
Apparently one of the nuclear turbines went offline because the turbine was exposed to the open air (for cooling during the summer) and some of the sensors triggered a shutoff of the turbine when they detected unexpected temperatures.
Another case where systems misbehave when they’re exposed to circumstances outside the expected range.
I think it's fair to say that their top two energy sources are natural gas and coal, although "mostly natural gas and nuclear" would also be fair, in its own way.
Renewable wasn't the issue. The renewables are outperforming what was expected. However, renewables are like 4% of the total energy generation. ERCOT lost about 40% of its total generation capacity.
Almost all of the ERCOT shortfall was loss of thermal generating capacity--mostly natural gas. The natural gas was shunted to heating because those contracts are fixed and higher priority (market failure). Also, some of the natural gas lines, wells, and pumping stations froze (planning failure).
ERCOT lost more than 35% of its natural gas generating capacity. This was everybody cutting corners and finally getting burned.
Even on cloudy days my small solar on my roof generates enough power for my house. Large solar farms sure have reduced production but they're not as useless as you'd think.
What a horrible article. First, Texas has its own independent grid as a matter of physics. Electricty travels at the speed of light so a continuous grid from coast to coast would get out of sync on phases just by travel distance. Texas just happens to be physically in the middle and large enough to have trouble by being supplied by either east or west grid. Second, ERCOT manages when utilizes can take assets out of commission to do maintenance. Texas peak demand is in the summer so if you have to take a power plant off line you do it in the winter. So there are a lot of utility assets under maintenance outages right now. One top of that reduced capacity, not all equipment is prepared for ice storms because it doesn't really happen here. Several gas pipelines in the state are having freezing issues causing the gas price to spike. ERCOT controls rates so if gas prices spike and utilities are forced to sell power for less than it costs to make, they would rather shut down and did until ERCOT stepped back in and let them charge real rates. People on variable rate power contracts are now basically screwed this month. And finally, the wind farms are not handling the ice well. Somee have frozen or iced up enough to be out of commission and the rest are operating at severely reduced capacity. So basically a varatiy of these went wrong and everything will be back to normal in a few days, but ERCOT has some work to do to make sure this doesn't happen again.
Just about every sentence in your comment is wrong:
> First, Texas has its own independent grid as a matter of physics.
Except that every state directly north of Texas is either on the East or West interconnects. ERCOT having its own grid is solely a matter of political desire.
> One top of that reduced capacity, not all equipment is prepared for ice storms because it doesn't really happen here.
Except a very similar event happened in 2011, and a specific set of recommendations were made by FERC to winterize power producers, and the recommendations were promptly ignored. Better discussion on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/ll2slh/texas_failed...
> And finally, the wind farms are not handling the ice well
Why do you say that? Texas has had its own grid basically forever. There are, and have been, some small connections to the other grids, but nothing that substantial.
To your first point, it's not about supply, it's about borrowing during periods of scarcity. There are plenty of wholesale markets that are "in the middle". Texas simply chose to not be apart of it.
How many of the 24+6 recommendations from the NERC/FERC review of last time this happened in Texas (hint:2011) were taken up by the legislature or those at ERCOT they delegated responsibility to or the power generation providers?
https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/ColdWeatherTrainingMaterials/...
The eye opener to me from skimming the 2011 recommendations is that there was no explicit rating/SLA for a power plant's acceptable temperature operating that could be used by planners for assessing the risks of an upcoming weather event by policy planners. It'd seem pretty basic to be able to ask "How many plants do we lose when temperature drops below X"? Dunno whether they fixed trying to create such a basic measurement for Texas plants, but it doesn't seem like it.
If you want to know some of the specifics about what "winterization" means in practice for a power plant including natural gas ones, you can read some of the details in that report. It's kinda interesting.