[HN Gopher] Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
___________________________________________________________________
Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid
Author : tomrod
Score : 298 points
Date : 2021-02-15 01:05 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ercot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ercot.com)
| ranieuwe wrote:
| And Ercot [1] "has declared an EEA 1. Energy conservation is
| needed. There are no rotating outages at this time. 00:17:45
| 150221"
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO/status/1361197991659503618
| WookieRushing wrote:
| It's now EEA 2
| gonzo wrote:
| It took 15 minutes to go from 2 to 3
| bombcar wrote:
| There is no EEA 4 and reserves are down to 318 MW.
| bombcar wrote:
| Reserves are now negative 100MW.
| foxhop wrote:
| I love my incandescent bulbs. It is a threat to remove them. The
| heat they produce is amazing in the winter. I use a 100 watt bulb
| to keep me warm at my desk. Heat bodies not buildings.
|
| I've been practicing this since a child and I'm 36 now.
|
| To heat yourself, check out: https://youtu.be/3gjvOOlHmsU
|
| For actual good LED lamps (not the crap they push in USA) check
| out: https://youtu.be/klaJqofCsu4
|
| TLDR most LED lamp are running over spec which cause them to fail
| and become a commodity rather than infra.
|
| I had a rear projection DLP LED TV which ran its red LED over
| spec and it burned out at least 3 times as fast as the green and
| blue.
|
| https://www.foxhop.net/samsung/HL-T5087SA/red-LED-failure
|
| The heat is not always just a byproduct, sometimes you need or
| want the heat.
|
| Compare this 100 watt bulb to a tiny space heater and you will
| see the difference in your electricity bill. Buy a "kill a watt"
| meter to start testing you appliances rather assuming
| incandescent is evil.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| You also use your incandescent bulbs when it's warm out. Stop
| wasting power.
| foxhop wrote:
| Nice try, I'm an environmentalist. I replace the bulb with
| LED when it's warm out.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i'm in Dallas, power has been stable so far but i made sure i got
| ye'olde generator out, checked the oil, and got plenty of gas. My
| house is really old and the cold just slowly creeps in. By
| Tuesday i bet i can't get it over 60 inside.
|
| All of my furnaces run on gas at least but if the power goes
| they'll probably turn off. I have a little bit of firewood for
| the fireplace but not enough to heat the whole house that's for
| sure.
|
| i was contemplating just basically evacuating wife and kids to
| San Antonio or something but the whole state is under a winter
| storm warning.
| v64 wrote:
| We just had two brief blackouts (~15m and ~5m) over here in SW
| Fort Worth
| Aloha wrote:
| I'm in FW right by DFW, and my apartment is cold even when its
| warm right now.
|
| Similarly, I dug my cold man lanterns out and fueled them, just
| to be sure.
| foxhop wrote:
| Colocate people into a small room, air mattresses and use
| incandescent bulb to warm the people and room.
| bombcar wrote:
| If possible shed load on the furnace - close vents in rooms
| that don't have water pipes in them and close the doors to
| those rooms - focus the heat on a smaller area. Try to keep
| rooms that have less "outside wall" area as the main focal
| point for people and heat. Move computers into the main room,
| keep people together if possible.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Wind farms can't operate in icing conditions.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| Wind farms _built in Texas_ cannot because it 's not economical
| to equip them for that, given how rare icing conditions are in
| Texas. There's plenty of wind farms in colder places that are
| perfectly fine in icing conditions.
| plantain wrote:
| >Wind farms can't operate in icing conditions.
|
| Some wind farms can't operate in icing conditions
|
| (https://www.windpowerengineering.com/the-cold-hard-truth-
| abo...)
| pxeboot wrote:
| Source? I have personally seen one operating in Alaska during
| the winter.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| It's not the temperature per se, it's icing. I read it here
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-14/deep-
| free...
|
| _"When wind-turbine blades get covered with ice, they need
| to be shut down," said Joshua Rhodes, a research associate at
| The University of Texas at Austin who focuses on energy._
| bombcar wrote:
| A windmill is basically a inverse airplane - and airplane
| wings don't like icing. I assume you could heat the blades
| but at some point you're consuming more energy than you're
| making.
| o-__-o wrote:
| Planes have deicing boots. Holes in the leading edge of
| the wing that has a balloon on the inside. A non freezing
| gel is usually pumped in which expands the balloon out of
| the hole and causes the ice to crack. It then retracts
| and this process repeats keeping the wing clear of ice.
| bearbin wrote:
| Not really usable for wind turbines though, the energy
| cost would be significant first of all (compare the blade
| area of a wind turbine to a plane!) The bigger issue is
| maintenance. Wind turbine leading edges are a very
| hostile environment compared to a plane and even normal
| materials get abraded very quickly, plus they are
| expected to last for many years without significant
| maintenance. Anti-ice systems would just not be
| economical if they had to be maintained to a working
| condition at all times.
| o-__-o wrote:
| If you consider plane propellers, they do not have de-
| icers and must avoid known icing limits. The rotation of
| the blade causes the ice to fly off the blade up to a
| certain point. After that point, thrust will be impacted
| and altitude cannot be maintained. Dropping to a lower
| altitude will usually resolve the problem. Wing surface
| deformation is a larger issue for planes and probably not
| the solution here
| xxpor wrote:
| Given they can generate their own electricity, wouldn't
| it make more sense to just heat the blades?
| r00fus wrote:
| Probably not worth the EROEI
| conk wrote:
| Heating the blades would be nearly impossible with any
| significant wind chill. I imagine anyplace that has wind
| turbines is going to have significant wind chill.
| xxpor wrote:
| That's because they lose lift though. For a turbine, that
| wouldn't matter (at least directly).
|
| I have to imagine it's really the overall weight or the
| unbalanced weight not being good for the bearings and
| such. Not to mention a blade flinging a piece of ice off
| when it starts to melt...
| bombcar wrote:
| The wind turbine spins because of an analog of lift -
| without "lift" it won't spin.
|
| There's also the issue of balance.
| xxpor wrote:
| >The wind turbine spins because of an analog of lift -
| without "lift" it won't spin.
|
| Thinking about it, that does make perfect sense, but just
| intuitively, I would think say, making a blade that had a
| flat side perpendicular to the wind direction would work,
| because the force can still be imparted to the blade. I
| can also intuitively surmise why that wouldn't work for a
| plane though.
|
| When dealing with a plane, you want to generate force
| perpendicular to the wing (i.e. up when the plane is
| moving horizontally), but in a turbine you want the force
| to be in the same direction as the blade is moving. I
| feel like I must be missing something.
| bombcar wrote:
| You're not - a flat board works as a wing with enough
| force behind it. There's a description on how a wing
| works involving Bernoulli's law - but it's more accurate
| to think of it how your hand feels when you hold it out
| the window of a car at speed.
|
| And of course old windmills were just boards - and I
| suspect they only stop working in the cold if the
| bearings freeze.
| mimikatz wrote:
| "We are experiencing record-breaking electric demand due to
| the extreme cold temperatures that have gripped Texas," Bill
| Magness, ERCOT President and CEO, said in a press release on
| Sunday. "At the same time, we are dealing with higher-than-
| normal generation outages due to frozen wind turbines and
| limited natural gas supplies available to generating units.
| We are asking Texans to take some simple, safe steps to lower
| their energy use during this time."
| nimos wrote:
| Turbine manufactures have cold weather packages and deicing
| systems. I'd wager they don't get installed in Texas.
| every wrote:
| Quite likely because we rarely have heavy icing. This
| current storm is the worst since 1989. I've been in Austin
| for over 50 years and can count such incidents on one hand
| with fingers left to spare...
| throwaway9870 wrote:
| What I don't understand is that it sounds like the utilities were
| unprepared for the cold because the windmills and gas lines froze
| up. But the same tech is used in Canada fine because it sounds
| like they plan for the cold and have equipment options designed
| to deal with ice, etc. So, you might immediately think - ah,
| climate change strikes again! But then I hear this is only a low
| temp in the last 30-40yrs. Who doesn't design a system to work at
| low temps that have occurred in the last 30-40 years?
|
| So, the question is - is this system poorly designed? Were
| corners cut that should not have been?
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Texas can prepare for Canadian type cold weather but we don't.
| I have lived in TX all my life and fondly refer it to the
| "blast furnace". Weeks of 100F is what I am used to.
|
| Most folks here don't own winter tires for their cars. We don't
| have car battery kick start kits like Canadians do. Many
| apartment dwellers only have electric heat. We are optimized
| for a semi arid plains climate. Optimizing for hot and cold is
| beyond the reach of most.
|
| One thing I wonder about is all the wind turbines in Texas. If
| they get iced over and continue to rotate, does the ice cause
| the blades unnecessary vibration and structural damage?
| bombcar wrote:
| People may claim to prepare for a once a century event but
| since it only happens once a century it's hard to determine if
| it's actually prepared for.
|
| Half the houses don't even have gas heat - because it's never
| been needed. What we have here is asking to a earthquake
| hitting the Midwest - sure it's known it could happen and there
| are plans for it - but they've never been tested.
| throwaway9870 wrote:
| I just saw something that said these are the lowest temps in
| the last 30 yrs. That isn't once in a century!
| fastball wrote:
| Depends on when you start counting your century. Once a
| century does not mean literally once every 100 years. These
| are certainly the lowest temps of this century so far.
| sct202 wrote:
| There were 3 'once in 500 year' floods in Houston from
| 2015-2017. It makes no sense.
| throwaway9870 wrote:
| I have a friend that lives in an area that drains into
| the Chesapeake bay. He is doing some changes to his
| property and is not allowed to do anything that would
| increase water run-off. OK, I said, that seems quite
| reasonable. Then he tells me it is for 12in of rain in
| 24hr. Wow, ok, that is a lot but I guess it could happen.
| Yes, it is a once in a 100yr storm. Then he tells me the
| rule is you have to handle that, and be prepared for
| another one within 48hrs. What?? Any water retention has
| to be drained within 24hrs so that if another storm hits
| it can be handled. So two, once in a century storms in a
| total of 72hrs. Kind of changes the definition of once in
| a century?
| maxlamb wrote:
| I think the combination of the lowest temps in last 30
| years, with sustained mucher colder temps than average over
| last 4-5 days with overcast sky (so there is no residual
| heat from mild Texas winter day), and that 50% of the
| state's wind turbines were made inoperable by freezing rain
| a few days ago might make it a once in a century event.
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah I imagine any once a century event is pretty hard to
| prepare for. Sure you're covered generally for X, Y, Z but it
| can play out in so many other ways.
| bouncycastle wrote:
| I wonder how much this has to do with bitcoin mining?
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Miners are being turned off at these electricity prices.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Except in places where the power is being stolen.
| ideamotor wrote:
| Example?
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by "stolen" but I'm sure there's
| a ton of mining that is occurring at a statutory or
| downstream low-rate (as opposed to C&I based on peak or
| wholesale subject to the real-time market). In those cases,
| the electric providers _should_ be able to pay them to
| curtail load but it 's frankly a travesty on all accounts.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| I think you're overthinking it. It's just regular
| stealing, something that would be more historically
| associated with Marijuana grow-ops. Bypassing your meter,
| tapping off your neighbours meter, street lighthing,
| mining in your employers basement without them knowing,
| etc.
|
| Basically using electricity that isn't "yours" without
| paying for it.
| ncmncm wrote:
| This is easier in countries with more retail corruption,
| and in some with wholesale.
|
| The latter would include Russia, China, and the US; the
| former, Venezuela, UAE, Nigeria. Retail would tend to be
| petrochemical power. Nuclear power theft is easier to
| cover up, so would be preferred where it is common, e.g.
| Russian military sites and US commercial.
| tamaharbor wrote:
| This is what happens when you let the Regulators plan the system.
| Reason077 wrote:
| Browsing from the UK, I got:
|
| _" Access Denied Error 16 www.ercot.com 2021-02-15 14:23:49 UTC
|
| If you believe you have a valid business reason for accessing
| ERCOT resources, please contact the ERCOT HelpDesk at
| 512-248-6800 or 1-866-870-8124 (USA) or HelpDesk@ercot.com.
|
| Your IP: 148.252.xxx.xxx Error code: 16 > This request was
| blocked by the security rules"_
|
| Using a VPN with a US IP address, I was able to view the ercot
| site.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| I'm in the US and was blocked because I have firefox set to
| request https.
|
| SSL Not Supported Error 29 www.ercot.com 2021-02-15 14:37:28
| UTC
|
| If you believe you have a valid business reason for accessing
| ERCOT resources, please contact the ERCOT HelpDesk at
| 512-248-6800 or 1-866-870-8124 (USA) or HelpDesk@ercot.com.
|
| Please provide the HelpDesk with the information supplied
| below.
|
| Your IP: x.x.x.x
|
| Error code: 29 > SSL is not supported
|
| Usually you just get an error so that Firefox can let you click
| through to the http site, but this error thing inhibits that.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I got that message as well. Seems kinda silly given that the
| error page was delivered over SSL. They even have a valid
| certificate.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The main difference between this and California rolling outages
| last August is the conspicuous lack of ten-thousand-word think-
| pieces about how it was the inevitable consequence of a failing
| one-party regime.
|
| Climate change is going to result in local excursions in heating
| and cooling demand. It's just stochastic bad luck.
| foxhop wrote:
| It's grand solar minimum, industry not preparing infra for cold
| snaps, uniformed population who gave up their incandescent
| bulbs (heaters) for LEDs and power hungry space heaters, people
| wasting energy. It's not just bad luck.
| jabl wrote:
| I'm sure you'll find the usual blowhards explaining how Biden
| is personally responsible for this.
| macintux wrote:
| Nah, but I'm sure they'll be shouting about how wonderful
| coal is vs that unreliable renewable power.
| imtringued wrote:
| And gas somehow didn't fail?
| macintux wrote:
| I didn't say it was a cogent argument.
| mimikatz wrote:
| Texas is shockingly green when it comes to power. The windmills
| have frozen and it is the winter when there isn't as much sun.
| Most people are on a contract with fixed pricing, but some
| startups like Griddy are hurting people's wallets. We will likely
| see some retail electric company bankrupcies. Some of the
| electric providers are paying customers to move to someone else
| on Monday.
|
| The Joke is all the Californians who immigrated brought the
| blackouts with them.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| Griddy literally emailed every customer yesterday and told them
| to switch providers asap.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| Yep. I was on track for a $5000 electric bill at the end of
| the week. I got switched over yesterday. Still going to be
| painful but not horrible.
| slater wrote:
| $5k?!?!? How?!
| ev1 wrote:
| $0.05 to $0.10/kWh seems like normal pricing.
|
| Average US house uses ~1100-1200 kWh (I don't actually
| know this, based on googling, assuming most places in
| Texas are standalone houses) per month.
|
| If prices are $3000-9000 per MW, then ~40 to 60 kWh/day
| (let's be generous, people are explicitly turning on heat
| for this extreme cold) for a week...
|
| Even $2/kWh (which was exceeded days ago) would demolish
| peoples' budgets.
| maxerickson wrote:
| I think most people are on fixed prices though. The
| supplier gets a big mark up over the wholesale cost and
| then is expected to have a plan to deal with situations
| like this.
| rstupek wrote:
| Griddy is a different provider which gives you grid
| prices for power
| maxerickson wrote:
| Yeah, this is the answer to slater's question, that some
| people have signed up for exposure to wholesale prices.
| ev1 wrote:
| griddy's twitter is full of people angrily demanding
| refunds because "i signed up for cheaper rates and it's
| been cheaper til now why am i paying higher rates??? this
| is a scammer"
| phonebanshee wrote:
| Those prices are far below normal prices. Normal is 28-50
| cents in places like San Diego
| (https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/energy-
| green/s...).
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| In Texas griddy exposes you to real time spot pricing. I
| was frequently getting paid to use electricity at night
| due to excess generation by wind. As an electric car
| owner this was fantastic as I frequently got paid to
| recharge my car. My average delivered rate before this
| week was 7c/kwh all in.
| tzs wrote:
| Does anyone there get a battery system, like a Tesla
| Powerwall, to save up negative priced night electricity
| to use in the daytime?
| manyes wrote:
| Of course, during these cold snaps, the battery doesn't
| really work well, right?
| tzs wrote:
| Powerwalls have an operating temperature range of -4 F to
| 122 F (-20 C to 50 C), although they recommend 32-86 F
| (0-30 C).
|
| They can also be mounted indoors.
| rstupek wrote:
| It doesn't happen enough that I've seen to make it
| worthwhile
| [deleted]
| Aloha wrote:
| I'm paying 8.5-8.3 cent kWh on a fixed contract.
|
| Power is very very very cheap in Texas.
| maxerickson wrote:
| My power comes from, I believe, a nuclear plant in
| Wisconsin.
|
| $0.098 per kW-h, with $15 a month connection fee.
| bfrog wrote:
| Wi has a lot of coal by the lake, where is there a nuke?
| Chicago was almost all nukes at one point
| khuey wrote:
| Point Beach is still operating afaik. Kewaunee shut down
| several years ago though.
| xxpor wrote:
| CA power is hilariously expensive compared to the rest of
| the country. 10c is much closer to average.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The weighted average price is 10.54C/ per kwh. In
| California it's 16. Both 5 and 35C/ are pretty poor
| estimates.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I paid $.36 last month living an hour north of SF.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Average or marginal? Most PG&E customers have a "baseline
| allowance" with a higher marginal cost as you draw more
| energy over the month.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| My house normally uses 70kwh/day. We have an electric
| heater and with this cold weather we were on track to use
| 150-200kwh day. At $5/kwh for 5 days of 200kwh due to the
| cold puts me at $5,000.
| pilom wrote:
| Holy cow! How in the world do you use that much? My old
| house in Colorado would use ~350kwh/month. Swap out that
| electric heater for a heat pump asap!
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| Big house (3700sqft or so), tall ceilings, four people
| working/schooling from home and an electric car as the
| primary family car. In 2019 I literally did not turn the
| heater on a single time, I don't think the investment in
| a heat pump would be worth it.
| jbm wrote:
| We have colder weather where I live, but I see I used 550
| kwh per month (at most). Even if my house is half your
| size, 70 kwh seems like a lot for a daily baseline. I
| have a similar situation (kids at home studying, me
| working at home).
|
| Does the the car that drives up your electricity usage
| that much?
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| Car adds about 500kwh/mo. During offpeak rates charging
| this amount cost between $1 and $12 for the month.
| lgats wrote:
| Heat pump systems can sometimes be an upgrade to standard
| air conditioning systems
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Does your AC has not heating function (I assume everyone
| in Texas has AC)?
| toast0 wrote:
| I'm guessing most Texas AC systems don't have a reversing
| valve, and a defrost system and all the other goodies you
| need to run it for heat. It adds to the equipment cost
| when many years heat isn't needed, and if the
| temperatures are 10F, you'd still likely need other heat
| sources.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| > a defrost system
|
| What does a defrost system includes? My dad manages a
| place where defrost system on one of the devices broke.
| Technician replaced something and hence it was fixed.
| IIRC it was temperature sensor. All defrost system does
| is periodically warms up the outside grill basically. It
| used to get stuck at -15C or so.
| sangnoir wrote:
| A don't think a heat pump would help them in this
| weather.
| [deleted]
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Modern ones and designed for purpose go to -20C.
| happosai wrote:
| I bet absolutely nobody in texas asked "how efficent is
| the heatpump at -20c" when buying them. Same reason why
| all the windmills froze: "would like this wind mill model
| that produces eletricity at -20, or this cheaper one that
| freezes at 0c?"
| bluGill wrote:
| No, but those who make heat pumps know that to sell in
| the north people care so they try to make one model that
| works anywhere.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Have you seen how houses are insulated in TX/LA?
| uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh wrote:
| You can live outside, inside!
| bluGill wrote:
| New construction is actually pretty good in Texas. But
| most houses are not new and have little.
| oezi wrote:
| Wow! European here. Family of 5 and we are at 8kwh per
| day. Total yearly electricity bill is < 1000 EUR.
| etimberg wrote:
| Even higher this morning. Up to ~ $6000/MWh or $6/kWh.
| http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/contours/rtmLmp.html
| pfdietz wrote:
| It would make sense for you to turn off your water, drain
| all the pipes, turn off the heat and go somewhere else
| for a few days.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| _and go somewhere else for a few days_
|
| Or put a tent up in the living room.
| conductr wrote:
| I've been half ignoring them because they tend to cry wolf
| with the high price emails. But this is no joke, I checked
| current rate which is $9.01/kWh. I immediately switched
| back to my old provider.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I hope they get some sort of a surcharge for this. Part of
| what you pay for with a big utility is for them to eat weird
| price fluctuations. Getting grid pricing just when it's
| convenient is cheating the system.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| It sounds like Texas has a substantially different market
| than most of the rest of the country, by typically
| utilities are heavily regulated. I would be curious how the
| other market players react to this (perhaps requesting more
| regulation).
|
| It kinda feels like someone who could have gotten insurance
| but declined getting coverage until after learning they
| have cancer. That's certainly not the spirit of how
| insurance is supposed to work (spreading tail-end risk
| across a pool of people), and if everyone acted that way,
| it would be far from sustainable.
|
| As a whole people are poor at assessing low probability
| risks. Low probability high cost risks pose a big threat.
| Letting people get spot pricing may help the market be more
| efficient, but considering many people would struggle to
| pay a $200 unexpected bill, it does feel odd to let
| everyone do spot pricing if they want. For many people,
| even having one bill that was double normal would financial
| headaches, much less 10x!
|
| Giving consumers spot pricing feels like having everyday
| people selling naked call options. It may work fine for a
| really long time, but when the strategy blows up, it has
| unlimited liability potential.
| mbreese wrote:
| Probably not a surcharge, but maybe a minimum contract
| length? I don't know if that's possible (legally). But, I
| imagine that a utility would want to make sure that a
| customer who switched providers to avoid these wholesale
| prices would want to ensure that the customer would stick
| around long enough to make sense financially.
| rstupek wrote:
| The contract lengths yield different prices. griddy has
| referral recommendations for several 1 month contracts
| through different providers until prices stabilize
| rstupek wrote:
| They emailed, sent a phone notification and called their
| customers to tell them to switch
| roenxi wrote:
| It'll be interesting, when the dust settles, to see how this
| event squares away with the regulator's risk modelling. My
| initial impression is there is a correlation between extreme
| power demand and renewable energy being unavailable that would
| not have been present for a nuclear or fossil fuel based
| system.
| eigenvector wrote:
| ERCOT is pretty good about releasing their event analysis
| after the fact.
|
| I think the main issue with renewables is not inherent
| unreliability but that grid operators do not understand the
| potential contingencies as well as with conventional
| generation sources.
|
| SPP has put out some good analyzes of recent max generation
| events there involving large amounts of wind being
| unavailable in cold snaps. It turns out no one at SPP
| bothered to ask wind turbine owners what temperatures they
| were capable of operating in and some wind operators didn't
| buy the cold weather package for turbines despite installing
| them in the Midwest. So generation availability forecasting
| didn't take into account the real capabilities of generators
| - a clear failure in operational planning.
|
| This is more of a regulatory issue than a technical one. The
| machines can operate at -40 C, but someone has to actually
| spec that functionality and ensure that the associated
| subcomponents (heaters etc) are properly maintained.
|
| There is a new NERC reliability standard in the drafting
| stage for this.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Somewhat off topic, but are regulators also considering
| mandating Basalt rebar in wind tower foundations,
| prohibiting steel rebar?
|
| I don't know what the re-use story is for foundation plus
| tower, but it seems to me a bad idea to start with the
| assumption of rusting out the foundations.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Just to add some numbers; we(Texas) have over 31,000MW of
| installed wind energy capacity. No other state comes close.
|
| Probably a lot of things people find shocking about Texas when
| compared to its reputation lol.
| Daho0n wrote:
| Texas is the state with the most wind energy in the US?
|
| 42,933km2 Denmark has 6GW wind energy capacity and 695,662km2
| Texas has 31GW. That doesn't sound very impressive.
| chrisrogers wrote:
| Texas' population is 29 million. Denmark's is 5.8 million.
| So the scale is remarkably equivalent.
| nyokodo wrote:
| Texas has 5X the population of Denmark and 5X the wind
| energy generation. That doesn't sound like a great
| justification for your smug comment. Also, that is current
| generation as the rate of increase of wind and solar
| appears to far outstrip Denmark on a per capita basis. If
| the WSJ is reliable, Texas is supposed to add an additional
| ~17GW of solar by 2023, reaching 21GW![1] If they reach
| that it'd beat Denmark's 2030 goal by 23% and 7 years on a
| per capita basis.[2]
|
| 1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/solar-power-booms-in-
| texas-1160...
|
| 2. https://um.dk/en/news/newsdisplaypage/?newsid=25147b44-3
| dce-...
| tolien wrote:
| Per capita doesn't seem like the most useful measure here
| unless you're expecting people to spin the turbines by
| hand. Texas has (by GP's numbers) 16 times the land area
| and 2.5x the annual sunshine hours [1,2] (given Texas's
| proximity to the equator relative to Denmark, I'd be
| shocked if those hours didn't confer significantly more
| power too) but "only" 5x the generation?
|
| Edit: Of course, it's 5x the wind power. For solar power
| in Texas and Denmark the difference is about 4x - 4,324.3
| versus 1,079 MW [3, 4] so the point stands that Texas
| still has a way to go relative to the resources available
| to them.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_sunshi
| ne_dur...
|
| 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark#Climate
|
| 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Denmark
|
| 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Texas
| kgermino wrote:
| > Per capita doesn't seem like the most useful measure
| here unless you're expecting people to spin the turbines
| by hand.p
|
| "Percentage of energy generated" is probably better, but
| per-capita is better than per-acre. Broadly speaking,
| people use power, not cornfields.
| tolien wrote:
| Not when acres directly correlate with the amount of
| energy being generated. The Sahara has very few people
| but would be ripe energy-generation space.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| I think far-off deserts aren't nearly lofty enough in the
| context of which nations are furthest ahead in renewable
| energy generation...
|
| Why not set the baseline with Mercury? That's an entire
| planet with much more solar capacity than any measly
| desert!
| tolien wrote:
| I mean, if we're going for complete absurdity why not
| build a Dyson Sphere?
|
| Getting back into the real world (and the original point,
| although accidentally I think you've made my point that
| energy generated per-capita isn't relevant) and putting
| aside that there are actual thoughts to build a solar
| farm in the north Sahara [1]...
|
| Texas has lots of surface area currently used by
| agriculture so while it's cute to suggest cornfields
| don't need electrical power there's a conversation about
| whether there's space which could productively generate
| power and send it over the grid which the rest of the
| state (and through HVDC interconnects, the rest of North
| America) is connected to?
|
| 1: https://theconversation.com/solar-panels-in-sahara-
| could-boo...
| Kokichi wrote:
| Why are you comparing figures like that? Is the land itself
| using the energy generated from those turbines?
| bluGill wrote:
| Iowa comes close. Sure it is a third, but on vastly less land
| area.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Driving through Amarillo on I-40, the number of windmills on
| the plains compared to even two years ago is mind-blowing.
| Saw lots of trucks carrying new blades etc. as well.
| briandear wrote:
| Where do all those blades go when they reach end of life?
| heyflyguy wrote:
| A giant graveyard outside Sweetwater, Texas. It's a
| blight in every way. You cannot recycle this stuff.
| txlpo78 wrote:
| Are you talking about this?
|
| Global Fiberglass Solutions Of West Texas
| https://goo.gl/maps/od4YB3MubUqT5B6a9
|
| It's a field about 600x600 feet. I wouldn't call that
| "giant", it's about the size of a typical warehouse and
| certainly smaller than most landfills. And according to
| some brief searches on the internet, they are indeed
| being recycled.
| heyflyguy wrote:
| I didn't know they can be recycled, and that is not the
| only graveyard. I appreciate the fact that we have
| differing opinions on the size of giant!
| ssully wrote:
| Currently they go in landfills, but there are programs[1]
| starting up to recycle them.
|
| [1]: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ge-announces-first-
| us-wind-...
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| just one nit to pick, it's wind turbines, not windmills. :)
| jeffbee wrote:
| Texas fuels mix in 2019 was 20% coal, 47% natural gas. That's
| shocking, yes, but not green.
|
| California's mix is 3% coal (2019 figures; in 2021 it is zero)
| and 34% natural gas, for comparison.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Can you share your source? I wonder if you are looking at
| production or consumption numbers. California is the largest
| energy importer in the USA (25%) and my understanding is that
| the number 1 source for this power is coal and natural gas in
| Arizona and Utah.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I'm looking at this source for California which includes
| imports. The main source of error is "unspecified" open
| market imports, but even if 100% of that is from fossil
| fuels, which seems unlikely, the worst-case error is
| another 7% of the total.
|
| https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-
| almanac/califo...
|
| Your understanding sounds completely fictional to me. Where
| did you come to believe that the primary source of imported
| power is Utah coal?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I didn't say Utah coal specifically. I said the leading
| sources were coal and natural gas from Arizona and Utah.
| I based this on theEIA. [1]
|
| >In 2019, California's net electricity imports were the
| largest in the country at 70.8 million megawatthours
| (MWh), or 25% of the state's total electricity supply ...
| California utilities partly own and import power from
| several power plants in Arizona and Utah.
|
| Arizona is ~75% coal and natural gas [2] Utah is ~80% and
| natural gas [3]
|
| Looking at your link [4], 70% of California imports are
| "non-renewable and unspecified" and 75% of "non-renewable
| and unspecified" comes from the southwest (e.g. Arizona
| and Utah)
|
| I think this brings us to the same conclusion that the
| number 1 source for _imported_ electricity is coal and
| natural gas in Arizona and Utah. You are saying that a
| worst case for CA power is being 3-10% coal. I am talking
| about the worst case for CA _imported_ power (which
| happens to be up to 37% coal)
|
| [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46156
| #:~:tex....
|
| [2] https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=AZ#tabs-4
|
| [3] https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=UT#tabs-4
|
| [4] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-
| almanac/califo...
| jeffbee wrote:
| How does this materially affect the discussion, though?
| If Texas at 67% fossil fuels is "shockingly green" then
| California, with at most 45% fossil fuels, must be jaw-
| droppingly green or some such nonsense.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I wanted to understand if the numbers you presented
| reflected a real snapshot of California's fossil fuel
| consumption or not.
|
| I think the conclusion we came to is that the numbers you
| presented likely underestimate the fossil fuels, but
| there is still a big gap between Texas and California,
| and there is no material impact on the discussion. Thats
| OK.
|
| I had an honest question about the data you presented, so
| I asked, and explained why I thought the data could be
| different.
|
| You said my understanding was completely fictional, so I
| demonstrated that yes, in fact a significant portion of
| California imports come from fossil fuels.
|
| Turns out that California's coal could be up to 3x the
| stated number, but is still less than Texas. My question
| is answered and hopefully we both understand the subject
| matter better now
| v64 wrote:
| > Some of the electric providers are paying customers to move
| to someone else on Monday.
|
| I'm on a fixed rate plan and my provider just offered me $150
| to change, but I had to do it by tomorrow and the rates
| available now aren't close to what I'm currently at.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| _> We will likely see some retail electric company
| bankrupcies._
|
| REP's go bankrupt all the time, especially when the weather
| gets funny. As WallStreetsBets says, "Sir, this is a casino".
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Griddy is basically a variable price for power? I checked their
| website, but it wasn't completely clear on that point (maybe
| because I don't understand Texas electrical billing).
| rstupek wrote:
| Yes you pay a monthly fee and get the grid price. Typically
| this is a great deal but when these surges happen it isn't
| maxerickson wrote:
| Yeah, they pass through the wholesale prices. Most providers
| do some work to offer fixed retail prices (gaining when
| wholesale is cheap, losing when it's expensive). Most markets
| in the US have some sort of system for matching supply and
| demand, often a wholesale market.
|
| https://www.epa.gov/greenpower/us-electricity-grid-markets
| has a picture of the various wholesale markets.
| pickle-wizard wrote:
| I was on Griddy for about 9 months a couple of years ago.
|
| Until one very hot August, when the wholesale price hit $10/kWh
| in the afternoon. My power bill for one day was $130. I didn't
| even wait till the end of the month. I switched back to my old
| power company that afternoon. Thankfully they were able to
| switch me back the next morning.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Trick is to set up a couple transfer switches and make a deal
| with your neighbour on a fixed rate plan. Could do it just
| for the air conditioner and gain most of the savings.
|
| We're you able to set up anything interesting to take
| advantage of ebbs and flows in rates?
| pickle-wizard wrote:
| No I never did. Griddy didn't have an API by the time I
| left. I had thought about setting up something to scrap the
| data from ERCOT's page, but decided it wasn't worth the
| effort.
| gok wrote:
| > windmills
|
| Wind turbines! :)
| rootsudo wrote:
| "The Joke is all the Californians who immigrated brought the
| blackouts with them. "
|
| Ouch, yet wow.
| fencepost wrote:
| Seems like this is where a generator and appropriate hookup for
| powering (primarily?) a gas furnace might not be a terrible
| thing. Unfortunately almost all homes regardless of source will
| lose heat if the power goes out because of fans and furnace
| control.
| [deleted]
| pram wrote:
| I was just looking at natural gas powered generators because of
| this. I've had an accumulative 24 hours of outages in the past
| month. They don't seem bad, the units themselves are around
| $6k. Definitely worth considering!
| jounker wrote:
| If you're just looking for emergence power you can get honda
| e2200i generator with a gas adapter for around 1500 USD.
| phonebanshee wrote:
| Most people around here (Pacific Northwest) do propane. No
| one wants to store large quantities of gasoline on their
| property.
| jounker wrote:
| Gas adapters are for propane or natural gas. Gasoline
| doesn't require an adapter.
| fencepost wrote:
| To consolidate and clarify a few comments:
|
| You can get a non-fixed portable generator modified to
| run on propane or natural gas fairly inexpensively (the
| "gas adapter" mentioned above). That can be hooked to
| either a large fixed propane tank or be used with the
| smaller tanks often used with gas grills (or be
| permanently connected to natural gas, but then just get a
| fixed install generator). Advantages of propane are that
| it's stable (gasoline and diesel degrade), readily
| available, you can simply be well-prepared for a heavy
| grilling season if you don't need to use the generator,
| and because it's stable and stored you can be somewhat
| insulated from price swings.
|
| There are calculators available to determine appropriate
| sizes and approximate runtime based on generator size,
| load, etc. but a simple rule that I saw was that a 3000
| watt generator would likely run for 45 minutes to an hour
| on a 20-25 pound tank depending on load and inverter
| setup.
| oasisbob wrote:
| Yup, especially when those tanks of propane work for hot
| water and cooking too.
|
| There's a lot of crossover with RVs, industrial, and even
| marine when you use propane. The cabin I'm writing this
| from has a battery bank and a standby generator salvaged
| from a touring bus.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Propane is quite expensive compared to natural gas,
| though, especially from a fixed-line utility. Except
| maybe this weekend!
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| You could conceptually also use something like Modern
| Electron's meta-material thermionic electric generator that
| just used a home's natural gas flame to make (lots of)
| electricity.
|
| https://modernelectron.com/technology/
| aftbit wrote:
| Looks pretty neat but they seem to be pre-launch. Call me
| back when they have a product with verifiable specs. I'm
| hoping a breakthrough in solid state thermocouple materials
| will eventually make heat engines obsolete (at least at small
| scales).
| pdx_flyer wrote:
| Some other thoughts:
|
| 1) Preventative maintenance on large units is planned 5-6 years
| out and in Texas typically takes place in the fall/winter as that
| is the lowest demand.
|
| 2) These units cannot be brought up (quickly at least).
|
| 3) Severe winters like these in Texas are extremely rare. Homes
| have been built for the conditions that have existed up to now.
| For example, I grew up in Houston and then moved to the PNW later
| in life. I experienced snow a total of two times while living in
| Houston and they were really more like glorified ice storms. I
| can remember Dallas and north Texas getting bigger, colder storms
| but even then they weren't awful.
| walrus01 wrote:
| It is kind of weird and worrisome that such a large entity
| doesn't use https
|
| Look at the weird error message...
|
| https://www.ercot.com/
|
| The rest of the site appears to be http only
|
| What's funny is that they do have a valid certificate for their
| error message page.
| xxpor wrote:
| On the other hand, the page is loading in single digit ms for
| me, even when I'm sure it's getting 10000x the usual traffic.
| Honestly I'll take it.
| ev1 wrote:
| There's a cloudflare-like MITM in the middle that is serving
| https.
| slater wrote:
| MITM in the middle? :D
| ev1 wrote:
| my brain stopped working after -like
| walrus01 wrote:
| be right back, headed out to the ATM machine to get some
| cash to pay my electric bill
| NickNameNick wrote:
| I can't even access it.
|
| "Error code: 16 > This request was blocked by the security
| rules"
|
| No idea why. Maybe they don't feel the need to serve thier
| website to foreigners?
| jayelbe wrote:
| I get the impression they're blocking requests from outside
| the US, yes. I get the same error message in the UK, but can
| access the site fine through a VPN to the US.
| gcbirzan wrote:
| Probably a GDPR thing.
| idlewords wrote:
| Encryption uses too much power
| selimthegrim wrote:
| So that's why Kirk always had to bother poor Scotty
| qwantim1 wrote:
| And so does growing massive amounts of pot and mining
| bitcoin.
|
| Will these things stop? Probably not.
| Animats wrote:
| This came close to happening in 2014.[1] They got to stage 2, but
| not rotating blackout stage 3.
|
| And yes, natural gas pipelines can freeze. There's some water in
| natural gas. Happened in 2011.[2] Search for "freeze-offs".
|
| [1] https://rbnenergy.com/the-night-the-lights-almost-went-
| out-i...
|
| [2] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=3390
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| Demand has been reading greater than the capacity for some time
| now.
| symlinkk wrote:
| Unbelievable how fragile our society is. All it takes is a little
| push (COVID, ice, etc) and everything falls apart. I'd like to
| see less $ being spent on innovative chat apps in the future and
| more being spent on innovative food, water, power, and medical
| systems.
| foxhop wrote:
| Join permaculture tech on matrix
| don-code wrote:
| Some time ago, I worked for a defunct energy company that
| provided demand-side relief in exactly this scenario - when total
| system load outstrips total system capacity, we'd begin taking
| actions on behalf of end users, not the utility. Lights would
| turn off, generators would spin up, fridge temperatures would be
| raised.
|
| ERCOT (Texas) is an interesting case in that it can't import
| power from other states as easily - it has its "own grid" at
| 60Hz, but not necessarily in phase with either of the other two
| major grids in the country (there's eastern US, western US, and
| "most of Texas"). So to import power, it first has to convert
| grid-scale amounts of energy from AC to DC, then back to AC,
| which incurs a pretty significant loss.
| Aloha wrote:
| ERCOT does have several HVDC links, which when I checked a
| couple hours ago were exporting power. Also, I believe that
| with modern technology HVDC is more efficient than synchronous
| AC connections (largely because of higher voltage
| interconnects)
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Did ERCOT build them bidirectionally though?
| cameronh90 wrote:
| Preface: I know very little about power grids, but had a couple
| thoughts.
|
| In the UK, there is a system of load shedding that is tied to
| the grid frequency. My understanding is that some industrial
| users agree terms where they get cheaper rates but if the
| demand outstrips supply, they are first to be cut. This load
| shedding is implemented by components that monitor the grid
| frequency, and if it drops below a fixed value, it disconnects.
| It seemed a nice system to me as in theory it operates just
| based on the principles of an AC power supply.
|
| Secondly, the UK has its own grid but is linked up to the EU
| grid with asynchronous HVDC connectors. We get a lot of our
| energy though those. Is this inefficient?
| eigenvector wrote:
| The technical term for what you're describing is under-
| frequency load shedding (UFLS) and it is part of most modern
| power systems around the world, including all of the North
| American grids. It is an important safeguard against system
| collapse, however, the goal of system operators is to avoid
| reaching this stage. In fact, resolving contingency events
| without interruption of "firm load" (that is, loads that have
| not previously agreed to be interrupted) is an important
| performance metric for any grid operator.
|
| UFLS is mostly intended to buffer transient loss of power
| supply (for instance, tripping of several large generators).
| If the grid operator knows they are facing an inadequacy of
| generation supply and all resources have already been called
| in, they will start to shed load under manual operator action
| to avoid UFLS activation. Before doing this they will declare
| an emergency which, generally speaking, requires all
| generators to make best efforts to supply as much energy as
| they can to the system.
|
| Think of it like automated emergency braking on a car vs
| driver braking. AEB is great, but if you can already see that
| you're gonna hit something, just hit the brakes right now
| instead of waiting for AEB. By the time UFLS kicks in, you're
| already in dire straits and have only moments before reaching
| an unrecoverable state.
| namibj wrote:
| In the central european grid, there is actually a market
| where companies can offer frequency stabilization service
| to the grid, which exists in both directions. It doesn't
| matter if the combat a lack of power in the grid with
| shedding loads or spinning up another generator.
|
| This exists on a few different timescales, and the faster-
| responding contracts trigger at higher frequency
| deviations.
|
| Primary operating reserve triggers at +-200 mHz and needs
| to be fully available within 30 s and for up to 15 min,
| secondary operating reserve has to take over (and be fully
| available within 5 min), and the tertiary operating reserve
| has to be fully available within 15 min.
|
| The entso-e map: https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/
| mncharity wrote:
| Curious that the map doesn't match its legend.
| Powerplants are drawn as substations. Ah, a PDF matches
| the legend.
| eigenvector wrote:
| Yes, this function exists in some fashion in every grid
| (although the economic setup of how you're paid for that
| service differs widely).
|
| The problem in ERCOT is demand massively exceeding
| available supply over a period of days. You need to carry
| your primary operating reserve all the time, because you
| never know when a generator or transmission line may
| trip.
|
| When there's simply a lack of energy supply to meet
| demand on a steady state basis, you still have to
| preserve your primary reserves for other unexpected
| events and cannot call them in to meet longer term (30+
| minutes) demand. So load shedding happens once available
| reserve dips below a certain threshold (generally around
| the single of the largest single contingency on the grid
| which may be the largest single generator or a line that
| feeds multiple large generators).
|
| ERCOT hasn't run out of primary reserve, but they are
| going to have to shed load in order to maintain adequate
| reserves. You always have to shed load before exhausting
| reserves, because one moves you closer to stability while
| the other moves you further away (consuming operating
| reserve).
|
| At this point, with power prices spiking to thousands of
| dollars per MWh, any plant that can run is running,
| including some that have come out of planned outage
| earlier to help out (and be paid handsomely). Even if you
| simply invoked some emergency order that "all generators
| must run until further notice", there simply isn't enough
| capacity due to the large number of generators on forced
| outage. There's no way out of that situation except
| temporary load shedding.
| bombcar wrote:
| Load shedding exists in the USA - however industrial
| customers who can shut off probably already have given the
| rise in spot prices.
|
| I know the Datacenter we were in years ago would be asked to
| go to generators during CA power crisis.
| gonzo wrote:
| Zayo just sent notice that they're cutting over to
| generators in the Texas area
| don-code wrote:
| I don't know that ERCOT has any similar program - here in the
| US, for areas that run a load-shedding system, load is
| typically dropped after 0.2 seconds of 59.5hz or lower
| (nominally 60hz). Some consumers may choose to cut themselves
| off prior to that point, to prevent damage to equipment at
| the lower frequencies.
|
| ERCOT (and others) also implement peak demand charges, where
| some portion of a large user's overal yearly rate is
| determined by their usage on days when the grid is under the
| most stress. Usage for that particular day ends up setting
| rates for the entire year, which makes it not only risky but
| also very costly.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| The UK had that too for demand charges.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_(Great_Britain)
| #...
|
| A small industry popped up predicting when the 3 half-hour
| snapshots would be taken so their customers could minimize
| their use during those periods to minimize their costs for
| the year.
|
| https://www.havenpower.com/news/what-you-need-to-know-
| about-...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| HVDC is the only reasonable way to transmit power underwater.
| There's loss due to the conversion, but less than a short
| underwater run or a long (500+ miles) high tension AC run.
| martinald wrote:
| No, not really. As far as I'm aware HVDC links are more
| efficient than AC links (even with AC/DC/AC conversion).
| jcampbell1 wrote:
| It looks like a tradeoff. The only place in the world doing
| a significant amount of long distance transmission is
| China. Their wind and coal resources are in the west, and
| demand is in the east, and transporting coal by rail just
| further increases air quality problems in the east. Based
| on what they are implementing, HVDC make sense at 800km+,
| and AC for shorter runs. I think it comes down to HVDC
| requires less conductor due to the AC skin effect, weighed
| against cost/loss for DC->AC.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-
| voltage_electricity...
| martinald wrote:
| Yes, exactly. But for example interconnecting Houston
| with AZ or NM power plants, I think HVDC will have fewer
| losses than AC. Could be wrong thoguh.
| jcampbell1 wrote:
| Yes, for that run. The reality is that a far cheaper
| option would be to just install natural gas peaker
| turbines in Houston. Chienre Energy is _exporting_ LNG
| from there so plenty of gas, and I'd estimate the cost
| per GW at $200M vs $1B, and the time to complete at 1
| year vs 5 years.
| frozentoad wrote:
| Manitoba Hydro's total DC transmission distance is
| +3,000km over 3 runs.
|
| https://www.hydro.mb.ca/corporate/facilities/bipole_lines
| /
| bsder wrote:
| The Pacific DC Intertie was the biggest in the world
| until the Three Gorges stuff.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
|
| More interestingly--it dates to the Kennedy
| Administration.
| themoop wrote:
| Hydro-Quebec is also doing at least one 1500km hvdc to
| the US and multiple 1000+km lines to the dams in the
| north. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydro-
| Qu%C3%A9bec%27s_electr...
| nikisweeting wrote:
| If anyone is curious about this HVDC line and the Quebec
| grid in general I gave a small talk about it ;)
|
| https://github.com/pirate/quebec-power-grid-talk
|
| It's one of the only multi-terminal HVDC lines in the
| world, most of the others are just point-to-point.
|
| They also literally short out the power lines with DC to
| warm them up and melt the ice off during ice storms,
| pretty crazy stuff.
| coryrc wrote:
| You also have reactive losses with AC.
| rocqua wrote:
| AC transmission has worse power loss per unit distance. But
| has very little 'base' cost.
|
| HVDC has better marginal loss , but you pay a loss up front
| for conversion
| centimeter wrote:
| It frustrates me how most analysis of wind and solar cost-
| effectiveness fail to take into account the need to have tons of
| backup infrastructure that lays fallow most of the time. You need
| to decide between poor grid reliability or drastically increased
| capital expenditures. Hopefully storage tech will get better and
| this will cease to be such a problem.
| plantain wrote:
| Or you just massively over-provision the renewable
| infrastructure. South Australia is aiming for 500%.
|
| https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-set-sights-on-st...
|
| The nature of the weather is that it is always windy somewhere
| - if you have a wide enough grid with enough overbuild, it
| doesn't have to be a problem. And when there's excess energy,
| people will find uses for it.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| You're right but you're getting downvoted by people who believe
| anything Big Green tells them.
|
| It's just like Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, etc.: all the
| suckers bought the religion and won't know they're suckers for
| 40 years. By that time a new, equally unsuspecting generation
| will mock us while swallowing the next Big Industry talking
| points uncritically.
| fghorow wrote:
| "...lays fallow most of the time."
|
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-02/tesla-battery-expande...
| mlyle wrote:
| Batteries solve a different problem. They can smooth over
| daily shortfalls, but aren't so great when you have a week-
| long aberration. To fix that, you need significant
| overprovisioning or alternate means of generation.
|
| That is, if you depend upon wind and wind is screwed up for a
| week... batteries aren't going to let you stretch limited
| solar all night long.
| RyanPringnitz wrote:
| Hydro storage is gaining popularity. During the day, with
| over-provisioned daytime production, they pump water to
| higher elevation ponds. At night they let it flow down to
| the lower elevation ponds.
|
| These could still freeze and stop becoming viable sources
| of energy, but they are a non-lithium source for energy
| storage. If they could be kept warm enough to flow in these
| conditions, they could provide generous storage capacity.
| mlyle wrote:
| Yup, but most pumped hydro is relatively short term power
| storage, too.
|
| You really want something like power->gas->power to help
| fill in on the worst couple weeks per year.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > To fix that, you need significant overprovisioning or
| alternate means of generation.
|
| They have alternate means of generation... natural gas.
| There is a big problem with wells shutting down due to the
| same extremes which shut down wind. Which has caused
| shortages of natural gas which is doubly problematic
| because it's also used extensively for heating.
|
| What do you do when your backup power is vulnerable to the
| same issues as your primary power?
|
| It is arguably a fantastic example of where nuclear power
| excels. Particularly if you had a nuclear plant which ran
| well below capacity most of the time and ramped up when we
| have extreme needs.
| [deleted]
| mlyle wrote:
| > It is arguably a fantastic example of where nuclear
| power excels. Particularly if you had a nuclear plant
| which ran well below capacity most of the time and ramped
| up when we have extreme needs.
|
| Right now that's awful, because most of the cost of
| nuclear plants is the capital costs. Paying a bunch of
| depreciation on something you don't use 24/7 is dubious.
|
| Also nuclear tends not to ramp very quickly.
|
| I'm pro-nuclear, but for nighttime base load + power-to-
| gas and filling other storage in the day.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| I should have stuck to my main point which is that they
| actually did have traditional backup power which is also
| offline.
| unreal6 wrote:
| Do such nuclear power plants exist? I was under the
| impression that they provided consistent, baseline levels
| of power in most circumstances.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| You can definitely ramp up and down power generation at
| nuclear plants. Whether that makes sense economically is
| another question.
| mlyle wrote:
| Nuclear plants are OK at this. The current fleet in North
| America can ramp at about 5% per minute from 50% to 100%.
| (Between 50% and less gets very slow). There's also
| concern that repeated ramping could greatly increase the
| amount of maintenance required.
|
| So, on the same order as a "fast" combined cycle plant
| and quicker than a older combined cycle ng plant. But....
| pretty slow compared to the 4 minutes from 0 to 20% and 4
| minutes from 20% to 100% for an open cycle gas turbine,
| and a fair degree of ability to react to "step" loads.
|
| So, if nuclear _needed_ to, it could help out in grid
| stability operations, but you really need something very
| fast like hydro or open cycle NG plants (or batteries) to
| do most of the work.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| This battery is exactly the kind of backup infrastructure the
| parent was saying we need to account for, and and, to my
| sibling comment's point, an obvious submarine marketing blurb
| lazily "reported" by a news outlet.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > "Natural gas rose to a record $600 per million British
| thermal units in Oklahoma. And as much as half a million
| barrels a day of oil output in West Texas may be impacted by
| _well shutdowns that began on Thursday because of the extreme
| cold_. "
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-14/deep-free...
|
| Energy planners didn't account for extreme weather, regardless
| of source.
| tomrod wrote:
| They do, but they are planning on the common experience of
| extremes.
|
| Texas' weather is colder now than in the past 40 years.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > Texas' weather is colder now than in the past 40 years.
|
| Yes. Thus "Extreme" weather.
|
| I was going to suggest it is likely due to climate change,
| but that is largely conjecture.
| blake1 wrote:
| There likely is a climate change effect. Polar vortexes
| have been making deeper incursions into North America
| because of increased turbulence in the atmosphere, driven
| by the overall energy level.
|
| This about a pot, slowly boiling. As it gets hotter, it
| swirls more.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Yeah, we've had a couple of major ice storms/ extreme
| snow here in the past 3 years too. It's a little
| disturbing when you realize they are hitting us at the
| expense of the North Pole.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| > This request was blocked by the security rules
|
| I'd guess they have a geoblock for some fucked-up-BS reason or
| another?
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Imperva seems to be offering a "solve GDPR compliance with this
| checkbox" solution that blocks the EU from accessing your web
| site.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| That's pretty stupid. Oh well...
| thu2111 wrote:
| Probably it's to reduce load on their website rather than
| GDPR related.
| bombcar wrote:
| Europeans trying to download our powers!
| gonzo wrote:
| ERCOT just declared EEA-2 at 1:13am local Texas time.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Weird.. you'd think with the AC demand in the summer they'd have
| enough capacity for winter..
| pdq wrote:
| Different supply/demand scenarios in summer/winter.
|
| Currently the wind turbines are down over 50%, due to icing.
|
| Solar is out during snow/fog and night time.
|
| Winter peak demand is night/morning (solar supply is
| out/minimum), versus summer peak demand is afternoon (solar
| supply is at a maximum).
| abathur wrote:
| I've seen comments that there's also like 13-15GW offline for
| maintenance (cleaning?)
| ameetgaitonde wrote:
| I think the problem is that homes are also designed to cool,
| efficiently, which is why many a/c and heater units are in the
| attic with vents in the ceiling.
|
| This means that they tend to heat homes more inefficiently than
| in places that are used to very cold weather.
| sjg007 wrote:
| If that's true people should insulate their attics. Or just
| keep the taps running and jump into insulated sleep bags at
| night.
| ip26 wrote:
| Attic equipment is mainly for low install costs. Easy to run
| the ducts. It's terribly inefficient.
| AgentOrange1234 wrote:
| IIRC air conditioning is generally less demanding because
| you're 'only' trying to drop the temp by ~30F to get back into
| the 70s on a hot 100F day, whereas for heat you're trying to
| increase by a much larger 50-70F on a cold 0-20F day. I'm sure
| wishing the house was better insulated today (Austin).
| sjg007 wrote:
| The insulation thing is weird because better insulation saves
| you in the summer too. I guess it's just the construction
| fixed cost. Electric heat seems like a weird compromise
| though considering the gulf of Mexico..
| maxerickson wrote:
| Electric heat is great if you don't use heat consistently.
| Relatively inexpensive up front, low maintenance, etc.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Central air and a natural gas furnace are both on the
| same duct system and low maintenance.
| toast0 wrote:
| Electric heat in the central air is low maintenance too.
| xxpor wrote:
| Electric heat doesn't need any duct system though, which
| is nice. Also, no chimney to worry about. For places with
| low-co2 footprint electricity, it makes a lot of sense.
|
| Granted, down in TX central AC is a lot more important
| than worrying about heat for a once-every-30-years cold
| situation.
| tpowell wrote:
| As an FYI I've really enjoyed (Austin-based) Matt Risinger's
| home building channel on YouTube [1] recently. He often
| discusses efficient building trends and materials. You think
| about your R-value much harder when it's 9degF outside... [1]
| https://youtu.be/Ro3Tg9-PqFc
| xxpor wrote:
| Air conditioning can also be more than 100% efficient (from
| the point of view of the heat in the room), because it's
| moving heat from inside to outside. If you're using
| electricity to heat your house, it's only 100% efficient
| because each kw is being dumped directly into the air. This
| is why heat pumps are so great, they're basically just ACs in
| reverse, so for 1 kwh of electricity, you'll get more than 1
| kwh of heat in the air of your house.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| FWIW:
|
| I have a Powerwall and solar. My electric company offers no
| incentive for me to use my powerwall, or to feed into the grid
| during high demand.
| bombcar wrote:
| The incentive comes during an EEA 3 when they simply cut power
| to your house for 30-45 minutes.
| mmglr wrote:
| in these conditions would it make a difference?
| [deleted]
| diogenescynic wrote:
| And more and more people keep moving to Texas.
| gregwebs wrote:
| Do power saving recommendations given out here to reduce
| consumption such as "don't use the oven" help in the winter given
| that wasted electricity ends up as heat? Or is this given by the
| electricity company hoping that they have natural gas to heat
| their house with instead?
| axiolite wrote:
| Beside natural gas, heat pumps have become popular. Ballpack a
| heat pump at about 1/3rd as much electricity for a given amount
| of heat, compared to a resistive heater. Even (larger capacity)
| hot water heaters come with heat pumps now.
| bombcar wrote:
| If you have GAS you should use the oven and furnace as much as
| you can and shut off electricity. If you have electric heat it
| doesn't really matter either way.
|
| (Pro tip - if you have a gas or propane oven but a electric
| furnace/baseboard now is a great time to run the self cleaning
| cycle. The oven will get to 500+ degrees and heat your kitchen
| up real nice.)
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Texas-affiliated energy businesses holding their customers
| hostage for the global warming* events they said no one needed to
| worry about. This would be some world's smallest fiddle shit but
| for the fact I have family in the state.
|
| _Global warming means more extreme heat_ and* more extreme cold.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Can anyone with a voltmeter see if they've cut voltage to 110V or
| 115V?
|
| Ontario Canada regularly does tests for 3% and 5% voltage
| reductions to see what the effect on demand is (and if the system
| even works):
|
| https://www.energyplus.ca/Modules/News/index.aspx?newsId=b37...
| xvilka wrote:
| A perfect case for the nuclear energy.
| [deleted]
| kaibee wrote:
| This is like, the worst possible case for nuclear energy,
| because this is a random fluctuation that won't be sustained
| for more than week. Whereas building a nuclear power plant
| costs billions of dollars and takes multiple decades to pay for
| itself.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Indeed - _traditional_ nuclear power plants which cost
| billions of dollars per reactor unit and are wrapped up in
| mountains of politics are not the future. I think SpaceX has
| demonstrated the impact rapid iteration, modularization and
| standardization can have on billion-dollar+ capex projects.
|
| There are SMR technologies that have already passed important
| phases of regulatory approval. Proposed nuclear technologies,
| such as from NuScale, will hypothetically be far more
| responsive to grid conditions than traditional nuclear power
| plants. Their current design can immediately reject 100% of
| thermal energy on demand. Power can be added or removed from
| the grid in increments as small as 77MW with their solution.
| This level of granularity is easily on-par with existing
| peaker plant capabilities.
| ulisesrmzroche wrote:
| I just got power back. I've never seen weather bad as this here.
| It's about as bad as it gets in NYC or Toronto. Not prepared
| whatsoever.
| Animats wrote:
| 59.774Hz? That's a huge frequency error. I saw 59.6 go by. 29.5
| seconds behind. Those are load-shedding levels. Unusually cold
| weather and heat pumps. Ouch.
|
| Back up to 60.080. They'll run a little fast if they can to make
| the remaining synchronous clocks catch up.
| bombcar wrote:
| Up to 30 seconds behind again, was as low as 10 just recently.
| 800MW of reserve remains.
|
| I wonder what "Current System Inertia" is.
| bob1029 wrote:
| From ERCOT's materials:
|
| Power system inertia is defined as the ability of a power
| system to oppose changes in system frequency due to
| resistance provided by rotating masses. The level of inertia
| present in a system at any time is dependent on the amount of
| kinetic energy stored in rotating masses of synchronously-
| interconnected machines, including various types of
| generators as well as synchronously operating motor loads.
|
| See: http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/key_documents_lists/141
| 324/... (you may need a VPN to USA IP to access this)
|
| Effectively, this is the amount of kinetic energy in the grid
| at any given point in time.
| Aloha wrote:
| I knew it was bad, when my electricity provider was raffling off
| a Tesla for reducing usage.
| hoseja wrote:
| How's that reliable solar and wind working out for ya?
| Animats wrote:
| As of Monday afternoon in Texas, it's getting worse, not better.
| The "rotating outages" have become longer. "Unfortunately, if you
| are a customer who is currently experiencing an outage, you
| should be prepared to be without power for at least the rest of
| the day."[1] Galveston is 95% dark.
|
| Tonight's predicted low temp for Houston is 12F. Tuesday may be
| above freezing.
|
| [1] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-
| weather/articl...
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Everything's bigger in Texas, except the electricity grid.
| slater wrote:
| ERCOT:
|
| The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) manages the
| flow of electric power on the Texas Interconnection that supplies
| power to more than 25 million Texas customers - representing 90
| percent of the state's electric load.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_o...
| mike_d wrote:
| Here is a bit more informative article with the background for
| non-Texans: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/14/texas-
| rolling-blacko...
| sam1r wrote:
| Thanks for posting this! First year here [in HTX] and the
| weather apparently [for born and raised texan locals] is weird.
| stevespang wrote:
| Here below Austin we are warm and toasty, no outages (yet).
| karaterobot wrote:
| I'd guess the insulation in most of the homes down there isn't
| great? If so, please take a moment to turn on any faucets with
| pipes that run along an exterior wall. Just do it a tiny bit, so
| that it drips every few seconds. Otherwise when it gets warmer
| you may have burst pipes to worry about. Good luck Texas!
| salawat wrote:
| Yeah... Guess who woke to the rolling blackout tonight and
| found that the faucets weren't working? Time to get out the
| heat gun and go frozen pipe hunting I guess...
|
| Though god knows how that'll go with PVC...
| JimNasby wrote:
| More than 4 GW of capacity has gone offline in the last few
| minutes, based on
| http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi....
| A significant chunk of load was shed as well. Frequency is
| swinging pretty wildly.
| bombcar wrote:
| Demand went above capacity just now by 100MW - I assume the
| "ancillary" is doing something.
|
| Or Texas is now an over unity device.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Now at level 3: Situation Critical:
|
| "has declared an EEA 3. Energy conservation is critical. Rotating
| outages are underway to reduce demand on the electric system. We
| urge Texans to put safety first during this time. Traffic lights
| and other infrastructure may be temporarily without power.
| 01:25:40 150221"
|
| https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO
|
| "Rotating outages primarily affect residential neighborhoods and
| small businesses and are typically limited to 10 to 45 minutes
| before being rotated to another location."
|
| http://www.ercot.com/eea_info/show/26464
| bombcar wrote:
| Look at the projected capacity graph on the main page - they
| expect to be 10 GIGAWATTS short by 9 AM!
| atian wrote:
| I'm in North Texas (Oncor) and my place just got hit by the
| rolling blackout 3 minutes ago (1:44am). See
| http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/main/currentDayForecastSyst...
| for dramatic shedding of load.
|
| Edit 1:54am - First blackout lasted exactly 10 minutes. They
| got this down to a tee.
|
| Edit 2:37am CT - Second blackout started.
|
| Edit 3:00am - Second blackout ended.
|
| Edit 3:17am - Third blackout started.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| I lost power at 2 am. It's 2:48 am and still no power...
| atian wrote:
| I'm charging my portable batteries with the power left on
| my Macbook.
| godtoldmetodoit wrote:
| Same here, been an hour and a half with no power in Austin.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Austin here also. 8.5 hours and counting. They need to
| find a solution soon...
| nottorp wrote:
| > "Rotating outages primarily affect residential neighborhoods
| and small businesses and are typically limited to 10 to 45
| minutes before being rotated to another location."
|
| I don't understand. Here they shut down a couple large
| factories (that have agreed beforehand to emergency shutdowns)
| when there are capacity problems. Those eat so much power that
| it usually solves the problem.
|
| They don't shut down power to residential just for capacity, if
| you're without power at home it means something blew up on the
| path that delivers to you.
|
| Also, how can a gas pipeline freeze? Almost everyone is heating
| with natural gas here, we have a cold wave, and the only
| question is if they can deliver enough volume. Which is again
| fixed by shutting down some large industrial consumers, not by
| freezing homes.
| bombcar wrote:
| They've already done that - that is EEA 1 and 2 (1 being
| voluntary shutdown, 2 being involuntary shutdown).
|
| They've asked everyone who CAN go to backup generators
| (think: hospitals, datacenters) to do so. If short-term
| shedding of residential load doesn't work, the next step is
| to blackout commercial players - think Walmart, etc. Those
| usually occur for longer periods of time and have security
| risks involved.
|
| Natural gas pipelines have some water in them, they can
| freeze if they're not buried deep enough.
| nottorp wrote:
| > the next step is to blackout commercial players
|
| Yeah, my point is they have the order wrong. They're
| shutting down residential first with the associated health
| risks instead of shutting down commercial which will just
| send people home for a day or three.
| bombcar wrote:
| I was wrong - there is no EEA 4. It's up to the local
| utilities to determine how to shed load; I suspect many
| office parks are already without power (but at 4 AM
| they're also probably not using much power).
| baq wrote:
| that's the scary part: daytime demand is much higher.
| cwhiz wrote:
| http://www.ercot.com/
|
| You can see the forecasted gap on the home page. It's
| going to her worse.
| Rapzid wrote:
| I'm curious how they coordinate between the transmissions
| providers as to what gets cut off when and by whom.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| The second link says:
|
| "each utility is required to lower the demand on its system
| based on its percentage of the historic ERCOT peak demand.
|
| "each utility is responsible for determining how to implement
| the required demand reduction, most utilities use rotating
| outages for this purpose."
|
| There's about 25 different utilities, so who knows what each
| does.
|
| I'm surprised voltage reduction isn't used. It's very
| effective at reducing resistive loads (ie: heaters and
| incandescent lights).
| JimNasby wrote:
| The grid has basically zero capability to change the
| voltage; frequency is all that matters. Frequency is so low
| that in the past hour any power line time base has fallen
| over 5.5 seconds behind. That's a _massive_ drop in
| frequency.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| It's a tool where I am. The grid operator does tests for
| 3% and 5% reductions:
|
| https://www.ieso.ca/Corporate-IESO/Media/News-
| Releases/2019/...
|
| Would be very effective with the space-heater (or oven?)
| driven demand right now in Texas. Not effective for
| A/C-driven demand (motors will draw more current).
| Animats wrote:
| No, voltage can be dropped a bit. "Brownouts" are a
| thing. But they're less effective than they used to be,
| because everything with a switching power supply will
| draw more current if the input voltage drops. That's now
| a big fraction of the load.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Surely it's not a big fraction of the load tonight. This
| whole problem is being caused by heaters.
| puetzk wrote:
| But heaters on thermostats will just run more if they are
| putting out less wattage. So across your whole population
| of houses, you won't move that part of demand much (maybe
| a few were already running at 100% duty cycle).
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| >Frequency is so low that in the past hour any power line
| time base has fallen over 5.5 seconds behind. That's a
| massive drop in frequency.
|
| Out of curiosity, where did you find this?
| gonzo wrote:
| NOW LEVEL 3
| https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO/status/1361215084010352644?s=2...
| bombcar wrote:
| THere is no EEA 4 but I assume as demand continues to increase
| and supply can't keep up they just have to keep shedding more
| and more loads. I expect a state of emergency to be declared if
| it hasn't already.
|
| Luckily today is a bit of a holiday.
| austincheney wrote:
| Rolling blackouts are in effect. What I have noticed is that if
| you drastically minimize your power consumption you drastically
| increase your odds of being spared from the blackouts. The
| observation is based upon neighborhood data posted by various
| homeowners to our community page.
| bombcar wrote:
| They blackout on a home to home level? In CA it was whole towns
| milofeynman wrote:
| They blackout neighborhoods here I believe. My guess is that
| neighborhoods that largely heat with natural gas are spared,
| as they don't use a ton of electricity.
| bombcar wrote:
| That makes sense - if you're going to blackout you want to
| start with the "highest loads" (perhaps per capita? per
| household?) so as to reduce the number of blackouts you
| have to cause. Better 10k people lose power than 50k.
|
| Though if 60% of Texas homes are electric heat then you
| have to consider that, too, and how long it takes a 60o
| house to get to 40 (any lower and you begin to risk health
| and water damage). I assume they'd roll the blackouts and
| no neighborhood would be without power for more than a few
| hours.
| bombcar wrote:
| Ah, looking at the EEA 3 alert:
| http://www.ercot.com/eea_info/show/26464
|
| In these situations, each utility is required to lower
| the demand on its system based on its percentage of the
| historic ERCOT peak demand. While each utility is
| responsible for determining how to implement the required
| demand reduction, most utilities use rotating outages for
| this purpose. Rotating outages primarily affect
| residential neighborhoods and small businesses and are
| typically limited to 10 to 45 minutes before being
| rotated to another location.
| jweir wrote:
| ERCOT is the only energy market not to have a capacity market.
| Combine this with a large dependency on wind(unreliable) and you
| see problems.
|
| This is not the first time has happened. Summer of 2019 saw a
| heat wave with no wind that lasted a week. Energy prices were way
| up.
|
| https://cpowerenergymanagement.com/why-doesnt-texas-have-a-c...
|
| Ps - I just checked the prices for northern Hub - day ahead was
| over $6,500 and real time around $4,500 per MW for 8pm.
|
| Last Sunday both prices were around $25.
| hourislate wrote:
| From what I understand, it's not that there is no wind. 50% of
| the Turbines have been shut down do to icing. The also have
| some NatGas suppliers that suffered freezing damage. So it's a
| combination of things that are adding up. I'm in North Texas
| and I can't remember temps this low in the last 30 years. It's
| about 13 degrees (- 10 C) at the moment and it looks like it is
| going to get a lot colder in the coming days.
| jweir wrote:
| Correct. The summer of 2019 was no wind. Today's problem is
| ice.
| grendelt wrote:
| I'm guessing ice is such a rare problem the turbines in
| Texas aren't equipped to handle it. Not that turbines can't
| de-ice themselves, right? Surely if they can operate in the
| North Sea, they can operate in West and South Texas, yeah?
| Element_ wrote:
| According to this article[1] you can equip them with cold
| weather packages that will allow them to operate down to
| -30C. I am guessing they wouldn't install those packages
| on turbines in Texas
|
| [1] https://energynews.us/2019/02/27/midwest/wind-
| turbine-shutdo...
| jweir wrote:
| I am not familiar with turbine technology. But I do know
| wind farms is ISO-NE (New England) have shutdown from
| ice. Just a quick bit of reading describes the challenges
| - historically the solutions have been expensive and not
| very good. One article said there is some promising new
| technology.
|
| Here is that article (or press release - I know nothing
| of the source)
|
| https://www.windpowerengineering.com/the-cold-hard-truth-
| abo...
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Perhaps there is an unhappy middle temperature where ice
| forms more easily? I know some people from the northern
| US that moved to Texas and were mocking how slowly they
| drove in the snow. Until they had a close call and
| realized the barely freezing weather makes for worse ice
| sheets.
| txlpo78 wrote:
| Central Texas has been getting a lot of freezing rain
| this weekend, as opposed to outright snow or sleet. I
| know this has caused a lot of power line and tree damage
| (because it causes water to cling to trees and freeze
| into ice, whereas snow doesn't accumulate as much on
| trees). I would imagine freezing rain would have similar
| effects on wind turbines.
| brundolf wrote:
| Austin TX here, it's the most bizarre thing I've seen.
| All trees, all objects, have a thin (couple mms) shell of
| clear ice. Evenly distributed all the way around, and
| then icicles on the bottom. It all appeared that first
| day (Thursday?) when we first had freezing temperatures
| and there was moderate rain at the same time. All of the
| trees are sagging, several branches have fallen just
| within the view of my house.
| heurist wrote:
| Walking around my yard this evening and the green
| vegetation that froze over crunched like potato chips.
| I'm from the Midwest so familiar with the cold, but I had
| never experienced that sensation before.
| chipsa wrote:
| Freezing rain usually occurs when you have an inversion
| aloft, resulting in above freezing temperatures over sub
| freezing temps, along with precipitation. The snow that
| falls melts, then chills down as it goes through the cold
| near surface layer. So when it hits an object, it freezes
| on contact.
|
| For this to occur, you need temps to be pretty close to
| freezing, as if it's too warm, or won't refreeze, and too
| cold, it never melts to rain.
| foxhop wrote:
| Look up grand solar minimum.
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| The forecast looks to be warmer after Monday, no?
| milofeynman wrote:
| Tuesday 2am is the lowest we'll see around North Dallas.
| 2degF is current prediction
| jabl wrote:
| > ERCOT is the only energy market not to have a capacity
| market.
|
| Plenty of energy-only markets around, at least internationally.
|
| ERCOT also has an ORDC. Surely they can tweak that if they want
| to have better insurance against black swan type events without
| going to a capacity market, with attendant problems.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Texan here. I tried, on Thursday, to buy a space heater; not only
| was the hardware store out, they told me a list of other places
| around town that were also out. Most homes use natural gas for
| heat, but I think a lot of space heaters are probably turned on
| right now.
|
| I also have to wonder how an everyone-videoconference-from-home
| society changes electricity usage? Not saying it has a
| significant impact, just wondering.
|
| It is odd for Texas to have peak electricity usage in the winter;
| especially anywhere other than north Texas, we usually get
| threatened with rolling blackouts when it's 110 degrees and
| everyone has their A/C cranked up, not in the middle of the
| winter.
| Krisjohn wrote:
| > I also have to wonder how an everyone-videoconference-from-
| home society changes electricity usage? Not saying it has a
| significant impact, just wondering.
|
| Well, anecdotally, my office is the only room that doesn't need
| heating.
| mdip wrote:
| Yup, year-round I have a window open in that room. It's 10
| outside, today, but a balmy 77 in my office.
| o-__-o wrote:
| I powered on all of my servers tonight and opened the
| window. I'm probably part of the problem
| [deleted]
| ddreier wrote:
| Several articles have said that only 40% of homes in Texas use
| natural gas for heat. https://climatecrocks.com/2021/02/14/the-
| eyes-of-texas-are-o...
| enraged_camel wrote:
| That actually makes sense since the lower half of the state
| rarely gets cold enough to warrant a complex heating setup.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I have lived in Texas all my life and this figure surprises
| me. Every home I have ever lived in or rented has had a gas
| furnace, even if some of the appliances are electric. I've
| never even lived north of ATX, so this makes even less sense
| to me.
|
| Why would we be building out all these homes in the Houston
| area with insanely powerful gas furnaces? The home I am in
| right now could easily get to 80F+ in this current ambient
| weather if I let the furnace run constantly. But, my 5 ton AC
| struggles in the summer to pull 30 degrees of delta. This
| stuff really staggers me sometimes.
|
| As a counterpoint, I also have a friend who lives in the
| downtown area with new construction (completed late 2019) and
| its a heat pump/resistive setup. He is on griddy and not
| having a good time right now.
|
| Perhaps its some economics thing with home builders and
| supply chains, rather than rational application of
| engineering talent.
| jjeaff wrote:
| I'm thinking it must take quite a bit more energy to heat all
| those big sprawling Texas homes to a comfortable temp during
| the day than the relative efficiency you can get for heating a
| building full of tightly packed offices. But this would be more
| of an issue with cooling since it is hotter mid-day. Whereas
| with cold, it gets colder at night, and most people are at home
| at night anyway.
| TylerE wrote:
| OTOH, the homes are probably gonna be heated somewhat anyway,
| even if no one as homes, and if the offices are shutdown,
| it's probably a net win.
| foxhop wrote:
| Get incandescent light bulbs and heat a small room. I use a 200
| watt bulb to keep me toasty at my desk in Connecticut Zone 6B
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| If you have anything else that can use a significant amount of
| power (e.g. electric stove/hotplate, kettle, gaming rig,
| bitcoin miner), it's just as efficient as a space heater.
|
| This also means that if your alternative is running a resistive
| heater, there's no meaningful extra cost to e.g. mining
| cryptocurrencies with your GPU (assuming you have decent
| cooling so your components don't get damaged from overheating).
| foxhop wrote:
| Thats a terrible idea. Get traditional light bulbs and warm
| your body and a small room.
| fastball wrote:
| Why is that a terrible idea?
| deniablenexus wrote:
| > _I also have to wonder how an everyone-videoconference-from-
| home society changes electricity usage? Not saying it has a
| significant impact, just wondering_
|
| I work in the industry in TX and we've seen noticeable changes
| in both usage patterns and amounts. Most notable in the early
| morning hours as people are waking up and getting ready to
| work. A whole lot more people are waking up, checking emails,
| and keeping lights on at home rather then driving to the
| office.
| lgregg wrote:
| Yeah normally 11 cents per kWh but right now am at $4.24 per kWh.
| manyes wrote:
| So as far as I can gather, there are no generating units (other
| than wind turbines) that are down for maintenance? There is
| really only a low pressure problem in the pipeline system that is
| causing some combustion units to idle?
| bloaf wrote:
| Natural gas prices have been absolutely _wild_ the past few days.
|
| https://www.naturalgasintel.com/weekly-natural-gas-prices-so...
|
| If you're not used to their bizarre units of volume the key
| takaway is this: Quantities of gas that usually sell for ~ $3
| were selling for over $300 on Friday/Saturday.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| That price volatility is an interesting thing. It could
| actually accelerate the transition to renewables in places like
| Texas. Gas for peaker plants becomes a lot less attractive when
| the price can jump by 100x when it is most needed. If that
| becomes a regular thing, people will want other options. And of
| course such options are readily available in the market now in
| the form of e.g. solar + battery that you can install in your
| home.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Battery storage is wholly inadequate for this current
| scenario. We need reliable baseload capacity for prolonged
| demand cycles like this. Texas being frozen over for days on
| end is not the same as dealing with the duck curve on an
| intraday basis in the summer.
|
| Running your AC on batteries for a few hours in the afternoon
| is a completely different ballgame than trying to heat your
| home for 72 hours straight.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| You are right, it's not a solution by itself. But it does
| help smooth out the energy peaks. The more people do that
| the better it gets. And if you have an EV with vehicle to
| grid capability, that's another very capable battery that
| should be able to keep you powered for 2-3 days. A couple
| of million of those would go a long way in the next few
| years. But it does require a bit of planning and
| infrastructure to happen.
| dehrmann wrote:
| How isolated are different natural gas networks in the US?
| maxerickson wrote:
| Not a direct answer, but you can adjust the active layers on
| https://www.eia.gov/state/maps.php to show pipelines. It's
| pretty well interconnected.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Connections only halfway answers it capacity is also a big
| part of this.
| bloaf wrote:
| Virtually everything is interconnected [0], but some regions
| are more connected than others. All the producers and
| consumers know how much it costs to ship to/from different
| hubs, including Asia and Europe, and will do so very quickly
| whenever it becomes economic.
|
| As you can probably tell from the wikipedia graph, the gulf
| is heavily plumbed. In addition to the shipping and
| processing in the gulf, there are also _massive_ storage
| caverns [1] that can buffer most swings in demand. Different
| US regions have their own storage hubs [2] but the reason
| that lots of natural gas-related prices have "Mont Belvieu"
| in the name is that Mont Belvieu TX is basically the biggest
| storage hub and serves as the benchmark for everyone else.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_pipeline_system
| _in...
|
| [1] https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2015/10/
| 19/...
|
| [2] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_stor_wkly_s1_w.htm
|
| Edit: wikipedia has a pretty good overview here, but it is a
| little dated:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_storage
| peter_retief wrote:
| I am blocked from the site?
|
| Access Denied Error 16 www.ercot.com 2021-02-15 05:18:28 UTC
| vesinisa wrote:
| Same here, both my European (.fi) home ISP and mobile data IPs
| are blocked.
| foepys wrote:
| It seems like someone or some DDoS detection blocked either
| everything or all foreign IPs.
| p_l wrote:
| Looks like the "GDPR doesn't allow to spy on users, let's
| block anyone who could be covered by it" kind of block.
| jabl wrote:
| I've been able to view the ERCOT site before, so probably
| not.
|
| At this point it makes sense for them to prioritize getting
| information out to residents rather than us foreigners with
| an idle interest. :)
| nottorp wrote:
| Yup, guess they turned on some crisis plan. Which is
| targeted more at those evil hackers outside the US than
| at an actual capacity problem :)
| deepstack wrote:
| Looks like internet is going to be partitioned one way or
| another. The time where any (non-loggedin) web site are
| accessible are coming to an end. Thanks a lot of scrappers and
| DDOS attack guys. Alway takes a few bad apples to ruined it for
| rest of us.
| cientifico wrote:
| Same here.
|
| Your IP: 91.64.84.221 Error code: 16 > This request was blocked
| by the security rules
|
| It might be requests from outside the United States.
|
| Anyway: * The cache from google:
| http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...
|
| * Arhive.org
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210215030515/http://www.ercot....
| eckza wrote:
| It's curious that the current tide of public opinion reckons that
| we're all going to be in EVs in 10-15 years, when the grid nearly
| collapses under the weight of everybody plugging in a heater and
| turning on Netflix at the same time.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| What's your point? That EV conversion shouldn't be a goal? That
| because of a freak, instant spike in demand in 2020 means grids
| and production can't be more robust in 2035?
|
| A TV pulls what, 50-100 watts? A space heater pulls 1500W on
| high. Now think about many people who, for better or worse, are
| running multiple space heaters in their house. Now imagine
| millions of households doing that, on two days' notice.
| fogihujy wrote:
| Not the grandparent, but this is an actual concern. As you
| say, there is nothing preventing us from aiming for large-
| scale EV conversion while simultaneously improving the grid.
|
| The problem is that many seem to believe the second part will
| happen automatically, whereas in reality, it'll require large
| investments in renewing and improving current infrastructure.
|
| As a comparison, I live in the Finnish countryside. Cold like
| the one experienced in Texas is pretty normal here, but the
| grid situation is similar to what the grandparent suggests; a
| large-scale EV rollout would simply not be possible during
| wintertime as the grid's already maxed out due to electric
| heating. And this is when most people burn wood or wood
| pellets in order to keep their electricity bills low.
|
| This will be easier to remedy in urban areas, but unless we
| start upgrading the infrastructure soon, there's simply no
| way we'll be using EV's to the extent we want to in 15 years.
| natch wrote:
| Savvy grid operators are deploying large battery installations
| to meet demand spikes, mitigating some of the issues around
| that. Also the amount of solar and wind energy installations is
| only going to increase going forward, so no worries. Still,
| plenty to do.
| baq wrote:
| in this case texas is net short gigawatts. the largest grid
| scale battery ever built wouldn't last an hour. you'd have to
| have 20 to get through the night.
| brundolf wrote:
| It's not that the capacity can't be mustered, it's that it
| can't be mustered _overnight_.
| chrismcb wrote:
| Not exactly public opinion when places like California are
| manadating it
| notatoad wrote:
| imagine if the grid _did_ have the capacity to charge everybody
| 's EV every night, and the only consequence of a sudden intense
| surge in demand for electricity like this was that you couldn't
| charge your car, rather than your house losing power completely
| when the power company has to institute rolling blackouts...
|
| A higher overall demand makes the grid healthier, not weaker.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Perhaps, in 10-15 years electricity output may increase along
| with demand?
| rtpg wrote:
| "Netflix" is not even 10% of a heater. Heating is so much more
| energy-costly than basically anything you do in your home.
|
| Granted, seems like if you're driving ~40-60 miles a day, then
| you're looking at needing 4kW during the evenings. Not
| insignificant, but it's like... electric heating for one big
| room, basically.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| What is the cost to build power grids to support days of
| weather a geography doesn't experience for decades at a time
| (it has been 30 years since Texas was this cold)? Would people
| pay more versus suffer through some power outages?
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Here's their news release about it:
|
| http://www.ercot.com/news/releases/show/225151
|
| That links to this PDF which describes their emergency
| procedures:
|
| http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/200198/EEA_OnePager_u...
|
| Basically, there are 3 levels of response:
|
| (1) Reserves below 2,300 MW: get more power, including from other
| grids.
|
| (2) Reserves below 1,750 MW: interrupt power to industrial
| customers (who've contractually agreed).
|
| (3) Reserves below 1,375 MW: order transmission companies to
| reduce demand (i.e. rolling blackouts).
|
| The reserves are shown on their main page
| (http://www.ercot.com/), and when I've checked today, it has been
| roughly 3,500-4000 MW. So that sort of sounds promising, but the
| graphs on the same page (projected capacity and demand) don't
| look as promising.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| edit: Took 15 minutes to go from Level 2 to 3.
|
| "Energy conservation is critical. Rotating outages are underway
| to reduce demand on the electric system. We urge Texans to put
| safety first during this time. Traffic lights and other
| infrastructure may be temporarily without power. 01:25:40
| 150221"
|
| https://nitter.42l.fr/ERCOT_ISO/status/1361215084010352644#m
|
| (old stuff):
|
| They just went into Level 2:
|
| https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO/status/1361211669788176384
|
| "has declared an EEA 2. Consumers are urged to reduce
| electricity use. Rotating outages may be needed to protect the
| system. 01:12:06 150221"
|
| Not sure how much load-shedding is available at 1AM...
| Rapzid wrote:
| Manufacturing.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Just went to Level 3:
|
| > has declared an EEA 3. Energy conservation is critical.
| Rotating outages are underway to reduce demand on the
| electric system. We urge Texans to put safety first during
| this time. Traffic lights and other infrastructure may be
| temporarily without power. 01:25:40 150221
|
| https://nitter.42l.fr/ERCOT_ISO
| fotta wrote:
| Rolling blackouts in effect now. https://twitter.com/ERCOT_IS
| O/status/1361215084010352644?s=2...
| svnpenn wrote:
| Uh, were at 1210 mw right now
| RNanoware wrote:
| 1.21 gigawatts? Do you have any idea how much energy that is?
| The only power source capable triggering that kind of energy
| is a bolt of lightning. It would have to be a real wall-
| shaker, big enough to stop a clock!
|
| (I mean this as purely a bit of comic relief. Texas is in
| dire straits right now, and I wish the people and
| infrastructure all the best in this time.)
| svnpenn wrote:
| Yeah, real fuckin funny. I've had no power for 8 hours and
| it's 9 degrees outside.
| carapace wrote:
| It's a quote from "Back to the Future":
| https://backtothefuture.fandom.com/wiki/Jigowatt
| svnpenn wrote:
| I don't care.
| milofeynman wrote:
| When I go to that page I see "Operating Reserves: 3,126 MW"
| nrmitchi wrote:
| I suspect the person you're responding to is using the
| featured link (real-time conditions) and looking at the
| diff between system capacity and current demand, which
| doesn't match the current operating reserves on the ercot
| homepage.
| supernova87a wrote:
| Problem is that:
|
| 1) People's use of energy is relatively insensitive to price, or
| they don't know the price, or few people care about the price
| when it comes time to need it
|
| 2) When you need the energy, it's too late to make the
| equipment/house more efficient, and when you don't need it,
| people don't think it's important to make it more efficient
|
| 3) Mandating that people upgrade their equipment is unpopular,
| they vote against it, yet when they get hit with the bill for the
| energy later, they're unhappy with government for not having done
| more to control it.
|
| It's a thankless job, to be sure. Good thing taking away people's
| incandescent bulbs was recognized as a threat to democracy and
| stopped.
| [deleted]
| Gravityloss wrote:
| So the people decide to act in a way that there will be power
| cuts - if it was only them, it wouldn't matter much - they
| would deserve it.
|
| But since the system is shared, it affects everyone.
|
| Insulation and heat pump equipped spot price aware water
| heaters etc could probably help a lot.
| fy20 wrote:
| Insulation is the main issue. I live in a cold country where
| it often gets to -20c (-5F) during winter, but we can have
| peaks well below that. We usually don't even turn our heating
| on until it drops below freezing as our home is well enough
| insulated (we have much stricter building standards regarding
| this than the US), so that it's comfortable inside (21C/70F)
| until then.
|
| Insulation helps in the summer too though - it's not just
| something you need in cold climates. If it's hot outside and
| you are running AC there's a temperature differential.
| Insulation will reduce the equalisation of that, and reduce
| the amount of energy you are using to cool your home. It's
| epecially important if you are in a stick framed home where
| there's basically no thermal mass (as opposed to masonry).
| jodrellblank wrote:
| What's the problem with incandescents here? They're
| inefficient, which means they turn lots of energy into heat
| instead of light, which means your thermostat will turn down
| your heating to compensate because it needs to produce less of
| the desired amount of heat.
|
| In the abstract, they're bad when you're cooling a Texas house
| and they're putting more heat into it; on a cold night a 100W
| resistance heater is a 100W resistance heater and if you'd
| banned them, the people with them would need 100W heat from
| another source for every bulb replaced. That wouldn't save
| power or money or reduce demand now as you seem to be
| suggesting.
|
| Or it's day time and the bulbs are off, or nighttime and the
| bulbs are off for sleep. They seem the least relevant thing to
| gripe about in this specific context?
| bluGill wrote:
| Natural gas to a powerplant is overall less energy efficient
| compared to natural gas to a high efficiency home furnace.
|
| This is about Texas though where high efficiency gas
| furnaces. In the north natural gas is the normal way to heat.
| I'm not sure about Texas.
| briandear wrote:
| Natural gas heating is common in Houston. Most new
| construction I've looked at in north Houston use gas forced
| air for heating. I have never seen electric central heating
| in Houston; I am sure it exists, but in my experience most
| houses that have central heat, have gas.
| clavalle wrote:
| I'm in Austin and my heater uses gas. Every house I've had
| has used gas. It's incredibly cheap around here.
| noodlenotes wrote:
| Texas has the equipment, but it's all frozen due to an extreme
| weather event.
|
| 1. The extreme cold is driving up demand to heat homes which is
| usually done in part by natural gas but
|
| 2. The cold has frozen natural gas pipes and wells, driving up
| the cost of gas 33x.
|
| 3. People are trying to heat their homes with electricity but
|
| 4. Wind turbines are frozen, limiting capacity, AND those sky
| high gas prices are limiting what gas power plants can output.
| pridkett wrote:
| Most of this is correct, but thankfully, wind turbines do not
| appear to be frozen. In fact, current wind power to the grid
| is 4300MW. The predicted level is about 2450MW for right now.
| That's difference amounts to the entire reserve power in
| their grid. You can see this on the ERCOT page (it's a popup
| which is hard to link from mobile). If wind wasn't doing so
| well things would be even more painful.
|
| Everything else you said appears to be spot on.
| netsec_burn wrote:
| Their press release from Feb 24th indicates that yesterday
| they were frozen. Perhaps not today, however.
| http://www.ercot.com/news/releases/show/225151
| heyflyguy wrote:
| They were frozen. De-icing helicopters un-froze them.
| namibj wrote:
| How do you manage to freeze natural gas pipelines? It isn't
| even liquid at the near-surface air low-temperature record
| (-89.2 C/-128.6 F).
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| 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.
| dmurray wrote:
| Methane can't realistically freeze in the pipes, but
| unrefined natural gas has plenty of impurities which can.
| Note they're talking about "pipelines and wells" freezing
| in a gas production context, not residential gas mains.
| namibj wrote:
| Understandable. As long as it remains available, the
| price hike seems to incentivize operators to expend
| energy on manually thawing them. I'm assuming they could
| rig up makeshift natural gas burners/heat lamps to keep
| critical sections above freezing.
| sneak wrote:
| I feel like this reads like the first 60 seconds of intro
| to one of those youtube disaster-recounting videos.
| genewitch wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/user/USCSB being one of said
| channels. I don't want to say in enjoy their videos due
| to the content, but for being so simple they convey a
| great deal of information in a way that few other media
| have done in decades.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| I've definitely watched over 20 hours of their content.
| It's very well produced, very approachable and easy to
| understand. I'm pleasantly surprised at how good of a
| resource their videos are. I had lower expectations with
| them being part of the federal government.
| sneak wrote:
| The one I was thinking of is
| https://youtube.com/c/FascinatingHorror - they aren't
| quite as in depth but cover a lot of different events.
| namibj wrote:
| Thanks for the link.
|
| And yes, my wording seemed weird, even to me.
| [deleted]
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| My parents live in Dallas and rarely use the heating because of
| cost; instead they wear scarves and mittens inside. They are
| running it now, because it is the coldest they've ever seen.
| When your alternative is to freeze to death, you pay. Finding
| fault with people because of that is insensitive and lacking in
| empathy. They know the cost, they also know what the
| temperature outside is.
|
| Resilience is an important principle in engineering, we know
| that from software, but it is even more important in
| infrastructure. People rely on this for staying alive. It is
| important to have a diverse set of electrical generators.
| Atomic energy and coal are very resilient. As someone else
| pointed out, a lot of green infrastructure is prone to failure
| in extreme events. The wind turbines froze. When the sun isn't
| shining the solar doesn't work, and it is coldest at night. It
| is great to have green infrastructure _with_ other types. This
| stuff is way to important to play politics with.
| [deleted]
| saurik wrote:
| Of all the things the comment you replied to complained
| about, people's inelastic demand wasn't one of them: it was
| merely the background for all of the actual things being
| complained about.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > People's use of energy is relatively insensitive to price, or
| they don't know the price, or few people care about the price
| when it comes time to need it
|
| Basically this. Few individuals pay the actual price of
| electricity. At best, they'll pay time-of-day rates that might
| change schedules 2x/year. Otherwise, everyone pays the average
| cost, and couldn't care less if noon-time electricity costs 10x
| on Monday vs. last Thursday.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The real fix here is to have more residential customers
| either knowing the minute by minute pricing, or paying extra
| for the privilege of an "unlimited plan" or something.
|
| That could be achieved for example by instead of setting your
| space heater to "low heat", "Mid heat" or "high heat", you
| could just hit the "$1/hour of heat", "$2/hour of heat", or
| "$3/hour of heat" settings. The heater itself can look at the
| minute by minute pricing to decide how much heat to output,
| and the user can decide to turn it up if they want to pay.
|
| Electronics to connect to wifi and check a server for pricing
| cost under a dollar now (ESP8266).
| protoman3000 wrote:
| Ahh, yes, the center of Neoliberal logic. Widespread rip-
| off is acceptable if the individual has technically a
| choice to not get ripped-off and if the fineprint of the
| contract had a size of at least 0.000001pt.
| freetime2 wrote:
| Can you elaborate further on why you think the parent is
| in favor of ripping people off or deceitful contracts? I
| didn't read anything in their comment to suggest that, so
| I am genuinely curious how you came to that conclusion.
| joosters wrote:
| _The real fix here is to have more residential customers
| either knowing the minute by minute pricing_
|
| This is insane. Do you really believe that individuals are
| going to be monitoring the energy prices like a rabid day-
| trader, making 'rational' decisions between "oh good, power
| is cheap now" and "power is expensive, I guess I'll just
| freeze"?
| markvdb wrote:
| Giving electricity consumers the opportunity to set their
| consumption preferences is actually super logical. It's
| an obvious way to shave peaks off the total demand for
| electricity.
|
| Consumers obviously shouldn't have to monitoring this
| themselves all the time though. Ideally, a device would
| do that for them. But even without that, quite a few
| people in Latvia buy their electricity at spot market
| prices and adjust their behavior to price changes.
| Working poor trying to penny pinch do so manually. More
| affluent eco minded people use intelligent devices.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| I have 2 charts running in my office all day. One is
| energy load and one is energy pricing. I also have the
| current energy price displayed on a screen in our
| kitchen.
|
| This has worked to change our habits pretty well. For
| instance we now consider it "expensive" to run the
| dishwasher during the day. We'll do it if necessary but
| there is now a mental barrier to doing so.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is amusingly interesting to me. I'd love to know
| more about your setup and the results make sense (I've
| considered installing a second dishwasher to be able to
| handle an entire days worth of dishes overnight) but it
| also seems somehow slightly dystopian.
|
| I agree with the note later in the thread that the
| solution is powerwall like things for demand smoothing /
| moving.
| nindalf wrote:
| They might not need to now, when most energy is generated
| by systems that run around the clock. But as we generate
| more solar, it'd be great if people could run more of
| their high energy activities like say, car charging
| during the day. I don't know of any way to incentivise
| this behaviour other than pricing.
|
| Of course it's unreasonable to expect people to monitor
| prices on a minute-by-minute basis. But the future
| probably looks like "oh, car is low right now. I'll plug
| it in this afternoon instead of right now".
| brianwawok wrote:
| If you have a Tesla power wall, I believe you can set it
| up to do this. Basically go power wall (house battery) to
| house during expensive times of electricity. And then
| charge the battery back up during cheap electric times. I
| think even 10% of the grid with such a system would do a
| lot to take the edge off peak demand, as all of those
| goes guys go to 0% usage.
| eitland wrote:
| > This is insane. Do you really believe that individuals
| are going to be monitoring the energy prices like a rabid
| day-trader, making 'rational' decisions between "oh good,
| power is cheap now" and "power is expensive, I guess I'll
| just freeze"?
|
| Pricing here in Norway already changes through the day.
|
| I changed my supplier yesterday to one that has an api.
|
| I'll use the current prices as an excuse to fix a few
| things:
|
| - turning down heat at night, heating fast before demand
| peaks, lower heating during peak etc. Boxes that can do
| this are available in the $150 - $350 price range
|
| - scheduling washing and drying and - if necessary -
| showering to low demand times
|
| - maybe install a fireplace (chimney was mandatory when
| tje house was built so I'll just pay for the actual
| fireplace and installation, not extensive modifications
| to the construction
|
| - or a air-air heat pump (also works as AC)
|
| - not relevant to me at tjr moment but EV owners (of
| which there are plenty around here) can save a lot by
| scheduling charging to avoid peaks. Further down the lane
| I think I've heard about someone (Tesla?) planning to
| allow their vehicles to be used as power banks.
|
| It is probably the main selling point for Tibber here in
| Norway, prices were slightly lower than my previous
| supplier, but not enough to make me switch. The current
| price hike, API access and real time price information
| helped me to make the jump however.
|
| Conclusion:
|
| Providing pricing information and APIs to end users seems
| like a good idea for companies that are in a position to
| provide it.
| manyes wrote:
| Batteries don't work all that well at these lower
| temperatures. I suppose if your Tesla is in a garage that
| would work, though.
| hedora wrote:
| Teslas regulate their battery heat for this reason.
|
| https://www.tesla.com/support/winter-driving-tips
| brianwawok wrote:
| Sadly Tesla doesn't have the tech in their car to pump
| power out fast. You need their home battery product power
| wall.
|
| It's actually very sad, I have a great 75 kWh battery in
| my garage. Would be happy to power my home with it during
| peak demand.
| djrobstep wrote:
| Here in Australia, I'm on a power plan that charges you
| the actual current wholesale price (plus an admin fee).
|
| I have an app where I can check the price, and set up
| alerts for when there are price spikes and such.
|
| I don't rabidly monitor it, but it does nudge you into
| changing your behavior gradually.
| londons_explore wrote:
| People make similar choices all the time...
|
| Eg. "Oh, there's a queue at the gas station today. I'll
| drive on and get gas tomorrow instead."
|
| Thats them observing that the cost (to their time) of
| getting gas is high today, and that they can purchase
| later for a lower time cost.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's on a per-day granularity. Not on a per second
| granularity.
|
| Imagine yourself standing at the pump and observing the
| gasoline price ticker, manually PWMing the pump trigger
| to only feed the gas when its price is below some
| threshold.
| baq wrote:
| in before "but this is freedom to make rational
| decisions!"
|
| rational decisions require concentration and that isn't
| free. at some point the cost of making these decisions
| outweighs any potential benefits. don't forget your
| externalities, folks.
| joosters wrote:
| You're comparing filling up the car to literally
| freezing. Find some humanity!
| [deleted]
| namibj wrote:
| The alternative to heating that much is wearing outside
| clothes inside, while heating only enough to prevent
| frost damage (and ideally not requiring gloves).
| mypalmike wrote:
| Imperfect economic analogy is imperfect. It doesn't mean
| it's unreasonable, and it doesn't imply the malicious
| intent you want it to.
| joosters wrote:
| There's imperfect analogies, and then there's completely
| unrelated 'analogies'. It was the OP chose this analogy
| in particular, it kind of implies that they consider the
| situations to be similar.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| At some level, consumers do pay that minute-by-minute
| rate, it just gets averaged out.
|
| No doubt, today, while some people heeded the advice to
| turn their thermostats down to 68 to avoid a grid crash,
| another group of people jacked up theirs up.
|
| Now that rolling blackouts have started, I'm sure some of
| those 68s are going to get changed to 80.
|
| If consumers were paying the $1-$2/kwh+, I'm sure a lot
| more will be set 68.
| joosters wrote:
| If anything, the poorer people will be the ones going to
| 68. So your grand plan is to let the poor freeze while
| the rich stay warm?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| While I agree with your outrage, 68F is 20C, that's a hot
| summer day in the UK; check this historic weather data
| for Heathrow Airport[1] for example, 5 months recorded a
| temp over 20C in 2020 and usually 4 or 3 in earlier
| years.
|
| That isn't a temperature you can reasonably describe as
| "freezing". I'm not used to having a thermostat that high
| even in winter, it's getting hot and stuffy that warm.
|
| [1] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/clim
| ate/sta...
| merpnderp wrote:
| You must have much higher humidity. Because 68F at 0
| humidity is a little chilly even in a sweater. Right now
| it is -8F and my heater just clicked off set at 60F and
| I'm cold even under my electric blanket with a sweater
| on.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Must be; it's 16C (61F) indoors and I've a window open to
| get a cooler breeze in because it's fresh outside.
| qayxc wrote:
| I think you have that backwards. Cold air with low
| humidity doesn't feel nearly as cold as cold air in high
| humidity.
|
| 20degC isn't cold at all unless you're soaking wet or
| there's some serious draft going on in your house.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Making people pay directly for what they use puts them at
| an advantage when the alternative is for them to pay a
| share of what everyone uses.
|
| Would you prefer to be poor and have a large electricity
| bill because bob up the street uses power at the worst
| time of day, or would you prefer to at least have the
| option to save money by heating your house when power is
| cheaper and let bob pay extra for not being considerate
| about his power use times?
| austincheney wrote:
| We normally operate our thermostat at 67 during the
| winter but have put it down to 60 given the power crisis.
| If people are crying about going way down to 68 I have no
| sympathy.
| joosters wrote:
| 68 = they deserve the pain, 67 = all ok?
|
| It's not about the absolute numbers, they were presumably
| just picked out of a hat. It's the general concept. Why
| is there so little empathy on here?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Because there's a difference between
|
| - the poor are freezing to death while the rich have
| plenty
|
| - we have you over a barrel, how much is it worth not to
| die?
|
| - the poor might have to run their dishwasher at a
| different time if they want t-shirt and shorts
| temperature indoors in the coldest winter in 40 years
| joosters wrote:
| Why are you assuming that the poor are demanding t-shirt
| and shorts temperatures? Please stop making up strawmen.
|
| And when did dishwashers come into this? Are you really
| expecting that poor people should be buying brand new
| 'smart' dishwashers that will pick the right time to run
| to save some cents? I'm sure they've got the cash for
| that purchase just sitting around in the bank.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Because that's what the discussed 68F temperature is, I
| didn't make up 68F as a straw man, it was suggested by
| parent comments as an unreasonably cold that it's in
| humane to leave poor people to experience unassisted.
|
| Dishwashers come into it when the parent poster arguing
| in favour of markets-fix-everything said their plan was
| not for poor people to become human icicles, but for
| everyone to be pushed by prices to adjust non-essential
| power use such as washing to other times. Such a plan
| doesn't depend on a smart anything - ERCOT twitter feed
| is suggesting people don't do laundry on Valentine's Day
| to reduce power use, the suggested price influence is
| that people don't do laundry by their own choice because
| it costs more.
|
| Pricing isn't demand based, so everyone does laundry and
| uses heat, then the grid collapses - do you think the
| rich and poor are equally affected by rolling blackouts?
| That they're more egalitarian? I suspect not, as rich
| people will have more and fancier clothing, more money
| for impromptu propane purchases, more insulated houses,
| more luxurious vehicles and more money for gas, etc.
|
| There is no current way to provide enough electricity to
| keep people alive while not providing any for rich
| people's luxuries. If demand-based pricing can reduce
| overall use so the grid doesn't collapse and there isn't
| a huge price surge and people can afford to survive,
| isn't that better?
|
| Fixing wealth inequality or assisting the poor could come
| outside this system - UK has a winter fuel payment for
| the elderly and poor, for example:
| https://www.gov.uk/winter-fuel-payment
| austincheney wrote:
| When we are facing record snow and temperature low with
| possible grid collapse that could result in numerous
| deaths then yes... my sympathy for first world comforts
| softens.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Ok just for the record you're not going to freeze to
| death at 67. I know because I'm in Dallas and my heater
| is out entirely. It's 52 in here and were cold and
| uncomfortable but we're not going to freeze to death
| either.
| nicoburns wrote:
| They could have automated systems to react to prices. Or
| they could be simpler (like on a fixed daily schedule).
| sjwright wrote:
| I do this today. My energy provider bills me based on
| live fluctuating rates. It's no big deal, on most days
| prices fluctuate less than they would on a regular
| peak/off peak pricing scheme.
|
| Some days there are short periods of high demand that
| cause price spikes, I'm given ample warning and can
| choose whether to adjust my behaviour during that spike.
| That might mean being more gentle with AC during a
| heatwave, or pre-cooling the house before the spike hits.
| (Price spikes can be 10x or even 100x typical rates.)
| joosters wrote:
| Why does this make sense to do on an individual level? If
| there is ample warning of price spikes, shouldn't we be
| expecting the power companies to do the energy hedging?
| Why make thousands of people do the job instead of the
| one single entity?
|
| If we are trying to make the energy system smart,
| shouldn't the power companies be the ones trying to add
| smarts to the system? (e.g. better energy storage for
| peak usage, etc)
| sjwright wrote:
| You make it sound like an economics problem when it's
| ultimately an engineering problem. Energy companies
| already do many things to keep the grid stable, but you
| can't rely _entirely_ on supply side solutions else you
| are forced to over-engineer the grid to handle extreme
| demand, a cost that 's inevitably passed onto consumers.
|
| This is going to become more important as electric cars
| become mainstream--without some incentive for consumers
| to delay charging their vehicles during extreme peaks,
| we're going to be paying for some fairly hefty upgrades
| to keep electric grids stable.
|
| Focusing on demand saves everyone money, because it means
| we can do more with existing infrastructure. In my case,
| if I'm willing to react to price spikes, I can reduce my
| annual energy cost by literally hundreds of dollars. For
| me, it just means occasionally delaying use of the
| dishwasher or dryer by an hour or so. And by occasionally
| I mean a handful of times every year.
|
| It's far less onerous than the regular peak/off peak
| pricing I've dealt with in prior decades.
| freetime2 wrote:
| There is a large cost to building out excess capacity to
| handle peak demands. That cost gets passed on to
| customers, and everyone ends up paying more for
| electricity. There's also an environmental cost, as
| "peaker" plants typically burn fossil fuels. Even
| building grid-scale storage solutions would have a fairly
| large environmental impact (assuming that's even feasible
| at all on the scale necessary).
|
| It makes sense to target both the supply and demand sides
| of energy consumption.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Devices can offer functionality to take the
| decisionmaking burden from the user.
|
| For example a dishwasher could have a setting where you
| tell it what time the washing must be done by, and it
| schedules the wash cycle to be when it thinks electricity
| will be cheapest.
| baq wrote:
| don't know about you but my dishwasher's shortest program
| is ~30 minutes - if price of electricity changed every
| minute, i just wouldn't care because it'd be pointless.
| jusssi wrote:
| Most of the energy a wash cycle uses is for heating the
| water it just took in. The part where it splashes the
| water around uses next to nothing.
|
| Waiting a bit to start heating that water if there's a
| high consumption peak right now is hard to transfer to
| any significant benefit for the consumer, because
| electricity is just that cheap. But it might make sense
| from the grid point of view to have higher demand
| elasticity.
| genewitch wrote:
| > from: GE to: end user
|
| > Subject: Missed payment on warranty program, features
| disabled
|
| >
|
| > Hello <name> due to missing your yearly warranty
| payment, your GE dishwasher's peak pricing avoidance has
| been disabled.
|
| > In order to save money, please send us money.
|
| > P.S. if you haven't paid up within a month, your
| dishwasher will only heat water when the cost of
| electricity is higher than the 24 hour rolling average
| peak.
|
| > thank you for your consideration.
|
| >
|
| > Mike at GE
| jonatron wrote:
| Half-hourly electricity pricing exists in the UK:
| https://octopus.energy/agile/ I'm considering switching to
| it actually.
| ev1 wrote:
| Texas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138767
| jonatron wrote:
| Oh, cool, interesting to see a similar thing exists
| elsewhere. It looks like Griddy is missing a reasonable
| price cap though.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Notice that it's pseudo-realtime pricing... The price for
| a given half hour is set the day before. That means the
| price can't adjust for unpredictable events like a power
| station failing.
| monkeydust wrote:
| Interesting offering. This is where you want a battery
| (electric car counts as one). Costs need to come down
| first.
| jonatron wrote:
| I actually don't have a battery. I have a large hot water
| tank with immersion heaters, heated overnight. I'm
| already on "economy-7", which is where the price is
| cheaper for 7 hours overnight.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Counter argument is that it is not my business to have to
| think how to consume energy to match the production pattern
| of my provider. It is literally their business to meet my
| energy demands. Invest in more generation capacity, more
| storage, improve the transportation grid.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Do you still have incandescent bulbs in the US? Its really hard
| to find them here in Australia. I thought they were banned but
| I just read that they are not, but have been phased out.
| makomk wrote:
| There are loopholes that allow incandescent bulbs to be sold
| in the US still. However, replacing incandescent bulbs would
| do basically nothing to help with this kind of power shortage
| caused by a cold spell - all their waste energy is heat, and
| they're as efficient at producing it as any other resistive
| heater. Switching to LED lighting saves people money during
| more normal times but makes the long-termp peak to average
| power usage ratio worse, and ordinary people have no reason
| to care about that because they pay the same amount for power
| during this kind of peak than they do at any other time even
| though it's a lot more expensive to produce.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| > However, replacing incandescent bulbs would do basically
| nothing to help with this kind of power shortage caused by
| a cold spell
|
| It depends on what you replace it with. If you switch to a
| resistive heater, yeah, that's pointless, but if you switch
| to a heat pump or natural gas-based heating it'd help.
| pkaye wrote:
| Its pretty much LED bulbs and fixtures in the US. I think
| Trump administration reversed the original law but there are
| a few state laws that are even stricter. The manufacturers
| have all moved onto LEDs so no going back.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It would have been an executive order the Trump
| administration reversed, he wouldn't have had the authority
| to reverse a congressional passed law.
| pkaye wrote:
| Looks like it was just the more recent DOE regulations
| that were reserved. These were for specialty bulbs. But
| with some of the states still enforcing the changes
| combined with other countries doing similar things, the
| manufacturers probably will move on to newer technology.
|
| > In 2014, the Department of Energy issued regulations
| that would extend the efficiency standards of the 2007
| EISA law to some specialty bulbs, effective January
| 2020.[91] The new standards would apply to Edison, globe,
| and candelabra bulbs among others. In February 2019, the
| Department of Energy announced a proposal to withdraw
| this change. In September 2019 the Trump administration
| rolled-back these energy efficiency standards for
| lightbulbs with the Energy Department's publication of
| regulations in the Federal Register.[92][93] The Energy
| Department announced the reversal of the 2014 regulation
| that would have taken effect on January 1, 2020 and
| implemented the last round of energy-saving light bulb
| regulations outlined by the Energy Independence and
| Security Act of 2007.[94]EISA law to some specialty
| bulbs, effective January 2020
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-
| out_of_incandescent_ligh...
| evan_ wrote:
| There was an incandescent bulb phase out over several years
| that was supposed to end in 2020, but Trump blocked it
| because he claimed that LED bulbs were too expensive and made
| him look orange.[0]
|
| You pretty much can't buy them anymore at stores except for
| specialty bulbs like oven lamps, but that might vary state-
| to-state.
|
| 0: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/climate/trump-light-
| bulb-...
| TheGrim-999 wrote:
| So, someone at the Department of Energy that was hired in
| 2012, under Obama, made a ruling, and that's translated by
| the NYTimes as the "Trump Administration" doing it, which
| then gets referenced as "Trump blocked it because they make
| him look orange". Fake news in action, folks.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| He literally said it.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_iFi1qH8Cg
| jayd16 wrote:
| You gotta love implying the president has no power in
| this sort of thing while simultaneously implying Obama is
| at fault here. In the same sentence, no less.
| [deleted]
| tamaharbor wrote:
| Few appreciate Trump's humor. Particularly democrats.
| rayiner wrote:
| Typical LED bulbs have shit spectrum coverage, and have
| terrible flicker when used with dimmers. I've been
| stockpiling incandescents.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| When's the last time you used an LED bulb? The CRI has
| greatly improved since they first came out.
| ashkankiani wrote:
| Stockpiling incadescent bulbs instead of spending time
| doing research to find LED bulbs with a better light
| spectrum?
| lizknope wrote:
| I replaced all of the frequently used lights in my house
| with LEDs. Now I actually have a stockpile of
| incandescent bulbs for things like the closets, laundry,
| and guest rooms where those lights may be on for less
| than a minute a day.
| ffk wrote:
| LEDs tend to give off a good range over the visible light
| spectrum. Incandescents tend to bias towards the higher
| end of the spectrum (towards red).
|
| Agreed that some research can also help find a good
| light. There are plenty of "full spectrum" light
| solutions out there which may work for the original
| poster.
|
| Compare Incandescents (A) vs LED (D) at
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Emission-spectra-of-
| diff...
| namibj wrote:
| As an example for high-CRI LED lighting components, I'll
| mention Yuji.
|
| https://www.yujiintl.com/
| criddell wrote:
| I bought a bunch of 25w bulbs for my lava lamp :)
| ricw wrote:
| Maybe try dimmable LED bulbs? They work perfectly fine
| here.
|
| I find LEDs look much better, particularly if you have
| chandelier type lights.
| akvadrako wrote:
| Dimmable led bulbs come in multiple varients and don't
| work with all style of dimmers. Quality matters too.
|
| The best bet is switching to Hue or other smart bulbs
| that manage their own dimming. It's generally cheaper too
| unless you have a dozen bulbs on one dimmer.
| da_big_ghey wrote:
| Worse, a bunch of them have awful coil whine. I seem to
| be one of the few who can hear it, but quite a lot of
| electronics kick off an infuriating, high-pitched ringing
| and I don't want one more doing that.
| tryonenow wrote:
| I've had terrible luck with LED lifespan. Totally
| ridiculous honestly. I imagine given the failure rate and
| the cost of manufacturing, LEDs are actually worse for the
| environment. Sure, the actual LED in the bulb should
| theoretically outlast incandescent bulbs, but the extra
| circuitry is apparently made of garbage, and I think it
| shortsighted that this mandate was forced on us.
| ruined wrote:
| yep. CFLs and LED bulbs are available everywhere, but every
| store stocks extremely cheap incandescent bulbs right next to
| them
| [deleted]
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| IJS record-breaking cold weather in Texas currently.
| jcranmer wrote:
| The problem here is the high tomorrow in Dallas is supposed to
| be about 10degF. The _typical_ winter high for Dallas is a bit
| below 60degF. This means that the demand for heating is about
| 4-6x what it normally would be for winter.
| mandelbrotwurst wrote:
| Sort of - to understand how extreme a 10 degree high really
| is we should be comparing it to the high on the typical
| coldest day of the year, and then consider how many
| deviations away from that number this event is, not just how
| it compares to a typical winter day. Probably want to
| consider the low temps as well.
| [deleted]
| whatever1 wrote:
| But on the other hand there are only so many hours in a day
| to run your HVAC/space heater. So from 8 hours per day, it
| can go worst case to 3x.
| stdbrouw wrote:
| Hm, heating is either switched off/on depending on a
| thermostat ("bang-bang") or in more sophisticated systems
| is regulated according to need (modulating control). It
| might be on 24/7 regardless of whether it's hot or cold,
| but it's not going to use the same amount of power.
| brianwawok wrote:
| My furnace, which is common in mid level units, is two
| phase. It's off, low, high. Basically it starts by
| modulating off and low. Once low is on 24/7 and it needs
| more heat, it modules low/high. At peak heat it's just
| high all the time.
|
| Upside to being in Indiana is our furnaces are made for
| this. I think I can keep my house at 70 down to like -30F
| outside. It's a pretty expensive furnace though, wouldn't
| make sense in Texas.
| bombcar wrote:
| Even a cheap thirty year old furnace can do that - it was
| able to keep my house at 80deg during the -40 (no need to
| specify; they're the same that low!) last year. I
| actually intentionally drove it to 80 to give me thermal
| mass if needed but it turned out not to be necessary.
|
| Burning gas is insanely thermodynamically active.
| stdbrouw wrote:
| As an addendum, this winter I unfortunately found out
| that, at very low temperatures, the limiting factor might
| be the furnace, but it might also be the capacity of the
| radiators (or underfloor heating, or whatever) to shed
| heat. Tiny radiators or highly spaced underfloor pipes
| and it won't matter how fancy your furnace is, there's
| only so much heat it can distribute.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Radiators are an alternative to, not a part of, a forced
| air gas furnace.
|
| Gas furnace burns gas, blows around hot air.
|
| Radiator heats water, and pushes that water around to
| heat rooms via radiators.
| adrianN wrote:
| Energy loss is strongly supralinear in the temperature
| gradient, so it's probably a lot more than that.
| airhead969 wrote:
| Time-dependent solutions to temperature change across a
| gradient are exponential decay functions that solve diff
| eqs based on Newton's law of cooling. It depends mostly on
| the insulation and the temperature difference.
|
| While it is 10 F outside, the central heating system for my
| apartment in a 6-story building cannot maintain
| temperature. It is 66 F and gradually falling. I would
| guess it would be 2.5kW running 24/7.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 25KW more likely
| NickNameNick wrote:
| I have a 2.4kW heater in my bedroom...
| skinkestek wrote:
| Just in case anyone is about to miss this detail:
|
| That heater probably doesn't run continously.
|
| For a well designed shared system you can get away with
| less than n x what an individual unit needs.
|
| (That said, I too guess 2.5kW is too small for what GP
| mentioned.)
| ChrisIsTaken wrote:
| Energy loss through an insulator is exactly linear to
| temperature.
|
| The problem is that people who would have otherwise
| tolerated 50F temperatures without heating by putting on a
| sweater are pulling their old oil column heater out of the
| storage.
| adrianN wrote:
| Oh you're right.
| makomk wrote:
| One other problem is that one of the ways people have
| been making their heating more efficient is by using heat
| pumps, and their efficiency gain drops off with lower
| temperatures until they become no more efficient than the
| resistive heaters they replaced during the kind of
| unusually cold weather Texas is apparently seeing. This
| makes the peak to average power usage problem even worse.
| ece wrote:
| More modern heat pumps can be efficient at up to around
| -10 degF[1]. Higher efficiency federal/local rebates are
| not bad across the US, so I wouldn't be surprised if
| these were installed in some TX homes. It's still a
| capacity problem if average use is 10hr/day instead of
| 2hr/day and your house has no gas furnace heating. I
| would guess most TX (Dallas/Austin) homes probably do
| have a gas furnace, but maybe not in coastal/south TX
| (Houston).
|
| [1] https://daikincomfort.com/go/aurora/
| da_big_ghey wrote:
| Energy usage is _superlinear_ below a certain point. As I
| recall, about 25% of homes in Texas use heat pumps. but
| below 30-ish degrees, heat pumps don 't work and they have
| to switch to resistance-based heating So, demand will start
| rising a whole lot faster.
| mmaurizi wrote:
| There are newer heat pumps that work below 30 degrees,
| but they're more expensive and not typically used in
| Texas for obvious reasons.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Seems to be a combination of many things (a perfect
| storm...):
|
| * Dwellings are not insulated to the same level as their
| northern counterparts. Over 60% of houses in Texas have
| single pane glass.
|
| * Texas seems to rely substantially on heat pumps for
| residential heating, with fallback to resistive heating. At
| 10degf very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep
| even a decently insulated house properly heated - my guess is
| that many are using 2-3x less efficient resistive heaters at
| night.
|
| * Heating peak demands tend to be correlated with the longest
| time since the sun was last shining... This bodes poorly for
| solar supply and also self generators - even those with
| battery backup.
|
| * Texas typically imports from neighboring states... Most of
| which are in a similar irregular climate.
|
| * Heating requirements for a building vs exterior temperature
| is non-linear, as are heat pump efficiencies. This is
| especially pronounced with poor insulation factor.
|
| To put it into context, Quebec has ~46,000MW of peak
| electrical production capacity for a population of 8.4M.
| during cold winter days (-30degf) it uses all of that
| capacity and becomes a net-importer. In Summer months, it
| uses 1/3 of this.
|
| Texas had peak electrical production capacity of 37,600MW for
| it's population of 29M.
| stdbrouw wrote:
| As others have pointed out, heating requirements (watt/m^2)
| are in fact linear which is why it's possible to more or
| less accurately calculate a building's insulation
| performance in watt/m^2/K, it's just that there's a grace
| zone where if it's e.g. 65F outside and you want it to be
| 72F inside, you might not need to heat at all because the
| shortfall is covered by solar gains through your windows,
| internal gains (cooking etc.) and energy stored as thermal
| mass. That is, the nonlinearity is not in heating needs,
| but in the efficiency of heating production and the amount
| of heating you get for free.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Yes that is correct in theory, BTU requirements are
| linear based on delta temperature with everything else
| being static.
|
| What doesn't follow is electricity consumption per BTU
| produced, ie. if your heating source efficiency is non-
| linear, such as a heat-pump + resistive fallback heating.
| You can easily consume 8x the amount of electricity with
| a delta T of 60 than you do at 15.
|
| In reality, outdoor air temperature alone isn't
| indicative of the entire building heat loss/requirement -
| ground temperatures don't respond linearly to air
| temperatures. Likewise, there are some oddities that come
| into play with high temperature deltas such as phase-
| change of materials or outright failure in some cases.
| Precipitation and wind can also affect thermal
| efficiencies.
|
| A bitter-sweet example for Texans: The snow can actually
| provide some insulation. It would be worse if you had no
| snow and similar air temperatures than getting that 12"
| of fluffy stuff later this week.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Greetings from Texas. Yeah, all that is true. You build
| based on how things usually are, or at least usually WERE
| when the dwelling was built.
|
| I live in Houston -- very close to downtown, so I'm only
| about 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. This makes it VERY
| FUCKING WEIRD INDEED that my entire yard is covered in
| snow, and it is 16F outside. This is NOT Houston weather.
| It's almost unprecedented -- it's certainly never been
| anywhere NEARLY this cold in the 26 years I've lived here,
| and the idea that we really won't be above 32F (0C) for a
| material amount of time until SATURDAY is really really
| nuts. In a normal Houston winter, by contrast, we MIGHT see
| 3-4 nights that freeze. We go years without needing to wrap
| plants, and I've never bothered to wrap outside pipes
| before. (Outlying areas to the north and especially
| northwest of the urban core get as much as 10 degrees F
| colder, but even so it's not a regular thing.)
|
| So yeah, we're all built here for cooling and not heating.
| Ambient air temp outside is rarely more than 95, so getting
| your house to 78 is pretty attainable. But when we get cold
| snaps, WE certainly notice in our house, which is a
| relatively new (1997) 3-story townhouse (very vertical;
| it's about 1800 sq. ft. or 167m^2). It's just not set up to
| heat evenly or well.
|
| The first problem is just distribution. Our house has a
| modern 'open' style floorplan, with soaring ceilings in the
| middle (living) floor. Heat, of course, rises. The upshot
| is that if you set the thermostat to warm the lower 2
| floors to, say, 65F, the 3rd floor main bedroom will be
| intolerably warm and dry.
|
| As a consequence, a window in our bedroom is open about 2"
| _all winter_.
|
| The other gotcha in our house is the floor in the first
| level, where I have my office (I work from home). It's a
| stained concrete floor, which is great in the summer
| because it helps keep the room nice and cool.
| Unfortunately, it does exactly the same thing in the
| winter. I'm wearing thick wool socks and long underwear in
| here now, even though I have a plug-in radiator to
| supplement the central heating.
|
| Actually, the radiator -- a Delonghi; it works great --
| would probably be enough IF the windows were better sealed.
| My desk is up against a window. My legs feel cold all day
| in weather like this (well, in cold weather; there hasn't
| been any weather LIKE THIS before), to the point that last
| week when it was much warmer (45F during the day) I was
| wearing sweatpants over jeans.
|
| The house is wonderful and comfortable and attractive. It
| works GREAT for the vast majority of our weather. It just
| gets drafty in the winter. And, of course, today I'm
| concerned that we're going to get rolling outages. Whooo!
|
| At least we have a fireplace. (People laugh about it, but
| in all honesty having a fire is the easiest way to make the
| living area comfy without overheating the top floor, just
| based on where the heat goes. If the house was a little bit
| bigger, I suspect it would've come with 2 climate control
| units and proper zoning, which would help a LOT, but as is:
| just one big zone.)
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > The first problem is just distribution. Our house has a
| modern 'open' style floorplan, with soaring ceilings in
| the middle (living) floor. Heat, of course, rises.
|
| This style of house made so that people can feel rich and
| high status while wasting enormous amounts of energy to
| heat and cool is an affront to our future generations.
|
| And it's almost inescapable unless you're interested in
| custom building or buying an old house.
| bombcar wrote:
| I hate open concept with enough fury to heat all of Texas
| to boiling. They're clearly built and sold to people who
| never have had to try to keep kids out of things.
|
| And even worse are houses badly "opened up" - thereby
| ruining whatever design was originally in place.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Well, as childfree people, that was an appeal.
| chaboud wrote:
| " This style of house made so that people can feel rich
| and high status while wasting enormous amounts of energy
| to heat and cool is an affront to our future
| generations."
|
| Wow dude. You decided why people want specific things and
| let us know that it's an affront to future generations.
| I'm glad it tops the list over deep sea drilling, paved
| suburban road jungles, ocean acidification, and dubstep
| (they will look back and mourn the loss of our sanity in
| this age, but it's so addictive...).
|
| Maybe people just walk into a tall place and feel more
| comfortable in it? Maybe builders and markets respond to
| purchasers and their response to something that lots of
| people find more comforting?
|
| Perhaps a hyper efficient off-grid renewable-driven
| earthen hovel isn't for everyone?
|
| I live in a small, modest, low ceiling home with zoned
| temperature management and comprehensive energy usage
| monitoring. That's great for me and my family, but it's a
| preference.
|
| And, you know what? Open plan high ceilings are nice,
| especially when you don't have kids and can hear each
| other more easily.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| You seem nice.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It wasn't a personal comment. I've seen it in all the
| houses built in the past 3 decades, coast to coast. Makes
| no sense thermodynamically. Obviously it sells better
| than a house that wastes less energy.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| "So that people can feel rich and high status" is an
| insulting way to phrase "has a different set of
| architectural preferences than I do."
|
| It heats and cools far more efficiently than the
| traditional homes in Houston (mostly pier and beam
| construction). There's more to home appeal than
| thermodynamics, especially in a mild climate.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Houston is not a mild climate, based on how much AC usage
| I've seen there.
|
| Conditioning an extra 2 to 12ft above your head is
| absolutely choosing vanity over energy efficiency.
|
| However, most people don't even have the choice since
| they're making trade offs between various neighborhoods
| of various income levels, and once you get above a
| certain income, all the houses are made with open foyers
| and tall ceilings. The builders wouldn't be able to sell
| the more energy efficient homes at as high of a price as
| the non energy efficient ones, so obviously we're going
| to end up with a stock of homes where the all the heat
| downstairs is constantly going upstairs.
|
| The reason the homes with higher ceilings will sell for a
| higher price is because people feel a certain way about
| them. A high ceiling has no practical benefits and is
| purely for aesthetics at the expense of energy
| efficiency. My intention isn't to insult, but I think it
| is accurate. People do many things to project their
| status.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| From a thermodynamics POV, we're very mild. We only ever
| really want to cool about 20F. Heating is nominal. Most
| places to the north end up with significantly more
| expensive heating needs AND roughly equivalent AC needs.
|
| You are still being insulting, or absurdly reductive.
| Neither is especially welcome. Normal humans value all
| sorts of competing concerns when evaluating a home where
| they may spend many many years. Maybe YOU only value
| thermodynamics and care nothing for aesthetics, but that
| doesn't mean people who don't share your POV are only
| trying to project status or whatever other uncharitable
| thing you envision.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| I'm very much in favour of this kind of aesthetic, but
| having both the heating on and the window open all winter
| is sad and should be unnecessary.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| To be super clear: the amount of heating actually done in
| a normal Houston winter day is very very minimal. It's
| just that enough of it collects in the high point of a
| tall home that an open window is desirable for balance
| (and, honestly, humidity).
| meowster wrote:
| OP doesn't seem mean at all, just accurate that open
| floorplans these days are built poorly. When I was
| shopping for houses, I never saw a good open floorplan.
| They all had weird angles, flows that didn't make sense,
| and zero symmetry, and the asymmetry was terrible to.
| Open floorplans these days aren't built to be nice,
| they're built to sell.
| meowster wrote:
| Did I piss off an architect?
|
| If anyone wants to see what I'm talking about, I think
| there are some examples here: https://McMansionHell.com
| Some of them aren't really that bad, but there are some
| definite atrocities.
| IOT_Apprentice wrote:
| Add zoned areas for the rooms that need heat/cold to
| isolate your usage.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Zoning a house built with a 1 zone system is very
| expensive, and zoning doesn't do much when the house
| looks like this:
|
| https://i.pinimg.com/originals/94/7b/67/947b6734e9ec93809
| b2c...
| mattmcknight wrote:
| I lived in a similar structure for a while, a 3 story
| townhouse with single zone hvac, thermostat on the second
| floor. What was in that system that made it work was
| three dampers, one for each the floors. If you can locate
| the main duct going to each floor, you should be able to
| add a manually operated damper to reduce flow to the
| upper floor when heating and reduce flow to the lower
| floor when cooling. When I switched my system from heat
| to cool or cool to heat, I would usually make a point of
| adjusting the dampers, as well as using that as the time
| to replace the filters. If you don't have dampers at the
| source, closing the dampers at the registers on the
| respective floor to 90% should have a similar effect.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| We have a sort of dumb zoning already, which is a
| thermostat on the first floor, but it only allows the
| first to opt out of whatever heating or cooling is
| happening in the rest of the house. This is never
| something we want to do.
|
| Before COVID were were shopping to upgrade, so we're not
| going to put any more upgrade money into this house, but
| if we were going to stay I'd absolutely make changes in
| this.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| The manual dampers for the ducts can be as cheap as $20.
| Why wouldn't you turn off cooling on the ground floor in
| summer? Heat should rise.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Re: dampers, we generally close 2 of the 3 vents in the
| 3rd floor for the winter.
|
| Re: the downstairs, unfortunately it warms up quickly on
| a hot day, and the structure of the house is such that
| the downstairs room's heat doesn't really have an easy
| path up.
|
| The other factor is that, in a NORMAL, non-plague year,
| I'm alone in the house during the work day. If had
| perfect control of the house climate system, I'd let the
| upstairs drift to 80 or 82 while keeping my office at 76
| or 78, and not start trying to cool the rest of the house
| until after hours when my wife gets home. Same with
| heating: just heat down here during the day, and warm the
| rest of the house in the evening.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| December 1989, there wasn't an unbroken water pipe in
| Houston. Had to use hammers to break up ice waterfall on
| steps to apartment.
|
| https://www.chron.com/news/houston-
| weather/article/Photos-Re...
| usefulcat wrote:
| Do you close off the vents in the upstairs rooms? Seems
| like that would help a lot in the winter.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| There are 3: one in the bedroom, one in the vanity area,
| and one in the actual bath/wc room. We close all the ones
| except the one in the bath/shower/wc tiny room, bc that
| is the place where we are often both naked and wet. :)
| o-__-o wrote:
| Hey neighbor, you live in the heights? You are describing
| my house and neighborhood :D
|
| Still have power here
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Montrose, near Taft & Fairview.
| tgtweak wrote:
| I'll add that up here in the great north - we also use
| combined air conditioner/heat pumps but in most cases
| spring for the "low temperature" models with a built in
| defroster and higher pressure refrigerant - allowing them
| to heat down to -18degf. This would almost never make
| sense in a southern climate where it happens once every
| 20 years. Likewise, investing in any high
| efficiency/dual-source heating setup would not make any
| financial sense.
|
| Any Texans looking for some guerrilla insulation/heating
| techniques:
|
| Put up some painters plastic on the inside frames of
| Windows (with dual sided tape) as this acts like a very
| rudimentary dual-pane window. Kits exist for this also
| (apologies for the Canadian link:
| https://www.amazon.ca/3M-2141W-6-Indoor-Window-
| Insulator/dp/... )
|
| Next I would look into a propane space heater (sometimes
| referred to as a garage/barn heater). These can be
| operated on a standard 20lb tank and can keep a house
| warm for a day or two on a single tank. Co2 levels are
| minimal but you should still make sure you have a decent
| co2 sensor nearby.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| >would not make any financial sense.
|
| Yeah, that's what people often miss. We're not prepared
| for this, and don't build for it, because it almost never
| happens.
|
| And it'll be 70F on Sunday.
| aftbit wrote:
| I remember my parents covering my old leaky single-pane
| windows in our first house with plastic in the winter. It
| looks goofy, but it's cheap and it really helps. We also
| had storm windows that we'd replace our screens with in
| the winter.
|
| We later moved to a house with newer windows that removed
| this need, and adult me has a ground source heat pump so
| I'm toasty even with the 15degF weather here.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Anticipating the cold snap, my wife ordered insulating
| curtains for the big windows on the front of the house,
| to hang behind the decorative ones.
|
| I figured it was more an example of "must do something"
| than "activity that will actually help," but I was proven
| wrong IMMEDIATELY. They've made a material difference (no
| pun intended), and I'm said I said no when she asked if I
| wanted some for my office.
| chiph wrote:
| > The upshot is that if you set the thermostat to warm
| the lower 2 floors to, say, 65F, the 3rd floor main
| bedroom will be intolerably warm and dry.
|
| Every townhouse I've ever lived in had this problem. The
| thermostat is on the ground floor or 2nd floor, which
| results in the bedrooms upstairs being oppressively hot.
| I will drop the temperature by 5+ degrees before retiring
| for the night. I hear you about the cold office floor - I
| have hardwood over a slab and I'm thinking of ordering a
| heating pad like the one the cat has.
|
| There are many intersecting problems here - the main one
| is that the standard building code in the South requires
| a minimum of R-15 insulation in the walls, so that's what
| the builders put in to remain cost-competitive. You can't
| get much more than that in a wall cavity framed with
| 2x4's. Builders and owners need to be incentivized to
| super-insulate. Not necessarily to a "Net Zero" standard,
| but increasing the minimum to R-21 (which requires going
| to 2x6 framing) would help in both heating & cooling
| seasons.
|
| The other problem is that I have had only a single heat
| pump for the entire house. It would be much better to
| have a variable-refrigerant-flow (VRF) system where you
| have multiple "heads" with their own thermostats that run
| independently (commonly called a Mini-Split although
| there are differences). And then you can close the doors
| to rooms that aren't being used, dropping the thermostat
| in them to reduce usage.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Yeah, you get hosed on insulation if you buy a spec
| build. Custom homes are often built better, but come at a
| premium.
|
| Larger townhouses -- say, 2500sqft & up -- are often
| zones more reasonably, at least here, such that
| heating/cooling can be managed with more granularity. But
| doing it really requires multiple units, not a single big
| unit.
| rini17 wrote:
| For open spaces an IR radiative heater - the kind with
| glowing elements - is better. It won't save much energy,
| but for comfort - you can actually point it toward your
| body and warmup it that way without having to heat
| everything around you first. The fireplace does this too.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Yeah, hence the fireplace in the very open main room.
|
| The radiator in my office -- which is a normal shaped
| room with maybe an 8 foot ceiling -- does very well.
| the8472 wrote:
| > the kind with glowing elements
|
| There are far-infrared ceramic heaters that don't glow.
| Less smell and more energy converted into radiation
| instead of warm air.
| jdeibele wrote:
| We live in a 1914 house. There's 2 returns on the main
| floor. We end up with a wide gap among the floors
| (basement to 3rd floor). I looked into systems that have
| inflatable bags that block the areas that are warm so the
| other areas can get more of the hot air.
|
| Something like this:
| https://www.retrozone.com/Catalog/flexdamper/Pumps.htm I
| didn't end up doing it and I don't know anybody who has.
| And it's probably a lot more expensive than opening your
| window in the winter.
| selimnairb wrote:
| There is probably a generation or two of work to retrofit
| housing across the US for energy efficiency, which can
| also address comfort, and health (indoor air quality).
| This is something that can only be accomplished using a
| government program like the Green New Deal (especially
| for rentals).
| eatmyshorts wrote:
| I was agreeing with your points....until I got to the bit,
| "Texas typically imports from neighboring states". Not with
| power. ERCOT is an isolated grid.
| tgtweak wrote:
| It imports from Mexico and neighboring grids.
|
| From ERCOT's own Q&A:
|
| -----------
|
| EEA1
|
| When the reserves drop below 2,300 megawatts, Emergency
| Energy Alert 1 is activated. That's when ERCOT
| communicates to the public and to power generators that
| the situation is deteriorating.
|
| _At this time, ERCOT will import power from other states
| and from Mexico. This regularly happens during peak
| summer months and is not new_. But right now, because
| prices are so cheap, and unrelated to the weather, ERCOT
| was already importing power from Mexico and other power
| grids.
|
| Rotating outages do not happen during this stage.
|
| EEA2
|
| When the electric reserves drop to 1750 megawatts, other
| steps are taken to bring on additional capacity, but
| rotating outages are still not yet activated.
|
| EEA3
|
| When the reserves get to 1,000 megawatts and they are not
| expected to recover within 30 minutes, ERCOT will then
| ask electric suppliers like Oncor and Reliant to begin
| rotating outages to reduce load on the system.
|
| ERCOT said the location of outages would be determined by
| each provider like Oncor and Reliant.
|
| https://www.wfaa.com/article/weather/texas-power-outages-
| fre...
| mschaef wrote:
| The DC ties represent <1.7% of current load. About the
| size of a single large generating station. ERCOT, by
| policy (to avoid certain federal regulations), keeps it
| that way. I guess you're technically right that they can
| import power, but that is far from the design intent of
| the system. (Which is stark contrast to the eastern and
| western interconections, and their internal multistate
| ISO's.)
| jsmith45 wrote:
| the Texas Interconnection (operated by ERCOT) is not
| fully isolated. They have 3 interconnections from Mexico
| (one of which has only ever been used once), and two with
| the eastern US.
|
| It is not clear to me if these interconnections are
| normally used, or only used in Emergency scenarios. I
| think they are used both. However I have no idea what
| sort of capacity these have, and if that is enough in
| cases like this.
| jhayward wrote:
| > _Texas had peak electrical production capacity of
| 37,600MW for it 's population of 29M_
|
| Texas delivered a peak of over 60GW _last night_ , before
| an unprecedented falloff in generating capacity due to
| weather and grid conditions.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Majority of the difference between consumption and
| generation is imported. ERCOT is operating at 52,000MW
| right now, with 37,600 of it being generated on-grid.
| lighttower wrote:
| Why does Quebec use more electrical power in winter if most
| (nearly all) of their heating is natural gas/oil based?
| lukeschlather wrote:
| Central heaters may be natural gas/oil based but the
| blowing fans or water circulation are typically electric.
| Also people will supplement with electric space heaters
| for whatever room they are in while keeping the house
| somewhat colder than they would prefer.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Electricity cost in Quebec is around USD $0.05/kWh.
| Combine that with the fact that most alternative heating
| sources are at a premium (natural gas, propane and oil
| all cost substantially more in Quebec than they do in,
| for example, Texas) and the fact that 98% of Electricity
| is renewable source, that leads to a very heavy
| proportion of electric heat. It's not uncommon to have
| residential units exclusively heated by baseboard heaters
| - the least efficient means as far as energy required per
| unit of heat - however it's still cheaper to operate on a
| yearly basis than a natural gas furnace, while costing
| 20% of that to install/maintain.
| fredophile wrote:
| Another thing that takes electrical power to heat in the
| winter is vehicles. In many Canadian cities in the winter
| it is very common to plug in your car over night so the
| engine won't be frozen solid in the morning. Forgetting
| to do this means your car won't start after a cold night.
| nikisweeting wrote:
| Power is super cheap in Quebec ($0.04/kwh USD) and gas is
| not, so many people heat their homes to 16-19oC with gas,
| then have electric space heaters in their rooms to bring
| it up to 21-23oC.
| rpeden wrote:
| I'm not sure where you're getting your information, but
| every source I've seen indicates that the majority of
| heat in Quebec is electric.
|
| This matches my experience, FWIW. When I lived in Ottawa,
| I occasionally looked at houses and apartment across the
| river in Quebec and nearly all of them had electric heat.
|
| More data: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-402-x/2
| 007/1741/ceb17...
|
| https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-
| markets/pr... (see Electricity heading)
|
| https://www.ivey.uwo.ca/energycentre/blog/2019/06/a-close
| r-l...
| csharptwdec19 wrote:
| IDK what it's like in quebec specifically, but a lot of
| my friends in Ontario would have multiple space heaters
| (depending on how many people were around and where they
| were) that they would use in the winter months for more
| 'localized' warmth and the HVAC was more about keeping
| pipes from freezing.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| The roads here aren't designed for snow either. My heat
| went out on Friday and I can't even get the heater replaced
| because the trucks that deliver heaters can't get through
| the roads.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > At 10degf very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat
| to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated -
| my guess is that many are using 2-3x less efficient
| resistive heaters at night.
|
| How is it possible for heating devices to be less
| efficient? Where does the waste energy go?
|
| Normally, waste energy in devices powered by electricity
| means it's lost to heat, but here it would be lost to...?
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/241-heat-pumps-
| and...
|
| Heat pumps use a small amount of energy to move thermal
| energy, but it's much more efficient than resistive heat.
| But if they can't move enough heat, they fall back to
| resistive heat to top it up.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Ohhhh, interesting. Right, that makes sense.
| joelwilliamson wrote:
| There's no waste heat with resistive heating, but heat
| pumps use electricity to move heat from outside to
| inside, and they can add more than 1J of heat using 1J of
| electricity.
| TFortunato wrote:
| The trick here is that with heat pumps, they aren't
| generating the heat, just moving it. As such, you can
| have, e.g. a 1 kW heat pump moving much more than 1 kW of
| heat. Wheras with a resistive heater, the best you can do
| is turn 1 kW of electric power into 1 kW of heat output.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| The problem is it's the coldest night in about 30 years.
|
| Here in Austin, it's just past midnight, and it's already down
| to 13degF (-10.5degC). It hasn't been that cold here since
| December 23, 1989.
|
| Also, a lot of Texas homes have electric heat (except in the
| northern part of the state). Winters are relatively short and
| mild.
|
| Many homes use electric heat pumps as the heating source.
| They're energy-efficient and easy to install in a home which
| has AC, so generally a good choice. But they get less and less
| effective as the outside temperature drops, so a backup
| electric heating coil kicks in, which uses way more
| electricity.
| criddell wrote:
| Just about every Texas building has air conditioning which is
| blasting for those 100 days of summer where it's often above
| 100 degrees. I'm surprised that a few days of cold is a
| bigger load than the crazy heat of summer.
| unpolloloco wrote:
| I'd think it's the difference between cooling 30F (100->70)
| vs heating 60F (10->70)
| criddell wrote:
| That makes sense.
|
| Edit: Now that the sun is up and shining through our
| windows, the duty cycle of our (natural gas) furnace has
| dropped way off. I'm pretty sure our energy usage today
| will be less than on a 100 degree day.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Cooling from 100 degrees to 70 uses much less energy than
| heating from 10 to 70.
| sn9 wrote:
| And with windchill, it's well below 0degF.
|
| I've lived in Texas all my life and can't remember the last
| time that happened.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > And with windchill, it's well below 0degF.
|
| You won't feel the windchill inside, but it will amplify
| the impact of draughty buildings/poor insulation.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| It has been snowing like crazy's I just lost power too.
| Time for bed. :)
| [deleted]
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