Texas Was 'Seconds and Minutes' Away From Catastrophic Monthslong Blackouts, Officials Say (texastribune.org) 384
Texas' power grid was "seconds and minutes" away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said yesterday. Texas Tribune reports: As millions of customers throughout the state begin to have power restored after days of massive blackouts, officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which operates the power grid that covers most of the state, said Texas was dangerously close to a worst-case scenario: uncontrolled blackouts across the state. The quick decision that grid operators made in the early hours of Monday morning to begin what was intended to be rolling blackouts -- but lasted days for millions of Texans -- occurred because operators were seeing warning signs that massive amounts of energy supply was dropping off the grid. As natural gas fired plants, utility scale wind power and coal plants tripped offline due to the extreme cold brought by the winter storm, the amount of power supplied to the grid to be distributed across the state fell rapidly. At the same time, demand was increasing as consumers and businesses turned up the heat and stayed inside to avoid the weather.
"It needed to be addressed immediately," said Bill Magness, president of ERCOT. "It was seconds and minutes [from possible failure] given the amount of generation that was coming off the system." Grid operators had to act quickly to cut the amount of power distributed, Magness said, because if they had waited, "then what happens in that next minute might be that three more [power generation] units come offline, and then you're sunk." Magness said on Wednesday that if operators had not acted in that moment, the state could have suffered blackouts that "could have occurred for months," and left Texas in an "indeterminately long" crisis. While generators rapidly dropped off the grid as the weather worsened, operators monitored the difference between the supply of power on the grid and the demand for that power. As supply dwindled and demand grew, the margin narrowed to more and more dangerous levels, forcing grid operators to enact emergency protocols to either increase supply or decrease demand. Further reading: Texas Leaders Ignored Warnings A Decade Ago That Their Power Supply Was In Danger
"It needed to be addressed immediately," said Bill Magness, president of ERCOT. "It was seconds and minutes [from possible failure] given the amount of generation that was coming off the system." Grid operators had to act quickly to cut the amount of power distributed, Magness said, because if they had waited, "then what happens in that next minute might be that three more [power generation] units come offline, and then you're sunk." Magness said on Wednesday that if operators had not acted in that moment, the state could have suffered blackouts that "could have occurred for months," and left Texas in an "indeterminately long" crisis. While generators rapidly dropped off the grid as the weather worsened, operators monitored the difference between the supply of power on the grid and the demand for that power. As supply dwindled and demand grew, the margin narrowed to more and more dangerous levels, forcing grid operators to enact emergency protocols to either increase supply or decrease demand. Further reading: Texas Leaders Ignored Warnings A Decade Ago That Their Power Supply Was In Danger
Um, thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
ERCOT:
We heroically averted the crisis that we created!
Congratulate us!
Re: Um, thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Um, thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Havent you been paying attention for the past 200. years ?
Didnt the American civil war teach you anything ?
Re: Um, thanks (Score:4, Informative)
There is nothing wrong with deregulation except you need a strong energy regulator who enforces minimum standards on the system operator and generators, this way liability can be enforced for anyone not meeting their connection conditions.
ERCOT should have a system quality and supply standards (SCSS) and manage the grid to that standard. An example is ROCOF requirements (rate of change of frequency), if you are approaching the limit such as in an event like this, they should begin scaling back generators and bringing additional generators online if possible. That way when you have a large frequency swing your automatic load shedding kicks in, plus the generators that are still running can use their limited frequency mode settings (LFSM) to ramp up and meet the difference. All of these things require a competent system operator however.
Re: Um, thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me help you here.
There is nothing wrong with deregulation except that you need regulation, so the first phrase in this sentence is ideological BS.
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"Deregulation does not mean no regulation."
Just like defunding the police does not mean no police.
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the english language eludes you. .. ..
This means that your entire argument, neigh even your entire
So Skitt's law prevails over mere mortals once again.
Re: Um, thanks (Score:5, Funny)
There is nothing wrong with deregulation except you need a strong energy regulator
o_O?
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Regulators are *defined* as public sector entities empowered by the state to enforce regulations. Private sector regulation is just voluntary agreements to abide by a code of practice, and has no force.
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How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?
Re: Um, thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Socialism (Score:3)
Texans not only flirt with socialism, they fuck on the first date. You just have to call it things like "farm subsidies".
I would not equate farm subsidies with socialism. Socialism at its heart is about trying to help the poorest individuals in society, and implementing policies that improve the lives of all citizens instead of favouring the rich.
Given that modern farming is done at industrial scale, the notion of "farm subsidies" is more akin to "corporate bailout" than to socialism.
Re: Um, thanks (Score:4, Informative)
Since the late 1990s California has had a deregulated energy market (electricity and gas) [energywatch-inc.com]. This led to the famous entirely artificial Enron led electricity crisis in 2001 when the free marketers created artificial shortages to drive up prices and create a free money machine. After that the market was not greatly reregulated, the privately owned production and energy market trading systems was retained, though reforms were introduced to prohibit gaming the system. The deregulated private market for power in California was engineered (in the political sense) by Libertarian Steve Peace under Republican Governor Pete Wilson in 1996. Some level of regulation exists in all electricity systems, including Texas.
So California actually has some of the same problem, on a much reduced scale, as Texas in that private operators (CAISO -- California Independent System Operators) have made poor decisions that impact the overall system. What actually tripped off the black-outs was, in the tight supply situation, the failure of the CAISO day-ahead market trading system to line up the power import contracts needed for the next day. Market price signalling was supposed to cause this to happen automagically, but didn't. None of the black-outs had to happen if adequate power imports had been scheduled. Unlike Texas, California is connected to a national grid and can get power from outside when needed.
Re: Um, thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
Heavily regulated utilities, extreme heat and extreme cold and we almost never have rolling blackouts.
The last major incident was the ice storm of 1998 which took out power in parts of Quebec and New Brunswick by toppling transmission and distribution lines.
Major improvements to the network were implemented as a result.
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Subsidies on wind, and to a lesser extent solar, led them to reduce reliable base load sources and replace them with wind.
Nope. Didn't happen. They didn't reduce base load sources (much; about 4 GW of coal was retired about three years back). They mainly reduced the usage of base load sources. There wasn't a sudden tearing down of a huge number of fossil-fuel-based power plants, and power consumption hasn't grown so much that they couldn't run the state almost entirely on fossil fuels if they needed to; in fact, that was the plan for this time of year.
That works great with normal demand and normal wind; but when the demand spikes due to low temperatures and wind power stops due to cold and lack of wind the entire grid fails.
Except that's not what happened. Wind power didn't fail. It was reduce
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"seconds and minutes" away
What sort of English is that?
"Seconds away from...."? Ok.
"Minutes away from...."? Ok.
"Seconds and winutes away from...."? Only a PHB would say that.
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Damn those typos. Damn them to hell.
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Re:Um, thanks (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. Their short-term push to maximize profits ultimately led to dozens of people freezing to death and untold millions of dollars in property damage.
Re: WEASEL WORDS (Score:5, Insightful)
No, he's pointing out that you're blathering about a theoretical issue in an attempt to distract attention from millions of Texans who are cold, hungry and have no safe water to drink, in the pathetic hope that no-one will notice that this was a direct result of idiotic right-wing policy decisions taken by Texas GOP politicians with the connivance of national GOP politicians and at the behest of power companies.
3rd world (Score:5, Interesting)
The more I see, the more news, the more the US is presented as a third-world nation.
- State-wide power outtages. A general inability to manage the power grid.
- Hacker getting into water supply, setting chemical levels to toxic levels (fixed by operator)
- Worst health crisis of any(?) country
- Utterly corrupt leaders, every time
- No, or terrible, public transit
- Isolationism
I don't know. Those are just off the top of my head.
well now trump, rush limbaugh, etc are gone (Score:2, Troll)
well now trump, rush limbaugh, etc are gone the USA can go back to being not so for profit.
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House Representatives earn $174k just from that job. Maybe you don't think that's enough to make ends meet without being forced into corruption but the rest of the planet is very certain that it is.
Re:3rd world (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget our terrible for-profit healthcare system, even when we weren't in the middle of a global pandemic.
Shitty broadband speeds and telecom monopolies.
Crumbling roads.
Stagnant wages.
America may not be a 3rd world country by the literal definition, but we're not far off.
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Re:3rd world (Score:5, Interesting)
I've lived in both the US and Iceland (several states in the US, including Texas), and I have to say, power reliability in the US is a joke. How can you be this bad at it? Multiple outages every year, accepted as just something that happens. We get pounded with one extratropical cyclone after the next all winter, some with gusts up to cat-5 strength, all sorts of icing conditions, etc, and the grid is almost always rock solid - at least here in Reykjavík (some of the countryside towns have occasional outages, but not with the frequency in the US). I can't remember the last time I had an outage in Reykjavík. And it's not like our power is generated in-town; it's transmitted over great distances, through very rough, unstable volcanic terrain.
I think the US's issue is a combination of (A) neglected infrastructure, and (B) aboveground local distribution. Our long-distance transmission is aboveground, but we bury local distribution to keep it safe from the weather.
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Overhead distribution itself is not less reliable, although when lines are placed on wood poles by major roads without a traffic buffer they are subject to accidents. I have lived in cities with 100% underground power lines and ~100% overhead and the frequency of outages is similar.
What dictates reliability is age, maintenance, and design load vs maximum load. US utilities generally size services at about 80% (nameplate) of peak load, and rely on overload capacity to handle the delta— which is genera
Re: 3rd world (Score:3)
This. I live in Switzerland, and we did have a power outage last year. For about 10 minutes. I cannot remember when the previous one was - years and years ago.
Y'all need to stop arguing about politics, and actually fix your country. Step one: stop the progressive "woke" crap and educate your kids. [breitbart.com] Then maybe the next generation can fix your infrastructure.
It will be all right. (Score:2, Interesting)
Texas will be saved by all the hot air from the politicians and think tanks spouting: "small government", "keep the feds away from our grid" and "be self-reliant" tropes.
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I wonder if this was a bellwether event though. Now that the freezing weather will be blown past in the next day or so, many will be spending a lot of money to handle broken pipes, recover their businesses, write their stories, and get over the shock of what happened. Even though the Texas former governor mentioned that it is better to be without power than to have power under a socialist system, not many are buying that. Even a Texas Mayor, Tim Boyd, was punted out of office when even the most conservat
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I wonder if this was a bellwether event though.
No. This same thing happened 10 years ago and we've seen how much change took place since then.
As former governor Rick Perry said, Texans would rather freeze than have to follow federal government regulations. And he got his wish [newsweek.com].
Profitability (Score:5, Interesting)
The real problem is that it hits dispropotionately (Score:2)
All you really have to do is spread the blackouts in districts that you don't need to win elections. Easy peasy when the governor gets to appoint the heads of the quasi private/public 501c that oversees everything (ERCOT).
Re:The real problem is that it hits dispropotionat (Score:5, Informative)
You just pulled all that out of your ass. Wealthy neighborhoods were subject to blackouts just like everyone else, and whole blocks in poor neighborhoods stayed lit and warm the entire time.
Unlike you, I was there ( I still am ), and I experienced it myself.
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I can confirm this. I have a sister in a well-off neighborhood in Texas and they've had rolling blackouts.
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The funny thing is that the costs are likely not that much. Most places in the world have pipelines, coal plants, etc., all running without issue even in very cold temperatures. This is definitely a solved problem. There are rules for 100 year floods, it makes sense to have rules for 100 year freezes.
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Bonuses all round if they build a small proportion of the infrastructure to withstand this type of weather, while a significant proportion goes offline. Price spikes are amazing, if you can sell small amounts of electricity into the pool when the prices are 100x normal prices.
The same people manging these plants learned from Enron: cause a shortage and profit from the price spike.
Re:Profitability (Score:5, Informative)
I can assure you, you can. Previous summer we had a 37 C (100 F) heat wave and just last week we had a -15 C (5 F) week of winter weather in the Netherlands. Never was there any doubt about Electric grid reliability.
Re: Profitability (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not sure why the "but", you are strengthening the GP post. It seems that the biggest issues with Texas were with natural gas power plants and the Netherlands rely mainly on gas. And Texas power plants were even warned in 2011 when the same thing happened in smaller scale. It's definitely easy to make them both summer and winter proof, the factory owners just don't consider it cost effective as they are not penalized in any way when they fail to deliver every 10 years or so...
Re: Profitability (Score:5, Insightful)
Texas is 25% reliant on renewables in winter. Because it was heavily subsidized by federal government and a good PR tool, it was âoecheaperâ than the natural gas they were sitting on.
When all the renewables shut down, they suddenly had to start old plants back up, by then, the steam pipes were frozen, because they werenâ(TM)t producing steam at the time. Other plants simply didnâ(TM)t have the personnel to start up again and they couldnâ(TM)t get people in place because of road conditions. Note that only 1 nuclear reactor (not a whole plant) went down over a sensor malfunction, which was only 2.6GW. Missing wind accounted for 30GW. Missing solar was another problem.
Sorry no, this is just wrong. It's a false narrative that Abbott and Dan Patrick in particular were trying to push, and it's bullshit.
Missing wind accounted for 16GW [texastribune.org] while thermal sources accounted for over 30GW. Also ERCOT estimated that wind would provide 20% of winter power, and Texas was not "reliant" on it. Texas is reliant on natural gas. 52% of its total power (in any season) comes from natural gas alone. And the gas lines weren't ready [texastribune.org]. Also in that same article, it notes that only about 4GW worth of power was offline before the storm (mostly due to planned maintenance), and the rest was lost during it. So no, this was also not a case of "they suddenly had to start old plants back up", that's just complete BS.
We had 46-48GW of active generation capacity lost. 30GW worth of operating thermal plants (not ones that failed to start), and 16-18GW of wind, and we had nothing to back it up with because only about 4GW was already offline to begin with. And thus, blackouts, because the total power demand far exceeded the available generation capacity.
And really, the primary culprit in all of this is the Texas leadership (i.e., the GOP). They have been warned, and warned, and warned that Texas needs to winterize its equipment, because while the scale of 2021 is extreme, it is not unprecedented. Texas is fucking famous for its ice storms. We had a small-scale plant loss in 2018 due to winter storm. We had large-scale losses in 2011. We had winter storms in 2008, 2006, 2002, 1996, 1993. We had a massive loss in 1989 that directly competes with 2021 for both scale of the winter storm/record low temps, and the scale of power capacity lost. We had storms in 1983, 1981.. seeing the pattern here? There was even a big kerfuffle and postmortem commission after 2011, and it concluded as it always does: winterize your shit, Texas. And the Texas leadership ignored it yet again [texastribune.org].
Wind, gas, solar, fucking magic beams from space, in the end it doesn't matter what source was lost. They can all be prepped for winter weather, but Texas has failed to do it because of a leadership that won't mandate it. Because it'd cut into profits. And now people are dead.
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And if the Midwest got hit with 100 degree heat like Houston in the summer their grid would collapse too. You cant build for all extremes possible.
The midwest gets temperatures over 100 and below 0 annually. This is not difficult to survive. It just takes preparation. These issues have been solved for a long time.
Blackout for Months. (Score:5, Interesting)
Can anyone shed light on how this could have resulted in blackouts for months? I mean this wasn't like Fukushima where you needed emergency generators to pump water to an atomic pile.
'if operators had not acted in that moment, the state could have suffered blackouts that "could have occurred for months,"'
Sounds like someone is trying to find a way to create a new narrative where the grid operators are the heroes in this story. Maybe the post-truth era is still a thing in Texas.
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I'm informed by a person who works at a different nuclear power plant in Texas that the coolant intake never actually froze up, it was a false sensor reading. I suspect (though have no evidence) that it might have been a dead leg sensor, where the sensor doesn't lie in the main flow but in a little dead-end branching path off of it. That would be much more vulnerable to freezing.
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You never want your sensors to lie.
Re:Blackout for Months. (Score:5, Informative)
I've not doubt they are stroking their own ego to look like heroes and shift blame, but there is probably some truth to what they say. Even in the best case scenario, restarting an electric grid from scratch is hard: plants need to be frequency synchronized, not all generators can cold-start with no external energy source, etc. But worse is the root problem: Texas plants were being damaged by the cold weather. A generator shuts down, it stops producing heat, and cold weather damage gets much worse. It might have gone from some natural gas plants failing to most of them failing. After that, it's months (or years) of repairs before the grid gets fully back online again.
NE USA blackout several days (Score:2)
Some 20 years ago there was a huge blackout in the NE USA that lasted several days. A tree had it a high tension power line.
So what? you might think. Some area will go black for a few hours while they remove the offending tree.
But it took them several days to get the power back on line. The reason was never clear to me. But I suspect really archaic control systems that prevented them from just bringing things back bit by bit and quickly.
So there are problems beyond Texas.
Anyway, the good news is that wi
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Synchronizing is necessary but not that hard. Modern plants can do it automatically. In the old days, farmers would synchronize a pair of generators using 2 light bulbs in series connected between the hot lines of the generators, then tweak the throttles until the bulbs were steady off.
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I've not doubt they are stroking their own ego to look like heroes and shift blame, but there is probably some truth to what they say.
You have to distinguish the people managing the grid in real time in the control room. They are probably competent and did the best they could given the circumstances. And then you have the C-level executives "managing" the grid by deciding how much should be invested in maintenance and weatherization, and those did a poor job. Now the latter are trying to attribute all the heroics of the former to themselves.
Re:Blackout for Months. (Score:5, Interesting)
When the grid goes down, a "Black Start" is required to get things going again. This is tricky, but can be done. If transformers experience overcurrent and fail, they can take YEARS to replace, but most have sufficient protection to prevent that from happening.
You've no doubt seen what happens when pipes freeze in a house? Imagine this happening in a generating station with pipes more than a foot across everywhere.
Electrical generators aren't allowed to stop turning, they have a "bull gear" to keep them turning, so they don't sag and bend, which would lead to vibration and potentially self destruction once they are turned on.
There are a huge amount of things that have to work just right in order for power to be generated safely and profitably... a few days of freezing could break things that make that impossible.
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What I find surprising is that a nuclear plant can't black start itself. Even in full scram, there is likely enough heat being produced which could muster enough energy to get the cooling system and other critical things back online.
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Interestingly, the original objective at Chernobyl was an experiment to see if the residual energy in the system would be sufficient to shut the plant down in an orderly manner should it have to scram without grid support.
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What I find surprising is that a nuclear plant can't black start itself. Even in full scram, there is likely enough heat being produced which could muster enough energy to get the cooling system and other critical things back online.
I'm afraid that no, they cannot black-start themselves. The power you could extract, even if there was some way to do it, from the core when shut down, isn't enough to run the cooling systems let alone all the ancillary equipment required to run the core at higher power (and raise it to higher power. Once running a nuclear plant can power itself, but they can't self-start. It takes around 50-100MW of power to run all the gear in a nuclear power station, and most of that is needed before you get any power ou
Re:Blackout for Months. (Score:5, Interesting)
25 years ago I toured the Union Electric plant in Keokuk, Iowa, one of the oldest hydro plants in the US. At the time they still transmitted DC power to a lead smelter north of St. Louis.
The tour was great because I was the only one on it and the tour guide was more or less just a plant guy. I got to go inside one of the spinning turbines and a bunch of other places I never expected. The water was high at the time or he said we could have walked out on the service walkway on the dam itself.
He also showed me this hand crank about the size of a bicycle wheel, attached to a little generator. He said this was the "manual start" for the whole plant. I guess the generators used electromagnets, and the hand crank generator could excite a field for one turbine, and then that turbine would be used to excite the fields for the rest of them.
Re:Blackout for Months. (Score:4, Informative)
It's surprising how much power is used by a nuclear plant's systems. The status page [edfenergy.com] for the UK's nuclear fleet gives some indications.
In summary, a planned shutdown (i.e. minimum requirement for a reactor) is about 14-16MW, and unplanned shutdowns (e.g. some types of trip) can have consumptions up to 30-40MW. I'd be suprised if this can be generated on-site without dedicated generators - something that would be uneconomical for all plants to have, even in a more heavily regulated system like the UK's.
Re:Blackout for Months. (Score:5, Informative)
It's in the article, part way down:
"The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down."
"If the grid had gone totally offline, the physical damage to power infrastructure from overwhelming the grid could have taken months to repair..."
If you have a grid of electricity lines and a lot of supply, especially supply in one place, goes offline then the grid may not be able to carry power from the remaining supply to all consumers. If any major transmission lines trip off then lesser transmission lines can easily become overloaded - there has been more than one cascading grid failure in the world because of this.
If these overloads, or misbalanced loads, burned out any major switchgear or transformers then it would take months to replace them. The major components of large electricity substations and switching yards are made to order with long (months) lead times. A Congressional Report Service publication "Physical Security of the U.S. Power Grid: High-Voltage Transformer Substations" describes how they are custom-made and have long lead times: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/homese... [fas.org] If an HV transformer substation is damaged for any reason, it takes the same time to replace.
Restoring large power lines damaged by anything, including overload, also takes time. It took many weeks to replace - not repair, much of them had to be replaced - the electricity transmission lines from Quebec to the US North-East after the 1998 ice storm. While the storm in Texas did not seriously damage power lines, had there been widespread by overloading (due to unbalanced grid supply and demand) then it would also have taken weeks to rebuild them.
Major electricity plants have rotating parts, turbines and generators with complex magnetic fields that are only built to operate at certain frequencies (and therefore rotational speed). Overload causes overcurrent in the generator windings and problems with back-EMF as the generator slows down. If you burn out a power station generator, it takes months to get another one.
The danger is real.
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"Same goes for America when theres a war, where was america in WW1 and WW2 for the first half ?"
Profiting from selling supplies to both sides. Well, in WWII anyway. I haven't studied WWI enough to say that about that war.
Are they short of black start capability? (Score:4, Interesting)
What do they have that can startup from nothing? As in no excitation power?
The fine article was sort of doomsday oriented, if voltage drops too far the breakers are supposed to open before equipment is damaged. But restarting a completely dead grid is an issue.
The boat had a battery sized to restart a shutdown and cold reactor. Hydro dams have a generator that can start first without power. Then you can bring up the rest when you have something to synchronize to. What does Texas have?
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The have a lot of wind and natural gas, which I imagine can both cold start.
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Its not self protecting? (Score:2)
Re:Its not self protecting? (Score:5, Interesting)
Are our electrical grids that easy to damage?
You sure you want to hear the answer to that question? ;)
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They're not that easy to bring online, especially if the heat goes out and the pipes freeze and burst. Even without that, it takes power to start a generator, actually they're alternators and it can be tricky synchronizing the frequency as they come back online.
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very strange that overloads would cause widespread physical damage
A rapid enough change in load above supply
can occur faster than protection devices can react (Especially circuit-breakers or mechanical
switches which are slow) is bound to cause minor damage in some cases - result to further reduce supply which can then spiral.
Minor issues cannot necessarily be repaired instantly and might take weeks - for example certain expensive high amp value fuses or other electrical components (the protection
Re:Its not self protecting? (Score:5, Insightful)
They are in Texas, with insufficient winterization and insufficient interconnections to other grids that might have kept the lights on.
All because they hate Federal regulation, apparently. Probably because that regulation would have prevented the massive profiteering that has been going on in Texas. Can't let ordinary people's lives and livelihoods get in the way of big corporations' profits. The sad part about that last statement is that it's not sarcastic: Texas politicians have openly expressed that sentiment.
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You're trying to tell us that in all that open space they couldn't find anywhere where they could run a few high tension lines to connect to neighboring states?
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Ach, you are just a little full of it. Look at the map. Texas is isolated from 'The Grid', because there isn't anything much around it to connect to. This is a physical engineering reality that they have to deal with - as opposed to the political windbags looking for sound bites about 'The Feds'.
Nope, sorry. Texas is isolated entirely by choice [texastribune.org], and yes, it has everything to do with avoiding federal regulation.
Aside from that, the majority of Texas' population is along the eastern edge (DFW, Austin, Houston, San Antonio), which is also close to the population centers of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. There is in fact plenty for it to connect to. Indeed, it actually has those connections already; they just don't like to talk about them. They are DC ties with limited capacity. Why DC? Aga
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Hold On.... (Score:5, Informative)
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You're right now that you mention it. Guess it was really those dirty Californians who broke the grid! Don't California my Texas!
Re:Hold On.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I am guessing that right now, there is some serious remorse amongst the movers and some serious reconsideration amongst the planning to move.
Texas in the grid (Score:2)
Texas should have been able to source power from other areas of the country, right — it's a "grid", right? Well, that turns out not to be the case, because... Texas. There are three grids in the U.S.: the Western Interconnection, the Eastern Interconnection, and (yes, I set this up for you... wait for it...) the Texas Interconnection. Texas decided it was just fine to be its own grid, thankyouverymuch. And here we are. Quick reference: https://www.eia.gov/energyexpl... [eia.gov]
Russians, Chinese (Score:2)
The Texas grid failure was a good thing. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: The Texas grid failure was a good thing. (Score:3)
Those are believers.
If you show believers proof that they can't just outright ignore, they will only double down and find more arguments to fortify their delusions. Until it's too late.
Which is exactly why believing is a mental illness.
Grid blackout (Score:4, Informative)
TFS says the same nothing four damn times! (Score:2)
WHY would that cause a something that causes months long blackouts. And WHAT exscrly would cause a blackout to last longer than "until we switch power back on"?
Also: First word country ... my ass. ^^
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Middle class, low density neighborhoods that cannot exist without subsidies from poor [strongtowns.org] and wealthy ones? Those neighborhoods?
Maybe this will finally teach them a lesson to stop opposing density.
Did I say suburb? (Score:2)
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Sometimes that isn't a bad thing. I remember how Iceland had economic woes after all the bankers left. However, soon after that, Iceland's economy righted itself. Having all the celebrities and such head for the hills brings long term good to a region overall, once the shock of them leaving is over.
Detroit is getting better. It has one thing that most of Texas and California doesn't have... and that is water.
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Re: What saved them? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I wish V2G could be a thing. However, we can't even get a single standard for the EV chargers here in the US, so we have to have multiple sets of chargers. V2G? Wishful thinking, especially because most of urban areas tend to have apartments whose management will not bother with chargers, or if they do, will tack on $500/month + energy usage... just because they can.
What might be ideal would be vehicles that had some type of IC engine that had no part of the drivetrain, but just did their part to charge
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Exactly. BMW has this in some of their EVs, called a range extender. Mazda is working on a revision of the rotary engine just for this purpose as well, and Ford is working on a range extender for the F-150 EV, which takes up bed space, but adds distance.
In theory, you could toss an Onan generator with a fuel supply and have the output voltage converted to what the battery bank can use, but it wouldn't be as effective as engineering the generator with the battery bank.
That's a rich people problem. (Score:3)
Though Teslas can run small inverters to power lighting and run tools and charge other batteries. They can store genset power nicely permitting more efficient intermittent operation.
Driving isn't an issue when vehicles are mostly parked, but any BEV can at least run a small inverter to power lights etc and charge power packs etc which make it comparable to typical ICE vehicles (I run inverters off my ICE trucks to power corded tools and charge cordless too batteries and there's a whole industry devoted to m
Re:What saved them? (Score:5, Informative)
I recommend checking out Texas Tesla user groups.
1) The situation has been precisely the opposite of what the general public imagines. The public imagines, "Oh no, my car is dead!". The reality is that people charge their cars when the power is up if needed (little is usually needed, as you can get days to over a week of usage out of them, depending on what you're doing), and then use them as lifeboats when the power goes down - keeping warm, charging their devices, using entertainment, etc. Most peoples' cars spend their time at nearly full capacity; I've not heard from a single person who's had even the remotest bit of trouble doing anything they wanted. Meanwhile, there have been carbon monoxide deaths from people trying to do the same thing with ICE cars (using them as lifeboats).
I've seen the exact same thing from users' groups in the aftermath of hurricanes and the like. It's the ICE vehicle owners that struggle with gas shortages and huge lines and having to shut off their car to avoid burning power idling and the like. The EV owners rarely ever seem to have problems. Many hundred kilometers range is a lot; EV owners start each day with a nearly-"full tank"; and essentially never is there no power, ever, at any time of day, within hundreds of kilometers.
2) Most gas stations in Texas do not have backup power. The pumps go down when there is no power.
3) Very few people are Supercharging, because few people are doing long-distance travel in these conditions. Which is usually the scenario in the aftermath of a disaster. Even at normal times, Supercharging represents only a small fraction of total charging; the vast majority of charging is slow charging.
4) Slow charging improves grid reliability; it's a steady, predictable load, most often timed during periods of low demands. DC fast charging (again, the minority) does reduce grid reliability by creating spontaneous high-power loads, but this can be eliminated with a powerpack buffer between the chargers and the grid to average out loads and make them predictable. Even without a buffer, the larger the station, the more predictable the load; more frequent arrivals and departures averages out the spikes, in percentage terms.
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On the other hand, a guy who makes niche tech videos under the moniker "the 8-Bit guy" found himself in the unenviable position of having a plug-in hybrid-electric car that had almost no fuel in the tank because he doesn't keep fuel in the tank for fear of it going bad and was low on charge.
So pretty much all states of readiness and preparedness can be found across users of techology of all kinds.
I happen to have a 5 gallon NATO-type fuel can full of gasoline, fuel that must be regularly changed-out so that
Re:What saved them? (Score:5, Insightful)
PHEVs are often presented as a "best of both worlds" scenario, but in practice they often work out to be a worst-of-both-worlds scenario. E.g. in your above "no fuel and power out" scenario, PHEV batteries are far smaller than BEV batteries, so you'll run out far sooner.
PHEVs have more maintenance; they stress their batteries more, so you have to use more expensive, less energy dense chemistries with shallower cycles; you pay for two separate powertrains; you still have a large, heavy, incompressible object in the front in a crash that can be pushed into the passenger cabin and raises your CoG; in terms of fire risk you now have both batteries *and* liquid fuel; etc. I'm just not fond of them as a solution. Also, in Europe they've been used in the form of regulations / credits cheats, where they sell PHEVs with tiny packs that according to studies only powers a minority of driving for the average buyers (and none for many buyers), so manufacturers or buyers can get credits or get free / cheap parking, entrance to low-emissions zones, etc. The EU is starting to have a backlash against this.
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Yep, I own a PHEV. Used to love it. Now, not so much. The low battery capacity makes it crappy as an EV, and you still have all the downsides of the ICE...except it doesn't run as regularly as a gas or regular hybrid, so it causes even more problems with things like gas going bad.
Re: What saved them? (Score:3)
The lighter compounds in gasoline evaporate.