[HN Gopher] What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
___________________________________________________________________
What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
Author : daenney
Score : 575 points
Date : 2021-02-16 22:39 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.houstonchronicle.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.houstonchronicle.com)
| [deleted]
| joejohnson wrote:
| Funny to see the replies to this comment I posted just 6 days
| ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26096563
| the_duke wrote:
| This whole episode also reminds us how far we are from going 100%
| renewable.
|
| In winter all renewables are inhibited and at risk. Wind:
| frozen/disabled turbines. Water: low water levels, small hydro
| plants often have to shut down. Solar is obvious.
|
| I'm not a fan of nuclear - externalities that last thousands of
| years are horrible. But until fusion arrives (if ever), nuclear
| and gas sadly are the baseline providers we have to rely on for
| the foreseeable future.
| gambiting wrote:
| How exactly does it show that? From my understanding Texas has
| an awful(below 20%) percentage of renewable sources.
| ianai wrote:
| TFA says it's grid is mostly natural gas and wind. There
| seems to be lots of misconceptions in this thread and not a
| lot of information.
|
| Nuclear would have been fine throughout this.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I think it's fair to say that their top two energy sources
| are natural gas and coal, although "mostly natural gas and
| nuclear" would also be fair, in its own way.
|
| https://www.utilitydive.com/user_media/diveimage/ercotmix.p
| n...
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Apparently one of the nuclear turbines went offline because
| the turbine was exposed to the open air (for cooling during
| the summer) and some of the sensors triggered a shutoff of
| the turbine when they detected unexpected temperatures.
|
| Another case where systems misbehave when they're exposed
| to circumstances outside the expected range.
| stonlyb wrote:
| Nuclear relies on water for cooling, which froze in at
| least one plant.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| The US as a whole is about ~11% [1], and Texas is ~25% [2].
| Considering Texas makes up a decent chunk of the total US
| energy consumption, it's a bit more lopsided than it seems.
|
| Texas is pretty green, when it comes to energy.
|
| [1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=92&t=4
|
| [2] https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=TX
| dawnerd wrote:
| Even on cloudy days my small solar on my roof generates enough
| power for my house. Large solar farms sure have reduced
| production but they're not as useless as you'd think.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Isn't that sort of the million dollar question here though?
| Would winterization of the turbines and solar panels have
| mitigated or even solved this?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I find it really weird that everyone is jumping to blame wind
| here, but totally ignoring all the natural gas plants that are
| turned off.
| mullen wrote:
| Right Wingers don't care about solutions, just their
| narrative. So windmills are to blame and the gas plants are
| okay.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| It's not "weird", it's the result of deliberate enemy action.
| There's a propaganda machine running full-tilt as we speak to
| paint this as the fault of wind power, when wind was actually
| overproducing compared to ERCOT's models.
| hristov wrote:
| It is even weirder than you find it. When you read towards
| the end of the article, it says
|
| "Most of the power knocked offline came from thermal sources,
| Woodfin said, particularly natural gas."
|
| So natural gas and other thermal sources (i.e., coal and
| nuclear) created most of the problem.
|
| Wind power is actually potentially a very good solution for
| occasional cold spells, because extreme colds usually comes
| with high winds. Of course you have to design your turbines
| not to freeze.
| eropple wrote:
| _> Of course you have to design your turbines not to
| freeze._
|
| While true (and I'm not saying you don't know this, more
| just pointing it out), wind works _great_ in cold climates.
| We 've done our homework on this one already.
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| if you actually look at the data, this has nothing to do with
| renewables. Wind is actually producing more than expected at
| this time of year, while traditional sources (nuclear, natural
| gas, coal) are underproducing what they are expected by 40%.
| This is due partly to these plants operating outside of their
| designed temp tolerances, and partly due to a natural gas
| supply crises in texas.
| bsder wrote:
| Renewable wasn't the issue. The renewables are outperforming
| what was expected. However, renewables are like 4% of the total
| energy generation. ERCOT lost about 40% of its total generation
| capacity.
|
| Almost all of the ERCOT shortfall was loss of _thermal_
| generating capacity--mostly natural gas. The natural gas was
| shunted to heating because those contracts are fixed and higher
| priority (market failure). Also, some of the natural gas lines,
| wells, and pumping stations froze (planning failure).
|
| ERCOT lost more than 35% of its natural gas generating
| capacity. This was everybody cutting corners and finally
| getting burned.
| barbacoa wrote:
| >renewables are like 4% of the total energy generation.
|
| Wind power is close to 25% of ercot grid.
| bsder wrote:
| Under _normal_ conditions because everything backs off.
|
| Under high-load conditions this is very definitely not
| true.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Hydro doesn't really suffer in the cold
| MSM wrote:
| There are a number of countries with very high renewable usage
| that are in cold climates. Denmark comes to mind, where, on
| average, it's right around freezing for months at a time. Hell,
| they have turbines in the extremely corrosive oceans, getting
| blasted by freezing rain and they make it work.
|
| Last I saw they got something like 50% of their power from
| wind.
|
| Anyone who is using this event to say that renewables are a bad
| idea is selling a completely false narrative.
| leesalminen wrote:
| I'm definitely not saying renewables are a bad idea, but I
| think there are some flaws in your comparison. For one, the
| delta from 32F (right around freezing) to 65F (heated home
| temp) is much less than 0F to 65F. Second, I'd imagine that
| buildings in Denmark are designed for this kind of cold.
| Unlike Texas where many homes have much less insulation
| because it rarely gets this cold. Both of these issues would
| compound the energy demand issue Texas is seeing right now.
| zamadatix wrote:
| > For one, the delta from 32F (right around freezing) to
| 65F (heated home temp) is much less than 0F to 65F
|
| Not sure what you're trying to say with this point, the
| average low of e.g. Dallas is 39F not 0F. I'm quite sure
| the record low in Denmark is going to be lower than the
| record low in Dallas if that's what you intended to compare
| instead.
|
| The second issue is valid logic for why you need higher
| peak generation not why renewables can't supply it. Wind
| was overproducing estimates, the problem wasn't wind
| couldn't provide during the load period it was that the
| plants of all types weren't prepared to operate in the
| cold.
|
| .
|
| I think the main differences are:
|
| - Denmark is part of a larger grid system instead of
| independent
|
| - Denmark pays more for electricity
|
| - Denmark prepares its equipment for extreme conditions
|
| and I think these are all true for all power sources.
| morsma wrote:
| We also have some of the most expensive power in the world.
| Kinda goes hand in hand it seems.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Radiation buried far below the ground in a remote region where
| it will never impact anybody or anything is not an externality
| of any magnitude.
| pomian wrote:
| I keep thinking, that from an engineering standpoint, maybe it's
| better to look at: What went right? Look at all the processes
| that worked, and continued to work in spite of high demand and
| stress. Those are the systems that should be studied, copied, and
| understood.
| kingaillas wrote:
| That doesn't scale because physical infrastructure can't be
| "copied" as easily. It's better to fix what failed (everything
| from "use winterized oil for wind turbines" to "insulate above
| ground pipes" to "better granularity on local power grids" to
| "better insulation for homes" to "don't have steam turbines at
| nuclear power plants in the outside air").
|
| Basically TX doesn't required electricity generators to cold-
| proof their assets so they fail. That's the low regulation low
| cost route.
| brohoolio wrote:
| Did the utility companies ask for voluntary reduction in power
| consumption ahead of time?
|
| We had a situation here where extreme weather and a natural gas
| pumping station that exploded caused real problems in our natural
| gas supply. The utility asked everyone to lower their consumption
| by turning their heat down to 65.
|
| Luckily, that was the extent of the rationing.
| abhisuri97 wrote:
| There have been calls from our utility company asking people to
| conserve energy and a lot of messaging on the local news.
| zrail wrote:
| I remember that. What an awful winter.
| slenk wrote:
| I had to learn how to manually light our furnace because the
| starter (or whatever it is called) died in the middle of a
| cold snap.
|
| Scary as hell in the beginning, but only nervousness-inducing
| at the end.
| slenk wrote:
| My companies office volunteered to power off so we got to all
| work from our homes.
|
| That was only good for those of us still with power, though.
| rconti wrote:
| I'm just surprised every time I hear of someone working in an
| office!
| slenk wrote:
| This was two or three years ago before it was totally
| acceptable.
| canada_dry wrote:
| Pretty damning the pics of downtown in various Texas cities lit
| up like normal!
|
| https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/over-200000-people-in...
| teraflop wrote:
| Technically yes, but they went from "stage 1" alerts (voluntary
| conservation) just after midnight on Sunday night, all the way
| to "stage 3" (rolling blackouts) by 1:30 AM.
|
| https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO/status/1361197991659503618
|
| https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO/status/1361215084010352644
| tpmx wrote:
| Afaik, the way abnormal situations like these are handled in
| northern Europe is that the grid suppliers have agreements with
| the very large industrial consumers (think aluminium smelters)
| who agree to shut down immediately when the grid frequency goes
| below a certain trigger level.
|
| The way I understand it, this is useful both in time-critical
| emergencies (like keeping the grid at 50 Hz when a nuclear
| plant suddenly goes offline for some random safety reason) and
| when things are moving a lot slower, like during periods of
| extreme colds and extreme electicity demand from heating
| houses.
|
| So, this approach is useful in removing the need for rolling
| blackouts, at least until demand reaches some very extreme
| level, but it does require ahead of time investments in
| shutdown agreements.
|
| Perhaps Texas hasn't been in this extreme situation before, and
| they simply don't have enough industrial shutdown agreements in
| place?
| cowboysauce wrote:
| ERCOT does have shutdowns agreements in place, but there's a
| limit to what you can do when simultaneously facing record
| demand and having ~30,000 MW of capacity go offline. For
| comparison, on Sunday evening demand was roughly 70,000 MW.
| landemva wrote:
| The bitcoin mining farms claimed to shut down, so some
| industrial load shedding seems to be in play in Texas.
| tpmx wrote:
| I guess my point is that if there had been sufficient
| contracts for industrial shutdown, there wouldn't be
| rolling outages in residential areas.
| nrmitchi wrote:
| > claimed to shut down
|
| I would guess that there is an ~0% chance any bitcoin
| mining operation, who's main cost is power, is still
| operating with power prices as astromonically high as they
| currently are.
| s0rce wrote:
| Isn't it immensely difficult to restart an aluminum smelter?
| Also, my vague memory of these is that in North America most
| of them are in areas with abundant hydro power.
| sjg007 wrote:
| They can probably run at lower power? I imagine you slow
| everything down. After all you just have to melt it again.
| tpmx wrote:
| Probably. I just picked something at random that I know
| uses a lot of power - I think in the order of one nuclear
| reactor for a typical installation. Should have known
| better than to do that here.
| askvictor wrote:
| Some designs can be stopped and started easily; others get
| into big trouble if they're shut down abruptly.
| wavesquid wrote:
| They're immensely difficult to restart once the aluminium
| solidifies: difficult enough that the answer is throw it
| out and make a new one. But there's a big enough difference
| between operational temperatures and solid that you can
| deprive them of electricity for e.g. 8 hours while you
| restart your other power generation infrastructure. IIRC
| for some aluminium smelters you can even run the reaction
| in reverse briefly if you need to jump start something.
|
| (citations needed.... I'm recalling this from a story
| someone told me ~15 years ago about the Alcoa plant in
| Victoria, Australia)
| foepys wrote:
| I recently watched a documentary about aluminum smelting
| and this topic came up. An engineer said that they have a
| 6 hours time frame. If the power doesn't come back on,
| the aluminum hardened too much and all smelters are lost
| forever. There is no possibility for on-site generators
| because the required generator would be the size of a
| power plant.
| oasisbob wrote:
| You can refresh your vague memories - all of Alcoa's west-
| coast aluminum industry is long-gone.
|
| The waves of Enron took out most of them decades ago when
| its destruction rolled through the energy markets. IIRC,
| the last NW aluminum smelter closed a few years ago.
| s0rce wrote:
| I was remembering a bunch in Quebec. Not sure where all
| the hydro power in the pnw goes. Was nice to have cheaper
| power when I lived up there though!
| todd8 wrote:
| I'm sure that Texas could have prepared for this cold weather
| better. However, to be fair, its a rare for the weather to be
| this cold in Texas.
|
| Even in climates where there cold weather is common, cold weather
| disasters still happen. The 1998 North American Ice Storm caused
| power outages that lasted weeks. It affected Ontario, Quebec and
| Main. It left 4,000,000 people in Canada and 700,000 in Main
| without power for weeks. Twenty-five people died from the cold,
| 12 more from related flooding caused by Ice. [1]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ic...
| [deleted]
| magnawave wrote:
| The result was "an electrical island in the United States," Bill
| Magness, CEO of ERCOT, said. "That independence has been
| jealously guarded, I think both by policy makers and the
| industry."
|
| https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/16/texas-power-...
|
| Maybe it's time to rethink that. HaI has an interesting take on
| something similar: Japan
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo88zA5nq4Q
|
| Running your own grid seems cool Texas style, until you have a
| regional problem and have no where to turn.
| [deleted]
| cat199 wrote:
| > Running your own grid seems cool Texas style, until you have
| a regional problem and have no where to turn.
|
| This cuts both ways, and most of the rest country is often a
| benefactor - many US/NA companies (and I'm assuming
| govt/military) have a 3rd DR location on the TX grid precisely
| because it provides an additional point of redundancy. TX also
| wasn't impacted by CA mismanagement of it's grid, for example..
| pkulak wrote:
| How hard can it be to have your own grid, but also have inputs
| on the edges to draw from? Or would that no longer be
| independent?
| teraflop wrote:
| Texas does have connections to other grids. But the problem
| is that since the grid frequencies aren't synchronized, you
| can't just plug one into the other.
|
| Transferring energy between grids requires either converting
| it from AC to high-voltage DC and back using solid-state
| electronics, or converting it via mechanical energy using a
| variable-frequency transformer. With either approach, you
| need bulky and expensive equipment in proportion to how much
| power you want to handle. These connections are designed to
| smooth out (and profit from) short-term capacity
| fluctuations, not to power the entire state.
|
| Currently, the Texas grid has two DC ties operating at full
| capacity and drawing about 800MW from the Southwest Power
| Pool. But that's a drop in the bucket compared to the ~45GW
| of current demand, or the estimated 70-80GW of demand that
| would be likely if it weren't for the outages.
|
| http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi.
| ..
| pkulak wrote:
| Thank you! I didn't think about the AC synchronization.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Electricity networks are a really fascinating hole to
| dive in. I did software and firmware for Smart Metering
| solutions for a half decade and know more about that
| stuff than I'll ever need.
| martinald wrote:
| TX grid is connected via HVDC, but keep in mind that even if
| it was "fully" connected there is no hope in hell it would be
| much better. There wouldn't be enough transmission to
| transfer 40GW+ from the East or West coast grids to TX. It's
| an enormous amount of power to go offline. I don't think
| California for instance has more than 10GW of transmission
| north to south.
|
| Basically, no amount of grid infrastructure can really help
| you much when you lose 50%+ of generation capacity on your
| highest demand days in history.
| s0rce wrote:
| Seems like CA might has 15-20GW of spare NatGas generation
| capacity. Looking back at the summer peak (9/6/20) I see
| 25GW generated at the peak, while we are currently only
| needing to generate about 8-9GW from NatGas (looking over
| night when solar drops off).
| snowwindwaves wrote:
| The parent said there is not enough transmission capacity
| not generation capacity. Generation needs to be near
| loads. If not then transmission lines are required to
| bring current from generators to loads. Transmission
| lines have fixed capacities, like your internet
| connection can only transmit so much data/s, they can
| only transmit so much power.
| s0rce wrote:
| I thought they were saying there wasn't enough
| transmission capacity but it wouldn't matter anyways
| since the rest of the grid didn't have any to spare.
| Maybe I misinterpreted or responded to the wrong comment.
| 8note wrote:
| It's likely that the transmission lines are less of a
| bottle neck than the frequency conversion. Power lines
| are pretty darned efficient, and given the cold weather,
| theyd be more efficient than usual too
| bsder wrote:
| That actually isn't true:
|
| https://3dfs.com/articles/wasted-electricity-vs-lost-
| electri...
|
| Almost 62% of electricity is lost in the grid. AC is the
| primary reason (matching, vibration, I2R, etc.).
|
| HVDC is _WAY_ better at transmitting power over any
| appreciable distance.
| angry_octet wrote:
| The Chinese have an amazingly ambitious plan to shift
| power from one part of the country to another with UHV
| DC. It has its own challenges, but it is definitely the
| way to shift massive amounts of power without grid
| interconnect (and the resulting frequency stability
| issues). Much lower loss, even with DC-AC converters.
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/chinas-
| amb...
|
| If America built a network of 20GW HVDC interconnects it
| would be far more significant infrastructure than
| building some highways.
| robocat wrote:
| The article is wildly incorrect: the 62% figure includes
| the losses during generation e.g. heat lost when burning
| coal or cooling towers for nuclear.
|
| I recall that losses after generation due to transmission
| across the electricity grid are typically about 10%.
| pixl97 wrote:
| They make long distance DC innerconnects, while expensive
| they are resistant to particular types of problems and
| can connect to multiple different grids at the same time.
| briffle wrote:
| there has been a 3GW DC interconnect between Portland, OR
| and LA for 5 decades or so.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
| snowwindwaves wrote:
| Electrical engineers wouldn't build a power line to Texas
| with a capacity of 5000 MW and then put intertie hardware
| such as phase shifters or ac-dc-ac converter with
| capacity of 1000 MW on the end of it. So it is likely
| that the transmission capacity and intertie capacity are
| exactly the same!
| ineedasername wrote:
| It's not the capacity of the converter, it's the
| efficiency of the conversion. There's some loss involved.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| If your gap is 40GW, and you could get another 8GW. That's
| enough to give everyone an extra hour of electricity every
| 5 which would be game changing. The different between a 33
| and 45 degree house is enormous.
| hangonhn wrote:
| The Tres Amigas Super Station is, ironically, being built in
| TX. If it was done, it could help the situation a lot. 30 GW
| of capacity!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation
| reportingsjr wrote:
| Nit: IF this gets built (big if), it will be in New Mexico,
| not Texas.
|
| It's also very unlikely that it would be near 30GW of
| transmission capacity.
| wnevets wrote:
| Regulations probably.
| gitgreen wrote:
| The latter. They do not want federal regulation.
|
| For the pedantic TX does have connections to other grids but
| the capacity is so low that it wouldn't have mitigated this
| event and is under whatever threshold is set for federal
| oversight.
| afavour wrote:
| It would be independent from a practical point of view but
| from a regulatory one it would become subject to federal
| regulations, which is the real reason Texas keeps theirs
| separate.
| [deleted]
| autoditype wrote:
| From the articles I've read they do:
|
| > Even today, ERCOT is also not completely isolated from
| other grids -- as was evident when the state imported some
| power from Mexico during the rolling blackouts of 2011. ERCOT
| has three ties to Mexico and -- as an outcome of the
| "Midnight Connection" battle -- it also has two ties to the
| eastern U.S. grid, though they do not trigger federal
| regulation for ERCOT. All can move power commercially as well
| as be used in emergencies, according to ERCOT spokeswoman
| Dottie Roark. A possible sixth interconnection project, in
| Rusk County, is being studied, and another ambitious
| proposal, called Tres Amigas, would link the three big U.S.
| grids together in New Mexico, though Texas' top utility
| regulator has shown little enthusiasm for participating.
|
| https://www.kvue.com/article/weather/texplainer-why-does-
| tex...
| throwaway667555 wrote:
| No, we shouldn't rethink independence. We should build back
| better.
| txlpo78 wrote:
| This current problems wouldn't be fixed if Texas wasn't on its
| own grid. The Texas grid _does_ have connections to the other
| grids, and even right now is importing power from both the East
| and West interconnections.
|
| The problem is that this is a truly _regional_ event and not
| just isolated to Texas. The entire central US is struggling
| right now. The SPP (which manages electricity for Oklahoma,
| Nebraska, Arkansas, and other states) has been struggling with
| forced blackouts over the last several days as well. They don't
| have enough power for their own grid, let alone enough to share
| with Texas.
|
| If Texas was more interconnected with the SPP, the end result
| wouldn't be Texans all having their problems solved. Many
| Texans would still be without power, but so would many more
| Oklahomans. The fact that the Texas grid is separate is the
| only thing keeping OK from having even worse blackouts. Which
| makes sense, because the entire point of grid isolation is to
| keep issues localized and not cascade over the entire network.
| And that's working to Oklahoma's benefit right now, but Texas
| is getting the short end of the stick.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I tried to say the same above. When the entire south is low
| on capacity, being fully AC interconnected probably doesn't
| help much even if the DC ties had more capacity.
| [deleted]
| ineedasername wrote:
| A few limited connections are not sufficient to fully take
| advantage of all areas of the country where there may be
| extra capacity. It wouldn't solve the problem, but would have
| helped. Oklahoma for example has been able to stop rolling
| blackouts. Texas is still deep in this.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| FYI the Texas grid runs on a different frequency than the
| other two grids and as a result incurs MASSIVE efficiency
| penalties for that hubris. If I recall correctly it has to be
| converted from AC to DC then back to Texas' AC.
| O5vYtytb wrote:
| Technically they run on at different phase, but the same
| frequency (60hz)
| txlpo78 wrote:
| Yes, that's correct. Texas has 5 ties to the
| western/eastern US interconnections as well as with the
| Mexico grid. But none of that matters right now because
| those grids don't have excess capacity to send to Texas
| anyway.
| teclordphrack2 wrote:
| Texas grid sucks. Deal with it. Everyone keeps pointing
| out its failings and you keep trying to defend it. Quit
| putting your head in the sand snowflake.
| teraflop wrote:
| It's not really a matter of whether the _grids_ have
| capacity; the ties themselves can only handle a limited
| amount of power.
|
| As per ERCOT's status page, both of the high-voltage DC
| ties between Texas are currently operating at >99% of
| their rated capacity, and they have been every time I've
| checked since yesterday. They're not being limited by the
| availability of power from the other side.
| txlpo78 wrote:
| You're missing the point. Even if the ties had more
| capacity, the supply of power on the other side of the
| ties is not there. It's a two-pronged issue, and you
| won't solve the problem by only focusing on one of the
| prongs.
| blake1 wrote:
| This is incorrect. MISO, the system to the north and east
| of TX, has capacity. The DC ties cannot handle it. You
| can see this by checking the price signals on their page.
| Right now, the TX hub is about $1,000 but the MS hub is
| about $60.
|
| https://api.misoenergy.org/MISORTWD/lmpcontourmap.html
| txlpo78 wrote:
| MISO does not have the capacity either. Sections of
| eastern Texas, such as Orange, are under MISO, and they
| too have been dealing with blackouts due to lack of
| capacity. Parts of Louisiana under MISO are also being
| told that they will see blackouts soon.
|
| https://www.klfy.com/local/cleco-rolling-blackouts-to-be-
| use...
|
| https://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article/134700/lr-based-
| tra...
|
| Again, just because you have excess power in Missouri
| does not mean that power can magically transfer hundreds
| of miles away where it is needed. Energy transfer does
| not work like that.
| ineedasername wrote:
| If you browse a few of the ISO pages for other
| states/regions you'll see a bunch that have excess
| capacity above their projected peak for the day.
|
| Here's one: https://www.iso-ne.com/
|
| Here's another:
| http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
|
| But there's a limited capacity for Texas to bring in
| power over just 5 connections, combined with their choice
| that makes conversion to something compatible with the
| Texas grid much less efficient.
|
| By isolating & not focusing on compatibility they have
| made it very difficult to have more robust redundancy in
| their grid.
| margalabargala wrote:
| It seems highly unlikely that exactly 100% of the
| capacity of the interconnects is, coincidentally,
| precisely equal to the amount of excess power available
| to be fed into the interconnects at the moment. Do you
| have anything to back up this extraordinary claim?
| txlpo78 wrote:
| Did anyone make that claim? No. Go re-read my comment and
| try again.
| [deleted]
| s0rce wrote:
| Do the other grids publish their generation/demand
| statistics live? I remember being able to check the
| CalISO page during the rolling blackouts in California
| during the summer.
| blake1 wrote:
| I am in MISO, which roughly runs up the Mississippi
| River, and borders TX. They have some real-time data
| available publicly.
|
| https://www.misoenergy.org/markets-and-operations/real-
| time-...
| qqqwerty wrote:
| CAISO says it has 10k MW in extra capacity[1].
|
| http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
| [deleted]
| stefan_ wrote:
| They have absolutely 0MW capacity that they would be
| willing to put online to earn millions an hour? Seems
| unlikely.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| You recall correctly, and interestingly, the same method is
| used for variable-frequency drive motor controllers
| mike_d wrote:
| This is not correct. Because the Texas grid is isolated, the
| frequency is not synced with the two other major grids and
| cannot import electricity at any meaningful capacity. (See
| http://fnetpublic.utk.edu/frequencymap.html)
|
| Frequency conversion is a costly and difficult to scale
| problem. If Texas was part of the Western grid they could be
| drawing excess hydroelectric power from the pacific northwest
| right now for example. Texas also could have contributed to
| help the California power shortages last year.
|
| Edit: Here is a map of the grid interconnects in Texas with
| capacity. As of the time of this comment the total
| importation capacity is less than 1% of demand. https://user-
| images.githubusercontent.com/22095643/49019079-...
| txlpo78 wrote:
| Nothing I said in my comment is incorrect. Texas has 5
| different connections with the other grids and can
| import/export through them. But they are irrelevant right
| now because the other grids do not have enough spare
| capacity to send to Texas.
|
| >If Texas was part of the Western grid they could be
| drawing excess hydroelectric power from the pacific
| northwest right now for example. Texas also could have
| contributed to help the California power shortages last
| year.
|
| No. That's not how the grids work. Just because Oklahoma
| and Washington are part of the same interconnection, that
| does _not_ mean that people living in Tulsa can pull power
| as needed from a dam in Washington, which is why Oklahomans
| are struggling with power outages today as well. Most power
| still must be generated locally. Long distance transmission
| is difficult and inefficient, and often requires converting
| to DC just like a grid-to-grid connection requires, so you
| have the same issues as you have when you're on separate
| grids.
| reportingsjr wrote:
| This does not seem to be true at all. If you look at a
| power outage map of Texas you can actually see exactly
| where the ERCOT boundaries are. Everyone else in Texas
| that's on the other, federal, grids, are not experiencing
| widespread power outages.
|
| https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas http://www.ercot.
| com/content/wcm/landing_pages/89373/ERCOT-I...
| https://poweroutage.us/area/state/oklahoma
|
| Per your comment about long distance transmission, that
| doesn't matter in a situation like this. If you're on a
| large grid you don't necessarily need to transmit power
| to Oklahoma all of the way from the PNW.
|
| You need the areas surrounding OK to supply excess power
| to them, then those surrounding areas can get whatever
| excess they may need from slightly further areas. This
| needs less and less excess as you go further since every
| area is over provisioned.
|
| Eventually at some point, yes, the PNW may be supplying
| excess power to states around them as a result of
| Oklahoma having outages, but that power isn't going
| straight from PNW to OK.
| briffle wrote:
| There is a 3.6GW DC line that goes from about an hour
| East of Portland, Oregon, down to LA. Its 2 wires. Texas
| doesn't have any interconnections with the west. But even
| if they did, 3GW would not be nearly enough to solve
| their problem could could replace many natural gas plants
| that are currently down.
| txlpo78 wrote:
| https://www.kmbc.com/article/southwest-power-pool-again-
| orde...
|
| Oklahoma has been dealing with rolling blackouts for the
| past several days. Tell me why this is, since apparently
| you think Oklahoma is able to magically get power
| transferred to them all the way from Washington? If WA
| has the excess capacity, why are Oklahomans still without
| power?
|
| > Everyone else in Texas that's on the other, federal,
| grids, are not experiencing widespread power outages.
|
| Completely wrong. Eastern Texas (eg Orange), which is
| under MISO, and is dealing with blackouts. And parts of
| the Texas panhandle like Lubbock, which is also not part
| of the Texas grid, is also struggling with power outages.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I'm sure you can see that a rolling outage affecting 200k
| people for 4 hours is quite different than an outage
| affecting four million customers for 3 days.
|
| Check out the map. It's pretty clear that what you said
| is wrong. ERCOT territory is all broken, panhandle, east
| Texas, and El Paso area are not having problems.
| https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas
| Qwertious wrote:
| >I'm sure you can see that a rolling outage affecting
| 200k people for 4 hours is quite different than an outage
| affecting four million customers for 3 days.
|
| ((3 * 24) / 4) * (4 000 000 / 200 000)
|
| Holy crap, that's literally 360 times worse.
| txlpo78 wrote:
| The site you are referencing is a crowdsourced site. It
| takes five seconds of looking at the numbers to see that
| it has incomplete data. Most major public utilities are
| saying that they are _not_ tracking these storm-related
| blackouts as "outages" and therefor do not show up on
| most utility outage maps.
|
| I have family and friends in every place you just said is
| "not having problems" and I can assure you that you are
| entirely incorrect.
|
| > I'm sure you can see that a rolling outage affecting
| 200k people for 4 hours is quite different than an outage
| affecting four million customers for 3 days.
|
| The 200k customers mentioned is only talking about the
| numbers from one relatively small provider. If you want
| to only look at one provider in Texas: Austin Energy, the
| provider for all of Austin, is currently reporting only
| 200k customers affected as well. But obviously that's not
| the whole picture in Texas, just like 200k isn't the
| whole picture in the SPP.
|
| All other providers in the SPP are affected, not just the
| one in the article. Many more than 200k people were
| affected, and the blackouts have been happening over the
| past three days, not four hours.
| jeffbee wrote:
| You've got it basically 180deg the wrong way around. "I
| know people in all these places" is literally
| crowdsourcing. It is anecdotal. PowerOutage.us is plugged
| into the API of every utility provider in America. It's
| the existence of the APIs that is crowdsourced, not the
| data itself.
| txlpo78 wrote:
| Do you not realize that utility providers outage maps are
| updated based on crowdsourced information from customers?
|
| And as I mentioned in my comment, utility providers do
| not consider blackouts due to capacity constraints to be
| "outages", and thus are not reporting them as outages on
| their outage maps, which means this website does not have
| the correct information on blackouts. They are tracking
| outages only if the outage is due to something like a
| downed power line. Please attempt to read the full
| comment and understand it before replying.
| jeffbee wrote:
| You're wrong about that, newcomer. The APIs I've been
| scraping report smartmeters that are off the air. It's
| all automatic.
| rashkov wrote:
| > You're wrong about that, newcomer.
|
| please don't do that, it's ad hominem and definitely not
| the way to talk to new posters here.
| txlpo78 wrote:
| Nope, if you even took five seconds to read up on how the
| OMSes at power utilities work, you'd know this isn't the
| case. Utility companies are not _even close_ to having
| their grids fully automatic, and most OMSes are manually
| updated by human operators whenever customers call in
| with outage reports.
|
| This is an area that you clearly do not have any
| experience in, yet you insist on being an armchair
| expert. Quite frankly, we don't need armchair experts,
| especially ones that are blatantly incorrect and refuse
| to educate themselves even when information is put right
| in front of you. Please reflect on this.
|
| As for your "newcomer" comment, lol. I have been on HN
| for years longer than your account. Apparently you've
| never heard of the ability to create new accounts,
| though. GTFO of here with that ridiculous gatekeeping
| bullshit, it's not welcome on HN.
| atian wrote:
| Somehow speculation causes points to be missed on both
| sides and conversations like these become meaningless
| semantic arguments.
| Element_ wrote:
| I am not sure it's that simple, I read some where else
| yesterday that at least one of the non-ERCOT grids had
| paid to winterize their local power plants after the last
| ice storm so their plants have been operational
| throughout this storm and as a result had no outages. I
| have no idea how accurate that is though, I don't know
| anything about the electric grid...
| blake1 wrote:
| AC transmission absolutely does work over large
| distances. It's just not a point-to-point system.
|
| Imagine four cities in a row, all connected with AC. City
| A generates extra power, which gets sucked up by city B,
| whose power goes to the next city down the line, to city
| Z.
|
| Sure, it's not actually that simple, but when was the
| last time NY literally had no power? They benefit from
| being highly connected.
|
| TX is paying for being isolated.
|
| Their handful of DC interconnects do not have the
| capacity to power their mini grid. They're short 35GW of
| generation, and I assume the DC ties are at capacity.
| pixl97 wrote:
| There is another problem here. Texas generates as much
| power as the second and third states on the generation
| list. The outage Texas had would have sagged most of the
| US.
|
| Separate grids are great for other kinds of emergencies,
| if we get a big solar flare then the splits save each
| grid.
|
| We need a east to west DC long distance interconnect to
| haul power across the country.
| txlpo78 wrote:
| > when was the last time NY literally had no power? They
| benefit from being highly connected.
|
| Do you not remember the blackouts of 2003? Multiple
| entire states went dark for hours, and the "highly
| connectedness" was a huge part of the problem. The only
| reason it wasn't even worse is specifically because grid
| isolation stopped it from propagating further, just like
| what's happening here.
| blake1 wrote:
| Just look at the first image on the Wikipedia page,
| showing the extent of the blackout. This is far smaller
| than the footprint of the eastern interconnect. The
| control software at the time made some simplifying
| approximations which left the grid vulnerable to problems
| cascading between operators. I do not think they have
| quite the same problem anymore.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_200
| 3
| mjevans wrote:
| You do still need generation closer to Texas that works,
| but as a whole the grid can balance the generation and
| output a bit depending on the gradient between the
| sources.
|
| Imagine a 'bouncy castle' with several input fans. Texas
| is like an entry ramp that isn't hooked up to either of
| two big banks of fans and sinks next to it. If it were
| just ganged in with one of those other two groups even
| though Texas is having a bad time the other blowers could
| compensate in aggregate.
| mike_d wrote:
| > that does not mean that people living in Tulsa can pull
| power as needed from a dam in Washington
|
| Not directly, but by way of demand shifting, effectively
| yes. Northern California is fed by Washington, SoCal by
| NorCal generation, etc. until you get excess capacity
| closer to the demand sink.
| oasisbob wrote:
| A good example of this is the PNW interties which move
| (primarily) hydro power to California from Washington and
| Oregon.
|
| One system is DC. The other is AC. They both do primarily
| the same thing through elaborate systems.
|
| Washington can send electricity south via AC - doesn't
| really mean CA and WA are functioning on the same grid.
| [deleted]
| austinheap wrote:
| This is a two day old account repeating exactly one trope
| FWIW.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Yes, basically Texas is great, this situation was
| unavoidable, nobody did anything wrong, and people should
| just suck it up.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I echo the sentiment that federation (in most things) isn't
| itself a bad thing. It just happens that in the case of
| electrical reliability, ERCOT has been the root of these
| issues, given their warnings from years ago.
| svnpenn wrote:
| Dallas suburb here (Las Colinas). No power since Monday 6am. I
| had to get room at holiday inn. I actually got the room
| yesterday, but the hotel lost power after an hour, so I had to go
| back home and sleep in 5 degree apartment.
|
| Don't believe anything you read about "rolling outages". It's
| only rolling, if you define that as "out until it's not freezing
| anymore".
| alyandon wrote:
| Yeah, "rolling outages" is a joke. I went 19 hours without
| power in GP&L territory yesterday and portions of my house were
| down below 40F when I went to bed around 9 PM last night. They
| finally decided to restore power in my neighborhood at 4 AM
| this morning.
| rasz wrote:
| A survival game 'The Long Dark' might be handy to learn how to
| keep warm. You dont need external heaters, just lots of layers
| and food, your body is a heat engine.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| Houston right now, haven't had power, nor water since
| yesterday. My room is sitting at 20ish degrees and has been all
| day. I've quite literally been snug under a load of blankets
| with my wife all day just to stay warm.
|
| My office back in Dallas which is not normally open offered to
| let people stay the night since they happen to be on the same
| grid as a hospital and I seriously considered trying to make it
| there today
| btbuildem wrote:
| 20F / -6C indoors? Canadian here, mind blown a little. Are
| homes in Texas not insulated? They must be, you have really
| hot summers and run AC all the time..
|
| Hope your power came back already. If not / or for another
| time: candles are great for heating a single room. Small,
| safe, but they make a difference.
| dgellow wrote:
| Note to readers: If you're not from the US and confused about
| the 20 degrees (I was), note that it is Farhenheit and not
| Celsius! So around -6degC, which is of course very cold!
|
| (edit: when you're on the internet, better to specify which
| unit you use, your audience is international)
| moooo99 wrote:
| I mean -6degC isn't very cold either. Its not every year
| you see temperatures like that, but its also not exactly
| uncommon. We had -17degC (1.4 degF) and lower here in
| Germany. We had some problems here and there, especially
| the railway, but afaik there were no major problems
| regarding power outages and heating.
|
| But obviously we're much more prepared for temperatures
| like this here.
| vultour wrote:
| I'm quite certain it's never -6 in your bedroom.
| moooo99 wrote:
| Sorry, misunderstood the original comment. I thought it
| was referring to outside temperatures
| arcosdev wrote:
| -6degC is pretty damn cold _inside_ a house.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Sure, it isn't that cold when you have heat and proper
| clothing.
|
| The power is out - there is no heat. For a lot of folks,
| this is more akin to camping without proper gear, during
| the winter, and without a fire.
|
| There isn't much infrastructure to deal with snow and
| ice, either, nor are most folks going to be prepared to
| deal with frozen pipes.
|
| The folks in Texas don't have the same sort of house
| insulation either: Since it doesn't get that cold, but it
| does get hot, the houses are designed to keep the house
| cool. And since this cold is very rare, folks aren't
| likely to have actual winter coats. What makes the cold
| tolerable for me - in Norway - is that I'm fairly
| prepared for it. They aren't.
|
| -6 is really darn cold for the unprepared.
| C19is20 wrote:
| 20 degrees? Laughs in European. Until "Oh, degf for 'freedom
| degrees'" realised.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| did not downvote, but
|
| Dr. Fahrenheit was of course the famous European physicist
| who invented the mercury-in-glass thermometer.
| justinzollars wrote:
| dude, go to the office. Its too cold to sleep in those
| conditions.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| You've never been winter camping?
| trianglem wrote:
| Sleeping in below freezing weather without proper
| equipment is stupidity.
| swozey wrote:
| A texan? I didn't buy anything below a 20* sleeping bag
| until I started camping in the desert and even 20* was
| super low for TX, most go with 40. I've got a -30 now but
| I never knew they went that low until I needed one.
| samfisher83 wrote:
| Roads have ice so you might get hurt getting there
| yurishimo wrote:
| The major highways are pretty good but it's snowing more
| tonight so it's gonna take another day to clear up. By
| that time, it'll be over 40 so power will likely be
| restored in short order.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Its too cold to sleep in those conditions.
|
| I don't understand - how do you think people camp in cold
| parts of the world? Of course you can sleep in those
| conditions.
| kingaillas wrote:
| IF you have the gear for it.
|
| I think the chances of random families in TX having 0
| degree cold weather camping gear are low.
| ziftface wrote:
| I've found that it's much easier to sleep in this
| temperature than the rest of the day. You just bundle up
| under several blankets and it doesn't feel that different.
| Living in a 30 degree house does take some getting used to
| though.
| trianglem wrote:
| What? That's way below freezing and totally unsafe. Why don't
| you sleep in your car? (WARNING: Make sure your exhaust is
| uncovered and you're not in your shed)
| tinco wrote:
| Why would it be unsafe to sleep? They are inside the house
| so they are protected against the elements.
|
| I'm pretty sure sleeping in your car would be more
| dangerous just because of the discomfort leading to worse
| quality sleep and fatigue.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > What? That's way below freezing and totally unsafe.
|
| How do you think people safely camp in cold climates? You
| can sleep safely at far far below zero in a sleeping bag.
| yetihehe wrote:
| In a sleeping bag which is rated for that temperature,
| sometimes cheaper bags are for like -5degC, which can be
| VERY uncomfortable already for +5degC.
| rconti wrote:
| Indoors??
| pault wrote:
| Yes, there were sub zero temperatures in Dallas last night.
| maxnoe wrote:
| How badly are your homes insulated that you get
| internal=external temperature in mere hours???
| ineedasername wrote:
| It's been going on for a lot more than just a few hours.
| KMag wrote:
| It has been a day or two, right? (Former Minnesotan, now
| living in Hong Kong, so slightly out of it, but familiar
| with -20F/-30C and occasionally -40F/-40C.)
|
| I think enough air circulation to avoid your breath
| causing mildew everywhere will mean without a ton of
| thermal mass, your house is going to get within a few
| degrees of the daily high within a day or two.
| tclancy wrote:
| Shut off your heat for a couple of days and report back.
| austincheney wrote:
| I was out for 17 hours from yesterday to mid afternoon today.
| Slept through the 0deg weather without power and yet still kept
| the house at 43deg internally without a heat source.
|
| Here is our simi-successful attempt to survive.
|
| * boarded up all the windows and doors with sheets, curtains,
| and heavy drop clothes
|
| * limit going outside to fewest essential trips
|
| * close all bedrooms and abandon them. All pets and occupants
| sleep in close proximity in a common area
|
| * we have lots of sleeping bags and mink blankets. It's more
| about layers
| [deleted]
| pomian wrote:
| As a Canadian, a few more tips: keep kitchen and bathroom
| cabinet doors open. To keep water pipes from freezing. They
| are trouble if they freeze, expand, crack, and then when thaw
| - start leaking. (Empty toilets if risk of freezing.)(add
| glycol if you have it, in bowl.) Also can trickle water from
| the taps - moving water sure but freeze so fast as still
| water. Blankets, in doorways, hallways, Windows - keep warmth
| in room where you need it.
| btbuildem wrote:
| "Keep your taps running" is the one practical bit of advice
| here.
| tyingq wrote:
| It does look like they intended to roll, then figured out they
| didn't have enough capacity to roll. So, the people "rolled"
| first got stuck.
| rst wrote:
| Rolling outages are when they've got enough power for some
| neighborhoods, but not all of them. Texas is so short of
| power right now that they've dropped power everywhere they
| can, excepting only certain critical facilities (hospitals,
| police), and continued operation of the grid itself -- a
| totally cold restart, they say, could take weeks.
| tyingq wrote:
| A rolling outage would be relatively short in duration, and
| "roll" from one area to another. No roll happened here,
| just a bunch of areas off for long periods of time, and
| others not off at all.
| cvhashim wrote:
| Man, what are people with children, elderly, or pets doing.
| lurquer wrote:
| Are you people for real?
|
| What did people with children, elderly, and pets do 150 years
| ago?
|
| If your house is 25f, put on a couple sweaters and a coat and
| have a beer. It's not the end of the world.
|
| As far as the kids go, they're outside building snowforts.
|
| In short, you make do. It astounds me that the typical HN
| poster can whip up a C++ compiler, pontificate about
| solutions to every social-ill, purport to speak intelligently
| about mRNA, economics, epidemiology, and race relations, yet
| can't figure out how to survive for a few days without power
| in freezing temperatures.
| sjg007 wrote:
| They burned wood.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Hate to be an insensitive jerk because people are
| suffering, but kinda agree.
|
| There was a 3 hour long line at trader Joe's in downtown
| Austin today. Uber eats has been down maybe 24 hours.
|
| Like....the human body can absorb a 3 to 5 day water only
| fast reasonably well in most cases and its even becoming
| trendy in certain longevity circles.
|
| On one hand it points to society getting soft. On the other
| hand who knows maybe in this pandemic some people really
| got hit at bad time. As long as no one dies it will all be
| fine.
| byecomputer wrote:
| > As long as no one dies it will all be fine.
|
| the latest is 10 deaths in the Houston area from some
| combination of the storm, the cold, and the loss of
| electricity
| ulisesrmzroche wrote:
| We're not ready for this kind of weather here in Texas. I'd
| you're so smart you should know people 150 years ago lived
| differently and built their houses differently
|
| Are you without power? I don't think so. Real easy to talk
| shit when you're warm and comfortable. It's not like you
| built any infrastructure or built your house, so don't take
| credit for keeping it warm
|
| What's more is that it's not only hackers and engineers in
| this situation. There's a lot of elderly people, sickly
| people, families with babies, small animals, and so on,
| that are far more at risk. I made it the two days but I
| know some of my neighbors didn't
|
| The real question is why are so many people rubbing their
| nuts till they pop with schadenfreude, it's not just you
| lordgroff wrote:
| Yeah, living here in Canada, when I read the temperatures
| I had to rub my eyes in disbelief. Temperatures of
| -30,-40C are by no means unheard of here but we know it
| will come every winter. I can't imagine a prolonged,
| unprepared for infrastructure failure, with houses
| getting down to minus territory indoors. Sounds terrible.
| stephenhuey wrote:
| Exactly. Several of us here in Houston are taking refuge
| at a friend's house and one person in the group is from
| Minnesota. She says that even though it's not so terribly
| cold outside she still wouldn't want to repeat this, that
| it's much easier in Minnesota because the power doesn't
| go out or if it does it's something that can get fixed
| quickly rather than be prolonged over several days.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I Finland the electric network companies have spent years
| and billions of EUR digging our electric grid underground
| after we had a few high-profile cases of electricity
| being cut off during winter because of snow-logged trees
| crashing on remote power lines.
| com2kid wrote:
| > If your house is 25f, put on a couple sweaters and a coat
| and have a beer. It's not the end of the world.
|
| Houses were designed very differently 150 years ago.
|
| Lower roofs, fewer windows, huge thick drapes or tapestries
| on the walls, animal skins or carpets on the floors.
|
| 9 ft windows (double pane or not) on all walls is going to
| leak out a lot of heat.
|
| Most importantly, fireplaces. Houses had fireplaces, and
| rooms were designed around a central fireplace to keep
| everyone warm.
| ghaff wrote:
| They had wood burning heat sources and they _didn 't_
| have indoor running water. So, as you say, people could
| gather around fireplace(s) and there were no actual
| issues associated with the rest of the house being cold.
|
| But for those being very casual about _other people_
| sitting around in 25 degree temperatures, that 's
| actually fairly chilly especially if you don't have the
| clothing and bed coverings for it. And I say that as
| someone who lives in New England and has done winter
| camping.
|
| Could I manage modulo piping concerns? Sure. (And I know
| you can drain pipes but I'd hate to be in a situation
| where I felt I had to do so in an emergency situation
| without electricity and then fire things up again when
| the electricity came back on.) But you're talking about
| huddling under covers if you don't have wood burning
| heat.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| I'd be surprised if a 150 year old house was insulated
| and sealed as well as a 20 year old house, even in Texas.
|
| Though you're right that the old house likely had a wood
| burning heat source, but I'd imagine that there were
| times when wood was scarce. And that 150 year old
| fireplace would have sucked air out of the house,
| bringing in cold air through every air gap.
|
| I looked it up, and wood has an R-value of around 1.4 per
| inch, so a log cabin with 6" walls would have an R-value
| of around R8, current building codes in Texas specify R15
| for walls, R38 for roofs.
|
| Single-pane windows have an R-value of around R1, energy
| efficient double panes, around R4 (triple paned can hit
| R9) so even though there are a lot more windows in a
| modern house, they have better insulation.
| byecomputer wrote:
| My house is 140 years old and it's a sieve with 12 ft
| ceilings & 9 ft windows... in Iowa.
| ghaff wrote:
| I have about a 200 yo house in Massachusetts. I've had a
| lot of work done to tighten it up but it still is very
| drafty in many spots. It has smallish windows and low
| ceilings but it's definitely not what you would call
| well-insulated overall.
| bjoli wrote:
| We had a heater outage recently, with temperatures at
| about -20c. More than half the house was heated by our
| fireplace. It churns out something like 7kw when used
| properly, which is more than enough for that part of the
| house.
|
| The other part was fine with one 2kw heater for the
| night. The whole thing was pretty scary. I'll make sure
| our next house has 2 fireplaces. One m3 of firewood will
| keep you going for a couple of days, and more
| importantly: your pipes won't crack.
| [deleted]
| falcolas wrote:
| I imagine plumbing contractors in Texas are rubbing their
| hands together in glee. Frozen, broken pipes everywhere.
| conductr wrote:
| It's going to take months to get to everyone too.
| Contractors here are busy enough as it is.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Nope, simply bad housing standards leading to no
| isolation. Passive houses work in the Scandinavia. This
| is coming from a Swede who lived for a while in Texan
| suburbia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
| bjoli wrote:
| Just better building standards will get you a long way. I
| live in a house with rather poor energy rating by Swedish
| standards (E on an A to F scale), yet with 4 people and
| some sunshine we keep 75m2 (half the house) heated to 20c
| with -5c outside.
| falcolas wrote:
| You can definitely get a passive house in the US; but
| it's fairly expensive and takes quite a bit of time to
| pay off.
|
| It also requires somewhat specialized (read: niche and
| expensive) heating and cooling equipment, since there is
| so little air movement into and out of the house, and
| requires so little energy.
|
| Oh, and ironically, when the power's out in a passive
| house, you need to open a window to ensure you don't
| over-humidify the house with your breath.
| lurquer wrote:
| You clearly haven't been in many 150 year old West Texas
| houses.
|
| Good lord...
|
| The spread of AC in the 1930s resulted in everything in
| Texas being insulated out the wazoo.
|
| Your typical suburban home in Texas -- with no
| electricity -- is perfectly habitable without power.
|
| Its an inconvenience, to be sure.
|
| But, all this handwringing over a freak -- and fun --
| event is laughable.
|
| Want to fret? Fret about floods, tornadoes, hurricanes...
| those events leave people without housing altogether.
|
| But, an ice storm and some snow?
|
| Gimme a break.
|
| If you were stranded in the wilderness in 3f temperatures
| and stumbled upon a typical suburban home without power
| but well-stocked with blankets, clothes, frozen food,
| comfy mattresses, bags of charcoal, a grill, flashlights,
| candles, and a new package of Oreo cookies, you would
| shout for joy. "We're saved!! Shelter! Thank God!"
| ulisesrmzroche wrote:
| You obviously don't live anywhere near texas. No houses
| have insulation for this kind of weather.
|
| It's like if I went to Canada and started shitting on
| people unable to deal with 110f weather without
| electricity .
| 8note wrote:
| Insulation works in both directions. If you use AC a lot
| in summer, the same insulation is doing you good
|
| Without adding heat, you're still not going to stay warm
| for long though. my window may have been bent so it
| couldn't close in winter throughout child hood, but we
| still had a heater on.
|
| Watch out for your windows. Hanging stuff to act like
| curtains will help
| lurquer wrote:
| Ha. I live deep in the heart of the Lone Star State.
|
| Don't make assumptions, buttercup.
| ulisesrmzroche wrote:
| Doubt it. But keep on shitting on people going through a
| severe weather disaster to make yourself feel better.
| Guess you really need it
| sn9 wrote:
| Millions of people don't live in suburban homes with
| grills.
|
| They live in apartments that don't allow grilling so they
| never thought to buy one. And it being the winter, not
| many people who do grill in the summer have charcoal for
| winter grilling.
|
| So when the power goes out, they can't cook anything on
| their electric ranges. If the water shuts off, that's
| even worse. Frozen food is useless if you can't even thaw
| it, let alone cook it.
|
| Initially the weather reports I read said the winter
| storm warning only extended to Monday afternoon and now
| it's to Thursday, so lots of people didn't think to
| extend their emergency supplies to Thursday, and most
| probably didn't think they'd be without water and power.
|
| I'm really lucky in that I have both water and power, but
| many are not. You really should not be judging people
| according to what the most privileged suburbanites can
| adapt to.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| Fun event? Bruh sit this one out.
| tjr225 wrote:
| I dug through this dudes post history out of pure morbid
| curiosity and 9 months ago he claimed that COVID-19 was
| blown out of proportion because, and I quote, "there
| haven't been millions of deaths."
|
| 9 months later and there have been millions of deaths. So,
| take that how you will.
| [deleted]
| lghh wrote:
| They died, you fucking ghoul. People rely on things now to
| live that people would have just died without 150 years
| ago. They had warmer clothes 150 years ago. They had houses
| with fireplaces and blankets and coats. We can't deal with
| this because we are not set up to function when this
| happens any more. People didn't have the same pets 150
| years ago we have now. Reptiles or birds? Dead. I just
| can't imaging the callousness of this comment. People are
| literally dying and you're telling them to toughen up.
| Fucking fool.
| listless wrote:
| More people need to watch "Naked and Afraid" to learn
| what the human body is capable of withstanding.
| lghh wrote:
| Nah bud, I'm not stoked on grandma on oxygen without
| power being naked or afraid.
| ineedasername wrote:
| A "reality" TV show that selects for people capable of
| handling the show through rigorous medical examinations
| is not going to provide an accurate picture on what the
| average person can handle.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| My pets are cold and miserable like us but I don't think
| they're in any danger of injury. They have thick coats and
| blankets which go pretty far inside.
| fulafel wrote:
| The most ugrent concern is probably for homeless people.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Not for long. Temperatures like the ones you're having will
| "solve" the homeless problem in days, unless they've got
| proper winter gear, winter-rated sleeping bags and the
| skills to keep a fire burning...
|
| Morbid, yes, but you guys should really get into housing-
| first for taking care of homelessness.
| brundolf wrote:
| Exactly.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| I'm wondering how rolling outages on the proposed schedules
| were supposed to work in this situation.
|
| If they gave everyone power 50% of the time, everyone would
| crank everything they have to the max during those periods to
| get _some_ heat into their buildings. Unless their total
| ability to consume energy is less than 2x their average
| consumption, it 's not going to help.
|
| To have any effect on overall power consumption, they first
| have to overcome this effect, and reduce power availability so
| people _can 't_ just shift the load.
|
| Depending on creativity (if you have an electric tumble
| dryer... that's a fan heater), I bet many people could easily
| 10x their average power consumption.
|
| If I had power for a short period of time and cold was an
| issue, I'd be dumping ~10 kW into water immediately (the only
| energy storage I can improvise on short notice).
| JamesBarney wrote:
| If you gave everyone power 20% of the time though, I don't
| think the vast majority of people would shift that much load.
|
| The only real power consumption anyone does above usual is
| plug in their phones. And obviously their heaters run full
| blast.
| lultimouomo wrote:
| I wonder why it is not possible to reduce the max amount of
| power each house can draw by 50% instead of doing blackouts.
| In Italy houses have remotely controlled meters, if you
| change contract and have a different power allowance your
| meter gets reporgrammed without the need of an operator on
| site. This would force people to consume less power to avoid
| automatic detachment, while still not leaving them completely
| in the cold.
|
| Don't they have any kind of smart meter in Texas? Maybe
| reprogramming them is a slow operation that cannot be done to
| almost every meter in a short timespan?
| KMag wrote:
| I suspect smart meters are optional / being lazily phased-
| in. I've been out of the US for a decade, but I know my dad
| gets a discount on his electricity because he opted-in to a
| smart meter.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| You are right if they were trying to reduce load 50%, that's
| basically impossible for the reasons you mention. They were
| only trying to get it down 20% and it might have worked if
| they could have effectively rolled the blackouts. A lot of
| people have natural gas heat. It doesn't work when the power
| is out (no ignition, no thermostat, and no fan), but doesn't
| put a huge load on the electric grid when it is on. For a
| well insulated house, you are probably running the heat for
| much less than 50% of the day. We run on average 6-8 hours in
| the winter. A rolling blackout where power was off for 1
| hour, on for 2 would have exceeded their target savings, and
| shouldn't have affected heating or demand.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| I don't know about North Texas but I don't think gas
| furnaces are that common in Houston or Austin.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Propane gas is relatively common, but wither way:
|
| 1) Natural gas has been a problem because the moisture in
| it has been freezing pipes
|
| 2) The cold has caused the pressure in propane tanks to
| drop, impairing their functionality.
|
| None of this might have been a huge problem if Texas
| didn't keep its power grid almost completely separate
| from the rest of the country. That has meant they can't
| easily bring in capacity to cover their own lack. Though
| even moderate winterization would probably have
| significantly reduced the problems. It's not like they
| have to prepare for continuous -10 F.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| These type were quite common when natural gas lines were
| first run to households in Houston:
|
| Dearborn gas heater example just like the one I had:
|
| https://external-
| content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
|
| In The Heights many original homes have a smaller
| version(s) built into the wall, sometimes a tiny one
| right there above the bathtub.
|
| After converting to showers sometimes it's right in your
| face while standing.
|
| Without a full set of built-ins, there were natural gas
| petcocks in each major room for portables or relocatables
| like Dearborns.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| I don't know what the geographic distribution is, but
| overall the state is split evenly between between natural
| gas and electric heat (45% each), with the remainder
| being misc sources like propane.
| gkop wrote:
| > A lot of people have natural gas heat. It doesn't work
| when the power is out
|
| That doesn't have to be the case. I have gas heat [0], that
| works fine when our power is out.
|
| (Not intending to detract from the rest of your point)
|
| [0] a basic Williams wall furnace on a 50 year old
| thermostat.
| pixl97 wrote:
| How does it blow heat around the house?
| gkop wrote:
| It's a wall furnace in the center of the apartment, I
| guess it blows via convection, outward on both sides of
| the wall.
|
| These heaters are super common in California, and some
| larger homes have multiple of them. I assume they're not
| as efficient as more modern solutions, but they are
| certainly reliable and low-maintenance.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Not very well, I lived in an apartment with one of those
| in the hallway, had to set up a fan to blow warm air to
| the living room or bedrooms or it got way too cold on
| cold nights. (which fortunately, were rare where I
| lived). It'd definitely be better than nothing in an
| extended power failure, but forced air heat is more
| comfortable
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| How does the thermostat work? I've had the old mercury
| switch style thermostats before, but those work by
| completing a circuit, so I assumed they were dependent on
| power being on.
| gkop wrote:
| Googling tells me it's "a pilot millivolt system". I
| guess the downside of this design is that the pilot* is
| always lit, consuming a certain amount of fuel. Neat old
| quick start guide for a similar thermostat: http://nebula
| .wsimg.com/b2bc334b6de3591406ddd01974f01830?Acc...
|
| * pilot is manual piezoelectric; doesn't require electric
| power
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Austin here, staying at a colleague's place who's in an over-55
| community on the hospital grid (unlikely to be taken down).
|
| Agreed that they're misusing "rolling outages". We got an hour
| of power a day for the last two days and don't foresee getting
| even an hour today. I don't know who they think they're fooling
| because everyone here knows exactly that these outages aren't
| rolling and is out for ERCOT blood.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| My guess why we keep seeing rolling blackouts mentioned is
| that ERCOT has three alert levels, and the way you would
| typically deal with number three is with rolling blackouts,
| so that has become the term everyone uses.
|
| Also, it's up to the power distributors in different cities
| to cut in the ways that they can. Some are doing rolling
| blackouts, and others (like mine...) aren't.
| salawat wrote:
| You realize ERCOT doesn't specify how rolling outages are
| implemented, right? That's up to the generating
| utility/transmission network. Ift you're not getting what you
| think you should, point your frustration where it belongs at
| least.
| ineedasername wrote:
| The ERCOT website say they _" manage the flow of electric
| power to more than 26 million Texas customers --
| representing about 90 percent of the state's electric load.
| As the independent system operator for the region, ERCOT
| schedules power on an electric grid that connects more than
| 46,500 miles of transmission lines"_
|
| This makes it seem like they would have at least some
| influence on the rolling outages, no?
| salawat wrote:
| You'd think, but nope.
|
| If you hit the About section and watch their videos, you
| learn of ERCOT's role as a market facilitator and
| administrative body. They don't actually own any of the
| infrastructure, they are just a mediating influence
| through which granular activities are coordinated. They
| have the highest level view of activity as a whole on the
| grid, but there is no centralized control room or
| intimacy with utilities systems that allows ERCOT any
| semblance of fine grained control beyond being a message
| dispatcher and info propagter. Powerful and influential?
| Yes. Top down driver of day to day operations? No.
|
| If anyone is interested in more about the Midnight
| Connection scandal, I highly recommend
|
| https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-
| courts/FSupp/4...
| igetspam wrote:
| That's terrible. I'm in Driftwood and a touch rural and we've
| had no hits. The subdivisions up the road have not been doing
| very well either. Bang for you buck with power probably has
| them focused on the higher density locations. Stay safe and
| stay warm. Glad you got some place better for now.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Hopefully that's 5C and not 5F.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Probably Kelvin
| bjacobt wrote:
| We were at 0 F today morning north of Dallas.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Wow, I had no idea it had gotten _that_ cold down there.
| I've never seen it that cold here in the PNW - west of the
| Cascades, anyway.
| lghh wrote:
| We hit -14 F yesterday in OKC.
| Balgair wrote:
| Denver Metro was -15F the other day. Though they are
| built for it, unlike Austin. This cold snap is having a
| fun time with the whole middle of NA.
| nogbit wrote:
| That's rough. I've bundled up without power with little
| ones for 4 day, but it was mid 20's. Keep warm however you
| can, safely...and good luck, don't wait and cross fingers,
| take action.
| svnpenn wrote:
| Why would it be celcius? I made it very clear that I'm in
| Dallas, and we don't use Celcius.
|
| That's not a knock against Celcius, frankly it's just a knock
| on you for the dumb comment.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| While you (and siblings) are all correct, I don't get the
| down voting of the poor guy trying to make a joke while
| being considerate-ish and hoping that you guys were
| actually warmer than you were.
|
| That said, I've been out in the hammock in 0F here,
| including snow and wind chill on top and been warm (oh
| wait, I'll be down voted too). It's all about insulation,
| which actually helps in both warm and cold weather. You can
| see that in Spain for example, where they have very warm
| weather (like Texas) in summer. It's a fallacy to believe
| though that there's no insulation used and that there's no
| heating in Spain.
| 8note wrote:
| Making jokes is for Reddit, not HN
| falcrist wrote:
| The more time I spend on Hacker News, the more it just
| seems like Reddit to me. All the worst impulses are still
| here. The dog-piling, the comments that were made without
| opening the article, the low-effort jokes. At least
| there's no pun threads.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| You could be a Canadian living in TX. You could be an
| American who prefers the metric system. And OMG I had no
| idea it had gotten that cold down there, please accept my
| condolences.
| liamwire wrote:
| Try not to let the situation turn you into such an asshole.
| superduperuser wrote:
| Texan here. This is great advice and have been constantly
| reminding myself of it the past couple of days
| kzrdude wrote:
| The comment is just hoping that they have some degree of
| warmth in their apartment and not way below freezing.
| That's not dumb.
| greenonions wrote:
| Approximately zero chance that that would be 5C
| ckemere wrote:
| We were at 14F this morning...
| masklinn wrote:
| I don't think Texans are legally allowed to use non-freedom
| units.
| HNfriend234 wrote:
| I'm in Dallas too. What we did was pull out our generator that
| runs on propane then run an extension cord from the garage to
| inside the house connected to an electric heater. Close the
| bedroom door. We were about 75 degrees.
|
| You are crazy to not have a backup generator! It is an
| essential item to have!
| lpmusix wrote:
| I hope I'm reading that wrong and you're not saying you
| actually have the generator in the garage (unless that garage
| isn't connected to the house), that's a good way to kill your
| entire family.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Until recently, I've mostly lived in apartments or condos
| where a backup generator is not easy to own or operate since
| there are limited places to store fuel or to put a generator
| while running. Even if I'm ok with putting it on the balcony
| and running a cord inside, my neighbor may not want the
| generator's exhaust in his balcony.
|
| Now I live in a single-family home and have an entire RV
| parked beside the house (with an on-board generator, and
| around 100 hours of fuel in the RV's gas tank to run it). I
| can run an extension cord to power the house furnace as
| needed, but unless it was below freezing and I was worried
| about the pipes freezing in the house, I'd probably just let
| the house stay dark and move into the RV during an extended
| power outage.
|
| So I can confidently say "You are crazy to not have a backup
| Recreational Vehicle!". Maybe I should buy a travel trailer
| to back up the RV.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >my neighbor may not want the generator's exhaust in his
| balcony.
|
| Might be easier to convince them if you shared the
| electricity . . .
| dalacv wrote:
| I'm 46. I've never owned a backup generator. Even here with
| rolling outages, I'm not sure I will every buy one. I don't
| think I am crazy.
| u678u wrote:
| Not many people are talking about home solar but its a real
| problem. Its nice to have your own solar power and then use the
| grid only when you need it. However that means you need idle
| power plants and transmission 90% of the year just for those cold
| un-sunny days. If power prices are regulated its a mugs game.
|
| I see bans on home solar coming. Maybe if you can disconnect from
| the grid with batteries it solves the problem too - but those
| people would be suffering right now.
|
| If you downvote me please tell me what is wrong and if you have
| ideas on how to solve the problem.
| zamadatix wrote:
| People aren't talking about it because it's something like 0.2%
| of summer energy production in TX, a sunny state, so a very far
| off problem compared to pretty much any other power related
| issue or concern to solve for.
| u678u wrote:
| I can't find a good source but an old site says 300k homes
| have solar panel a few years ago, by now it could
| realistically be 5%. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/19/the-us-
| states-leading-the-wa...
| zamadatix wrote:
| The 0.2% figure was an exact power figure for TX summer
| 2020, not sure what that'd be in %homes with >0 panels.
| ckemere wrote:
| Home solar saving the day for my neighbors in Houston today,
| actually.
| barbacoa wrote:
| Electrical codes require grid-tie solar inverters to shut off
| if the utility power fails.
| dawnerd wrote:
| No, they're just not allowed to export, you can still
| generate.
| extrapickles wrote:
| You only have to shut off if you don't have the ability to
| disconnect yourself from the grid. Automatic switches are
| fairly expensive ($500-2k), so unless you also have battery
| storage, you generally opt out to save money.
| gwright wrote:
| I think the point that was trying to be made is that wide-
| spread deployment of residential solar isn't a panacea.
|
| You still need to provide sufficient grid capacity to serve
| the customers when there is no sun. And you have to pay for
| that standby grid capacity whether you are using it or not.
| That isn't a problem when the residential solar is a tiny
| percentage of the customer base but it is a problem with
| wide-spread deployment.
|
| The same problem exists at the grid-level as you ramp up
| grid-scale wind/solar -- that doesn't mean you can
| decommission the other generating capacity and so total cost
| of the grid goes up, not down.
|
| https://www.americanexperiment.org/2018/11/renewables-
| cheap-...
| u678u wrote:
| I'm not saying its bad for the people with solar, I'm saying
| everyone else suffers because of the people with solar.
| dawnerd wrote:
| That's an incredibly bad take.
| williesleg wrote:
| Everybody's so smart here! Wow!
| autotune wrote:
| I got caught in the storm and have been without power 24 hours
| and counting. Thankfully there is a hotel downtown that has their
| own power generators for the same amount of time that I've been
| staying at and have been staying safe. My thoughts and prayers to
| those without power who have not been able to find shelter in
| these trying times.
| doggodaddo78 wrote:
| In an apartment in Austin 78702. 47 F / 8 C inside, 22 / -6
| outside.
|
| Power out for 2 days now, while west across I-35 has always had
| power. There's some baloney they're feeding us about "complicated
| critical loads" while huge swats of hotels and office buildings
| have power (I can see from north to south since my unit overhangs
| the frontage and has windows all over, and elevated enough to see
| over I-35). My fridge food is in a cardboard box outside with a
| shower curtain liner around it.
|
| Water still working, and there are no plans according to the
| water company to interrupt service. There's no hot water (which
| IIRC, condemns a building) because the apartment's water heater
| needs electricity.
|
| I'm out of battery bank capacity and might have to leave the
| area. Appears it will go on until Friday or Saturday, so 5-6 days
| total.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Bon voyage. Stay safe.
| [deleted]
| turtlebits wrote:
| Maybe its time for people to stop treating electricity like
| essentially an unlimited cheap resource and instead something
| they consciously try not to waste.
|
| I've been working in an off-grid office where I am limited by
| solar and battery capacity and it really puts into perspective
| what really needs to be plugged in all the time and how much
| running a large appliance affects capacity.
|
| Maybe electricity should be sold in blocks that have to be
| refilled, set daily/monthly quotas or limit current draw. Or even
| just significantly raise "2nd block/high usage" kWh prices.
| lightgreen wrote:
| Electricity is unlimited and cheap when people do not fear to
| build nuclear power plants.
|
| > Maybe electricity should be sold in blocks that have to be
| refilled, set daily/monthly quotas or limit current draw
|
| Or maybe there should be realtime electricity price and fines
| for outages, so both providers and consumers would be
| incentivised to optimize consumption, and market will make the
| electricity available.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Nuclear power is nearly the most expensive source of power if
| you include the cost of decommissioning and liability
| insurance.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#.
| ..
| pas wrote:
| Yes, but no. Nuclear power plants are extremely costly
| because they lack prefabrication-level standardization.
| This is the main cost driver. And this is simply because
| there's no economies of scale. Because we're not building
| enough. Classic vicious cycle. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| zamadatix wrote:
| I think most would rather pay an e.g. +10% premium for the
| plants to handle more extreme conditions once a decade than
| think about what has to be plugged in all day every day.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| I'd be surprised if they will. If provider A is selling power
| at 10 cents/KWh and says that they can handle a once every
| decade cold spell, and provider B is selling power at 9
| cents/KWh and isn't taking cold weather precautions, I'd bet
| that most people will use the cheaper provider. They'll tell
| themselves that if the extreme event happens again, they'll
| switch to another provider, or they'll tough it out, or get a
| hotel or whatever, then they'll be in this same situation
| where there's no where to go and no where else to buy power
| from.
|
| It needs to be mandated so all power producers incur costs to
| handle the weather.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The generator will take that 10% as profit and not invest,
| then when the disaster happens they'll beg for public money
| and even higher rates.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| It's quite easy to mandate providers have certain
| winterization requirements, lots of other power grids do
| it. For that matter, it's exactly why insurance is so
| tightly regulated, because government wants to ensure
| companies have the resources to handle rare but predictable
| events.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I think "emergency ration pricing" would make sense, but I'm
| not sure non-emergency restrictions are needed.
| WorkingDead wrote:
| What a horrible article. First, Texas has its own independent
| grid as a matter of physics. Electricty travels at the speed of
| light so a continuous grid from coast to coast would get out of
| sync on phases just by travel distance. Texas just happens to be
| physically in the middle and large enough to have trouble by
| being supplied by either east or west grid. Second, ERCOT manages
| when utilizes can take assets out of commission to do
| maintenance. Texas peak demand is in the summer so if you have to
| take a power plant off line you do it in the winter. So there are
| a lot of utility assets under maintenance outages right now. One
| top of that reduced capacity, not all equipment is prepared for
| ice storms because it doesn't really happen here. Several gas
| pipelines in the state are having freezing issues causing the gas
| price to spike. ERCOT controls rates so if gas prices spike and
| utilities are forced to sell power for less than it costs to
| make, they would rather shut down and did until ERCOT stepped
| back in and let them charge real rates. People on variable rate
| power contracts are now basically screwed this month. And
| finally, the wind farms are not handling the ice well. Somee have
| frozen or iced up enough to be out of commission and the rest are
| operating at severely reduced capacity. So basically a varatiy of
| these went wrong and everything will be back to normal in a few
| days, but ERCOT has some work to do to make sure this doesn't
| happen again.
| konjin wrote:
| >Electricty travels at the speed of light so a continuous grid
| from coast to coast would get out of sync on phases just by
| travel distance.
|
| You just need to be in sync with whatever the phase is in your
| local grid. For a real world example:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPS/UPS
| mzs wrote:
| You can have very wide synced AC grids and even couple them:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPS/UPS#Interconnections_with_...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| You know you can shift AC phase, right? That "out of sync"
| article doesn't seem right.
| 8note wrote:
| If you've got tooling to do it efficiently at scale, you
| could make a whole ton of money
| arberx wrote:
| To your first point, it's not about supply, it's about
| borrowing during periods of scarcity. There are plenty of
| wholesale markets that are "in the middle". Texas simply chose
| to not be apart of it.
|
| https://www.epa.gov/greenpower/us-electricity-grid-markets
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Just about every sentence in your comment is wrong:
|
| > First, Texas has its own independent grid as a matter of
| physics.
|
| Except that every state directly north of Texas is either on
| the East or West interconnects. ERCOT having its own grid is
| solely a matter of political desire.
|
| > One top of that reduced capacity, not all equipment is
| prepared for ice storms because it doesn't really happen here.
|
| Except a very similar event happened in 2011, and a specific
| set of recommendations were made by FERC to winterize power
| producers, and the recommendations were promptly ignored.
| Better discussion on reddit:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/ll2slh/texas_failed...
|
| > And finally, the wind farms are not handling the ice well
|
| Yes, this is true, but this is almost insignificant. The grid
| is already designed to handle windless days:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/frozen-wi...
| bouncycastle wrote:
| I wonder if this is related to bitcoin mining?
| (https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-mining-farms-in-texas-offli...)
|
| Sure, they claimed that they turned it off, but there will always
| be someone who doesn't turn it off, especially when the bitcoin
| prices are going up astronomically. Rising electricity price
| doesn't matter.
|
| Also, they hold up the "floor price" for electricity and push it
| up, meaning that electricity prices will never be cheaper.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Even if all of the bitcoin mining in the world happened in TX
| and 0% of them shut down it'd still just be 1/4 the normal
| power draw in the state (121 TWh vs 429 TWh), far less than the
| demand increase due to the cold or current production/demand
| gap.
| bouncycastle wrote:
| Still keeps the floor price of electricity up as some would
| probably not bother turning off in the case of an
| astronomical bitcoin price. (Read the article Yahoo, they are
| in fact keeping some on!)
|
| Also I'm assuming 429 TWh is when it's at full capacity. You
| have to quote the number for the current crippled capacity
| for a fair comparison.
| zamadatix wrote:
| 429 TWh is average yearly usage, current "crippled" usage
| is 77% the yearly average usage, so 100% worldwide bitcoin
| usage would only account for ~1/3 the current "crippled"
| power delivery.
|
| Worldwide mining would have to pull a hell of a lot more
| than ~1/4 (of TX) of ~1/10 (TX of the US) ~1/7 (US of
| world) to be setting the price floor of electricity.
|
| http://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/load note some figures are in
| power (watts) and energy (watt hours)
| bouncycastle wrote:
| Still, that's a lot of electricity that could have been
| warming houses.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| The incompetence of the Texas ERCOT is mind blowing. A relative
| works in a semiconductor fab in the Austin area. Apparently the
| utility gave the fabs an entire hour of warning that their power
| was going to be shut off. These plants can't shut down properly
| in an hour.
| terse_malvolio wrote:
| This is only a problem because we haven't figured out a good way
| to store electrical energy.
| leoh wrote:
| That's not really true. The grid has worked just fine for
| decades. We also do have "good" means of storing electrical
| energy, they're not as economical as just running at sufficient
| capacity and managing the grid properly.
| gitgreen wrote:
| Texas had blackouts due to extreme cold as recently as 2011.
| The findings from the investigation after that event were
| ignored and we are now seeing a repeat of it exactly 10 years
| later. It has not worked "just fine" for decades.
| epistasis wrote:
| We have great ways of storing electricity, it's just that
| they're only getting built right now, and they're getting
| cheaper so fast that waiting a few years will get you a 30%+
| discount off the price.
|
| There are currently 17GW of batteries in the ERCOT
| interconnection queue for the coming years, for a grid that's
| only ~80GW. The ERCOT of 2025 will be _massively_ different
| from the ERCOT of 2021, and it 's going to mean a lot less gas,
| a lot more storage, and a _lot_ more solar.
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| GW is a unit of power, it's not a unit that energy storage
| capacity can be measured in.
| epistasis wrote:
| Yes of course, that's trivial. Grid connections are
| measured in power, not in energy units.
| snowwindwaves wrote:
| Not for batteries since a battery that can deliver 17 GW
| for an hour is much smaller than one that can deliver 17
| GW for a week. Usually grid connections are measured in
| power since you could use it at 100% indefinitely - not
| so with a battery , so hours matter.
| epistasis wrote:
| Regardless, the interconnection absolutely does not care
| about the MWh of the battery. It has no concern, no care,
| no need to know. So when talking about interconnection
| queues, only the GW are reported.
|
| As far as 17GW of battery, the only technology shipping
| at that scale is lithium ion, and all lithium ion grid
| batteries are designed for 30 minutes to 4 hours of
| duration at maximum discharge.
|
| The idea of a week long battery is not a realistic one at
| this stage. With Texas' excellent solar resources, it may
| never need long-duration storage, whenever/if that tech
| gets developed.
| snowwindwaves wrote:
| So bringing up battery storage on an article about a
| blackout caused by a multi day storm might lead some
| people to believe that batteries would make a difference
| in this situation, when they wouldn't, regardless of the
| GW.
| epistasis wrote:
| I was responding to this comment:
|
| > we haven't figured out a good way to store electrical
| energy.
|
| Before batteries solve all the problems in the grid, they
| get installed in smaller amounts. We are in the "smaller"
| amounts, even though small isn't that small actually. And
| even 17GW with 2 hours duration can help massively with
| congestion on transmission lines.
| cccc4alll wrote:
| Nuclear is the cheapest, cleanest, safest form of electricity
| generation.
|
| Do some research into who pushed FUD propaganda about Nuclear
| industry, (Big oil) and who paid off the shrill environmental FUD
| lobby, (Bug oil).
|
| Nuclear power is used safely in aircraft carriers and submarines
| for decades. It's time to build more nuclear power and build the
| cleaner, safer, cheaper electrical energy future.
| redisman wrote:
| I'm all for more nuclear as a stopgap but they had to shut down
| large parts of their nuclear energy in TX because the water
| froze.
| Dobbs wrote:
| Nuclear power plants in Texas are down due to the cold.
| senectus1 wrote:
| plant. singular.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Singular, yes, of two total. I think the point still
| stands, simply saying "nuclear good" isn't the answer to
| the problems from this event.
| sjg007 wrote:
| I think solar panels and power walls are clearly the future. You
| have some issue with the snow but maybe the wall helps you get
| through it.
| tyingq wrote:
| It was posted as it's own story here, but it's mildly fascinating
| to watch the demand versus supply figures from Ercot. And the
| demand, I assume, doesn't include those places currently without
| power.
| http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...
|
| As I post this, demand is 99+% of supply, and the outside temps
| are dropping.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I read ERCOT predicted "real" demand was estimated to be at
| least 75 MW at one point Monday. I imagine it's not much better
| with everyone needing to reheat their entire homes now either.
| [deleted]
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| Texas style capitalism.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Not much discussion here of the fundamental problem: why is Texas
| so energy intensive? In the last decade ERCOT energy generation
| has expanded 20%, which is much faster than the population of
| Texas has grown. Why? Just gigantic, detached houses for
| everybody? I think this is why people say the California housing
| crisis is such a calamity for the environment. A person in Texas
| consumes 150% more energy.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Because "muh hyper efficient heat pump system" that a huge
| fraction of Texas uses for heat during their typically mild
| winters has an electric heating system cobbled on to provide
| heat when the temperature is lower than what the heat pump
| likes running at.
| StillBored wrote:
| Large energy intensive businesses have been moving to TX too
| because our governor(s) runs around telling people TX is open
| to lax regulation. Heavy industry is frequently also very
| energy intensive.
|
| So its not just a statement of per capita consumption. Toyota,
| Tesla, Samsung, etc moving their factories are not
| insignificant.
| s0rce wrote:
| Wow, that surprised me. Current demand is 45GW in Texas vs.
| 24GW in California. Over double per capita.
| rconti wrote:
| Well, yeah, the populated areas of Texas happen to be
| insanely cold right now at this moment we've cherry-picked,
| and the populated areas of California happen to be.. _checks
| thermometer_ between 55-65f right now. (Bay Area, Sacramento,
| LA, San Diego).
|
| Also, Texas heating is HEAVILY reliant on electricity (heat
| pumps), since they're used as air conditioners in the summer.
| Presumably this means CA has a lot more forced air natural
| gas, like my house. Of course, I keep hearing ads encouraging
| me to replace my polluting "methane gas" furnace with a
| clean, efficient electric heat pump....
| s0rce wrote:
| I didn't think about heat pumps that makes sense. I had
| electric heat pump for heat when I lived in WA state.
| Worked well with cheap hydro power.
| StillBored wrote:
| Yas, there are heat pump systems designed to work at
| fairly low temps. Those aren't the ones they install in
| TX, where its just a cheap reversing valve on a stock
| R410 system. AFAIK they don't even necessarily have aux
| heat (my mother's in FL didn't) and even if they do,
| after a decade or two it might not even work and no one
| would know.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Sunday night before the capacity dropped, TX was at 65 GW
| consumption.
| rconti wrote:
| Increased A/C adoption? I mean, presumably the same thing is
| happening in other areas of the Southwest (nobody's ripping out
| their air conditioners and throwing them away, and some are
| installing new ones). The reductions in per-capita electricity
| consumption in CA must be made up by great efficiency
| increases, since no doubt A/C usage is going up at the same
| time. OTOH, if power was as cheap at is in Texas, perhaps
| investing in efficiency wouldn't be worth it.
|
| Also, it sounds like Texas' population has increased by 3.8
| million to 29 million from 2010 to 2020. That sounds like
| pretty darn close to 20%.
|
| https://thetexan.news/texas-population-increases-in-the-last...
| jeffbee wrote:
| I think you hit on the real truth: this is an electric grid
| optimized for cost, not for resilience. Electricity in Texas
| is much cheaper than in California. California grew 7% from
| 2010 to 2020, but electricity consumption fell from a peak of
| 302 TWh per year to 277 TWh.
| [deleted]
| slfnflctd wrote:
| I don't know why power demand is up in TX generally, but I do
| know that right now a big reason for the demand is because a
| lot of residences have electric resistance heat only-- which is
| great for electric blankets, but not so much for heating all
| the air in your home when it's extremely cold.
| redisman wrote:
| Why is it not good for heating? I'm sure resistance based
| electric heating is very efficient. I've lived in very cold
| places and the heat has almost always been electric or water
| heated by electric. You just need radiators. Northern
| European countries for example use that a lot and the
| temperatures are often as low as -22F. Of course they build
| to optimize for low temperatures unlike TX.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Resistance heating is 100% efficient and therefore
| basically the least-efficient method. Heat pumps have
| coefficients of performance well over 1.0, even when the
| outside air is below zero degrees.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Boilers/furnaces are ~90% efficient now. Combined
| electrical/heat generation can only hit 50-80% efficiency.
|
| In theory heat pumps powered by electricity would be the
| most efficient option.
| kolencherry wrote:
| Heat pumps don't work particularly well below 25F. Our
| heat pump switched to auxiliary heat (electric resistance
| heating) with how cold it's been in Texas.
| StillBored wrote:
| Those are just the standard compressor/r410 systems with
| reversing valves. There are number of systems designed to
| work well below 0F.
|
| https://www.mitsubishicomfort.com/benefits/hyper-heating
| https://www.fujitsugeneral.com/us/residential/technology/
| xlt...
| 8note wrote:
| Theory would require some magical fluid to do the heat
| transfer, and we're limited to real coolants that don't
| have horrid environment impacts
| benlivengood wrote:
| Or geothermal heat pumps for very cold and hot
| environments.
| Tossrock wrote:
| Though, heat pumps lose efficiency in very cold weather,
| and right now it's very cold in Texas.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| It takes enough natual gas to heat three homes in order to
| generate the electricity to heat one home.
| cowboysauce wrote:
| It's more efficient to burn natural gas directly for heat
| than to use it to generate electricity which is then used
| for heating. Typical gas turbines are around 40% efficient,
| plus a few percent for transmission loses. Though
| apparently there are some cutting edge turbines that are
| 60% efficient.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| It's more efficient, but not more environmentally
| friendly, given how much of Texas's grid is wind power
| (and increasingly solar).
| JohnCohorn wrote:
| Lived in TX all my life. Every residence I've seen has had a
| heat pump for decades. The the thing is though it switches to
| resistive heat at something like 20F when they are no longer
| efficient. Rarely a concern in TX, most of the time we're
| complaining it's over 100F!
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| worker767424 wrote:
| The Texas-only grid was definitely part of it, and should be a
| lesson to people who thought the lesson from Covid is "do more
| locally." No, having stronger, longer distance connections is
| what makes you more resilient, at least when there are local
| problems.
| bhupy wrote:
| On the flip side, the fact that we're talking about a Texas-
| specific outage means that the system actually worked as
| designed, in a degraded state.
|
| We generally try to incorporate redundancy and decentralization
| in systems design for the purpose of antifragility and graceful
| degradation. If something bad happens, best to isolate it so
| that it doesn't afflict everyone globally.
|
| At the time of this writing, every State in the contiguous US
| except Georgia, Alabama, Florida are covered in snow; for many
| of those States, the snow is catastrophic and generally
| unplanned. The fact that, in the face of that black swan event,
| it was "just" Texas that had degradation means that,
| collectively, the US is better off. Obviously we should learn
| from this and improve Texas's grid to be resilient to such a
| failure in the future, and that's exactly how a healthy system
| that "localizes" implementations should function over time.
| pas wrote:
| It's not like extreme weather events getting more and more
| frequent weren't foretold long ago by those pesky
| climatologists...
|
| Sure it's possible to learn from this, but the "efficiency"
| of that learning is predictably low.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Your entire argument is only valid if the other two major
| grids don't have the excess generation capacity to support
| the gap in Texas.
|
| Otherwise, it's cutting off a limb because of a papercut.
| bhupy wrote:
| Well, there's also a cost to connecting the other two major
| grids, and Texans have collectively decided that this cost
| is not worth it. Energy sovereignty is a concept we talk
| about in the context of nation-states, but it's also
| applicable in the context of States.
|
| Most Texans have a different idea of what energy production
| should look like than Californians or New Yorkers. They get
| to enjoy the upside of that independence, but they should
| also suffer the consequences. The vast majority of people
| that might disagree with them likely don't live in Texas,
| and are most likely unaffected by that decision themselves.
| cat199 wrote:
| Strangely, the TX grid also wasn't impacted the multiple times
| that CA couldn't manage it's own portion of the western grid...
| bstar77 wrote:
| No, having a distributed grid is what makes you more resilient.
| If every house had solar panels this would likely be a non-
| issue.
| mmaurizi wrote:
| Solar panels don't generate that much power during the day,
| and even less when they are covered in snow.
| [deleted]
| worker767424 wrote:
| > If every house had solar panels this would likely be a non-
| issue.
|
| I doubt this. That would mean a lot of power plants were
| taken offline as solar ramped up, and I doubt that enough
| solar to cool a house from 105 to 75 can heat it from 15 to
| 70.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| The latest thinking is that with the seasonality of solar
| insolation and the current demand curve, a complete move to
| solar will require massive overprovisioning. (5x, 10x
| capacity at solar noon?) The price curve in 2050 or so
| would look funny to modern eyes: power would be free around
| noon, but expensive at night. Charge your car for nothing
| during the day, and enjoy endless hot water, but the minute
| the sun sets you'd cut your own throat rather than run
| anything power hungry.
|
| Amusingly, Texas in this current crisis is halfway there:
| the handful of people who haven't had their power cut off
| are going to see gigantic power bills next month
| https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/texas-utility-company-
| urge...
|
| I wonder what a similar cold snap would look like in the
| future. Long distance HVDC lines ramping up to full
| capacity. Strident alerts on your phone as KWh spot prices
| triple, then trigintuple. Water heaters and EV charges
| passing stop loss triggers and shutting off. A wood stove
| in every home. I see Texans in this thread talking about
| using space heaters, and boy will they regret that when
| they see the bill. Electric blankets and heat pads are
| dozens of times more efficient:
| https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/03/home-heating-for-the-
| hard...
| yellow_postit wrote:
| Agree on the point about Texas extreme stance on having their
| own power grid. I don't known if there's enough micro grids in
| Texas to determine how well, or not, they worked in these
| conditions.
| fastball wrote:
| It's not that extreme. Texas is huge. Having it's own grid is
| not some support of excessively-local craziness.
| yellow_postit wrote:
| Yes it's a huge area but the Texas interconnection[1] has a
| long history of fierce protectionism from other parts of
| the national grid.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| You're describing why Texas having its own grid isn't
| localized insanity, but for the uninitiated, it still seems
| like insanity. Why not connect (and be able to draw from)
| other grids?
| jimkleiber wrote:
| The irony is that longer distance connections is also what
| spread covid from one community to another. I think it's often
| just a combination of things that gives us resilience. Both
| longer distance grid connections could help, but so could more
| off-grid solutions. Maybe just designing more fail safes at
| various levels.
| refurb wrote:
| I think the big lesson here is "when you have extreme weather
| events, things can go wrong".
|
| No more than that.
|
| To say this can always be avoided is misleading. When black
| swan events happen, shit goes bad.
| falcolas wrote:
| I'm not sure this is a truly "black swan" event. Cold fronts
| that bring snow and cold temperatures to Texas are becoming
| more and more frequent. This is simply the worst one _so
| far_.
| 8note wrote:
| That would be a benefit to following the federal
| regulations - more of the country gets failures in unique
| modes, and you get the learnings from all of them, rather
| than having to experience each one for yourself
| StillBored wrote:
| Apparently its not, there was one in the 1940's that was
| worse. So its the usual "ignore any outlier we don't like"
| attitude that seems common in so many things. Plus, its not
| like this is unusual. The random unexpected heat wave in
| oct -> rolling blackouts. Unexpected storm during hurricane
| season -> power goes out for a week due to unmaintained
| power lines, etc.
|
| Its why you need engineers running your grid, not some
| politically connected organization which seems to
| prioritize free market theories above delivering power.
| refurb wrote:
| Your most recent example is 80 years ago?
|
| And yeah, politics is involved. Unless the engineers want
| to work for free and fundraise for infrastructure, they
| need to compete for limited resources.
| StillBored wrote:
| Power is different. You get to pay the price it takes to
| produce and distribute even if it happens to be slightly
| inefficient. Its only when short term MBA/Politics get
| involved do the engineers who size capacity, maintenance,
| etc get overruled to save money. Or you can go the free
| market route, and just let everyone race to the bottom,
| which means cheap service that fails when it gets cold,
| hot, traders decide to screw people, or a storm blows
| through.
| refurb wrote:
| Again, unless the engineers are going to secure funding,
| they need to get politicians involved.
|
| And the "free market race to the bottom" is why you have
| $1,000 computer in your pocket.
|
| CA is nowhere close to a free market and is arguably
| worse than TX.
| StillBored wrote:
| CA is the same problem in reverse. There the politicians
| think they can regulate both the price and the product.
| Vs TX where they think the bean counters can solve
| everything.
|
| Nowhere do the engineers have a voice in what actually
| works. So of course they are both dumpster fires.
|
| Edit: BTW: if you remember your history a lot of CA's
| power problems a couple decades ago were caused by free
| market experiments, which were promptly exploited by TX
| energy traders. The fixes haven't really helped CA.
| refurb wrote:
| I don't disagree about CA. They are micromanaging a
| "private" company and making things even worse.
| wins32767 wrote:
| > Its why you need engineers running your grid, not some
| politically connected organization which seems to
| prioritize free market theories above delivering power.
|
| Why do engineers seem to think that it's possible to do
| things at scale without politics being involved? A
| statement that boils down to "trust this group of people
| that I am affiliated with because we know better" is an
| inherently political statement, even if you really do
| know better!
| StillBored wrote:
| Autistic power dictators?
|
| What I'm trying to say is that electricity is a
| life/death situation, not only when it freezes but during
| heat waves too. We go to extremes to engineer airplanes
| (and we have recently seen how that can fail too).
| Weighing once in 80 year events as inconsequential and
| failing to properly design/maintain backup generators
| (Fukushima), or NG holding tanks/heaters or whatever it
| takes to secure the supply isn't generally the function
| of the guy doing the engineering unless he has been given
| some kind of financial constraint. Same at it was some
| bean counter who allowed the 737MAX to be sold without
| redundant sensors or decided to skimp on the training
| requirements to save some $.
|
| So, who was it, who didn't size heaters on the wind
| turbines correctly despite turbines being installed in
| far colder places, or didn't build NG holding tanks
| sufficient to supply the peaker generators for any length
| of time? Most of those decisions come back to free market
| financial pressures that are prioritizing cheap over
| reliable.
|
| The grid is a giant redundant system, designed to correct
| for errors on the part of individual actors. Its only
| when the system is systematicaly undermined does it fail
| like this.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >Why do engineers seem to think that it's possible to do
| things at scale without politics being involved?
|
| Because they're only a stone throw away from physicists
| in when it comes to the "I know X therefore I know
| everything higher level than X" flavor of hubris.
|
| It'll be interesting to see how the damage stacks up to a
| California wildfire season or an active hurricane season.
| pasttense01 wrote:
| Of course it could have been avoided: much of the rest of the
| country has much colder weather regularly than this "extreme"
| Texas cold weather event. And the solution is to winterize
| the power generating facilities. And this type event
| regularly happens in Texas every couple decades or so. Look
| at what happened in 1989 for example.
|
| https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/san-
| antonio/weather/2021/02...
| refurb wrote:
| _Of course it could have been avoided: much of the rest of
| the country has much colder weather regularly than this
| "extreme" Texas cold weather event._
|
| That's my point. Other parts of the country have "colder
| weather regularly". Texas doesn't.
| 8note wrote:
| You can certainly avoid failures that have been predicted for
| you 10 years ago and the fixes are part of a standard.
|
| Pretending the black swans you've seen don't exist make it a
| black swan event when one finally pecks you
| ahnick wrote:
| I think it's probably not that clear cut. What happens in a
| cascading blackout scenario? If you are part of a larger pool
| are you more exposed to have a service disruption now when
| there is a problem in another part of the grid of the pool that
| you don't directly control?
| Retric wrote:
| You can isolate yourself from cascading blackouts while still
| being able to share power. This is why they may cross several
| states, but never hit nationwide.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Yes and no :)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003#Se
| q...
|
| I really like this minute by minute play.
|
| > Estimated total affected people 55,000,000
|
| Now this is not supposed to be a "NA vs. Europe" thing. So
| here we go:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout#Timeli
| n...
|
| Funny how this was actually caused by a planned shutdown of
| a specific line to let a ship pass. Something that had been
| done before :)
|
| > In total, over 10 million people in northern Germany,
| France, Italy, Belgium, and Spain lost power or were
| affected by the blackout
|
| It's especially funny how while this was less total people
| affected, it spread much more so to speak. I would tend to
| believe that this is actually due to the fact that Europe's
| power grid is way more interconnected, meaning that they
| could power more people more quickly again by just routing
| electricity differently than they would usually do.
| Retric wrote:
| Or just Yes.
|
| That US blackout was completely isolated to the Northeast
| Power Coordinating Council (NPCC), all other regional
| grids where unaffected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nor
| th_American_power_transmiss.... "The regions are not
| usually directly connected or synchronized to each other,
| but there are some HVDC interconnections."
|
| It's just a question of cost. Regional grids could have
| more resiliency internally, but large blackouts are rare
| enough it's not considered worth it.
| fastball wrote:
| The Texas Interconnection has DC ties to the Eastern
| Interconnection, so... power _can_ be shared.
| pas wrote:
| Some comments claim that those connections have small
| capacity. (DC-DC interconnects are a lot more expensive
| than a synchronized grid.)
| redisman wrote:
| Also thinking longer term, climate change is making the polar
| vortex more unstable and more prone to "freak" incidents like
| this. Of course there has been zero thought put into any of the
| effects of that.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I'm not sure how true this is. There are DC ties that allow
| Texas to import from both the East and West interconnection,
| but power is scarce everywhere now. So even if their region was
| fully AC connected, all the other nearby regions were scrapping
| the bottom of the barrel as well.
| worker767424 wrote:
| But the lines have a fixed capacity, and only Texas is having
| California-style rolling blackouts.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| The West is having crazy snow too, so I assume it is just
| as bad. Just east of ERCOT is SPP which was also in an EEA3
| and very low on capacity. Northeast of them is MISO which
| is also in an EEA3 event (ready to curtail load) and very
| low on capacity. So even if they weren't as islanded,
| they'd still be in a lot of trouble. Both SPP & MISO have
| also curtailed load which is always the last resort. This
| thread is focused on the Texas grid being isolated as a
| primary cause, when natural gas supply and low wind are
| much bigger problems to me.
| hahahahe wrote:
| Can someone explain how the ninth largest economy in the world
| where it is dominated by the largest energy companies in the
| world failed so miserably? This is all self-inflicted.
| Bud wrote:
| In a word: greed.
| bassman9000 wrote:
| Simplistic, but:
|
| http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/181766/IntGenbyFuel20...
|
| 1/4 of the mix is wind, and turbines were frozen. Maintenance
| in extreme condition not done, because either they didn't think
| it was needed, or because they didn't want to pay for it.
| woeirua wrote:
| Not true. Stop spreading misinformation.
| njdullea wrote:
| I'm so cold
| Pokepokalypse wrote:
| conservatism
| vondur wrote:
| Maybe having more nuclear power plants instead of wind would have
| helped? It sounds unrealistic for the energy generators to sell
| electricity at a loss over a 10 year period. It would be nice to
| see some of the data that the professor is referring to.
| goat_whisperer wrote:
| The article clearly states that many natural gas plants were
| knocked out due to the cold.
|
| So why aren't you asking "maybe having more nuclear instead of
| natural gas would have helped?"
|
| Since nuclear uses water, which freezes, the reason why the gas
| plants were knocked out, maybe the problem isn't the power
| source itself but the lack of weatherization?!
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| > Since nuclear uses water, which freezes
|
| I suspect that the water involved in the steam generation
| (heavy water or otherwise) wouldn't freeze since it's
| inside/near the core, and constantly temperature regulated.
|
| The water used for cooling would go through heat exchanging
| and would also not freeze, especially if it's underground, or
| deep in a lake somewhere.
| oivey wrote:
| This isn't theoretical. A nuclear plant was knocked out of
| service due to water freezing at the current temperatures.
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| I stand corrected.
|
| I had trouble finding articles detailing how the nuclear
| plant was brought down, but then I found this:
|
| > On Monday, Feb. 15, 2021, at 0537, an automatic reactor
| trip occurred at South Texas Project in Unit 1. The trip
| resulted from a loss of feedwater attributed to a cold
| weather-related failure of a pressure sensing lines to
| the feedwater pumps, causing a false signal, which in
| turn, caused the feedwater pump to trip. This event
| occurred in the secondary side of the plant (non-nuclear
| part of the unit). The reactor trip was a result of the
| feedwater pump trips. The primary side of the plant
| (nuclear side) is safe and secured. [...] We evaluated
| Unit 2 and have confirmed that we do not have the same
| issues that caused the feedwater pump trips in Unit 1.
|
| and subsequently, an answer to my question of 'how':
|
| > Some people have wondered how "pressure sensing lines"
| for a feed water pump could have been affected by cold
| outside air temperatures. There are no turbine halls at
| STP, both of steam turbines are out in the open air. I'm
| sure there is a design reason for this choice, but it
| isn't apparent.
|
| (from https://atomicinsights.com/south-texas-project-
| unit-1-trippe...)
| 8note wrote:
| Which water though?
|
| Water related to the main cycle of the plant? Or
| something non-essential like the toilets, or some valve
| froze shut because water froze on the outside of it?
| oivey wrote:
| I don't think the toilets would knock a nuclear power
| plant out of service.
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| I didn't want to admit it in my original comment, but I
| basically thought something along these lines haha
| [deleted]
| wongarsu wrote:
| Cutting costs on the cold-proofing of wind turbines in Texas is
| somewhat understandable. But as far as under-investment due to
| lack of profit goes, nuclear isn't much better off.
|
| The economics of building a traditional nuclear plant right now
| don't work out: they are incredibly expensive to build and tear
| down, take a decade to plan and another decade to build. In the
| time until a new nuclear plant is built and has paid back the
| investment you could have built a wind park, made back the
| investment, made a profit, decommissioned it, built a new one
| and made back the investment for that one.
|
| Maybe small-scale nuclear will help somewhat, but properly
| weather proofed wind and gas would work just fine too.
| YarickR2 wrote:
| They take a year to build, and can be mobile.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_pow.
| ..
| wongarsu wrote:
| With 2 70MW reactors these fall squarely into "small-scale
| nuclear". A traditional nuclear power plant has reactors
| with 10-20 times the power output.
|
| I think these kinds of applications have a lot of
| potential, and are the future of nuclear energy production.
| But using these kinds of small reactors outside the
| military (or Russian icebreakers) is an idea that only
| recently gained traction (at least since it was originally
| abandoned around the 60s).
| maxerickson wrote:
| This article puts wind at 13% of shut down production:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/frozen-wi...
|
| I imagine the person in the article is griping about the
| downward pressure wind and solar can put on energy prices (so
| maybe you lose money operating a traditional plant, but less
| money than you'd lose by walking away; operating at net that
| doesn't cover the up front investment).
| epistasis wrote:
| Nuclear tripped too, just like gas, because of a pump failure
| in the cold.
|
| In the 2011 cold snap, the problem was all about frozen lines
| like the pressure sensing line that caused a problem yesterday
| for the nuclear reactor. Likely similar things are causing
| problems for natural gas.
|
| The answer is weatherization of all these sources. Wind
| turbines work great in other settings with icing wind, you just
| have to have the hardware for it. Just like you have to have
| the hardware to keep your pressure sensing lines from freezing.
|
| We are likely to experince more events like this before a
| single nuclear plant could be built. And the idea of building
| 30GW of new nuclear, the amount of gas/coal/nuclear that was
| lost, is so daunting that not even China is trying to build
| that much nuclear, and they're pretty much the best at doing it
| of anyone out there.
|
| Honestly, building 60GW more of wind and solar, and 10GW/40GWh
| of storage would be a lot easier and cheaper than building 30GW
| of nuclear. Solar delivered an extra GW when it wasn't
| expected, wind dropped 4GW from what was expected, and
| gas/coal/nuclear dropped 27GW.
| hokkos wrote:
| At worst wind provided only 2% of its capacity, 40GWh would
| be gone in minutes, please count on TWh.
| epistasis wrote:
| It was just an offhand number, there's already 17GW of
| storage in ERCOT's interconnection queue for the next few
| years, which is 40GWh - 70GWh. By 2035, the soonest we
| could expect to see a new nuclear reactor powering on, we
| will have many multiples of 70GWh. Not sure if TWh will
| every be needed for a grid that only peaks at 80GW. The
| cheapest solution will be a tradeoff between excess
| renewables capacity and storage, it will be interesting to
| see what the market picks for Texas.
| snowwindwaves wrote:
| 70 GWh of battery storage would have kept the lights on
| for an extra 2 hours during this event - assuming the
| batteries themselves aren't affected by temperature.
| While battery storage might be nice to increase the
| capacity factor of a solar or wind farm it isn't going to
| make a difference in an event like this where a weather
| system moves in for a week.
| epistasis wrote:
| The current grid took a looot longer than 2-4 years to
| build, and that 17GW/50GWh is just 2-4 years of
| replacement equipment at the very beginning of a
| transition. So I'm not sure why this amount of batteries
| needs to power the entire grid, or how that's a helpful
| or even interesting comparison.
| StillBored wrote:
| As I got heavily downvoted a month or so ago for saying. In
| TX the wind backup is NG plants. The storage is really only
| there to cover tiny glitches, and its quite expensive. Which
| I why I keep pointing out that the price of wind conveniently
| ignores the storage costs and NG generators required to back
| it up.
|
| At least part of the problem here seems to be the fact that
| the NG plants can't start due to lack of gas because the
| supply is frozen.
|
| The other problem is of course that backing up wind with NG
| means that its not actually "green" anymore. Its reduced the
| carbon footprint, but at the growth rates in TX its only
| slowed the increase in CO2 output, not decreased it.
| epistasis wrote:
| The economics are changing quickly, and storage is
| replacing gas plants. There are now more GW of battery
| backup in the pipeline than gas plants, and many multiples
| of solar and wind GW for each new gas GW.
|
| https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/
|
| Texas is experiencing the interchange first because it's
| one off one of the few places where independent operators
| can connect and undercut those who have made bad long term
| capital investments.
| StillBored wrote:
| So, remind me again how much storage it takes to keep a
| grid going for a week? And please don't confuse GW for
| GWh.
| epistasis wrote:
| There is nobody who is saying "let's fix the grid and
| design a system that will be reliable" in Texas. It's
| just people raising money to build projects that they
| think can make money.
|
| Right now, there's more and more people thinking they can
| make money with batteries, and fewer and fewer people
| thinking that gas can make money on the grid.
|
| Which, if we are to believe the hypothesis that markets
| make good capital allocations decisions, says that they
| future of the grid is battery backup, and no more gas
| backup.
|
| This is a process of transition, so pointing at the
| current amount and saying "that's not enough" is going to
| be obvious.
| gwright wrote:
| Adding more wind capacity doesn't help because you still need
| a substitute for when it isn't windy.
|
| As far as I can tell we still don't have reasonable grid-
| scale power storage and until we do increasing the ratio of
| intermittent generation capacity (wind, solar) to non-
| intermittent generation (hydro/gas/coal/nuclear) will
| increase the probability of not being able to meet demand at
| times (all other things remaining unchanged).
| epistasis wrote:
| > 60GW more of wind and solar, and 10GW/40GWh of storage
|
| These all complement each other, not sure why you pulled
| out _only_ wind from that.
|
| We do have reasonable grid-scale power storage, last year
| there were 17GW of batteries in the interconnection queue
| for ERCOT alone, from independent investors. The major
| holdup from this happening, say, 5 years ago, were ERCOT
| regulations that made it hard to be both a generator and a
| consumer on the grid. But there are _huge_ arbitrage
| opportunities on ERCOT because of the huge price swings,
| which make it a perfect place for batteries. Other energy
| markets, like PJM, which have capacity markets in addition
| to energy markets, will also see huge amounts of batteries
| installed since FERC order 841 forced all grid operators to
| allow batteries to compete.
|
| Other regulated utilities will only install batteries when
| they are forced to by their regulators. As a money-saving
| device, it's generally bad for utilities' profits, and it
| also requires them to learn something new. Far more
| profitable to rate-base unnecessary transmission or another
| natural gas plant that will never be fully used.
| gwright wrote:
| > These all complement each other, not sure why you
| pulled out only wind from that.
|
| I wasn't trying to call out wind. I just should have said
| "intermittent'
|
| 17GW seems like a strange unit for storage. That should
| be GWh I think. So my question would be for the demand
| that exists right now in Texas, how long would those
| batteries been successful in providing power to delay the
| rolling blackouts?
|
| My understanding is that batteries are mainly used in
| grids to react to short term demand changes and not to
| continuously feed energy into the grid.
|
| Totally willing to be educated on this though. I'm not an
| expert.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Maybe having more nuclear power plants instead of wind would
| have helped?
|
| No. Most of the missing production was not wind, and several
| nukes went out (unclear whether that was because the grid was
| dying though).
|
| What would have helped was proper standards (avoiding emergency
| being much of the reason why Texas still has its own grid) and
| properly winterising.
|
| The wind thing is just a bullshit excuse, the vast majority of
| the missing generation is in fossil power plants. Even with
| half the turbines frozen over (which _still_ has to do with
| Texas' lack of proper winterization, those things work fine in
| Canada, Washington State, Montana, etc...) wind performed above
| expectations for the period.
| sokoloff wrote:
| What is "proper winterizing" for a state where the 99th
| percentile design temperature is mostly 25-30oF? Properly
| sized heating systems _should run_ 24 hours a day when the
| temps are well below the design temp.
|
| If almost all of those systems are electric (because they are
| simple and cheap to install and don't get a ton of use), you
| get a lot of constant demand for electricity. Smart load-
| shedding (to dump large 240VAC loads in rotation) would allow
| the grid to survive these periods, while keeping houses
| livable but chilly.
|
| I agree the wind excuse is (almost entirely) BS. Some amount
| of production is offline all the time, at least enough that
| you have to design for that.
| notatoad wrote:
| as long as they're an independent grid, optimizing for the
| 99th percentile isn't really acceptable. that's only two
| nines.
|
| if you have a contingency plan for winter storms, then it
| makes sense to skip the winterization. but it appears their
| plan for a winter storm was just to fail.
| sokoloff wrote:
| You're conflating two things. The 99th percentile design
| temp for winter heating systems only implies a steady
| load would be imposed on the grid. Optimizing _HVAC
| systems_ for the 99th percentile load is proper
| engineering. A higher powered electric resistance heating
| plant would make the grid problem worse right now (as
| houses could draw enough energy in a day to maintain temp
| rather than only drawing enough energy in a day to _not
| quite_ maintain temp).
|
| It doesn't mean you design the grid to only sustain the
| loads 99 percent of the time. This is going to turn out
| to be a grid implementation problem, not an insulation or
| a renewables problem.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The power infrastructure is also failing from the cold.
| Some big fraction of that could probably be prevented for
| cheap.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Long-range interconnects probably would help, the rest of
| the US isn't having this problem, just Texas's mini-grid.
| gitgreen wrote:
| The regional grid above TX is also instituting rolling
| blackouts due to this weather.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Oh, fair enough. But if they really are rolling than
| that's not nearly so bad as the areas in Texas that have
| been out for days.
| gitgreen wrote:
| I don't know enough about importing capacity in that
| other grid since they're hooked up to the western half
| supposedly but I agree with your points. TX being hooked
| up to the rest of the US could have saved them and this
| other regional grid appears to be managing it better than
| TX.
| pixl97 wrote:
| That is debatable. Close grids could not have supplied
| 30GW of power, they were also under near record loads.
| You would have had to pull from many states away which is
| insanely inefficient.
|
| Also people miss how big the TX grid is. FL and PA are
| the #2 and #3 power generation states. TX produces as
| much as both added together.
| [deleted]
| gshubert17 wrote:
| Yes, that's the Southwest Power Pool, which covers 14
| states. Here's some news from them,
|
| https://www.ozarksfirst.com/local-news/local-news-local-
| news...
| okcwarrior wrote:
| We had two hours without power due to rolling blackouts
| ranrotx wrote:
| Yep, this is the thing no one is talking about. Dallas has
| easily added 10k apartment units in the past 5 years.
| Almost all of them are all electric (no gas heating).
|
| Considering it's more energy efficient to cool with Air
| Conditioning on the hottest summer days than it is to heat
| with electricity in the winter, it's no wonder the grid
| collapsed when the region was below freezing for several
| days and some generating capacity was lost.
| 8note wrote:
| Resistive electricity will be close to 100% efficient,
| and heat pumps even higher depending on the outdoor
| temperature.
|
| What kinda of air conditioners beat that for efficiency?
| I don't think we covered those in heat engines
| pixl97 wrote:
| In addition to the other comments your missing the heat
| delta.
|
| We commonly cool from 100 to 70F, or 30 degrees.
|
| Yesterday we were warming from 0 to 65, or a 65 degrees
| delta.
| [deleted]
| andbberger wrote:
| Air conditioners are heat pumps. Resistive heating is
| inefficient compared to burning something, and very
| inefficient compared to heat pumps
| sokoloff wrote:
| > What kinda of air conditioners beat that for
| efficiency?
|
| All of them beat resistance electric.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Pretty sure you are off by a large factor. It looks like
| Dallas added almost 300k apartments in the last 5 years.
| vondur wrote:
| I think Texas as a whole has seen a huge growth in
| population in the last 10 years.
| hokkos wrote:
| At the worst wind only provided 0.7GW on 30GW installed, with
| capacity they count on during winter peaking events for wind
| of 6.2GW it only 11%.
| masklinn wrote:
| That's a cherrypicked low point, which is unsurprising
| given wind is not a permanent energy source. 30GW nameplate
| capacity is nowhere near the production you'd expect of
| wind (hell even nukes are not expected to come close to
| 100%).
|
| Texas' electric mix is 75% thermal, and that's what shat
| the bed, at peak 34GWe of thermal was offline. Even if wind
| actually accounted for 6GW missing dieting the entire event
| it would have accounted for a small minority of the missing
| production.
|
| And more specifically Texas gas is 66% of expected winter
| capacity. That's also where most of the outages are.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Gigawatt scale nukes would need to go down in an unreliable
| grid. They have virtually no demand response compared to LNG
| and other fossil fuels. Frequency stability is the ultimate
| constraint.
|
| I think a really good question to ask: _Why_ was there
| missing generation in the LNG and other fossil fuel plants?
| Was it because they all froze over at the same time, or was
| it because the price of LNG went to the moon on Sunday night?
| Was this price increase caused by natural supply-demand
| mechanics, or was there an artificial component as well?
|
| The way I see this - LNG generation providers shutdown to
| avoid incredibly expensive fuel costs, which they were unable
| to pass onto the customer. PUCT did make a change last night
| to try and alleviate this market model issue. Fundamentally,
| the whole thing is broken. I was looking for some historical
| precedent for all of this, and you would probably not be
| surprised to know this has happened before and would
| certainly not be surprised to find out which company was
| involved:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%9301_California_ele.
| ..
|
| Now, I am not alleging that the current situation has any
| sort of malicious or criminal element, but there are some
| direct quotes from sources in that above article that trouble
| me as a Houstonian going through this exact kind of hell
| right now:
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2005/US/02/03/enron.tapes/
| pixl97 wrote:
| Almost all nat gas storage in Texas is very short term when
| demand is high. Texas already had 3 days of cold weather
| before this even and stored supplies where low. This means
| most gas will come straight from the field or from wet
| storage, this is having a high water content, so it needs
| dewatering before burning.
|
| A number of years ago I was helping a relative attempt to
| restart one of these wells/dewatering units because it
| froze in at somewhere between 10-15F. And that was the next
| day when the temps had warmed up to around 25.
|
| It's been far colder than that in the last two days so
| these units are staying frozen and its icy so techs cant
| get to them easy. I've not seen wells in colder climates, I
| guess they equip them so they dont freeze.
| masklinn wrote:
| I've read that the tussle between opec and Russia
| dropping the prices of fossil fuels also lead to many
| producers halting production, which in turn led to
| difficulties filling up reserves, so Texas didn't /
| doesn't have much headroom there.
| [deleted]
| bsder wrote:
| _One_ nuke went out and was restored. Almost all missing
| generating capacity is natural gas.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Where would one build them? Since the USA has no long term
| nuclear waste storage plan, the current plan is to store at the
| plants for the most part which is a huge NIMBY issue. IIRC
| Texas went mostly in on gas/wind because of prevailing prices
| for the different fuel/plant options. This article gives a bit
| more data about current generation sources in Texas.
| https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/02/16/tex...
| Also, the alternative coal plants had pretty big waste/cleanup
| issues with existing plants in addition to costing more based
| on projections last time I remember reading about this.
| epistasis wrote:
| NIMBYs are not an impediment to building nuclear. The first
| impediment is finding a funding for a project of a class that
| has a huge chance of being a multi-billion dollar economic
| disaster. If you can find the money, the problem is actually
| completing it, and continuing to find new funding as build
| times go to 2-3x initial estimates, and costs balloon to 2-5x
| initial estimates.
|
| There are _plenty_ of sites that welcome new nuclear, usually
| any existing nuclear site would welcome more as its an
| economic engine for towns. The issue is it 's just really
| poor and overly complicated technology, requiring miles of
| precision welds, the failure of any of which could cause big
| problems, and which must last for 50 years. It shouldn't be a
| surprise that this is hard to do well.
| huffmsa wrote:
| They are to building the waste facility you need for long
| term storage of spent fuel.
|
| See Harry Reid vs Yucca Mountain
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >Where would one build them?
|
| Nuclear energy is insanely efficient from a "materials that
| need to move around" perspective. That's why not having long
| term storage and just cobbling together short term on-site
| storage hasn't caused a crisis. The maintenance department at
| a plant generates more waste by volume.
|
| Finding the space isn't the issue. Anywhere we could fit a
| couple container ships is fair game if you're looking for a
| national level solution. Politics is the problem. People are
| more scared of "magical glowing toxic waste" than normal
| toxic waste for whatever reason.
| ziggypup wrote:
| The problem is simple really. Green energy can't handle bad
| weather. Texas has made a huge green energy investment and fossil
| fuel energy sources have been on the decline since...2008. Atomic
| energy has also been demonized. While the article states that
| 'Most of the power knocked offline came from thermal sources'
| that is a number based on total wattage output, not total
| production sources, and those outages were caused not only by
| weather but by cascading failures related to wind sources. The
| article attempts to assert that the failures were due to lack of
| investment but truly the failures were caused by relying on wind
| energy that isn't ready for prime time and will never be
| resilient enough in the face of dramatic weather events.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| This is factually incorrect.
| daenney wrote:
| Choice quote from the article: "The ERCOT grid has collapsed in
| exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union," said Hirs. "It
| limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally
| broke under predictable circumstances."
| dekhn wrote:
| similar situation in california, too.
| falcolas wrote:
| Which confuses me, as it follows a statement about how energy
| has been deregulated.
|
| Of course, deregulation would also reduce some of the
| incentives for maintaining preparation for "100 year winter"
| storms. Much like how hospitals reduced the number of beds
| based on their average case loads, not the uncommon-but-not-
| unheard-of peaks.
| shortandsweet wrote:
| Can't really say it's a regulation vs deregulation issue.
| I've worked for both and it's incredibly difficult to get
| anyone to do anything other than a broke fix. Once something
| breaks or someone dies, that's when it's taken seriously. I
| wish I had a problem statement and a solution to go with it.
| korethr wrote:
| This confused me as well. In the article, there's the
| criticism that by not being allowed to charge for electricity
| what it cost to generate, producers have fallen behind on
| maintenance of their plants. But I don't see how that follows
| from deregulation. When I think deregulation, I think
| something more akin to, "Alright boys, you're on your own.
| Ya'll will live and die by your ability to profitably
| generate the power people need and want, and deliver it how
| they need and want. Don't get lazy now, or some
| whippersnapper will buy your infrastructure for pennies on
| the dollar after they bankrupt you because all your customers
| went for their better customer service."
|
| Not being allowed to charge actual cost of production strikes
| me as something that would come of price controls, which are
| a kind of regulation, not deregulation.
| snowwindwaves wrote:
| Or somebody cheaper can generate since they didn't bother
| building their plants to withstand low temperatures so the
| more expensive plants to run go out of business or lose
| that expensive to maintain ability and then here we are
| gruez wrote:
| Or maybe it hasn't been deregulated enough? From the article
|
| >Wholesale electricity sold are near the $9,000-per-megawatt
| hour maximum in power markets across the state Monday as the
| system struggled to meet demand, according to ERCOT.
|
| Why bother spending millions on preparing for a once in a
| century event when your upside is capped? This is further
| compounded by the wholesale rates not being passed to
| consumers, which removes a lot of backpressure from the
| system. If turning on the heater costs $100/hr to run you're
| going to find alternatives (eg. co-habiting with your
| inlaws).
| toast0 wrote:
| > Why bother spending millions on preparing for a once in a
| century event when your upside is capped? This is further
| compounded by the wholesale rates not being passed to
| consumers, which removes a lot of backpressure from the
| system. If turning on the heater costs $100/hr to run
| you're going to find alternatives (eg. co-habiting with
| your inlaws).
|
| If it's a once in a century (or once every 10 year) event,
| consumers aren't going to pay $100/hr to run their heater.
| They're going to refuse to pay the bill.
| Talanes wrote:
| Especially given the household dynamic I see most, where
| only the person who actually pays the energy bill is
| actually considering the cost of heating.
|
| Compound that with the fact that, unless utility billing
| has changed a lot in the last decade (I haven't been a
| master tenant in a while), people won't see how much more
| expensive that power is until after they've used it.
| gruez wrote:
| >They're going to refuse to pay the bill.
|
| ...and subsequently get their electricity cut off in a
| few months for non-payment? Besides, it isn't too hard to
| impose a cap on the rate you pay and requiring a credit
| card to be on file if you want to lift the limit. In
| other words, by default the maximum rate you'll pay is
| $2/kWH, but if you have a credit card on file you can put
| in whatever rate you want. If the wholesale price goes
| above the maxmimum rate you can pay your electricity gets
| cut off. If the utility thinks the rate is too high and
| you aren't going to pay, they'll pre-authorize your card
| for the amount. At that point they can let the credit
| card company/banks worry about chasing after the
| customers.
| masklinn wrote:
| > "100 year winter" storms
|
| It's like the third time in 30 years.
| windthrown wrote:
| "100 year" is shorthand for probability. In reality, these
| are storms that have a 1% chance of occurring in any given
| year.
| [deleted]
| masklinn wrote:
| Maybe they were back in 1950. But this happened in 1989,
| 2011, and now 2021. And things are not going to get
| better.
| roughly wrote:
| How's the line go? If a coin comes up heads twice in a
| row, that's normal. If it comes up heads ten times in a
| row, it's abnormal. If it comes up heads a hundred times
| in a row, it's probably not a fair coin.
| da_big_ghey wrote:
| This is the first time since the eighties that we have had
| weather this cold.
|
| Edit: why u booing me? I'm right!
| pixl97 wrote:
| What happened to 2011?
| da_big_ghey wrote:
| We didn't have a situation like this, though it was a
| close call power-wise.
| maxerickson wrote:
| In the US, licensed hospital beds are pretty heavily
| regulated.
|
| https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/con-certificate-of-
| need...
|
| And then Medicare won't pay any old place for services (which
| is something that would impact many potential hospital
| sites).
| falcolas wrote:
| TIL. That's... it makes sense in one fashion (keep health
| care cost reasonable (reasonable health care costs in the
| US... kek)), but it utterly defies the idea of being ready
| for disasters.
| amluto wrote:
| This regulation utterly defies economic common sense. It's
| like saying that, if we allow too many people to sell
| groceries, the cost of groceries will go up. That's not how
| a functioning market works.
|
| Of course, medicine in the US is not a functioning market.
| maxerickson wrote:
| That's right.
| Finnucane wrote:
| but it is unpossible that a free capitalist market could
| provide an ungood result.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't do this here. We're looking for curious
| conversation, not ideological battle (which tends to be an
| angry kind of boilerplate).
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| synergy20 wrote:
| Plan B: 1. generators, generators with plenty
| oil. 2. satellite internet 3. water tank or large
| container 4. food for two weeks.
| 8note wrote:
| Hopefully your water tank doesn't freeze
| alacombe wrote:
| Burry it below the frost line, even here, with yearly cold /
| freezing season, frost line is only 16".
| ulisesrmzroche wrote:
| I just got power back a couple hours ago. What happened is that
| they finally started to cut power away from business and
| industrial users. Empty ass Downtown was lit up like an Xmas tree
| yesterday, and so was dell, ibm, and so on.
|
| It's a scandal
|
| San Antonio was able to do rolling blackouts, Austin really
| messed them up
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26137893
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26146945
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138213
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26144560
| zests wrote:
| Thank you
| whatever1 wrote:
| For some reason the supply of gas to houses is unaffected. So
| those with on-line natural-gas-powered generators are fine.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Texas is so so so overwhelmingly single family homes. How do
| these folks not have generators? This is supposed to be
| independent rootin' tootin' Texas.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Would take one hell of a generator to heat a home, even then
| you'd need to get fuel to them - which is what many of the
| power plants are having trouble with.
| alacombe wrote:
| Even a cheapo 3kW generator is plenty to at least warm up a
| single room.
| whatever1 wrote:
| If this happens once every 10 years, it means that each year
| there is 10% probability of happening. I would happily pay a 10%
| premium knowing that measures are in place to not let my family
| freeze to death when the temperature slightly drops.
| rtx wrote:
| America stop heating your houses, buy thik blankets and sweaters.
| Earth can't take it anymore.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I get the sentiment but it's just not useful to tell people not
| to heat their homes. Fly less. Go veg. Downsize. But asking
| people to freeze? You sound like a lunatic.
| s0rce wrote:
| You could have a better insulated and much smaller home, but
| clearly this person has never lived in <30F weather, you
| obviously need to heat your home to have any modicum of
| comfort. Its unconformable if you are well prepared and
| healthy, life threatening otherwise to young, old and infirm.
| alacombe wrote:
| Good luck not heating your home when it -15C or below outside.
| cbmuser wrote:
| The blame doesn't lie on the power grid but on the power sources.
|
| Texas has only four nuclear reactors, it should have many more as
| only nuclear is able to deliver power under virtually all weather
| conditions (yes, I know that South Texas 1 tripped but that was
| due to a false alarm).
|
| It's because of renewables and gas power plants that electricity
| became scarse. Many wind turbines in particular froze because of
| the low temperatures.
|
| The situation in Texas reminds me of the situation during a
| blizzard in East Germany 1978/79 where all lignite-fired power
| plants came to a hold due to the lignite freezing while the two
| nuclear power plants delivered electricity without any problems.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Renewables had nothing to do with this and performed better
| than expected. A nuke plant tripped off and natural gas
| production and de-watering froze starving the plants. The vast
| majority of capacity loss was nat gas.
| 0xy wrote:
| Natural gas follows all rollouts of renewables, though. In
| fact I'm not even sure you can separate the two. Grids with
| renewables would absolutely collapse without natural gas.
|
| The only thing capable of replacing natural gas is batteries,
| which are extremely expensive and aren't exactly renewable,
| either.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Renewables may create demand for more natural gas on the
| grid, but you seem to be saying also that if Texas hadn't
| expanded renewables, they wouldn't have built so many
| natural gas plants. What would they have built instead to
| supply their power?
| gregimba wrote:
| Currently in ATX we haven't had power for over 24 hours, wood
| fireplace is saving the house from completely freezing but the
| whole city of Austin needs to evaluate how they setup their
| critical infrastructure to allow for rolling blackouts instead of
| having parts of the city with power and parts without for the
| entirety of an outage.
| derptron wrote:
| Just say Austin, TX please. You aren't living in a motherboard
| configuration.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Rolling outages work when you need to shed 1% of your load, not
| when you need to shed 80% of it. If Austin is down to critical
| loads only (hospitals or whatever) there may not be anything
| left to rotate.
| epage wrote:
| From what I hear, only about 40% are on non-critical
| circuits. There is room for improvement.
| gregimba wrote:
| This is essentially the crux of the problem, multiple
| friends/and coworkers are staying in islands of power that
| have been interrupt free due to proximity to
| Fire/Police/Hospitals and others have been without power
| for extended periods of time, if 60% of a grid is essential
| you can't roll non essential loads because simply
| maintaining the critical loads takes up 100% of capacity.
| More granular control could significantly help alleviate
| this issue which is specific to Austin Energy.
| bluGill wrote:
| True crtical loads have backup generators up to this task, or
| the maintenance people should be fired for incompetence.
| Though they could get a break for some failures of the
| system, but only a handful statewide
| brundolf wrote:
| There are non-critical loads all over that were never
| interrupted (my neighborhood, north edge of ATX). It's pretty
| arbitrary.
|
| Even worse: for about the first 24h there were (largely
| uninhabited!) commercial buildings all over the place that
| were fully lit up. We're talking skyscrapers. Even some
| _unfinished_ skyscrapers. I think they 've _finally_ begun to
| address those. The charitable interpretation is that it was
| simply a massive failure of coordination.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Do grid operators really have controls at that level? In
| California they can shut off a substation or not, and
| that's as low as they can go except in the special case of
| industrial customers with demand-responsive equipment
| installed. If those empty skyscrapers were on the same
| local circuits as a hospital, perhaps it simply wasn't
| possible for the electric company to turn them off.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| If the grid operator has deployed modern Smart Meters to
| their customers, they can control and measure electricity
| to the house level remotely.
| brundolf wrote:
| It's more that they needed to communicate with the owners
| of the buildings to shut off massive systems that weren't
| even being used, while the minority of residents who
| still have power are being asked to "live as if we
| didn't" and navigate by candlelight, etc.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Around 2010 or so I worked for a skyscraper in downtown
| Seattle. There was a heat wave and the utility needed to
| shed load. The mechanism for doing that was someone
| calling our front desk and saying "Hello, please shut off
| your lights."
|
| (Commercial lighting runs at 277v, so it's all on
| separate circuits from wall outlets. You can shut off the
| lights in a building without killing the servers, for
| example)
|
| We had remote-controlled breakers, so doing that was a
| couple clicks of the mouse. But if nobody had picked up
| the phone, they would have needed cops to break into the
| electrical room on each floor and start flipping breakers
| by hand.
| salawat wrote:
| Keep in mind: the details of how generators shed load is
| not ERCOT's decree. If there is unfairness in how liad
| shedding is taking place, you need to look at the entities
| generating/transmitting it. Not ERCOT.
|
| Bluebonnet has done a great, if annoying job. They
| converged to a near 50/50 duty cycle I think between two
| trunk lines.
|
| I've heard Austin Energy is epically failing some of it's
| customers though.
| brundolf wrote:
| The people getting dangerously cold in their own homes
| don't care about the nuances between ERCOT and Austin
| Energy and their city government and county and state and
| federal governments and this private organization and
| that. _The system as a whole has failed._ In _tragic
| fashion_. Period. Modularize your organizations if you
| want to, but it is not an excuse for passing the buck.
|
| There are people at the top of the whole pile. And they
| have the authority and the responsibility to make sure
| the whole thing works, at the end of the day, no matter
| the implementation details. And the whole thing _doesn
| 't_ work.
|
| This is what the American system is chronically worst at.
| We delegate, and we contract out, and we federalize, and
| we privatize, and we divide responsibilities. We avoid
| centralizing things at all costs. And then when put under
| pressure, those separate pieces often fall apart.
| Communication fails. At best nobody knows what's going
| on, at worst they willfully ignore responsibility because
| somebody else will end up with some or all of the blame.
| This keeps happening over, and over, and over again. I
| can't help but feel our society is crumbling.
| salawat wrote:
| >The people getting dangerously cold in their own homes
| don't care about the nuances between ERCOT and Austin
| Energy and their city government and county and state and
| federal governments and this private organization and
| that. The system as a whole has failed. In tragic
| fashion.
|
| Mayhaps if they did, they'd have seen warning signs that
| such an eventuality was inevitable in coming as they'd
| have a firm grasp of who was responsible for what, and
| had their hope of someone getting it just right wiped
| from their minds and replaced by the grim fact that the
| best tool they could employ to their own survival is that
| matter within their own head.
|
| >Modularize your organizations if you want to, but it is
| not an excuse for passing the buck.
|
| Part of Modularization is clearly defining and
| delineating roles and responsibilities. ERCOT's is to be
| the tracker and issuer of EEA's. That means having the
| authority to instigate, not implement, instigate, rolling
| blackouts. Make it happen; not how, just that it needed
| to. It isn't ERCOT's business other than to keep
| everybody dancing to the sane tune, and to keep track of
| the numbers.
|
| Each provider went and did that; Some to great success.
| Even mine. I, in fact had to make some extra clever use
| of those times I had power to put it to the best use to
| stabilize the situation in our household.
|
| >There are people at the top of the whole pile.
|
| Funny thing about being on top of a pile, you're just as
| clueless as to what's actually on the bottom unless you
| actively go look into it, which is a calculated tradeoff
| that may distract you from doing something only you can
| see to do from where you are.
|
| >And they have the authority and the responsibility to
| make sure the whole thing works, at the end of the day,
| no matter the implementation details
|
| Oh, you sweet summer child. You think it's just a case of
| hup, two, three, four, and there you go, ERCOT makes your
| problem go away?
|
| ERCOT owns _nothing_. It 's a platform. A glorified
| clearinghouse. A market in which a bunch of private
| entities sell their wares, in this case, generation of
| power, usage of transmission infrastructure, etc.
|
| There's no authority to magically make it all work.
| There's process, a whole lotta tooling, hopefully a
| pretty good chunk of people smart enough to use it well
| and sensibly, and a common agreement as to who has final
| say. In ERCOT's case, that jurisdiction and authority is
| well defined, and limited in scope.
|
| >This is what the American system is chronically worst
| at. We delegate, and we contract out, and we federalize,
| and we divide responsibilities, and when put under
| pressure those pieces tend to fall apart.
|
| Welcome to the real world. Where people like me, and now
| you too have come to the epiphany that there's some level
| of "inevitable failure" at play because companies act
| like bored people more than happy to pass the buck, and
| are fundamentally flawed, collective creations, of
| implicitly flawed beings. Mistakes will always happen, as
| will miscommunication. We contract out in good faith, it
| isn't always recipricated perfectly. We delegate, and we
| have to accept what we get back even if it only sorta
| marginally resembles what it was we asked for. We
| federalize, generally to make some common thing formally
| a common thing, but we also open ourselves to abuse by
| doing so.
|
| There is a solution though. That's for people to get dead
| serious about doing _damn good business_. Something which
| can 't happen in an environment of natural monopolies or
| industrial monoliths, a concept enshrined in the
| architecture of the Texas Grid, and enshrined in American
| system as a whole, though you have to rip off a few
| decades here and there of astonishingly bad ideas that
| are best characterized as cranial rectal insertions to
| see it.
|
| Competition -> innovation -> newfound possibilities
| propagate through the competitive environment -> repeat
|
| The last thing anyone needs is more conglomeration, if
| anything we need more people cranking on the same
| problems, cross checking everyone else to figure out if
| anything has been missed, and to ensure there is enough
| overall fault tolerance in the system.
|
| Texas is, and will remain, what it is. We rebuild, but
| better. We try, and make it work as best we can. You may
| not like it, but a not inconsequent number of them do.
| gregimba wrote:
| As an Austin Energy customer a large portion of the blame
| for this on their poor infrastructure configuration and
| the number of critical circuits.
| sfeng wrote:
| Unfortunately Austin has not done a very good job of
| designing it's grid. There are many sectors which can't be
| rotated as they contain one or more critical services, even
| as they also contain many consumers who are not critical.
| This means that instead of being able to rotate amoungst the
| ~80% of non-critical power users, they are only able to shut
| down about 45% of the power.
|
| Unfortunately in a situation like this that means that 45%
| have remained off for the past 48 hours (no rotation is
| possible), while many empty buildings are fully illuminated.
| It is a technological failure of their ability to shut down
| specific power users.
| gred wrote:
| ATX?
| thehappypm wrote:
| Austin Totally Xtreme?
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Yes. Beyond a doubt, yes.
| okcwarrior wrote:
| Austin, TX
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I had my wood fireplace going for the first time this weekend
| when the daytime temperatures were around -12F. It can easily
| raise the temperature of my living room, dining room & kitchen
| (one open space) to 80+ but that's with electricity to power
| the circulation fan.
|
| How are you keeping the whole house warm if you can't circulate
| the air? I'm genuinely curious.
| gregimba wrote:
| Currently running a generator to run the wood stoves fan, its
| not ideal but not amazing.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| From personal experience, a heat-powered fan helps a lot. I
| used one when I lived in a Franklin-stove-heated cabin in
| Montana, and while you wouldn't mistake its power for an
| electric fan, it more than did the job.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/heat-powered-stove-
| fan/s?k=heat+power...
| teachrdan wrote:
| There's some old school technology to solve that problem. For
| example, I stayed in a friend's ancient family home in Maine
| that simply had a bedroom over the living room wood stove,
| and an open vent between the two floors to let the heat
| through. There are also non-electric fans to help distribute
| heat from a wood stove.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/PYBBO-Improved-Fireplace-Magnetic-
| The...
| benlivengood wrote:
| To clarify, that fan is electric and powered by a peltier
| (thermoelectric effect) device using heat from the stove.
| sunflowerfly wrote:
| This is exactly why old farmhouses here in the Midwest were
| T shaped. There was a chimney in the center of each long
| arm of the T. Then vents through the floor right above the
| heaters to warm the second story. With good placement they
| did not need to blow the heat around.
| rasz wrote:
| car battery and computer fan
| Rapzid wrote:
| SAT going on 24 and 36 hours of effectively no power. It's 44
| in room.
| naebother wrote:
| Anyone have break down of which areas had their power cut for how
| long?
| zamadatix wrote:
| It's still ongoing for millions at the moment but there was a
| nice map in https://www.usatoday.com/in-
| depth/news/nation/2021/02/16/tex... for this morning.
| Ecto5 wrote:
| It will be interesting to see which communities had their power
| cut and which were barely affected
| hotsauceror wrote:
| There was a rather morbid photograph on one of the local news
| sites the other night of Austin looking south along I-35
| during the rolling blackouts. The East Side was more or less
| pitch black. The west side - downtown, the capitol, the
| stadium, the Frost Bank building etc - was lit up like a
| Christmas tree.
|
| The east side was created by redlining policies put in place
| 100 years ago, and is where much of Austin's lower income
| population lives.
|
| It wasn't meant to be a comprehensive statistical analysis
| but it was a pretty stark photo.
| pault wrote:
| About half of Austin has been out for 42 hours now. Source: I'm
| one of them.
| naebother wrote:
| That's ridiculous. I always thought the point of rolling
| blackouts was to make sure no one area was without power for
| too long.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Rolling only works for demand overages of up to 20% or so.
| With a loss of generation capacity of over 1/3rd of
| generation that is out the window.
|
| They were trying to keep the grid alive and not have a
| statewide blackout.
| chasd00 wrote:
| My sister lives in Rockwall and she's been without power since
| Sunday with no service expected until Friday.
|
| I'm in Dallas and thought I made it through unscathed. Power and
| inet have been stable with gas furnaces doing their best. However
| today at about 430pm a water pipe burst in an exterior wall. I
| shut off the water, found the break, cut a hole in the wall all
| set to repair. I get to home depot and they closed early! Closing
| a hardware store early during a major weather event seems wrong
| to me.
|
| I called a couple plumbers but they're booked for weeks (not
| surprising)
| [deleted]
| bassman9000 wrote:
| Can we now add the profusely mentioned weatherproofing to the
| solar/costs? Because nuclear works better at 0deg, at no added
| costs.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Should always include what's needed in the deployment and cost
| modeling, including whatever is needed so the South Texas
| nuclear plant doesn't have to shut off the reactor due to the
| extreme cold.
|
| The problem here is not being prepared for the cold not the
| choice of energy production method.
| 8note wrote:
| A Nuclear plant went down due to the cold, so you need to add
| weatherproofing to it, too
| TrumpsHandler wrote:
| But you got cheap taxes
| lightgreen wrote:
| Expensive taxes don't help either. California had blackouts in
| 2020.
| dwt204 wrote:
| This is what
| happened...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evjMjpd4PNM
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| You'd probably be more comfortable if you left your house and
| went winter camping. Surprisingly, it's not that difficult to
| stay warm while winter camping, you just have to be doing
| something: cooking, eating, exploring, talking.
|
| Learn neat skills like: keep your water in a cooler so it doesn't
| freeze; pee in a nalgene rather than go outside to pee, then keep
| the nalgene in your sleeping bag to retain heat; eating to stay
| warm; changing clothes to stay warm; covering your neck to stay
| warm; which clothes will actually keep you warm and which just
| look neat; what fabrics are best in winter; layering; what stoves
| work below freezing; how to stay positive ("hey, my toes still
| work!"); how to remove ice from your socks in the morning; how to
| keep icicles from forming in your tent; how to anchor a tent in a
| blizzard; how to _find_ a tent in a blizzard; how to help your
| friend find his tent that blew away in a blizzard; how to pick
| snacks (two things that don 't freeze hard: fat and alcohol); how
| to pick snacks so you don't need to poop often; staying hydrated
| and warm.
| masklinn wrote:
| That requires winter camping gear. Which you could use inside
| your home _if you have it in the first place_.
|
| It's also a bit late to learn winter camping if you're already
| stranded with neither electricity nor gear.
| [deleted]
| gregw2 wrote:
| What went wrong is that the Texas legislature which owns Texas-
| specific grid process to avoid interference from the Feds didn't
| figure out how to also ensure Texas generator companies got
| compensated for weatherizing (and ensuring it was done).
|
| How many of the 24+6 recommendations from the NERC/FERC review of
| last time this happened in Texas (hint:2011) were taken up by the
| legislature or those at ERCOT they delegated responsibility to or
| the power generation providers?
|
| https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/ColdWeatherTrainingMaterials/...
|
| The eye opener to me from skimming the 2011 recommendations is
| that there was no explicit rating/SLA for a power plant's
| acceptable temperature operating that could be used by planners
| for assessing the risks of an upcoming weather event by policy
| planners. It'd seem pretty basic to be able to ask "How many
| plants do we lose when temperature drops below X"? Dunno whether
| they fixed trying to create such a basic measurement for Texas
| plants, but it doesn't seem like it.
|
| If you want to know some of the specifics about what
| "winterization" means in practice for a power plant including
| natural gas ones, you can read some of the details in that
| report. It's kinda interesting.
| gregw2 wrote:
| Anecdote: All 7 developers in my Houston team (semi-
| geographically scattered in the city) lost power; half for >24
| hrs (it's 10-25 degrees F here for the last 2-3 days).
|
| Most lost water for some stretch of time and some still don't
| have it.
|
| I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at
| least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping
| would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that
| well.
|
| (I haven't found clear findings on what determines whether your
| fireplace net-warms or net-cools your house in super-cold
| weather (by sucking heat out of adjacent rooms and pulling cool
| air from the outside and sending hot air up your chimney).
| Pointers welcome.)
| kelnos wrote:
| In 1996 (or thereabouts), I lived in Maryland, and my family
| lost power for 6 days due to a snow/ice storm that took out a
| ton of power lines (water froze on them and the added weight
| pulled them down). We had no natural gas service, and our
| running water was provided by a well in the backyard that had
| an electric pump. So no electricity, heat, or running water
| for 6 days in ~20-30degF weather. (Fortunately we'd prepared
| by buying many gallons of drinking water, and filling up
| bathtubs and buckets with water earlier in the week.)
|
| We had two fireplaces in the house, one each in the living
| room and master bedroom, so we kept all doors closed and all
| slept in the master bedroom. They did a decent enough job
| keeping us somewhat comfortable while wearing several layers
| and winter coats at all times, and sleeping in sleeping bags
| and with extra blankets. (An oddity of our house was that the
| chimney ran through the middle of it, not outside an exterior
| wall, so even some of the heat going up it would warm the
| house a bit.)
|
| After 4 days my dad felt the roads were clear enough for us
| to go to a motel where we could shower and experience some
| heat. Going back to the house after that (before power was
| restored) was in some ways worse than enduring the first 4
| days.
|
| Granted, the reason for that outage was very different from
| what happened in Texas, but I just wanted to highlight that
| our power grid _everywhere_ is still very susceptible to bad
| weather. (Well, ok, this story is 25 years old, but I suspect
| things haven 't changed all that much.)
| blabitty wrote:
| I remember that storm! Week off of school and you could
| skate right on the sidewalk.
| VonGuard wrote:
| I remember trees encased in beautiful ice. Freezing rain,
| basically encased everything in that ice: powerlines,
| trees, roads, it was a monster.
| sizzle wrote:
| Is there no CO2 danger from sleeping with gas stove on?
| Don't people die from carbon monoxide poisoning from
| sleeping with open flames?
| dmitriy_ko wrote:
| carbon monoxide is CO, not CO2.
| trulyme wrote:
| Nitpick: CO.
|
| Otherwise - no, _if_ there is enough oxygen coming in.
| When fireplace is done properly it is not a problem.
| todd8 wrote:
| Technically, I believe the problem is the CO
| concentration and exposure time, not displacement of
| oxygen. CO binds to hemoglobin more effectively than
| oxygen, preventing enough oxygen from getting to the
| body's tissues. CO poisoning is common: 20,000 hospital
| visits per year in the United States, and in many
| countries is the most common form of poisoning. [1]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide_poisoning
| axaxs wrote:
| No, due to ventilation. Even an indoor fireplace for
| example is -always- vented, so the gasses can escape via
| the chimney. If you close the damper with a fire blazing,
| you'll not have a good time.
|
| Outdoor fires well, are outdoors, so there's plenty of
| oxygen.
|
| People die nearly every year in the brutal cold from
| getting desperate and bringing grills and such indoors to
| light, which is a big no no.
| kingnothing wrote:
| Downvoting because this isn't the case in the US at
| least. It's still legal to install internally vented gas
| burning fireplaces.
| jacobajit wrote:
| Not all indoor fireplaces are ventilated in the US,
| actually. (Source: have one unventilated fireplace that
| is probably mostly for aesthetics and not to be used for
| extended perios of time)
| beerandt wrote:
| >Granted, the reason for that outage was very different
| from what happened in Texas
|
| There are actually _a lot_ of ice / freezing-rain downed
| powerlines happening simultaneously with the rolling
| blackouts, and that's a huge part of the problem.
|
| The grid/supply is being blamed for both. Of course if the
| lines _weren 't_ down, it would increase demand and there
| wouldn't magically be any more supply to feed them... but
| it does explain why a lot of people's blackouts aren't
| "rolling."
| JamesBarney wrote:
| The grid supply issue is orders of magnitude worst than
| the downed powerlines.
|
| I don't know anyone who is affected by a downed powerline
| and I know 12 people without power.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Interior or central chimneys make more sense to me than
| ones against an exterior wall, and they seem common enough
| in houses of a certain vintage at least. If your chimney is
| on an outer wall, doesn't it radiate heat to the outdoors?
| KSteffensen wrote:
| Chimneys on outer walls are worse on every measure
| compared to internal ones.
|
| They loose heat to the outdoors as you say and since they
| cool down a lot faster than the internal chimneys it is
| also generally harder to get the fire going when re-
| lighting. The chimney on my house is on an outer wall and
| when it's below 0C I have to light a fire every day or it
| becomes too much of a hassle to get it going.
| xornor wrote:
| Here where I live (northern Europe), chimneys are always
| internal. Nobody would even think external chimneys. Heat
| loss is massive that way.
| adingus wrote:
| Old houses in New England were built with internal
| chimneys for the same reason (less heat loss).
|
| Houses in southern states were built with external
| chimneys which made sense for a couple reasons. Back in
| the day people would keep a fire 24/7 for cooking and
| that fire + southern heat is uncomfortable. Because of
| the shorter cold season the chimney was on the outside of
| the house. Also, in the case of chimney fires you could
| tie a chain around an external chimney and rip it down
| with a horse, hopefully saving your home.
| hinkley wrote:
| The ones on the outside can use outside air to go up the
| chimney, avoiding the problem listed above. Harder to do
| with inside chimneys.
|
| Last place I rented with a fireplace, there was a metal
| door in brickwork below it in the basement. It wasn't
| until after I moved out that I realized what it was for.
| todd8 wrote:
| Wood ashes also collect in the small chamber in the
| basement under the chimney. As a child in Michigan, one
| of my hamsters escaped his confinement. Poor little Pinky
| couldn't be found in the house, but a couple of days
| after disappearing my Mom found him in the chamber
| covered in ashes that had cushioned his fall. (He made a
| full recovery from his adventure.)
| rebuilder wrote:
| I think if you're having to worry about makeup air
| cooling the house down than your fireplace heats it,
| that's less to do with chimney placement and more with
| how the fireplace is designed. I.e a gas flame in a
| fireplace with no appreciable thermal mass and a chimney
| that pipes the heat straight out is where I'd look to
| first as a problem.
|
| A massive stone fireplace that's heated with a single
| load of fuel, then has its chimney flaps closed to keep
| the heat from escaping, is going to be much more
| efficient. I wonder if maybe the fireplaces in many parts
| of the USA are actually designed to _not_ heat the house
| too much, given the usual weather in e.g. Texas.
| devwastaken wrote:
| We've had a ridiculous cold snap in northern U.S. the last
| couple of weeks, where every day is at least -15f and every
| night -30f, not including wind-chill. So much so that 8f
| out feels warm now.
|
| Have not had even a blip of outage for anything. Last year
| I believe something damaged a large power pole and we were
| out for 3 hours.
|
| If warmer states took notes on how north states do it we
| wouldn't be in this pickle I assume. Also warm states need
| to bury their water lines deeper.
| [deleted]
| theshrike79 wrote:
| > I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but
| at least one person found their gas fireplace they were
| hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really
| work that well.
|
| American fireplaces in general are a joke. You are just
| spending way too much energy and not really storing it
| anywhere except the air around it. They are built to look
| good, not to actually heat anything properly.
|
| Check any Nordic country, we don't have gas fireplaces nor do
| we have the silly tiny iron things you have. What we do have
| is stone fireplaces. [1]
|
| How it works is this: You heat the multi-hundred kg stone
| mass using any material you want, for us it's usually wood in
| some form. After the stone is hot enough, you stop wasting
| wood and close the chimney when the fire has burned out to
| prevent heat from escaping.
|
| The stone mass will store heat and distribute it slowly and
| evenly over many hours, keeping everyone warm without
| electricity. If you want to distribute it, there are fans
| that operate on the radiant heat coming from the fireplace. A
| properly installed fireplace (central to the house) will keep
| a normal home toasty warm for a day or two with one proper
| heating cycle depending on how cold it's outside.
|
| [1] https://www.tulikivi.com/en
| tallanvor wrote:
| Why would most places bother with the expense of a
| fireplace really designed to heat a room?
|
| I can assure you that most new construction in Oslo (pretty
| much only apartments these days) don't include fireplaces.
| And why would they? With steam pipes running through much
| of the city, there's no need for the expense and pollution
| involved with a fireplace except for show anyway.
|
| The fact is that cities in the US, like in Europe,
| generally have very reliable power and gas supplies, so
| they don't need to build fireplaces designed to actually
| heat the place, and we don't want to encourage people in
| cities to burn wood to heat their place anyway. So
| showplace fireplaces, especially the gas ones, are a better
| solution for allowing people to have the cozy feeling when
| they want it.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Of course apartments in city centres shouldn't have wood
| burning fireplaces in them. This discussion wasn't about
| multi-story apartments, but about the uselessness of
| American-style fireplaces in detached homes.
| makomk wrote:
| Cities in the US and Europe have very reliable power and
| gas supplies, until suddenly they don't. The trouble is
| that people have started to take the reliability of the
| power grid for granted and stopped thinking about what
| happens when it inevitably fails.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| We take metric shit tons for granted in our everyday
| lives. The risk that we will be out of power for more
| than a few hours where I live is very small, so I chose
| to save the about $10000 that it cost to install a
| fireplace and a chimney, so I'm instead prepared if I get
| long time sick, unemployed, or the car breaks down. All
| of those risks are order of magnitude higher than that we
| would be without electricity for any extended period of
| time.
| ghaff wrote:
| For that matter, as someone who lives in New England, if
| I wanted to install backup for extended power outages
| (which do happen where I am now and then), the sensible
| thing to do would be to get a propane-fueled generator
| installed because that would work if I were traveling (to
| keep pipes from freezing) and would also keep
| refrigerators running in a summer outage. (Added: Maybe a
| Powerwall-type thing would make sense today.)
|
| I do have a fireplace and a wood stove which provide
| something of a backup but won't heat the whole house and
| only work if I'm there.
| vidarh wrote:
| We've started taking it for granted because it works.
| It's ~35 years or so since last time I experienced an
| outage longer than a few minutes, and enough years since
| I experienced _any_ outage that I can 't remember when it
| was.
| [deleted]
| mikeytown2 wrote:
| You can do a hybrid approach with the hot metal burn
| chamber for wood gas and earthen materials to slowly
| radiate the heat. This is called a rocket mass heater. The
| exhaust temperature is usually below 100C and often
| smokeless (a complete burn). Using a fan to extract heat
| from the final vertical stack (pipe around the exhaust with
| air running by) can give you an exhaust temperature of
| around 40C. Here's a quick 3 minute video that explains the
| concept; there's other YouTube videos that go into greater
| details if you wish to research this topic more.
| https://youtu.be/fwCz8Ris79g
| varjag wrote:
| There are absolutely countless iron fireplaces here in
| Norway, they been the most popular installations for
| decades.
|
| The modern ones with afterburn contour are also quite
| efficient in energy output per unit fuel burned.
| vidarh wrote:
| Jotul [1], one of the the largest manufacturers of
| fireplaces in Norway has been around since 1853,
| manufacturing mostly cast iron fireplaces.
|
| The considerations are different, though. Cast iron is
| great if you want to radiate as much heat as possible as
| fast as possible or need to heat a small area (e.g.
| single room per heater). There's a reason small cast-iron
| Jotul fireplaces used to be the stereotypical heater for
| cabins etc. in Norway.
|
| [1] https://www.jotul.com/
| bklyn11201 wrote:
| Sterotypical for the United States also! While brands
| like Vermont Castings have become quite common (founded
| 1975 after Middle East oil embargo), we often see old
| Jotul in New York cabins, hunting lodges, etc.
| ghaff wrote:
| Jotuls are fairly readily available in the US as well.
| When I wanted to put a small woodstove in a new sunroom a
| few years back, the local woodstove dealer recommended
| the small Jotul over the equivalent Vermont Castings
| because they said it drew better.
| paraselene_ wrote:
| Or you know, instead of having a whole fireplace, just get
| a kerosene heater? Enough to heat a whole room in case of
| power&gas outages, last long enough through the night on
| one fill, and kerosene can be had at a gas station.
| batty_alex wrote:
| Please don't run a kerosene heater indoors without an
| amazing ventilation system.
| ScottBurson wrote:
| But used indoors, it consumes oxygen, and can produce
| carbon monoxide. Leaving it on while you sleep is
| dangerous.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| There are many kerosene heaters safe for indoor use.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| I am not sure why you got downvoted, this is a good
| backup strategy.
|
| I have natural gas heating and a combi smart boiler which
| runs on electricity. Even if I still have the gas link
| operational, if my power goes down then my heating is
| dead.
|
| This news of Texas actually reminded, that I should have
| some sort of emergency winter heating backup, and a boat
| or camping kerosene heater is a actually a pretty solid
| idea for emergencies.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The whole prepper community isn't completely crazy.
| Everyone really should have a Bug Out Bag or a Bug In Bag
| ready or at least under construction.
|
| You don't need to go overboard with tons of dried food
| and a nuclear fallout shelter. Just a cheap multi-fuel
| camping stove and some canned food will last you a few
| days easily.
| katbyte wrote:
| Bug out/in bag seems like a weird term, kinda adds to the
| "crazy" of preppies. here it's just called your
| emergency/ earthquake kit - 1-2 weeks of food and some
| amount of water.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Pretty much anything actually built to heat stuff is
| better than the all-looks-no-function "fireplaces" the
| Americans seem to be in love with. The ones they like to
| mount their TVs over, despite the neck pain.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| You are stereotyping a country of hundreds of millions
| that spans climate zones ranging from Hawaiian tropics to
| the arctic circle.
|
| Yeah. There are decorative fireplaces. The Norwegian
| company Rais sells some great decorative ones.
|
| There are also incredibly efficient cast iron stoves that
| some people use for heat. You made fun of them in another
| comment, but they are much more efficient than a
| fireplace, and can use a variety of fuels like pellets or
| gas in addition to wood.
|
| Of course, there are also people that have a standard
| wood fireplace that you imply is in every Norwegian home.
| Most people don't use them here since they are so
| inefficient, dangerous and illegal in cities due to the
| pollution.
| fractionalhare wrote:
| I don't think you can generalize American fireplaces.
| Every fireplace I've personally encountered has been
| traditional wood burning and absolutely heats up the room
| well past the time the fire is actually lit (American
| Northeast). I haven't actually been in a home with a gas-
| burning fireplace.
|
| But more importantly - the gas fireplaces are intended to
| look nice with minimal effort. They are explicitly not
| intended to change the indoor climate much if at all.
| They're usually built in very new homes that have
| dedicated, reliable climate control systems or in cities
| that don't require much heating.
| dhagz wrote:
| I can agree with that last statement. Every house I've
| seen has had a gas fireplace, but I live in the metro
| area of a city that (in)famously only owned a single
| snowplow.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| You have a slightly condescending tone here that I'm not
| sure is necessary. Perhaps they're "all-looks-no-
| function" because they're mostly _meant_ to be decorative
| rather than functional?
| todd8 wrote:
| Here, in Central Texas, my home has three fireplaces.
| Each designed to accommodate wood, but all have gas feeds
| that make it possible to run them without the smoke of
| wood fires. We don't run them for heat nor decorative
| effect. The are just architectural features of the house
| that some people might choose to utilize for the mood
| that a fire can convey.
|
| They are a bit like windows: not energy efficient but
| nice to look at/through.
|
| During the historic cold weather going on this week, I
| have no confidence that they would help if the power went
| off.
| foxtr0t wrote:
| >Most lost water for some stretch of time and some still
| don't have it.
|
| This is extremely problematic. Power going out for periods of
| time less than 48 hours is one thing, losing water from the
| utility is a problem 3rd world countries have. You sure these
| people's pipes didn't simply freeze.
|
| If its the utility, shame on Texas.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Even if your pipes didn't freeze, the upstream pipes could
| have frozen, or enough of your neighbors' pipes could have
| frozen, burst, and gotten thawed again, allowing water to
| flow freely out of the system.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Funny you mention that. Quebec is used to cold weather.
|
| Aging infrastructure. There's not a single winter that
| you don't hear about water main breaks ;) Seen a few
| parking lot lakes myself over the years.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Having worked at a water treatment plant in the past: if
| the power is out for a sufficiently long time, then your
| water is going to go dry. The time it takes is dependent on
| the distribution system (and time of year, you consume
| about twice as much water in summer as in winter), but
| where I worked, it was about 12 hours.
|
| Also, we had no generators. Why? Because a) power outages
| of that length are extremely uncommon (2 in 70 years, IIRC)
| and b) the power draw of a large water treatment plant is
| insanely high. The water company was literally the largest
| consumer of power in the entire state, and turning on some
| of the pumps require the power company's permission because
| it draws that much power. It's not very feasible to keep a
| backup power system for such a large facility when the need
| for it is so very low.
| hotsauceror wrote:
| We had an incident early this AM and of the eight people we
| paged, only one had power. I've been without power, heat,
| internet, water, or septic more than 90 minutes at a time for
| two days. My house was 44 degrees this morning when I woke
| up. Sunday night we were without power or heat for seven and
| a half hours. Our DR plan didn't really account for all of
| our _staff_ being on the same power grid!
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >Our DR plan didn't really account for all of our staff
| being on the same power grid
|
| Yup. I hear you loud and clear.
| p1mrx wrote:
| What does "without septic" mean?
| oasisbob wrote:
| Some septic systems require power for a lift, essentially
| a pumping station. When the ground is too flat, you need
| to pump the waste higher than the drain field.
|
| If you've ever seen a septic system with an audible
| alarm, this is probably why.
| xxpor wrote:
| If you don't have sewer service, you'll usually have a
| septic tank instead. It's basically a mini waste
| treatment plant in your backyard, eventually the water
| will flow into the ground. Modern systems have pumps and
| such that depend on electricity to function.
| koolba wrote:
| I've never heard of a below ground septic system that
| required pumps. The only pumps for drainage are for sub
| level bathrooms such as in basements.
|
| There is a significant overlap of septic installations
| and wells and most modern wells run on electric. But if
| you're toilet's basin is full, it doesn't need any power
| to flush and drain. It just won't fill again.
| snypher wrote:
| They're common used in multi stage septic systems that
| have a perc field above the tank level. If this pump is
| without power for a significant time, it will cause quite
| a problem. However usually your tank will have enough
| free capacity for some hours. You don't see pumps in
| single tanks very often due to solids blocking the
| intake.
| gonzo wrote:
| > But if you're toilet's basin is full, it doesn't need
| any power to flush and drain. It just won't fill again.
|
| typically there is enough pressure in the tank to allow a
| flush or two. you don't operate the well pump every time
| there is demand.
| crshults wrote:
| When one of the pumps on my aerobic system died a few
| years back it was less than 24 hours before the drains
| were backed up. If your soil won't pass a perc test I
| guess you can just go with aerobic which allows you to
| build pretty much anywhere. The final stage sprays
| effluent on your yard.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Sewer systems, i.e. toilets and waste water.
| ratsmack wrote:
| If you have a pressure fed (septic) sewer system, you
| need electricity for it to work. Usually if you avoid
| excessive water use, your holding tank has a bit of
| reserve.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Remote workers just became a resiliency requirement for
| businesses.
| tjr225 wrote:
| You would think so but there were rolling blackouts
| during the bay area/socal fire season last year and
| nobody seemed to change course. I wonder if it's because
| a lot of companies in the Bay Area already had remote
| workers?
| gtaylor wrote:
| Those were fairly short and did not take out the entirety
| of the Bay at once.
| bushbaba wrote:
| It already was. 24x7x365 geo redundancy SRE and Ops teams
| is pretty common place.
|
| Texas was actually a preferred location as the time zone
| allowed both west coast and east coast work hours.
| pault wrote:
| I'm in Austin, without power for almost 48 hours now.
| There's ice in my roommate's bedroom. It's my birthday
| tomorrow, and I'm hearing that we won't have power until
| Thursday at the earliest. I've gone beyond furious to just
| horribly depressed.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Good luck, and here's some advice from a midwesterner
| that has dealt with cold, ice, and snow forever. If it's
| cold enough to start freezing things inside then make
| sure you have some water flowing in your pipes. Keep your
| kitchen sink running on a low (very tiny) dribble. Maybe
| even keep a shower/bathrub running at a very low rate
| too. You do NOT want to be dealing with frozen, broken
| flooding pipes on top of no power. Can find more tips
| here: https://www.redcross.org/get-help/how-to-prepare-
| for-emergen... Good luck (and happy birthday)!
| hotsauceror wrote:
| Also, leaving water trickling when you're on a septic
| system can ruin your grinder pump because it stirs up the
| solids in the first separating tank. And, as I learned
| the hard way this week, even if all the faucets are
| dripping, there's no way to trickle a toilet. The supply
| lines for both of our toilets froze while the sink next
| to them kept right in dripping. And then there's the
| question of how to keep your water heater from bursting
| when the power goes out and it can't heat anything.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Ooph, yeah this is going to be a nightmare for home
| insurance to unwind it all and deal with everything at
| such a big level.
| jmkb wrote:
| > there's no way to trickle a toilet
|
| If you have a tank toilet you might be able to adjust the
| floater (bend the rod upwards) so it never quite turns
| off the supply valve. Failing that, you can just manually
| prop the flap open with something.
|
| If you have a flushometer, remove the nut over the valve
| and adjust the screw underneath until the valve never
| quite shuts off.
|
| Warning: Take careful note of exactly how things were
| before. A toilet that never stops running can be just as
| hard on the spirit as a toilet that doesn't work at all.
| hotsauceror wrote:
| I guess that's true. But the alarm on our septic starts
| screaming after about six hours of a trickling toilet.
| The alarm is pretty much there for that specific
| condition and the installer really hammered on the need
| to fix a leaking toilet Immediately. I guess in the grand
| scheme of things a new grinder pump and a visit from the
| honey wagon are cheaper than a condemned house, though...
| KMag wrote:
| For a couple of cents, couldn't the grinder circuit
| include a basic 555 timer de-bounce circuit to suppress
| multiple triggers within, say, 30 minutes? That seems a
| lot cheaper than an alarm.
|
| Alternatively, why doesn't the grinder have a higher
| minimum triggering flow rate? It seems it's falsely
| detecting potential solids arrival.
| gnarlysasquatch wrote:
| Otherwise there are folks who would let the toilet run
| for a year without fixing it.
| pas wrote:
| Doesn't that simply means water and sewage treatment are
| also too cheap?
| mattacular wrote:
| No, it just means people act human.
| gnarlysasquatch wrote:
| It's not that it "stirs up solids," it's that a
| continuous leak causes the pump to cycle on more
| frequently. Your pump might cycle a few times a day
| normally; a running toilet could cause that to be every
| 30 min, and at that rate you could need a new pump in a
| year or two instead of 10.
|
| Trickling your faucets (just a drip-drip-drip) for a few
| days is a small amount of extra wear on your pump in
| exchange for not rupturing pipes.
| caf wrote:
| Why don't pipes in areas prone to this sort of thing have
| some of cheaply replaceable burst disc relief valve,
| given how catastrophic an uncontrolled failure of the
| pipework is?
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| PEX handles freezing pretty well
| skmurphy wrote:
| Water expands about 9% when it freezes. It's not a
| question of pressure relief, it's a question of the pipe
| bursting in multiple locations as it freezes end to end
| if you have lost heat in the house. The pipes don't leak
| until the ice melts.
| dmitriy_ko wrote:
| I don't think relief valve will help with freezing pipes.
| Freezing pipes burst because ice is less dense than
| water, so water expands as it turns into ice. Pipes
| freeze on the outside first, resulting in remaining water
| being entrapped in ice. As remaining water freezes, it
| can't move into relief valve.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| There is what people that have vacation homes do in the
| winter, shut off the water and drain the water heater and
| pipes.
| KMag wrote:
| ... and put a non-toxic antifreeze in the water traps
| (and seal the drains up) to prevent sewer gas from
| entering the house.
| Animats wrote:
| That's not recommended for some areas of Texas. There's
| low water pressure and water has to be conserved.[1]
|
| (Edit: Houston only.)
|
| [1] https://www.wfaa.com/article/weather/if-dripping-
| faucets-sav...
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Consult your local regulations of course. But frozen
| pipes are no joke and can turn a brand new, perfect home
| into a condemned tear-down, rebuild in a matter of hours.
| blihp wrote:
| For those in that situation, turn off the water to your
| home and drain the pipes. Bursting pipes can do massive
| damage to your home and make it uninhabitable during the
| rehab.
| doggodaddo78 wrote:
| Two units in my apartment building already flooded
| because they didn't trickle their water. Trickle means a
| tiny trickle of drops, not leaving the tap running. Use
| common sense, not FUD.
| ghaff wrote:
| Be that as it may. Frozen pipes can be catastrophic.
| oivey wrote:
| Honestly probably better to store some water, run your
| pipes in a tiny stream, and then if you lose water at
| least your pipes will be drained.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are issues with restarting a forced hot water
| furnace if you drain your pipes entirely.
| eecc wrote:
| Issues? You just need to restore water in the circuit and
| vent the air trapped in the radiators... really
| ewams wrote:
| Re fireplace - check out a ventless system. They can change
| existing burner and logs with ventless which gives you lots
| of heat that a vented system won't. Can get a decent one for
| 600-1200 bucks.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Power down at home in west Houston before daylight Monday.
|
| Lost water before daylight Tuesday.
|
| Power came back on just before daylight Wednesday, off just
| over 48 hrs, not as bad as some hurricanes.
|
| Water service unlikely for a few more days, worse than any
| hurricane this century.
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| I can't speak to a fireplace by itself, but anyone who uses
| wood as a primary source for heat will have a wood stove or
| furnace.
|
| Wood stoves and furnaces are pretty advanced these days, some
| of them have catalytic "converters" (I guess that's the
| term).
|
| A fireplace looks nice, but doesn't do much else other than
| that.
| [deleted]
| JamesBarney wrote:
| I'm surprised they have natural gas heat. Everyone I know has
| electric heat.
|
| I've been without power for 2 days and it sucks. My house was
| 34 degrees this morning. No water for 2 days.
|
| Most of my friends are in the same boat.
| tw04 wrote:
| >I don't think any lost heat (most have gas) but at least one
| person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat
| them up when out of power didn't really work that well.
|
| I'm curious how they didn't lose heat. Any furnace built in
| the last 30 years, even gas, has an electronic control board
| in order to ensure it doesn't accidentally turn on the gas
| without a functioning pilot light and/or heating element
| (which would blow up your house).
|
| No electricity = no heat, regardless of natural gas supply.
|
| I've got about a dozen coworkers in Texas, they've all been
| without power (which means no heat) for two days now. The
| power comes on long enough to at least warm their houses up
| to 50ish degrees before dropping back out so they're not
| completely screwed but I know they're scared.
| 13of40 wrote:
| Maybe it's changed lately, but most of the medium sized gas
| heaters (thinking fireplace inserts, fake wood stoves,
| etc.) have a feedback loop where the pilot light heats a
| thermocouple that opens the pilot light valve, plus a
| thermopile for opening the main valve when the thermostat
| switch closes. The fan won't run, but you'll still get
| radiant heat without main electricity.
| mrfusion wrote:
| My gas fireplace had a place you could put in D batteries
| to run it. Pretty cool feature if the power goes out.
| koolba wrote:
| Having grown up with wood fireplaces, the thought of
| having to change the batteries to turn it on is
| hilarious.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| I have a gas-only fireplace less than 20 years old that
| does not require power to function. There's a mechanical
| spark generator for lighting the pilot, but in colder
| months I keep the pilot on all the time. I believe the
| opening/closing of the valve for the gas to the main flame
| area is powered by a thermopile once the pilot is on.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| This seems to be a problem specifically with whole house
| furnaces. I don't quite get why but I'm guessing cheap
| companies. Our gas fireplace has no such problems. Piezo
| electric knob to start the pilot (like your Coleman camping
| stove but it actually works - ask me how I know) and the
| pilot generates the electricity needed to actually let the
| gas flow. If the pilot isn't able to generate the
| electricity to open the gas valve then no gas ever enters
| the burn chamber. Again ask me how I know - yes those
| things gunk up and then can't supply the current you need
| to open the valve. Easy fix tho. Zero electricity needed
| and the upstairs stays warm. Also no cold air sucked into
| the house. The whole system is closed off towards the
| house. Love this thing!
| beerandt wrote:
| Being close to the gulf a lot of people have generators
| that are likely big enough to power at least their fridge
| and one or more window/portable AC units. (For hurricanes.)
|
| That size is usually big enough to run a blower and control
| board (and maybe a few other circuits), but it wouldn't
| come close to powering an electric heating element. But
| having a gas heater makes it all doable.
|
| That's what we do, anyway.
| bluGill wrote:
| Though with a generator that big and some ingenuity you
| can plumb the radiator into the house and get heat from
| the engine. The more load on the genererator the more
| heat.
| beerandt wrote:
| Schemes like that are generally how CO poisoning stories
| start. Or fires. A door gets cracked to run a hose
| through... etc.
|
| Besides, at some point, you're just reinvinting an overly
| complicated combustion heater.
|
| Which I already have, is already hardwired for fuel, and
| only needs to be plugged in.
| bluGill wrote:
| Very much true. I didn't touch on safety which is a real
| issue.
|
| That doesn't make the idea bad though. There have been
| attempts to do this in commercial furnaces before, but
| the details are hard, and ultimately of questionable
| value in general. In this particular situation it might
| be useful, but that is a lot of complexity for something
| that only makes sense for a week every 10 years.
| 8note wrote:
| Maybe not a heating element, but heat punp?
| beerandt wrote:
| It's more an explanation of how you can have gas heat
| without power. Also, even heat pumps use a heating
| element at some point below 28~30 degrees. If you rely on
| the pump only below that, it'll start to freeze up into
| an ice block itself at some point.
|
| Plus having a continuous plug-in (natural gas) fuel
| source is a big advantage over refilling a gasoline
| generator, which most portable generators are.
| agsnu wrote:
| Heat pump efficiency drops a lot when the temperature
| goes significantly below zero celsius
| gregw2 wrote:
| Good question. I am unclear about heaters but I do think
| some of them are out for some team members and you may be
| right on that. Ovens also are commonly gas but ones since
| 1990 require an electric light. But... stovetops which are
| gas do not require electronic ignition. The risk is of
| course carbon monoxide poisoning; hopefully you have such
| detectors as part of your in-home fire detectors.
|
| The problem is not so much the deliberate rotating
| blackouts who can get restored after a time, but large
| groups of people for whom power is out due to some other
| weather-related outage issue; there are large swaths of
| them in Houston at least according to the Centerpoint
| Energy outage map which distinguishes between the two (but
| does seem to be not the most timely updated data per
| various people I have talked to whose status has changed
| during today:
| http://gis.centerpointenergy.com/outagetracker/ )
| monadic3 wrote:
| Gas heaters still require electricity for basic management.
|
| I'd imagine heaters have batteries for specifically this
| case. If they don't, it's frankly a miracle if we don't
| lose anyone, and someone needs to get prosecuted.
| evan_ wrote:
| gas furnaces do not have batteries.
| monadic3 wrote:
| That's a failing of gas furnaces. I don't know why you'd
| design a system without them except to breed dependency.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| We're talking about forced air furnaces here, I think.
| Something has to force the air. A big blower motor that
| takes hundreds of watts.
|
| Forced air heat is not great in terms of comfort, but in
| Texas you already have all the ductwork and the blower
| motor and so on for AC, so it's simplest just to add a
| gas burner to that.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Furnaces don't come with batteries because a 12v 100Ah
| battery that costs $180 will run a 1/3rd HP (700w) fan
| for 2 hours. To sustain the fan for 3 days, you'd need 36
| batteries. Lead-acid batteries have a limited lifespan.
| You would also need a transfer switch and enclosures and
| at that point you may as well buy a UPS or a natural gas
| generator to provide backup power.
|
| One thing the NEC 2020 update allowed is bi-directional
| power between an EV and its charger, you can set up an EV
| to provide backup power your house, with a transfer
| switch and everything.
|
| Radiant heating systems with boilers require electricity
| for the pump, even if they're gas fired. Electric
| resistive heating needs electricity. Forced air heating
| needs electricity to run the fan. All heating systems
| require electric power, even if the heat is generated by
| burning natural gas.
| 8note wrote:
| The real question is why gas furnaces don't also have
| their own generators built in
| quickthrowman wrote:
| I wasn't aware, but these actually exist: https://en.m.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/Micro_combined_heat_and_powe...
| monadic3 wrote:
| Why would you use car batteries? Seems like a terrible
| fit for the job of daily charge and discharge.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| What? A backup battery for a furnace doesn't do anything
| daily.
| JshWright wrote:
| It is not feasible to run a gas furnace off a battery
| (short of a "whole house" battery like a Powerball). It's
| more than just basic management. You need to run either a
| blower or a pump to distribute the heat throughout the
| house. You'd need a substantial battery to run a 1/3 HP
| motor for any length of time.
| monadic3 wrote:
| Ahh, I see, power companies have simply failed their
| customers and certainly will receive their commupance.
| Thrymr wrote:
| A gas boiler furnace with steam radiators typically only
| requires power for the thermostat and solenoid valve,
| which can indeed be powered by a small battery. This is
| assuming you have a pilot light, which many older
| furnaces do.
| JshWright wrote:
| Residential steam boilers are pretty rare these days.
| Generally hot water heat uses circulation pumps (which
| draw less than a forced air blower, but still have a non-
| trivial continuous current draw)
| [deleted]
| mythrwy wrote:
| "No electricity = no heat, regardless of natural gas
| supply."
|
| For the furnace yes.
|
| The gas fireplace and gas ovens/stoves though probably
| don't need electricity.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I haven't seen a gas oven that can work without
| electricity. A gas stove, yes, you can simply turn on the
| gas and quickly use a kitchen lighter to ignite the gas
| manually and hope not too much poisonous gas escaped the
| stove. But ovens? How?
| sithadmin wrote:
| Many gas ovens (and stovetops) work just fine without
| electricity thanks to pilot lights.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Older gas ovens used a standing pilot light. They would
| work without electrical power. Really old ones you light
| with a match.
|
| My kitchen has a gas range, the oven uses electical
| resistance/incandescent ignitors so it won't work without
| electrical power. The top burners have spark ignitors but
| of course I can light them with a match.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's not poisonous.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| The gas oven in my apartment has a pilot light that is
| always on, no electricity needed.
| gregmac wrote:
| > No electricity = no heat, regardless of natural gas
| supply.
|
| You're confusing furnaces and fireplaces.
|
| A fireplace is soemthing that sits in a living space
| usually with a visible flame behind glass and is designed
| more for aesthetics than function. They typically run using
| a millivolt valve for the gas supply, with the voltage
| generated from a thermopile sitting in the pilot flame.
| They're often controlled by a regular light switch or a
| simple two-wire mechanical thermostat.
|
| There's natural gas and propane models, and they'll run so
| long as you have gas flowing.
|
| I upgraded mine to use an older wifi thermostat, but kept a
| light switch on a small cable underneath so I could always
| use it in case of a power outage, and it's come in handy a
| couple times. [1]
|
| Mine also has a mains-powered blower fan built in (that's
| the plug on the left), but electrically it's completely
| separate and controlled by its own thermostat. It turns on
| when a certain temperature is hit -- usually about 5-10
| minutes after the fireplace is on -- and stays on for some
| time after the flames are off. Obviously the blower doesn't
| work when there's a power outage but the fireplace still
| generates a usable amount of heat for the room.
|
| On the other hand, my gas forced-air furnace -- which
| distributes heated air via ducts around the house -- is, as
| you describe, entirely useless without electricity. Even if
| it was running without the main blower fan, it would just
| be heating up the air sitting in the duct coming out of it.
| At best it might get some heat into the house via
| convection but I suspect it would cut out on thermal
| overload before actually doing anything useful.
|
| [1] https://i.imgur.com/secdqaR.jpg
| bluGill wrote:
| They used go make furnances that didn't have a blower,
| hot air raises which gives circulation. You need bigger
| pipes and can never get high efficiency (went out of
| style before about 1960 is my guess ). If the furnace
| looks like it belongs in a horror film it might be this
| style.
| 8note wrote:
| For a full on description of how a good portion of
| furnaces, tech connections made a video not long ago:
| https://youtu.be/lBVvnDfW2Xo
| JonathonW wrote:
| The big issue isn't just the control board-- most forced-
| air furnaces (at least, of the type used in the southern
| US) use an electric blower to actually distribute hot air
| to the rest of the house.
|
| End result's the same, though-- no electricity = no heat,
| regardless of natural gas supply. (But, at least in this
| case, a relatively small generator can provide enough power
| to get the furnace up and running and heat the house; the
| electric furnaces and heat pumps that are most common in
| places like Texas would need something quite a bit beefier
| to run without grid power).
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| This is one reason why a gas fireplace is a great thing -
| even without electricity, you can at least heat half a
| room.
| chasd00 wrote:
| My gas fireplace has a valve mounted flush with the
| floor. You use a special key-like wrench to turn it on.
|
| Even with the valve barely open you have maybe 3 to 5
| seconds to get it lit in a normal fashion. Heh mess
| around too long and you're in for a big woosh and plenty
| of singed arm hair.
| redisman wrote:
| My gas fireplace still requires electricity to run. I
| know I can start it with a match if needed (and it has a
| pilot of course) but I'm not 100% sure if I can manually
| override the gas valve to open. It opens when I flip an
| electric switch.
| JonathonW wrote:
| Does it? Mine opens when I flip an electric switch, but
| it's self-powered via a thermopile on the pilot-- no AC
| connection whatsoever.
|
| Some other models (from the same manufacturer as mine)
| don't have a standing pilot, but either use a battery as
| the primary ignition source, or use AC power but take
| batteries as a backup.
| bluGill wrote:
| I've seen both styles. If it is a regular switch in the
| wall it uses mains to open the valve. If it has a switch
| on it, or a thermostat on the wall it probably is
| thermocouple powered. Though there are exceptions both
| ways.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Even with the switch on the wall nothing is certain. See
| my sibling post to parent. We had a wall thermostat but
| all it did was send a trigger current. If the thermo pile
| wasn't generating enough current nothing would happen :)
|
| Sooo many different systems and many are just not well
| thought out. Especially in climates where it usually
| doesn't matter.
|
| Here in Quebec it does matter so the one we have works in
| all conditions with various levels of manual
| intervention. We don't even have the one with a battery
| operated fan but even that exists.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Try it. I was confused the first time I used ours when
| the power was out. That switch still worked.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| _at least one person found their gas fireplace they were
| hoping would heat them up when out of power didn 't really
| work that well._
|
| I have a gas fireplace, it's vented to the outside through a
| chimney.
|
| If you sit right in front of it, you can feel a little
| radiant heat, but the true warmth comes from the electric fan
| that circulates air through the firebox that's heated from
| the gas flames. I'd always figured that if there was an
| extended power failure, I'd set up a 5V fan from my computer
| to blow air through the the fireplace.
|
| Some gas fireplaces are "direct vent", which means that they
| vent the exhaust right into the room. I'd never trust one of
| those not to fill the room with Carbon Monoxide.
| KMag wrote:
| I'm honestly surprised direct vent gas fireplaces are
| legal.
| throwaway189262 wrote:
| I've been out of power since Sunday night. Water out since
| yesterday. I'm on the seventh floor too. Most of my friends
| are in even worse situation. I'm a paranoid near doomsday
| prepped and my batteries are still low.
|
| Walking out of my apartment is indistinguishable from an
| apocalypse. The emergency system batteries died days ago.
| Police don't come. The roads are pure ice. Nothing is open.
| All essential supplies are sold out. Fire systems are all
| disabled because pipes have burst. Elevators have been gone
| for a long time. Without a flashlight you might as well be in
| a cave.
|
| Pray for us. People are going to die
| lmilcin wrote:
| I have seen some fireplaces in US (I am from Poland) and
| outside of northern states they are all decorative pieces not
| designed to heat the home.
|
| A good fireplace is completely closed (yes! no fire visible!)
| and is built to recover and store as much heat as possible.
|
| * the fireplace must be enclosed completely so that it is
| possible to regulate amount of air going inside and
| especially to close it completely and _SAFELY_ when you go to
| sleep. You need to close it so that it does not suck air out
| of your house. The fireplace stores heat but it does not make
| any sense if, once it burns out, the air takes all that
| stored heat out.
|
| * the hot gasses go through a complicated tunnel (not
| directly into chimney) to heat up a large amount of bricks
| made from material that has high energy capacity. That's why
| here in Europe we don't tell silly stories about Santa coming
| through the chimney, because that would be totally
| ridiculous. He could just as well be coming through water
| pipes, it is just as accessible.
|
| * the fireplace is built on a steel bed so that you can
| easily take out the ash _WHILE_ it is burning. Also, it
| supplies the fire from beneath which makes for much better
| heating.
|
| * traditionally, if you made effort to keep fire on
| throughout the day, you want to make as much use of it as
| possible. That's why you will see these frequently performing
| multiple functions: separate space for oven, large top to be
| able to heat multitude of things, maybe even place to sleep
| (that especially in really cold climate in Russia, in Poland
| much less popular).
|
| Here are pictures of traditional fireplaces you could expect
| to heat well:
|
| https://images.app.goo.gl/Ka9uiuNTU3LxMHqa6
|
| https://images.app.goo.gl/rWrvoqGxzcJHC5P77
|
| The first one is something you would expect heating the
| kitchen and the main/dining room and provide most of the
| heating for the house throughout the day.
|
| The second one is something to put in individual rooms that
| are too far from the kitchen. It is easy to light it up and
| it heats extremely quickly but also stores absolutely no
| heat.
| evgen wrote:
| There is a difference between a fireplace and a wood-fueled
| heater. You have described the latter. No one would ever
| call what you have shown in those images a 'fireplace' in
| English. There are wood-fueled heaters but they have mostly
| been replaced by ones that use composite wood pellets,
| these are popular for off-grid heating in the US.
| lmilcin wrote:
| That's exactly the point. Here this is _the_ fireplace.
|
| You will find western style "fireplaces" in some new
| homes which are nothing more than show pieces to have
| cosy atmosphere but are utterly impractical for the task
| of heating the home.
|
| Now, what what we would call "heater" is usually placed
| in the basement for practical purposes. The ones I showed
| above are placed directly in living area and are way more
| efficient.
|
| Traditionally, you did not heat entire home, only the
| area where you live which contracts during winter. There
| might be other rooms which you only heat in the evening
| before you go to bed and then it gets extremely cold (but
| that's fine, you just put good enough featherbed to keep
| warm). This is practical aspect because heating entire
| home requires huge amount of resources.
| ants_a wrote:
| There are plenty of manufacturers making glass fireplace
| inserts that are designed to be combined with a heat
| accumulating flue systems. Romotop or Hoxter are examples
| of fancier ones. The finished stoves typically are
| specced to retain 50% peak heat output after 12h, 25%
| after 24h. Combined with automated dampers you just load
| the firewood, light it and can then basically forget
| about it as the automation takes care of regulating
| primary and secondary air and shutting air supply off
| once the fire is done burning.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Anyway, just as you mentioned, this requires enclosing
| the fireplace (even if with glass) and it requires that
| the heat is routed somewhere else rather than directly to
| chimney.
|
| This is 101 of building a functional fireplace designed
| to heat the house.
| evgen wrote:
| No one in the US builds or uses functional fireplaces to
| heat the house. We have not done so for over 100 years.
| Any fireplace you see in the US is a decorative feature
| designed to look nice and set a 'mood' for a room. There
| are some off-grid wood-heated homes, and some places will
| have fireplaces designed to efficiently heat a room or
| two, but statistically these are so close to 0% as to not
| exist and in many locations it has become illegal to
| install wood-burning fireplaces due to the air pollution
| they cause.
| lmilcin wrote:
| I think you misunderstood. I don't have anything against
| fireplace as a completely decorative element. Just don't
| expect it to perform the function of heating the house.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| This isn't really true. My parents build a house with a
| large fireplace in the living room. True enough it
| actually _sucked_ warm air out of the house (tall
| chimney) and made the whole house colder.
|
| My folks simply bought a really nice fireplace insert. It
| works extremely well. These are not uncommon, even in the
| south, and my parent's place is far from 'off grid'. They
| absolutely do use it to 'heat the house', and we only
| supplement with radiant heaters in the far bedrooms.
| dbrgn wrote:
| Where I previously lived (in Switzerland), we had a
| fireplace/stove very similar to the first picture. A bit
| similar to this: https://artoffire.ch/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/05/Kachelofen-s... On the other side
| of the wall was the kitchen, and this was where you
| actually set up the fire, inside an ancient iron cooking
| stove. Using some kind of a "flap" you could allow the heat
| from the stove (for cooking) to go to the tiled stove in
| the living room (for heating).
|
| In my current appartment (also in Switzerland), this is the
| stove we have: https://imgur.com/a/SVKahw5 We also have an
| oil based central heating system, so it's not really needed
| anymore, but on very cold days it allows to get the living
| room warm and cozy.
| ip26 wrote:
| Gas furnaces need power for the circuitry & blower.
|
| My experience with fireplaces is that the house winds up net-
| colder, but you can warm yourself with radiant heat while it
| burns. Freestanding wood stoves on the other hand are very
| capable of warming a large space.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Seems like they should divert a small part of their output
| to keeping a small battery backup just in case of
| emergencies. Then in an emergency the battery could
| reignite the system and run the blowers with the furnace
| again diverting some output to keeping things charged.
| 8note wrote:
| Or like a standing bike?
|
| Ride the bike to start the heater in a blackout
| conk wrote:
| You would need the generator to provide about 100 watts
| to run the electronics and blower. Something passive like
| a thermoelectric generator would require a large amount
| of surface area to get this much power. Something more
| active like a traditional generator would require
| significant maintenance. If you're really concerned your
| best bet is to get a couple Powerwalls and limit what you
| run off them. You could go a week running just the
| furnace and charging cellphones.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Power walls are pretty expensive. Much cheaper-- if
| you're primary concern is keep heat going and maybe a few
| other basics-- would be a low-maintenance dual fuel
| generator. Unlike the powerwall it's run-time isn't
| limited. Prolonged blackouts will run the powerwall dry,
| but with a dual fuel generator as long as you can get
| gasoline or propane you're good to go.
|
| I suppose if you can afford it, go for both and have
| multiple reduncancy.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| > My experience with fireplaces is that the house winds up
| net-colder
|
| Why is that?
|
| EDIT: Oh are you saying that the rate of heating provided
| by the fire is less than the overall rate of heat leaving
| the entire house?
| JonathonW wrote:
| Fireplaces typically draw air from the house to sustain
| the fire, then up the chimney or out a vent. That creates
| negative pressure, which draws cold, unconditioned air
| from outside into the house from wherever air can leak
| in.
|
| How this works out in terms of net heat gained/lost will
| depend on the fireplace design, but, from what I hear,
| it's not uncommon for this to be a net-loss type of
| situation.
| AuthorizedCust wrote:
| Not if they are in the attic. Also, my house has a
| subfloor. When the furnace and water heater were inside
| the part of the house you live in, they both had vents on
| the floor, so air used for combustion came from outside.
| ctdonath wrote:
| Yes. You've got a big hole in the wall/ceiling with a
| pressure differential blowing most of the heat up & out
| while sucking cold air in. Balanced improperly, you get a
| radiant heat area with rest subject to cold air.
| ip26 wrote:
| Right, if you think about it almost all of the heat from
| the fire goes right up the chimney. The brick of the
| firebox & chimney are generally built outside the
| building envelope for safety reasons, so any heat in the
| brick doesn't warm the house. The only heat that actually
| makes its way into the house is the radiant heat cast
| from the fire itself, which is small.
|
| The smoke is poison, and unlike a furnace, gas fireplace,
| firebox, or wood stove, there is no heat exchanger, so
| you can't capture any of the heat out of the flue gasses.
|
| It's counter-intuitive, I know. But this is why everybody
| congregated around the hearth in the days of fireplaces.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| Ah the only heat exchange being radiant makes total
| sense. Thanks!
| gowld wrote:
| Why don't we run radiator water pipes across the chimney,
| to bring that heat back to the house?
| ag56 wrote:
| The house I grew up in in Scotland did exactly this.
|
| We had fireplace powered central heating --- radiators
| throughout the house linked to pipes behind the firebox.
| In the morning I'd wake up to ice on the inside of the
| windows, and by my teenage years it was my job to head
| downstairs and light the coal fire first thing in the
| morning. It worked well once the fire was up and running.
|
| This was in the '90s btw, I'm not _that_ old.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| There are designs that do this or things like it. In the
| US, though, it seems fireplaces are mostly an aesthetic
| feature and not a practical one.
| mbreese wrote:
| This is a very old problem and there are solutions, like
| the Franklin stove [1]. However, we don't really use
| fireplaces as a primary source of heat anymore. Their use
| is really more decorative. If they were really intended
| for heat generation, so one of the other posts mentioned,
| we would use a completely different design.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_stove
| mikestew wrote:
| My father did that a long time ago in a house that had
| baseboard heat. Made a fire grate out of plumbing pipe,
| ran the baseboard water through that. It worked, when it
| did. It would also somehow get air in the lines and start
| banging from time-to-time. I was a kid, so I don't know
| if the monetary savings offset the pain in the arse, or
| not.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| In parts of Europe (definitely Germany) heating with
| water based radiators throughout the house is normal. And
| that goes from individual houses to big apartment
| complexes (I lived in a 52 unit one with a central
| furnace). It's totally normal to let the air out of your
| radiator from time to time. And they (or you in the
| individual house case) fill up the water in the 'closed'
| system from time to time.
|
| Different places, different 'customs' i.e. systems we are
| used to. All have their pros and cons and sometimes it's
| just that we don't know that different systems exist.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Radiative heat actually makes you feel significantly
| warmer, so you can set your heating to a lower
| temperature and still feel the same warmth compared to
| airflow heating. This is the reason why floor heating is
| very efficient, because you have a large heat mass with
| radiative heat that sits at your feet (which typically
| get cold first). So it provides the same comfortlevel at
| significantly lower temperature.
| saberdancer wrote:
| Which is why it is better to make a quick but strong
| draft in your home than keep window constantly slightly
| open. With a quick exchange of air, your walls remain
| warm and continue to radiate heat. Having a window
| constantly slightly open means air exchange is slow but
| constant and the area of the wall around the window cools
| down significantly.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Wood boilers are common enough. Pipes and radiators won't
| do all that much good if you aren't moving the water, and
| at that point it makes sense to optimize the whole thing
| for heating water with the minimum required fuel.
| User23 wrote:
| The 180 year old house I grew up in has a central brick
| chimney for this reason. When you put the fire out before
| going to bed you have a column of brick radiating
| throughout the night. It's still pretty chilly in the
| morning but it works quite well.
| ip26 wrote:
| Right, but it turns out the mortar fails more often than
| you would like and you'd get smoke & carbon monoxide
| leaking into houses from that central chimney, which is
| why that went away (or so I've heard)
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| It takes very, very specific conditions (you'd have to go
| out of your way to minimize radiant heat transfer) for a
| fireplace to put less heat into a room than it removes
| with airflow.
|
| Back in the day (i.e. 1700s) everyone heated with
| fireplaces. And many of them (e.g. 2nd floor ones)
| weren't that big.
| ihaveajob wrote:
| The problem, in my experience (grew up spending
| significant time in a 3 story country house made of stone
| with only one fireplace for heating), is that it gets
| warm close to the fire and whatever is touching the
| chimney, but the rest of the house gets colder because of
| the cold air drawn in by the fire. So very likely a net
| gain, but depending on where you sleep, it could get
| interesting at night.
| treis wrote:
| Even worse, all that exhaust gas that goes up the chimney
| has to be replaced. And it's replaced by cold air from
| the outside coming through all the little books and
| crannies of your house.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| I have seen slow combustion fireplaces still drawing in
| air from the room in front of them, leading to your exact
| comment.
|
| Seems like it could be fixed with a simple design change.
|
| But I am not a fireplace lawyer so I won't profess to
| know.
| treis wrote:
| There are many different designs that have tried to solve
| the issue. Both from capturing the heat lost up the
| chimney and supplying combustion air from outside. They
| all come with downsides and ultimately forced air heating
| won out.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| https://www.offgridquest.com/fload/homes-
| dwellings/heating-c...
|
| Almost without comment. All I will say is that we have
| some friends in Germany living in the 'countryside' (as
| much as that's still a thing in densely populated
| Germany) that heat their main living area with one of
| these (way less elaborate design lol). My grandma had one
| of these sitting in the wall between kitchen (right next
| to the eating area) and the living room.
| cycomanic wrote:
| My parents have one of these in their holiday house by
| the sea (essentially an old farmhands dwelling). I can
| confirm that it heats the house up to blistering
| temperature even in the coldest winter if one wants.
| Other friends use a more modern design in their house
| which essentially heats up the whole house (I don't think
| they have any other heating except water heating)
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| This is why russian-style stoves have a whole labyrinth
| for the air to blow through, warming up the large brick
| structure. It can hold heat for a while even after it's
| done burning.
| nickt wrote:
| A bit OT, but I would have no idea about Russian-style
| stoves until I saw this video a few days ago. Amazing.
|
| https://youtu.be/r_TO30jzyUA
| brandon272 wrote:
| I doubt this net-loss is the case for most new gas
| fireplaces with direct-vent exhaust systems, in which
| case the combustion air comes from the outside. This is
| what I have. Not sure how common these would be in Texas.
| It can also be used in the event of a power outage.
| (Minus the fan) [1]
|
| [1] https://www.heatilator.com/owner-
| support/troubleshooting-and...
| jcims wrote:
| No, the issue is that the draw of the heated air up
| through the flue creates a negative pressure inside the
| home, which gets made up through all the little nooks and
| crannies around the house.
|
| As a result, the room where the fireplace is will be
| warmer but the rest the house is typically colder.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| Oh interesting. So you're saying it actually accelerates
| net heat loss to the environment?
| jandrese wrote:
| It does, and it creates a floor on the outside
| temperature where the heat from the stove is overcome by
| the losses of sucking in the cold air. This depends on
| the design of the stove. Some wood stoves pull down the
| firebox air from the outside to avoid this problem, but
| it is fairly unusual. There is a second heat exchanger
| with its own fan that circulates the inside air. The
| problem with this is that you still lose a lot of heat up
| the chimney.
| bluGill wrote:
| Many fireplaces that HSE outside air sometimes put hot
| smoke out the intake. The intake probably wasn't designed
| for this so it is a fire hazzard. This can be avoided,
| but if you don't know how you probably didn't.
|
| Then again Ben Franklin figured out how to make a
| fireplace that worked yet most don't.
| yetihehe wrote:
| > Some wood stoves pull down the firebox air from the
| outside to avoid this problem, but it is fairly unusual.
|
| AFAIK in europe having outside air intake in stove is
| mandated by law. You can not use it, but all newly built
| houses have outside intake if someone was planning on
| adding wood stove. You also need to have proper vent near
| your stove, so even if it uses inside air, it will
| typically get it through that. I have automatic pellet
| burning furnace in basement for normal heating needs (it
| starts automatically when needed, uses 3 temperature
| sensors on floors and in basement) and wood stove for
| "romantic" purposes, but when it's fired, it heats up
| almost whole house and pellet stove sees that no more
| heating is needed. I have lots of leftover wood from
| construction phase, so wood stove will pay itself back
| from reduced use of pellet.
|
| As for losing heat through chimney - properly mounted and
| operated wood stove doesn't lose that much heat through
| chimney. Most of them have long enough steel pipe from
| stove to chimney, which reuses some heat from exhaust and
| ventilation channels in chimney, which are heating
| incoming air.
| jcims wrote:
| Probably to a small extent but the more pronounced effect
| is the heat gradient. The rest of the house becoming
| quite a bit colder just sends you back to the fireplace,
| which is generally not a bad place to be, so overall it's
| not a major issue.
| KMag wrote:
| > so overall it's not a major issue
|
| ... unless the extra peripheral heat loss freezes pipes.
| bdamm wrote:
| A tight wood stove in the hands of an experienced user is a
| remarkable thing. The amount of heat that can be extracted
| from a large oak log is nothing short of remarkable.
|
| Sadly, most wood stoves are not tight, nor are most users
| experienced.
| jcims wrote:
| Especially if you use an outside air kit for the firebox.
|
| For the uninitiated, take a look at the forums at
| hearth.com.
| abathur wrote:
| Surprising amount of erotic energy in this comment. :)
| throwanem wrote:
| What's a good place to learn the art, do you know? I'm
| not in Texas, but I have two woodstoves now, and my one
| experiment with them thus far has taught me only that I
| have a lot to learn.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Wood stoves are charcoal breeder reactors powered by
| their own vaporized wood gas. The re-radiated heat from
| the ironwork is what gives them their extreme warmth.
| They are like many other fuel burners -- stage one
| vaporizes the fuel and stage two burns the vapor -- it's
| just that both stages are in the same iron firebox.
|
| When you start a fire you want to quickly get the stove
| up to temperature. Use small split logs and kindling
| sticks along with some kind of "candle" that burns long
| enough to get the flames going. Commercial fire lighters
| (kerosine wax bricks) or even just a bit of kitchen towel
| with a tablespoon of vegetable oil will do.
|
| The kindling and your first log will burn hot and bright
| with an attractive yellow flame -- like a campfire. At
| the end of this first burn you will build up a layer of
| red hot wood embers in the base of the firebox and the
| ironwork will be about half way to temperature.
|
| The next stage and each stage after that is to put on a
| much smaller load -- often I will just use a single large
| log -- and leave the air intake or door ajar,
| temporarily. The hot embers will rapidly get the new log
| hot and the whole thing will instantly go from glowing
| red to an inferno in under a minute.
|
| At that point you have achieved a self sustaining
| reactor. You can leave it running full throttle if you
| want the pretty yellow flames. It will only last 20
| minutes though and all the energy will blast up the
| chimney.
|
| Much better, and indeed the whole reason for having a
| wood stove over an open grate, is to now shut off almost
| all of the airflow to the firebox. Low airflow means the
| combustion goes right down -- you may not even see any
| flames if you go super low -- but it also means the stove
| isn't being constantly cooled by a high volume of
| airflow.
|
| If you balance it just right then the flame front of
| burning wood gas will sit above the logs and permeate the
| whole chamber. It looks like a cross between Aurora
| borealis and a _Backdraft (1991)_ slo-mo sequence -- a
| deep red wraith that flaps around slowly, completely
| unlike the sooty yellow flames you began with. You get a
| real feeling for how it's the gas not the wood that's
| burning. (Having a stove with a glass viewing window
| really opened my eyes to their operation.)
|
| A single 10" log -- quarter split from a 20" diameter ash
| tree and air dried for 18 months to <20% moisture content
| -- will now produce 10kW for an hour or more and stay
| burning for eight. The fire will "keep" overnight and in
| the morning you can put on a new log, fire it up with the
| door ajar, and be back at full capacity in minutes.
|
| What's interesting is that if you run the stove in
| _pretty mode_ -- like a cartoon open fireplace with
| crackling and burning and yellow flames with the vents or
| even the whole front door open -- you'll notice that
| parts of the stove might not even get hot. The iron air
| intake grill on mine will remain at room temperature
| because although the flames are vigorous, the airflow is
| so fast it keeps the stove body cool.
|
| Conversely, once the stove has been running for an hour
| in slow burn mode, the entire body is practically glowing
| and requires thick gloves to handle. It is wonderful.
| URSpider94 wrote:
| Exactly this. Wood stoves operated in this manner are
| extremely efficient, and generate particulate emissions
| comparable to an oil-fired furnace, maybe 100x less than
| an open-hearth fireplace.
| malandrew wrote:
| > It looks like a cross between Aurora borealis and a
| Backdraft (1991) slo-mo sequence -- a deep red wraith
| that flaps around slowly, completely unlike the sooty
| yellow flames you began with. You get a real feeling for
| how it's the gas not the wood that's burning. (Having a
| stove with a glass viewing window really opened my eyes
| to their operation.)
|
| Would love a video if you can find one to see exactly
| what you're talking about.
| Izkata wrote:
| I've never seen it before (so I'm not 100% this is the
| same thing), but did find a picture that I think is
| similar to what they're describing - the red glow in the
| top window of the picture here:
| https://commonsensehome.com/masonry-heaters/
| bdamm wrote:
| The trick is to start it up hot and then reduce down the
| airflow to near zero. The knowledge was passed down in
| the tribe, so I don't know where one learns the art.
| baq wrote:
| my fireplace has this in its manual.
| anonfornoreason wrote:
| Other poster covered it well, but one thing to add. There
| are the kinds of wood burning stove. Old simple, pre EPA
| mandated high efficiency stove, efficient stoves with a
| catalyst to provide the clean burn, and efficient stoves
| that use secondary air injection to provide a clean burn.
| The new efficient stoves are a bit more forgiving for
| throttling them down for long burns without producing too
| much creosote they can cause chimney fires.
|
| I just replaced the old stove in my house with a new
| catalyst model and I burn 30% less wood while providing
| more steady even heat. I am heating 4000 sqft 2 story
| with only wood heat, one load every 12 hours, house
| between 80 and 64 degrees depending on location.
|
| Wood heat is great!
| KMag wrote:
| Are you aware of any high-efficiency wood burners that
| don't require electrical power for the secondary air
| injection? If they do all require electrical power for
| secondary air injection, if power is lost, do they
| quickly foul the burners with soot, or do they just
| gracefully degrade to running at a lower efficiency?
| nkurz wrote:
| The secondary air combustion for wood burning stoves
| usually doesn't require electricity. At least, we shopped
| for an EPA 2020 compliant replacement wood stove a couple
| years ago, and I don't think I came across that needed
| electricity for combustion. Pellet burning stoves often
| do, and there are often add-on kits for wood stoves to
| provide greater air circulation for the room, but the
| primary and secondary combustion use the natural "draft"
| from the chimney. I guess it's possible that even higher
| efficiency would be possible for bulk wood with a forced
| air design, but I don't think they are common. We ended
| up with a Progress Hybrid Soapstone, and have been happy
| with it.
| mikeytown2 wrote:
| Best fireplace in terms of efficiency is a rocket mass
| heater. It burns the wood gas in a secondary burn chamber
| and then routes the exhaust through a lot of thermal
| mass. One 2 hour fire a day will usually heat 2000 sq
| feet of house. 3m video explains the concept; longer
| videos will better explain it
| https://youtu.be/fwCz8Ris79g
| voicedYoda wrote:
| On reddit i follow /r/woodstoving. My inspiration for
| getting it right
| ip26 wrote:
| This is 50% of the reason why pellet stoves were created,
| with the other 50% being you can burn scraps instead of
| large oak logs that could be used for furniture etc.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Pellet stoves sound nice in concept but my experience
| with them (n=2) has not been good. The hoppers break and
| jam, the fans die, and they're generally just a pain in
| the rear. Usually happens right when you need them most,
| too.
| jandrese wrote:
| I only have n=1 experience here, but I've been using a
| pellet stove for years, burning a ton (50 bags) of
| pellets each year. I buy quality pellets which avoids
| having clinkers and keep them dry in the garage.
|
| It does require yearly maintenance to grease the motor
| and I had to undergo some repairs when we bought it
| (used, it came with the house) because the previous
| owners did some really dodgy stuff like using a
| completely wrong sized fuse and taping it in with duct
| tape, mangling the fuse holder, but it has been reliable
| for over a decade now.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Cold climate here (Quebec) and we heat with electricity
| usually. Many people have an electric furnace (forced
| air) or even baseboard (what I have for example). We also
| have a heat pump (heats the upstairs very well until
| about -15C and provides awesome AC for the entire house
| in summer).
|
| For Power outages and also coz its just awesomely warm:
| propane fireplace. All the benefits of a wood fireplace
| with none of the downsides.
|
| What this means is that we don't worry about "oh how
| about we all go ice skating" just turn the fireplace off
| without worrying about a fire. No indoor air quality
| issues. Electricity is out? Sure no fan but who cares.
| Still warm (and some have battery backup fans). Have to
| start it up without electricity? No problem, pilot lights
| w/ piezo starter. Propane delivery isn't that different
| from having to stockpile the firewood.
| yellowait44 wrote:
| LPG or Propane is awesome down until -42 celsius. Then
| it's basically useless as it won't vaporize. Live in
| Quebec too and my backup is a dual fuel generator.
| Propane and then regular fuel if it's too cold or I'm out
| of propane. Never too careful!
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It doesn't _have_ to be useless. It could have a way to
| keep the tank warm.
|
| Edit: Downvote? I really want to know why you disagree,
| please respond! What am I missing?
| KMag wrote:
| I haven't downvoted you, but it's perhaps because the LPG
| tank is usually outside with a rather large surface area,
| so if -40 degree days are rare, insulating the tanks and
| providing a heater might not be very cost-effective vs.
| having multiple fuel jets in your burner for multiple
| viscosity fuels.
|
| Also, either the "way to keep the tank warm" would
| probably be an electric heater (which would fail in these
| corner cases) or else a small burner... next to your tank
| of highly flammable gas with lots of no-smoking signs
| around.
|
| Though, I would guess in colder climates, if you really
| wanted to use LPG, you could put an electric fuel pump in
| your tank (so it doesn't rely on vapour pressure to feed)
| and have a burner that pre-warms the fuel and includes a
| small electric heater for starting.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > it's perhaps because the LPG tank is usually outside
| with a rather large surface area, so if -40 degree days
| are rare, insulating the tanks and providing a heater
| might not be very cost-effective vs. having multiple fuel
| jets in your burner for multiple viscosity fuels.
|
| It's more or less a one-time cost and you might want the
| simplicity. Tradeoffs rather than it being inevitable.
|
| And multiple fuel jets aren't enough. If you can't depend
| on the propane, then you need a lot of backup fuel.
|
| > small burner... next to your tank of highly flammable
| gas with lots of no-smoking signs around.
|
| You have fire that's not very far anyway. It's not hard
| for an expert to design something that's safe, since you
| don't need all that much heat.
|
| > Though, I would guess in colder climates, if you really
| wanted to use LPG, you could put an electric fuel pump in
| your tank (so it doesn't rely on vapour pressure to feed)
| and have a burner that pre-warms the fuel and includes a
| small electric heater for starting.
|
| If you prefer keeping the tank design the same, that
| sounds fine. A tiny pump would take barely any power, so
| a cheap solid-state generator attached to the burner
| could run it and charge your phone too. You don't even
| need a battery to get things going; a 1 pound tank could
| be warmed by hand if everything else goes wrong.
| KMag wrote:
| Is "regular fuel" fuel oil? At what point does the fuel
| oil sold in your area start to gel?
| tharkun__ wrote:
| You do have us on the regular fuel backup :) don't have
| that but we also don't have a backup generator in
| general. I wanted to last time we had a >12 hour outage
| but couldn't get the expense approved by the "finance
| minister" (i.e. the SO). When the electricity goes out
| for more than an hour or so the neighborhood is suddenly
| very loud though coz several next door neighbors go and
| bring out their generators so I'm not too worried about
| our survival and there's always the firewood pile in the
| backyard.
| sjg007 wrote:
| It's almost impossible to get a permit for a wood or
| pellet stove these days.
| ghaff wrote:
| Depends where you are. Certainly not true as a general
| rule.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| My brother's house is currently 38deg. Inside. Also, gas is
| not useful for a central, forced air system because it
| depends on the electric motor driving the blower.
| brk wrote:
| A "decorative" residential fireplace typically won't do much
| to provide real heat. If you want something that will make a
| difference it is usually going to be a sealed unit or
| something a little more purpose-built. Still, when you
| compare the burner in the average small fireplace to what you
| have in a typical furnace, it becomes clear pretty quickly
| that a fireplace is not likely to be a heat source of much
| merit, and even if it did have a decent BTU output, it's
| unlikely to be evenly distributed around the house.
|
| tl;dr - a typical residential fireplace isn't an alternative
| to a furnace.
| jdc wrote:
| My dad's heated with nothing but wood for at least a couple
| winters. The fireplace is never lit, but he'd run his
| airtight stoves would non-stop.
| bjacobt wrote:
| > I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but
| at least one person found their gas fireplace they were
| hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really
| work that well.
|
| I believe fireplaces in Texas are for decoration. I live in a
| relatively new house in North Dallas, read open floor plan,
| and turning on the fireplace make absolutely no difference.
|
| We managed to turn it on by replacing the igniter batteries
| and turned it back off after an hour because you don't get
| any heat unless you sit within 1 feet of it.
| sjg007 wrote:
| For natural gas you want a sealed one so effluent goes up the
| chimney but the heat radiates through the glass. But heat
| rises so you create convection. I think a fireplace is an 80%
| loss so for $10 spent you get $2 heat.
| hedora wrote:
| Modern fireplaces can be >90% efficient. Some pull feed air
| from the outside, creating no draft inside.
| roenxi wrote:
| It is annoying when this sort of event happens and everyone
| starts deciding what they believe to be truth within 48 hours
| of the outage. It makes more sense to be talking about the 2011
| outages in terms of what went wrong than the 2021 ones -
| because we have actual information on 2011 instead of "things
| went wrong!" now.
|
| I want to thank you personally for injecting a PDF into the
| discussion, but also positively assert that it is not obvious
| what just happened this week. We don't yet know how many of the
| recommendations were ignored, what happened in the last decade
| regulator-wise or whether this round of failures are for the
| same or different reasons.
|
| Speculation is much less useful than waiting a few months for
| the actual investigations. Emergencies are urgent, engineering
| (and political) decisions and assessments are never
| emergencies.
| tacon wrote:
| Since the Texas Legislature is in its once every two year
| session right now, and four million Texans are pissed off, it
| will be fun to see if new laws result this cycle.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Once every two years FFS this makes the Handforth Parish
| Council look Good.
| trentnix wrote:
| It's not a bug. It's the best feature.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Apart from the holding the executive to account part of
| democracy.
| trentnix wrote:
| The executive can't do much damage if it doesn't have any
| money to work with.
| roenxi wrote:
| Continuing my theme from above; if legislators took a 6
| month recess after every major crisis before starting to
| debate it the quality of law would probably be a lot
| better. Democracies naturally tend to deadlock anyway,
| stuff everyone agrees on got waved through years ago.
| Most of the time in session is grandstanding and making a
| fuss without achieving much.
|
| Legislators have a terrible habit of using a crisis to:
|
| 1) Make something that was already illegal super-dooper
| illegal (see: terrorism).
|
| 2) Mucking up traditional safeguards against bad
| government - like evidence requirements, reasonable
| process, human rights in some cases, debating the
| legislation, reading the bill before voting on it, etc.
|
| In emergencies, legislators are just going to rubber-
| stamp things technical experts wave under their nose/hand
| power to some executive. They aren't needed.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| Austin should secede
| gregw2 wrote:
| From an engineering standpoint, I agree that you want a true
| RCA and this event's RCA will be a bit different than 2011's.
| And this RCA (and its political consequences) will take time,
| doesn't need to be done right this minute, etc etc.
|
| However, this problem is not at its root an engineering one;
| it is political. While the public attention is on this, we
| should point attention as close as possible to the most
| likely cause given the information we have at the time. It's
| bayesian truth and bayesian politics.
|
| You'll note I didn't draw conclusions about which
| recommendations were ignored but having read through them
| all, there is no way they were all actually followed and we
| ended up where we are. I think some basics are fairly
| obvious. While some winterization perhaps was done, there is
| some degree of winterization that was never done; power
| plants in other states far north of us and colder than us are
| not having the same types of problems. Various professors in
| various cities in Texas who follow this stuff confirm this in
| various news outlets I haven't cited here. I also wouldn't be
| surprised if there was were issues with gas transport from
| wells through pipelines to plants that were noted in 2011 but
| much more severe this time due to even colder temps and
| unexpected by all. But still...
|
| At the end of the day, Texas has optimized for cheap power
| and has not funded the work of reliable power. This is a
| political decision at the end of the day due to companies not
| paying for their externalities of poor service. I'm open to
| saying we shouldn't blame follower-type politicians who were
| scared of "raising electrical rates" and we should blame
| ourselves, but let's all acknowledge that some costs that
| weren't borne should have been borne and some oversight that
| should have occurred didn't occur. Is that so hard to concede
| at this early juncture?
| silexia wrote:
| Is this power outage truly such a bad thing? It seems like
| a decision that the elected representatives of Texas have
| chosen to make. They basically said we would rather have
| much lower utility costs on a regular basis and have a risk
| that we lose our power every 9 or 10 years in a big storm.
| Everything is cost vs benefit trade off, and this just
| seems to be a different decision than most make.
| gregw2 wrote:
| The deaths and impacts on the poor make it, to me an
| unacceptable tradeoff.
|
| I don't see why others states can do it and Texas
| couldn't or shouldn't. This is hindsight, but out past
| strategy, if it was intentional, was not optimal.
|
| Even just numerically, I would bet money that the lost
| productivity and sales will be much more than the "ounce
| of prevention" costs, even ignoring the humanitatian
| aspects.
| seph-reed wrote:
| My friends have been unable to drive, without water or
| electricity for a few days now. Their house is slowly
| losing all residual heat, making its way down to ~18
| degrees.
|
| They're young and prepared, so they'll be fine. I expect
| there to be a lot of deaths. And then a wave of burst
| pipes and property damage. Many people may be going
| without running water for weeks or months to come.
| kevingadd wrote:
| People aren't leaping to conclusions here, this isn't
| speculation. This has happened at least twice, and there were
| a bunch of clear recommendations from 2011 that weren't
| followed. The state government and other sources are already
| providing information on the current crisis and its causes.
| softawre wrote:
| Appreciate your wisdom on this.
| modriano wrote:
| Well, looking at the breakdown of electricity generation by
| energy source [0], it looks like energy generation fell by
| about 30% around the start of 2/15, with most of the losses
| being from coal and natural gas. And as Texas's grid is
| isolated from the the other eastern and western grids, they
| can't make up the difference. And reports indicate that it's
| because instrumentation in coal and natural gas plants has
| frozen, shutting them down.
|
| It kind of feels like the problems are evident, and waiting
| for time to lull people back into complacency on the issue
| seems like it will just set up the next such disaster.
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/MikeZaccardi/status/13620381822342512
| 67?...
| [deleted]
| dalbasal wrote:
| This is meta/tangent, but I've had similar conversations a
| few times recently. Seems to be in the zeitgeist.
|
| Re: _everyone starts deciding what they believe to be truth
| within 48 hours of the outage._
|
| Maybe, hopefully... the epidemic is humbling us. It's been
| significant and long lasting enough to rub our noses in
| whatever opinions we so brashly got behind too early.
| Professors and peasants alike. We're more likely to stop and
| say "I don't know."
|
| The classic example of this is governments taking
| credit/blame for economic stuff. Low unemployment, high gdp,
| etc. Current government decisions are really unlikely to be
| affecting these, because stuff takes time. Meanwhile, short
| term data about the economy is both uncertain and fairly
| useless even if it wasn't. The whole thing is so
| disingenuous, yet I doubt there has ever been an democratic
| election where this wasn't a major factor.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| Nah, it's very easy to selectively forget what you ended up
| being wrong about and remember what you got right (or close
| enough to pretend it was right).
|
| I was wearing an n95 mask in the grocery store starting
| March 1st last year, there was no reason at that point to
| think it wouldn't help and I still can't comprehend why
| someone like Fauci who said in no uncertain terms not to
| wear a mask, it won't help never faced any repercussions. I
| probably got a lot of things wrong that I don't really
| remember. I still am a bit ocd about hand washing and hand
| sanitizer even though covid seems not to spread via
| surfaces very much, except for when it does, and I'll
| probably keep doing that until the pandemic is over just
| because I have been.
|
| My takeaway from this past year is certainly not that
| humans are rational or good at accountability.
| sixothree wrote:
| > I still can't comprehend why someone like Fauci who
| said in no uncertain terms not to wear a mask
|
| I thought the general assumption was they were afraid of
| dramatically affecting supply for the people who were
| risking their lives taking care of sick patients.
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| And in the process lost a significant portion of trust in
| public health measures. Saying the don't work is very
| different than saying they are short in supply and
| blocking sales temporarily or something. Second one is
| much easier to reverse without teaching public to second
| guess every public health directive from there on.
| arielserafini wrote:
| This, exactly this. And the guidelines re: masks changed
| pretty quickly.
| IOT_Apprentice wrote:
| I would say it is Americans that are not rational or good
| at accountability from a cultural perspective.
|
| If you ever have the opportunity to visit Japan and see
| people wearing masks when they have a cold or flu on
| normal days. We don't do that. Heck, we are in a work
| culture where it is a bad thing to take days off when you
| are ill.
|
| If you look at other countries where the government and
| the populace take pandemics seriously and lock down.
|
| You see governors here being proud about not adhering to
| COVID-19 Protocols. You see Police in major cities of the
| country REFUSING to wear masks or intentionally wearing
| them wrong. You hear of them refusing to get the vaccine,
| when they are prioritized to do so.
|
| You see a Pandemic become politicized because an
| incompetent man was President and it was part of his
| brand to not deal with it or set an example.
|
| You have certain epidemiologists telling school teachers
| to get back to work and teach his daughters because, well
| only a small number of them will die from COVID, so get
| the fuck back to work.
|
| I could go on, but it is what it is.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > I still can't comprehend why someone like Fauci who
| said in no uncertain terms not to wear a mask, it won't
| help never faced any repercussions
|
| May I ask what exactly you were hoping for here?
| khrbrt wrote:
| Being fired or resigning in disgrace.
|
| If my bad advice cost thousands of lives, I would at
| least retire from public life.
| helen___keller wrote:
| Okay, well let's start with firing, and let's assume
| since his bad advice was in march 2020 then any
| repercussions would happen within the next few months
| when it became obvious that masks should definitely be
| worn.
|
| The two people with the power to fire Dr Fauci are the
| NIH director, and the president (via his power over the
| NIH director). In fact by summer 2020 Dr Fauci had earned
| the ire of the White House, but for essentially the
| opposite reason (this was when the White House was still
| trying to underplay the pandemic as not-that-bad, going-
| away-soon, it'll be an Easter miracle, etc). As such the
| NIH director aligned with Dr Fauci against the White
| house, and Fauci was seen as the "defender of wearing
| masks" or somesuch. For example, consider the following
| article:
|
| https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/16/francis-collins-
| defends-...
|
| I don't think it's impossible to have seen Fauci fired if
| that's how Trump played it politically. But it's not.
|
| Consider the following:
|
| > Trump, in particular, has openly disagreed with Fauci's
| guidance on whether fans should attend professional
| football games in the fall [...]
|
| > In recent weeks, as the U.S. outbreak has spiraled out
| of control, Fauci has urged Americans to wear masks and
| to practice social distancing. The White House, however,
| has refused to amplify his advice, and instead has
| escalated its attacks on him.
|
| The white house was trying to stimulate the economy by
| reassuring people it's okay to go out and spend money.
| Attacking Dr. Fauci for not being serious enough about
| masks sends the _opposite_ signal. Hence, Fauci became
| the "wear a mask" guy (as viewed in opposition to the
| White House). Thus, everyone forgot / didn't care that
| early on he was wrong about masks.
|
| Hope that cleared things up.
| sixothree wrote:
| Was it really bad advice? We certainly didn't have supply
| at the time and first responders would have been
| affected.
|
| Can you imagine telling people to take care of covid
| positive patients without having any face masks?
| helen___keller wrote:
| I'm explaining why Fauci didn't get fired, so I took the
| GP's assertion that it's bad advice as assumption
| arielserafini wrote:
| He wasn't exactly wrong, as not wearing masks was still
| the general scientific consensus at the time, right? It
| was a WHO guideline, if I'm not mistaken.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| Or at the very least, not continuing to be worshiped as
| some sort of saint.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Or maybe, like, an apology. Or an effort to not repeat
| future lies (e.g. the effort required to achieve heard
| immunity)
| shireboy wrote:
| I have yet to see any of my friends and definitely not
| politicians (of any stripe) humbled about anything
| pandemic. If anything there's a doubling down and mental
| gymnastics to explain away inconsistencies or hide lack of
| knowledge. I'd love to share your optimism- seriously- do
| you have an example in mind?
| dalbasal wrote:
| Test the waters again maybe. I've been feeling this
| change pretty recently.
|
| I'm not predicting any kind of revolution, and this is
| all at the margin. I don't expect TV takestars or
| politicians to be the vanguard. That said, I have noticed
| people pondering the unknowability of it all. More
| interest in margin or error equivalents. Stuff like that.
|
| Example: Covid conversations (the one I have in mind was
| with my aunt) 6 months ago were along the lines of "the
| government did X, Y happened." Now, it's wondering
| whether X impacted Y... counterfactual thinking.
|
| I have yet to encounter this in my work/corporate life
| though, and honestly, that's where it's most needed.
| shireboy wrote:
| I agree and have been feeling this more lately. You know this
| is already being politicized. Armchair investigators are
| suddenly becoming power grid experts. The complex reality of
| balancing a huge diverse power grid is becoming an "easy"
| problem - if only the evil other side had done what my media
| source and politician said they should!
|
| It's tricky - I also have a problem waiting months for a slow
| inefficient government agency to figure out how to cover
| their collective asses (or find the right scapegoat). I don't
| think it's unreasonable to make systems we can monitor,
| analyze and draw conclusions from much quicker.
|
| There needs to be a happy medium- find the problems and
| "trust the experts" for sure, but do so without being so damn
| _loud_.
| IOT_Apprentice wrote:
| This country politicizes everything, rather than dealing
| with it, because you have some people who have financial
| interests that make money off the existing situation. For
| many, it is part of a belief system, rather than dealing
| with it from policy and engineering perspectives.
|
| We don't deal with school shooting massacres here right
| after they occur. We don't deal with them after they
| happen.
|
| What stopped school shootings? Not having children in
| schools.
|
| You just had a group of militias, white supremacists et al,
| invade a branch of government, terrorize they staff,
| representatives and security--and nothing comes of it in
| terms of accountability and responsibility by Trump.
|
| You have those on the political right saying nothing big
| happened. You have people whining why is the national guard
| still there?
|
| As a nation, we don't prioritize efficiency, competence and
| reaction time. We don't want to measure and improve our
| infrastructure and policies.
| ehvatum wrote:
| The right to protest should be important to you,
| regardless of your political persuasion. 2020 saw a very
| great many more violent protests, including the
| construction of autonomous zones that rejected the
| authority of all elected United States government. To say
| that a person's voice should not be heard because they
| are dangerous to your beliefs is itself the most
| dangerous thing.
| mercurysmessage wrote:
| "You know this is already being politicized"
|
| "I also have a problem waiting months for a slow
| inefficient government agency to figure out how to cover
| their collective asses"
| shireboy wrote:
| Guilty.
| cavisne wrote:
| It's hilarious to look back on this HN post and the top
| comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14630650
|
| Exactly the same thing happened in South Australia in 2016
|
| 1) Renewables % of generation mix grows (wind + solar)
|
| 2) Base generation sources get pushed out by economics and
| regulation (coal)
|
| 3) Peak generation sources get squeezed by the economics of
| wind + solar over summer (lots of wind, lots of sun) and begin
| to be relegated to backup roles
|
| 4) Something bad happens (in SA it was software
| misconfiguration across multiple wind generation sources)
|
| 5) The backup generation gets used for the first time, suprise
| suprise it doesnt work
|
| 6) chaos
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Yeah, but none of that appears to actually be what happened.
|
| Renewables are down from their peak capacity in Texas, but
| they're actually performing _above_ what the grid thought
| they 'd do. So it's not like ERCOT got caught with their
| pants down when it comes to renewable generation.
|
| Instead the issue appears to be that thermal (gas, coal,
| _and_ nuclear) plants all over Texas are failing in the face
| of cold weather, and because Texas has its own grid it can 't
| shift enough power from nearby states in order to cover the
| demand.
|
| And it's not like these plants were off and everyone is
| surprised that they didn't turn on; Texas gets most of its
| power from natural gas most of the time. More to the point
| cold weather specific recommendations from back in 2011
| weren't followed with sadly predictable consequences.
| bbreier wrote:
| I think you might have missed this important line:
|
| > Most of the power knocked offline came from thermal
| sources, Woodfin said, particularly natural gas.
| cavisne wrote:
| backup generation (gas) is not working. As mentioned. When
| your only on-demand source of generation is only profitable
| in peak periods its a recipe for disaster.
| newacct583 wrote:
| Texas gas plants aren't "backup generation". Those are
| always available, almost always on, full-time-operated
| facilities.
| angry_octet wrote:
| Yes in Texas gas is used for base load.
|
| Strangely the rules under which some of them operate
| involve them paying for gas at spot prices (or at least
| during peak demand), and with spot gas prices being so
| high (due to pipeline failures limiting supply, and gas
| for heating having precedence) they had the option to
| stop generating...
| 8note wrote:
| It sounds like in texas's case, the backup generation
| (renewables) aren't built up enough to take over for when
| traditional power goes down
| kortilla wrote:
| Renewables aren't backup generation. They can't be
| activated on demand to cover dips.
| woeirua wrote:
| Again, this is not what is actually happening. Texas has
| heaps of on demand natural gas generators. They froze up
| with the storm and failed to turn on. Has nothing to do
| with renewable.
| cromwellian wrote:
| Sorry, but no. A 2011 FERC report cited problems in Texas
| gas/coal/nuke plants for failing to weatherize. They didn't
| fix the problems, and gas and sensing lines froze, taking
| gas/coal plants offline too.
|
| 2/3rds of the power that went offline from the storm was
| fossil.
|
| Moreover, Texas's independent grid (not connected to the rest
| of the US) makes it difficult for them to import power from
| neighboring states.
|
| Stop trying to push political tribalist stories that blame
| renewables for bog standard failures in traditional systems
| that could have been avoided.
|
| https://www.powermag.com/ferc-nerc-february-blackouts-in-
| the...
| golemiprague wrote:
| I do have a feeling though that putting too much attention
| and funding into renewables, which Texas did, takes some
| attention and funding from other issues like "weathering"
| which is basically either warming or cooling or anything in
| between.
|
| It also raising the question about funding climate change
| initiatives when we don't know what exactly the "change" is
| going to be in any given year. I am not saying renewable is
| bad or dealing with warming or anything like that, but
| maybe a more conservative and humble approach which takes
| into account the assumptions that we can't exactly predict
| the future, is more appropriate.
| cavisne wrote:
| The heavy reliance on natural gas is _not_ traditional. Its
| a side effect of 1)
| cromwellian wrote:
| No, it's because natural gas got cheaper, and they
| switched to the cheaper source.
|
| "The report also addresses the interdependency of the
| electric and natural gas industries. "Utilities are
| becoming increasingly reliant on gas-fired generation, in
| large part because shale production has dramatically
| reduced the cost of gas,"
|
| In 2011 when this happened before, Texas had even less
| renewables. I realize you're trying to hard to sell an
| ideology to blame renewables for what is really, gross
| mismanagement of the Texas grid, including fossil and
| nuclear power, but the reality is much more complex than
| your simple narrative.
|
| https://twitter.com/i/events/1361767999200317440
| makomk wrote:
| Natural gas got cheaper if you don't include the cost of
| the power grid going down in the case of weather like
| this. I do wonder if it would still be cheaper if you
| do... it's not just the power plants that failed,
| apparently the pipelines and the natural gas production
| infrastructure couldn't cope either, and that sounds
| potentially really expensive to fix.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Which fossil source is cheaper also largely depends on
| individual markets. The way carbon offset and carbon
| pricing is implemented in Germany for example, means coal
| got cheaper than natural gas for electricity. Despite
| being bad at ramping up quick and being really worse for
| the climate and environment. Gas would also be a good
| companion to renewables, simply because a gas turbine is
| very reactive, something a coal plant is not.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| That doesn't explain why coal and nuclear plants failed.
| Or why gas power plants in other states are still
| running. All of which is in line with the 2011 report
| about TX not winterizing their power plants properly.
|
| Frankly, it seems like you've decided that the issue is
| renewables and you're searching around for an argument to
| justify a conclusion you've already come to. Because what
| you're saying is simply not actually supported by the
| evidence or consistent with the current situation.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| 0. Houston Lighting & Power
|
| Local monopoly.
|
| 1. Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Utility_Holding_Company...
|
| Limited the profits of a utility holding company, spurring the
| formation of additional shell companies to each get the maximum
| allowed.
|
| Overturned in 2005, when today's highly increased risk was
| cemented.
|
| 2. Houston Industries, Inc.
|
| https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/67/HOUSTON-IND...
|
| 3. The Public Utility Commission of Texas
|
| https://www.puc.texas.gov
|
| Still exists in more toothless form after 2005.
|
| 4. Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_o...
|
| Est. 1970 just in case of unreliability (for utility
| shareholders), not much of a factor until recently. Given more
| leeway to disappoint consumers after 2002.
|
| 5. Public Utility Regulatory Act (PURA)
|
| https://www.lawinsider.com/documents/5KMbhJATuC2
|
| Est. 1975.
|
| Modified 1995, 1997, 1999, restructured 2007, latest edition
| effective as of September 1, 2017.
|
| Straight downhill as far as reliability goes.
|
| https://www.electricchoice.com/blog/guide-texas-electricity-...
|
| Up until 1995, under the HL&P monopoly the first 675 kWh
| remained extremely low cost for residential consumers as had
| been agreed with PUC to allow jacking up further residential
| kWh, and business accounts, into rates beyond the reach of low-
| income households. Check your old bills. Of course 675 kWh is
| not enough for air conditioning but otherwise a small household
| could remain within that tier if they could conserve
| effectively, and had gas heat for the normally mild winters. As
| soon as deregulation started, HL&P then began the agressive
| promotion of new plans to all their established customers,
| similar to the limited number of newly allowed competitors
| where giving a break for the first bunch of kWh was no longer
| required. For a while there it was still required for HL&P
| consumers who had not opted out of their 1980's plan, but they
| made whatever straight-rate deals were necessary to get this
| info off of people's bills ASAP.
|
| 6. Deregulation of the Texas electricity market
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation_of_the_Texas_elec...
|
| Headed us in the current direction starting in 2002.
|
| New company Centerpoint took over the energy delivery
| infrastructure. Transmission assets from HL&P and others,
| delivery pipelines from gas suppliers, all of it.
|
| As the name implies, pay no attention to a central point of
| failure. Nothing to see here.
|
| By 1983 in the other most air-conditioned state, FPL the
| Florida state monopoly in a number of power plants was
| consuming the same grade of fuel oil as the Houston monopoly. A
| fuel oil vessel could be loaded from a Houston refinery, and
| with freight to FL the consumers there were paying half the
| price as in Houston using the same fuel without the added cost
| of sea freight.
|
| 7. As we have seen, Gov. Abbot has never been good enough for
| Texas, Lt. Gov. Patrick experienced his high point as a failed
| sports announcer, and Atty. Gen Paxton has only enough
| integrity for an uninhabited island.
|
| Don't get me started on the equally compromised Ex. Rep. DeLay
| who in 2002 became US House Majority "Leader". Left in disgrace
| over lack of ethics himself.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Forgot to mention the 27-story Houston Public Works building
| downtown which was built in the 1960's by HL&P still has the
| nicely air-conditioned parking garage.
|
| No garage doors to keep the cold air in since it didn't
| really matter to the power company.
|
| No mayor has ever wanted citizens to be very aware of that
| since the city took over the building in 1999.
| jswizzy wrote:
| wrong
| oivey wrote:
| The legislature could have done something, but the private
| utility companies could have also decided to provide a quality,
| reliable product. In the old days they may have considered it
| their civic duty. This is just another example of why private
| utility monopolies don't work.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| They did that in the old days because the public utility
| commission wielded a big stick. Companies only understand
| punishment when delivering a commodity service. Power
| companies care about the dividend.
|
| In my experience running capital projects, you get
| performance by paying modest performance bonuses and
| assessing tough penalties for non-performance.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| Yes I agree state's legislatures did not prepare. But maybe
| that shows why a body of politicians is not prepped for
| engineering nuances. Maybe they should have adequately applied
| leverage to the power companies to "push" them to better
| practices rather than trying to fine and inspect and regulate
| which is an inherently "pulling" option which the companies
| will always try to weasel out of.
|
| This argument to incentivize rather than punish applies to many
| issues with legislative bodies across all complex industries
| like Big Tech and other Engineering fields. You pass a law that
| drinking water cannot have over 10ppm of XXX carcinogen? There
| is most likely going to be 9.99ppm because that's the bare
| minimum.
|
| We really need to move from stick to carrot.
| confidantlake wrote:
| Under 10 ppm you get a carrot. Then drinking water will still
| be 9.99. How is it any different?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Under 10 ppm you get a carrot. Then drinking water will
| still be 9.99.
|
| But also the company decides that they're okay with only
| getting that carrot 95% of the time because filtering costs
| money. So 5% of the time it's much worse.
|
| The real power of a stick over a carrot is the incentives
| can be much bigger. If you're selling widgets, and 1%
| catching on fire just means you're paid 1% less, you don't
| care very much. If you're fined 50 times the purchase price
| for each widget that catches fire, you care a lot.
| newacct583 wrote:
| > Yes I agree state's legislatures did not prepare. But maybe
| that shows why a body of politicians is not prepped for
| engineering nuances.
|
| The problem is that Texas is an outlier. Other governments,
| broadly, get this right. Those FERC recommendations mentioned
| upthread? They're the work of _the government_ (hell, NERC is
| even a multinational globalist thing). That argues less that
| "governments are bad" than it does for "THIS government was
| bad".
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Can you clarify what the distinction is that you see here?
| Ultimately, whether it's fines/regulations ("stick") or
| bonuses/incentives ("carrot"), you're still going to have a
| bunch of budget-focused politicians pulling the levers.
|
| Their incentive structure rewards short term budget savings
| at the expense of long term preparedness. The real fix is to
| have a non-partisan body staffed by actual engineers setting
| this kind of policy, isn't it?
| ianai wrote:
| The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and
| expecting a different outcome. When another option works and
| the current implementation fails, then it's time to change to
| the workable option.
| mjevans wrote:
| Parts 15 and 16 of that PDF are, in polished up polite speak,
| particularly scathing in terms of what's being recommended.
|
| The summary is: Regularly inspect and maintain your equipment,
| here are the obvious things that must be done. (Unstated: We
| feel a need to say this, because obviously it didn't happen in
| at least one place...)
|
| Probably got cut by the bean counters and a cut-throat market
| that didn't require safety and availability as considerations.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Given the current crisis, it seems like they weren't scathing
| enough.
| myself248 wrote:
| If the penalty for ignoring scathing words is hurt
| feelings, then there's no reason to be scathing or not.
| (Well, except it might look good in an investigation
| someday.)
|
| What's needed is real incentives, carrots and/or sticks,
| with real enforcement and follow-through. Speak softly, and
| all.
| Animats wrote:
| Would customers be willing to pay 20% more for electric power
| to prevent a once a decade event?
| zero_deg_kevin wrote:
| Are customers being asked to pay 20% more? 20 whole percent
| more?
| cjbprime wrote:
| It would be interesting to see a plot of price vs. uptime
| in the face of unlikely events for electric grids, and
| which spot on the curve has been chosen here.
|
| There are definitely points on such curves, of course,
| where you've exhausted the sweet spot and just have the
| option of paying e.g. 3x as much for a very modest marginal
| decrease in risk. But that doesn't sound like the case
| here.
| Animats wrote:
| 20% is about what energy deregulation supposedly saved
| customers. Utilities regulated under rate-of-return
| regulation tended to overbuild and maintain large safety
| margins, because they could pass those costs along to the
| customer.
| takeda wrote:
| From my observation, typically it's 20% more in profits
| rather than 20% cheaper service.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| After experiencing that event? I think so. A lot of people on
| both sides of the political spectrum are very pissed right
| now. The state of Texas and its Republican rulers have been
| embarrassed in a big way, as the sham that is "free market"
| has been revealed for all to see.
| angry_octet wrote:
| Dumping a political talking point like '20% more' without
| anything analytic to support it is just trash posting.
|
| Interconnect with neighbour grids does not cost 20% more, AC
| or DC. In fact the huge peaking capability of a state with
| ~50% gas generation would generate revenue supplying peak
| demand and variations in renewable supply.
|
| Pricing systems (i.e. market rules) that encourage
| reliability doesn't automatically lead to gold plating.
| kevingadd wrote:
| We always get told that <important thing> will result in
| massive price increases for the customer, even though in
| practice it's not always true. For example, we're told
| raising the minimum wage above where it's been for decades
| will make everything cost absurd amounts, even though there
| are many cities in the US with a $15/hr minimum wage and
| prices there aren't much higher than the ones with minimum
| wages in the $8/hr range.
|
| It certainly could raise your electrical costs by 20% for
| weatherization, but there's nothing stopping the utility from
| raising your costs for any other reason. If weatherization
| doesn't completely eat into their profit margins, they don't
| HAVE to raise prices at all. The government could also fund
| it as a one-time expense.
| tedunangst wrote:
| The customers unfortunate enough to have signed up for spot
| pricing are paying 200x more than before. One week of that is
| enough to erase two decades of 20% savings.
| fishingisfun wrote:
| willing or not, they had AMI sold to them in some cases for a
| 25% increase. This 20% for a winterized solution is a no
| brainer
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Are they related?
|
| Was the 20% cost savings they just stopped winterizing the
| generators?
| gego wrote:
| I am always amazed how well the "market" regulates resilience...
| when, for example, regulators used the Wienerberger winter-proof
| brick with much better isolation as standard for building
| regulations in some regions of Europe with cold seasons,
| businesses and builders sued. Two years later, the same
| regulation helped people come through a cold winter... I fear it
| needs regulations for infrastructure resilience...
| newbie789 wrote:
| Can somebody explain as if I were a kindergartner why exactly
| natural gas is down by such a large amount in the state? Did the
| pipes freeze? Does natural gas not burn efficiently in snowy
| conditions? How will raising the spot price dramatically help
| with these physical conditions of the pipelines/other power
| production/distribution apparatus in such a way that providing
| power becomes available more quickly (if at all)? [1]
|
| Has Texas never had weather like this in 350ish years and there
| was no reasonable justification for preparing for something like
| this?
|
| [1]https://mobile.twitter.com/jmontforttx/status/13617035547890..
| .
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/natural-gas-power-st...
|
| > The systems that get gas from the earth aren't properly built
| for cold weather. Operators in West Texas' Permian Basin, one
| of the most productive oil fields in the world, are
| particularly struggling to bring natural gas to the surface,
| analysts said, as cold weather and snow close wells or cause
| power outages that prevent pumping the fossil fuels from the
| ground.
|
| > "Gathering lines freeze, and the wells get so cold that they
| can't produce," said Parker Fawcett, a natural gas analyst for
| S&P Global Platts. "And, pumps use electricity, so they're not
| even able to lift that gas and liquid, because there's no power
| to produce."
|
| > Texas does not have as much storage capacity as other states,
| experts said, because the resource-laden state can easily pull
| it from the ground when it's needed -- usually.
| newbie789 wrote:
| So, to answer my specific questions
|
| 1. So basically, this is the worst winter in the history of
| Texas to such an extent that nobody could have possibly
| predicted this?
|
| That sucks.
|
| 2. Can you answer my question about the spot price increase?
| What does that accomplish in immediate terms?
|
| As a sub-question, the article that I'm asking about says
| that electricity generators haven't been able to make money
| for over a decade. Why have they been providing this for free
| (or worse at a loss!) for so long? That sounds like some top-
| notch philanthropy! Is this an issue of the private company
| providing electricity at a loss statewide for so long that
| they can't stand the financial hit of maintaining their
| systems when strained for more than a couple days?
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >So basically, this is the worst winter in the history of
| Texas to such an extent that nobody could have possibly
| predicted this?
|
| More like "to the extent that people who were actually
| accountable for how money was spent couldn't justify
| spending the money to hedge against it".
|
| Could you justify to your boss spending 5% per year on a
| project to hedge against something that happens every
| 50-100yr and has a 10% chance of really screwing you when
| it does? Exactly this but applied across every utility in
| an entire state.
|
| Know-it-alls on the internet, love to tell other people how
| to spend their money but the real world is more complex and
| doesn't have the luxury of hindsight.
| snowwindwaves wrote:
| Plus they are not really screwed, they lost 5 days
| revenue from not being able to pump/generate, surely at
| elevated prices - but these businesses will not feel this
| event in a negative way on their annual report
| mjevans wrote:
| I could for a 10-20 year contingency, particularly if
| lost property and lives were my liability (which they
| should be for this case).
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > So basically, this is the worst winter in the history of
| Texas to such an extent that nobody could have possibly
| predicted this?
|
| It's a bad winter, but not "nobody could have possibly
| predicted this" bad. Some cities are breaking records, but
| quite a few haven't. For example Austin's Tuesday low of 7F
| is cold, but not quite as low as the record from December
| 23rd 1989 (6F). San Antonio recently tied their all time
| low from December 22nd 1990. Obviously "coldest winter in
| 30 years" is quite the statement, but it's still well
| within living memory and not the distant past. Chances are
| most of the policy makers and system designers for the TX
| energy system personally remember the winters of 1989 and
| 1990.
|
| There's also a 2011 report recommending that TX winterize
| its power systems in case this exact thing happened. So at
| least back in 2011 energy experts saw this as a distinct
| possibility.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Texan here!
|
| This weather is CRAZY, I've NEVER seen something quite like
| this. I've seen it dip down to the teens, before, but I haven't
| seen: sub 20, with snow, for more than 2 days... across the
| entire state.
|
| I'm not entirely certain why we are sucking hard at making
| electricity, but here is what I've heard: Nat Gas pipelines
| "close to the well" are "freezing" because they have a lot of
| impurities (like water) that are literally freezing amd
| clogging the pipes. I'm not sure why wind is down (maybe bad
| lubricant???). I'm also not sure why the power plants designed
| to run on oil (or Nuclear!!!) aren't sufficient.
| sounds wrote:
| Thanks for this insight.
|
| I would suspect that Coal and Natural Gas generation plants
| use a lot of water for cooling. When the plant is designed to
| dump as much extra heat as possible, as cheaply as possible
| (for 100-degree days and ~200-degree hot water), things start
| to fall over when the cooling water freezes in the
| uninsulated cooling lines.
|
| Or, it's pretty much lack of winterization and lack of a plan
| for this kind of cold.
|
| Just speculating.
| evgen wrote:
| Wind turbines that are not built for cold weather operations
| will have problems with lubricants for joints and bearings
| and icing on the blades. The icing does the same thing to
| turbine blades as it does to plane wings (i.e. makes them
| suck in terms of aerodynamics and kills lift) and as the
| blades slow the friction and load from the lubricant failure
| means that eventually the turbine will stop spinning and then
| just freeze up.
| cydonian_monk wrote:
| The way the natural gas issue has been explained to us over the
| last two days is there are two issues. First: natural gas is
| prioritized for home usage, which has understandably
| skyrocketed over the last several days. There was not enough
| left in the gas market for the standby power plants to buy up
| to burn; and what was available was inaccessible due to price
| and price caps. Second: The standby generating plants
| themselves suffered failures due to excessive cold. This also
| affected coal and nuclear plants (one of the reactors at the
| South Texas plant shut down automatically after the intake
| water in its cooling pond froze).
|
| The emergency charges for the spot prices changes from that
| order are recent news that I've not had time to digest yet and
| as such can't reply to.
|
| Apologies for not providing sources - barely have cellular data
| service at the moment and have only had electric back for a
| handful of hours. (Edit: And I jinxed myself there... back in
| the cold dark again.)
| ourlordcaffeine wrote:
| At $9000 per MWh ($9 per KWh), you could connect your exercise
| bike to the grid and make nearly minimum wage if you're fit.
| matsemann wrote:
| I'm reasonably fit with an FTP of about ~280W (4.0W/kg), so I
| could easily hold 200W for hours. So 5 hours to make $9 I
| guess?
| bagacrap wrote:
| but hey it will obviate the need for a space heater.
| baq wrote:
| black mirror almost real
| kbar13 wrote:
| is this the wakeup call that texans need to acknowledge that
| climate change isn't a coastal elite type thing, and that it
| affects us all and requires investment from all of us?
|
| imo texas is in a great spot to capitalize on the shift to green
| tech. they have strong engineering talent, large investments from
| the energy sector. car manufacturers are already clamoring to be
| the next to go fully electric. get your leaders in line and cash
| in on the trend, and save the world in the process! or go the way
| of detroit when oil demand tanks...
| tryonenow wrote:
| A single cold snap is no more evidence for climate change than
| it is against global warming. The earth is huge, climate is
| chaotic and oscillatory with large variance, you need many data
| points over, at a minimum, decades (though centuries or
| millennia may be more appropriate) to determine with certainty
| that the climate is changing.
| GVIrish wrote:
| This cold snap is due to the polar vortex destabilizing and
| pushing arctic air down South. Normally the polar vortex
| stays stable and that arctic air oscillates at higher
| latitudes. But with warmer temperatures in the higher
| latitudes that stability has been disrupted and a large part
| of the vortex air has been pushed South.
|
| The arctic is warming much faster that the rest of the
| planet, so these events will probably become much more
| common. Other sorts of extreme weather events are also going
| to become more common with climate change
|
| Some explainers on the polar vortex:
| https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-how-is-arctic-warming-
| linked-...
| nharada wrote:
| Okay but we do have that. Nobody is saying that this is the
| entirety of the evidence, just that this could be the wakeup
| call where people realize it affects them personally and they
| should do something about it.
| lurquer wrote:
| Ha. I love how 'global warming' transmogrifies into 'climate
| change' to suit the argument.
|
| Not everything is as big of a crisis as your Facebook posts
| make out.
|
| A few days without power... big woop. The power goes down
| longer in most coastal cities every summer during hurricane
| season. Not to mention the usual outages of a day or two due to
| tornados and ordinary storms. And the cold? Who cares? Kids are
| playing in the snow, most everyone in my neighborhood had been
| grilling out, if it's been a wake-up call for anything, it
| would be to maybe buy a quieter diesel generator.
|
| Jesus H... can't we have a winter storm any more without using
| it as grist for ideological arguments?
|
| It will be 70f in a few more days. All this will be forgotten.
| Me1000 wrote:
| Climate change _is_ a result of global warming. It's not that
| complicated, so let me try and explain: climate patterns will
| change as the earth warms up. Jet streams change, hurricanes
| get more powerful and occur more frequently, etc.
|
| As for "no big deal", I don't know what else to say other
| than 15 people have already died. When it's below freezing
| and people are without heat, they will freeze to death. Not
| to mention people who have medical equipment they need to
| stay alive that requires electricity.
|
| Many areas see this temperate every year and they're prepared
| for it. It's not the same thing in Texas.
| lurquer wrote:
| >Climate change _is_ a result of global warming.
|
| You mean the cold weather is a result of global warming.
|
| Yeah. Whatever.
|
| As far as the rest of your comment, the warmth of your
| virtue and sensitivty has raised my room's temperature by a
| degree and I thank you. I am tearing up as I write this;
| your comment struck me to the core. Oh, the children... the
| poor freezing people on covid-ventilators... the 15 who
| have -- sob -- died. I am going to save the salt from my
| tears and use them on my driveway. Someday I hope to be as
| thoughtful as you. Thank you for being such a good role-
| model to the rest of us.
|
| If only we Texans had the foresight to realize that -- sob
| -- instead of a single day of freezing weather in February,
| we'd have -- sob -- three days. In a row, no less! How
| could we have been so foolish?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Can you not do ... whatever this is. It's not
| contributing.
| lurquer wrote:
| Don't worry.
|
| Only have about ten minutes of charge on the laptop left.
|
| Shut the generator down for the night.
|
| And, my fingers are a bit numb.
|
| But, as I slip into my bed -- made comfortably warm by
| now by my own personal 98.6f furnace (otherwise known as
| a wife) -- I'll sleep more soundly knowing that various
| computer programmers and tech guys are worried about us.
|
| Adios.
| Me1000 wrote:
| I hope you and your family stay safe.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| Give me a break. Actually, the whole reason for this series of
| outages is because Texas took the bait and installed a bunch of
| solar and wind _instead of_ taking the safe route and doubling
| down on coal. Peak energy consumption in Texas is almost always
| in summer when there 's a lot of AC units running -- which just
| happens to be when solar and wind work best. They gambled on
| green, paid the price in the past few days, and you're sitting
| here on the internet saying that they're a bunch of rednecks
| who don't understand science or climate change. Pretty rich.
|
| This is a black swan event -- this is the coldest it's been in
| over 100 years.
|
| edit: to be clear about what I'm claiming, I'm saying that if
| Texas invested in coal _instead of_ making the large
| investments they made in solar and wind, this never would have
| happened. I don 't see how anyone can dispute that. This is not
| the time to be gloating about green energy.
| Me1000 wrote:
| 1) There are wind turbines in Antartica. There's nothing
| inherently bad about wind turbines in the cold.
|
| 2) This might be a black swan event, but we've seeing a lot
| of "once in a 100/500 year" weather events in the last
| decade. Which is exactly what climate scientists predicted
| would happen if we continued ignoring climate change.
|
| 3) and as everyone else said, the fossil fuel plants are also
| offline.
| daenney wrote:
| Doubling down on coal? What makes you think that would've
| worked any better than the natural gas and nuclear plants
| that failed too?
| jcranmer wrote:
| > to be clear about what I'm claiming, I'm saying that if
| Texas invested in coal instead of making the large
| investments they made in solar and wind, this never would
| have happened. I don't see how anyone can dispute that.
|
| If I remember the statistics correctly, there is _more_ coal
| power offline right now than wind power offline. If that is
| true, that rather debunks your theory, doesn 't it?
| nickysielicki wrote:
| What I'm interested in, and what I'm talking about, is
| judging each method of power production from its total
| current output relative to nameplate capacity.
|
| All I'm really arguing is that non-renewables are able to
| accommodate bursty and unpredictable demand much better
| than renewables. For every dollar spent on solar and wind,
| if that built X amount of coal or NG plants, they would
| have such an excess of capacity that the few plants that
| have gone offline would be completely irrelevant.
|
| My point isn't that Texas _shouldn 't have_ invested in
| renewables. It's just that this is really not an
| appropriate time to be lecturing Texas about renewable
| energy, because had they invested their money in non-
| renewables instead of renewables, they would likely not be
| in this situation.
|
| The problem is not a lack of regulation. It gets below
| freezing every single year in Texas. The problem is that it
| doesn't get this cold _in Houston_ every year, and they
| misjudged demand.
| jcranmer wrote:
| As I understand the situation, the problem is that
| several coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants had to shut
| down because it was too cold. It's not that there isn't
| sufficient baseload capacity to deal with the demand,
| it's that the baseload capacity wasn't sufficiently
| winterized to handle the situation. Many wind farms were
| also insufficiently winterized to handle the extreme
| cold.
|
| With the exception of natural gas (where some plants shut
| down to allow the pipeline capacity go to people who heat
| their homes with natural gas instead), the primary driver
| of the lack of capacity appears to be a failure to
| winterize for what is objectively a pretty rare
| situation, combined with an unwillingness to draw the
| power from those places where production isn't so heavily
| impacted by the weather.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > All I'm really arguing is that non-renewables are able
| to accommodate bursty and unpredictable demand much
| better than renewables.
|
| You do realize that all of this is happening because a
| bunch of non-renewable power plants failed, right? You're
| making an argument that's literally countermanded by the
| exact situation we're discussing.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| Most of the capacity lost was fossil fuel based. In fact
| solar generated more than expected. So how exactly are
| renewables the problem here?
|
| Even nuclear went down due to frozen pumps.
|
| And how is more coal the solution when these kinds of event
| will just become more common with global climate change?
|
| Should we not push for changes which halts the ongoing
| climate change?
| beckingz wrote:
| Wind was supplying more power than forecast right as total
| capacity plummeted...
| nickysielicki wrote:
| > In fact solar generated more than expected.
|
| This is technically true, but kind of irrelevant to the big
| picture. Solar beat expectations, which is great until you
| realize how little it was expected to produce in the first
| place. Solar and wind do not scale to demand as well as
| non-renewables.
|
| And look, I'm not saying that Texas should have invested in
| coal, I'm saying that it's tone deaf to admonish them for
| not embracing green energy when they _did_ embrace green
| energy pretty strongly, and when their lack of capacity
| currently is mostly about their lack of production in
| renewables.
|
| The core problem is that you can almost always burn more
| coal or NG and get more juice out of the coal and NG
| plants. But you can't make the wind go faster, and you
| can't make the sun shine brighter or longer. Had they
| invested in an abundance of non-renewables, people would
| not be freezing in their dark homes right now. It's not
| Texas fault, proponents of green energy need to have a
| better answer for this.
| benlivengood wrote:
| > Even nuclear went down due to frozen pumps.
|
| That doesn't sound at all like a potential disaster.
| Presumably the emergency cooling pumps didn't freeze.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Wind was performing above expectation throughout the event.
| roughly wrote:
| > This is a black swan event -- this is the coldest it's been
| in over 100 years.
|
| While everyone else is taking you to the woodshed for the
| rest of the comment, I'd like to take a moment to address
| this, because I think it's a misunderstanding of the term and
| a misreading of the book.
|
| The point of "Black Swans" was that an over-reliance on
| standard distributions derived from historical data generates
| predictions and confidence intervals that misrepresent the
| underlying phenomenon by assuming away "fat tails" and
| ignoring changing circumstances. If there's not some good
| reason why an event can't happen, any forecast or plan which
| precludes that event is necessarily flawed.
|
| To describe this as a "black swan" event assumes nobody
| could've seen it coming, there was no reason to suspect it
| would happen, and it's unlikely to happen again. All of those
| are false. Every bit of climate forecasting over the last
| ~decades has pointed towards increased weather variability
| and increased likelihood of extreme weather events. Specific
| to this case, increasing the overall energy levels in the
| atmosphere increases the variability of the polar jet stream
| and increases the likelihood of polar vortex events like the
| one Texas is currently experiencing.
|
| So, no, this wasn't a "black swan" event, this was a
| predictable - and predicted - outcome of climate change,
| which is a predictable outcome of burning as much coal and
| carbon-based fuels as we have over the last couple
| generations.
| teraflop wrote:
| It's even worse than that, because it's not even that
| there's no historical data to draw from! It got just as
| cold as this back in December 1989, resulting in power
| shortages and rolling blackouts, because of increased
| demand and reduced generation capacity.
|
| And then it happened again in February 2011, for almost
| exactly the same reasons, despite the weather not being
| quite as severe.
|
| https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/February%202011%20Southwest%
| 2...
| nickysielicki wrote:
| It gets below freezing every year in Texas. But in the
| biggest city in Texas -- Houston, with a metro population
| of 7 million, it does not.
|
| This is unprecedented in the modern era. Statewide load
| on the grid, for this time of year, is unreasonably high.
| Black swan.
| woeirua wrote:
| There are objective meteorological records that
| definitively prove that you are wrong.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| Where are they?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| It got down to -1F in Dallas on December 23 1989. Houston
| saw 7F on the same day. Houston saw sub-freezing temps
| during December of 1985 (25F), 1989 (7F), 1983 (11F),
| 1979 (26F), and 1996 (21F), among others. And that's just
| December.
|
| So yeah, it happens. Not often, but at least a half dozen
| times in living memory
| nickysielicki wrote:
| It gets cold in Texas, especially north Texas. I never
| claimed otherwise. It regularly snows in Dallas, but it
| does not regularly snow in Houston.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I listed half a dozen times when it got well below
| freezing in Houston in December alone. Don't move the
| goal posts to snow, you said that freezing temps in
| Houston were unprecedented in the modern era, which is
| just simply not true.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| I said that it doesn't get below freezing in Houston
| _every year_. Certainly not for days at a time.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > I said that it doesn't get below freezing in Houston
| every year. Certainly not for days at a time.
|
| Yeah, but you did not say that.
|
| You said:
|
| > It gets below freezing every year in Texas. But in the
| biggest city in Texas -- Houston, with a metro population
| of 7 million, it does not. This is unprecedented in the
| modern era.
|
| If you want to change that to say "this is an unusually
| long and wide freeze across the entire state", or "this
| is an unprecedented power outage" that's arguably true.
| But you didn't actually say that, you said that freezing
| temps in Houston were unprecedented, which is objectively
| not true.
|
| Heck, a long freeze knocking off the Texan power grid
| isn't even unprecedented in this century. A similar thing
| happened back in 2011[0].
|
| 0 - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ercot-
| rollingblackouts/te...
| nickysielicki wrote:
| I definitely worded it poorly, but I promise you I meant
| to communicate what I claim to have meant to communicate.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Isn't the whole thing about climate change that it makes
| black swan events more likely (less black?)? It was well
| known that the most immediate effect would be weirder,
| stronger weather events.
| huffmsa wrote:
| Nah it's because the plants are literally freezing up.
| masklinn wrote:
| > the whole reason for this series of outages is because
| Texas took the bait and installed a bunch of solar and wind
| instead of taking the safe route and doubling down on coal.
|
| That's an outright lie. The vast majority of the missing
| production is in fossil plants.
|
| Wind only accounts for about 20% of nameplate capacity, and
| has been performing above expectations for the period. And
| that's with Texan wind being as un-weatherised at the rest
| (hint: when wind turbines work just fine in Montana or
| Washington State, if they freeze over it's not because
| they're wind turbines).
| hokkos wrote:
| How do you reconcile with the fact that at the worst wind
| only provided 0.7GW on 30GW installed. Don't you understand
| that people are going to blame wind because it only
| provided 2% of its total capacity. Also even taking into
| account the dangerously overestimated capacity they count
| on during winter peaking events for wind of 6.2GW it is way
| worse, only 11%. Comparatively gas is at worst at 50% of
| 56GW installed and nuclear at 75%.
| afavour wrote:
| ...but the primary reason for the current outages is that
| fossil fuel plants failed. Wind power etc has also failed but
| is a rounding error in terms of lost production.
|
| > if Texas invested in coal instead of making the large
| investments they made in solar and wind, this never would
| have happened.
|
| If they invested that money in coal and failed to winterise
| it in the same way they failed to winterise the other plants
| then there would be absolutely zero difference.
|
| This is kind of a meta point and probably sounds patronising,
| but you've just said a bunch of stuff that's flat out wrong.
| It's time to start questioning your information diet. Where
| are you being fed disinformation from? What can you do to
| diversify your sources of news?
| nickysielicki wrote:
| Of course it sounds patronizing, it's extremely
| patronizing. Did you make a real effort to understand my
| argument?
|
| This is probably going to also sound patronizing, but have
| you considered that _you 're_ wrong and _I 'm_ right?
| disgrunt wrote:
| Weather isn't climate... or something..
| jussij wrote:
| The reason this might be 'climate change' related is because
| the warming Arctic is impacting on the jet stream, which then
| leads to these unexpected hot/cold events:
|
| https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/03/07/climate-change-
| may-...
|
| _The slowing of the jet stream, therefore, could cause
| weather patterns to remain in place for longer, resulting in
| prolonged heat waves or cold snaps._
| judgemcjudgy wrote:
| That's only a "just so" story.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| There were reports over a decade ago that such
| destabilizing events would happen.
| judgemcjudgy wrote:
| Predicting occasional extreme weather events doesn't
| prove anything. There have always been occasional extreme
| weather events.
|
| Also in what sense is it supposed to be a "destabilizing
| event"? I predict it will get warm again.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| No, it was predictions of occasional extreme weather
| events. The prediction was that the impact of global
| warming on the poles would destabilize air circulation
| patterns and increase the frequency and magnitude of such
| weather events.
|
| The destabilizing event which is the change in air
| circulation patterns related to the poles is here to
| stay.
| [deleted]
| mikesabbagh wrote:
| It is surprising that windfarms are freezing. Here in Quebec, we
| have windfarms that have more than 6 months a year of snow and
| temperatures much below the freezing point. How can they freeze?
| they dont use water or gaz or oil. It is only a fan and dynamo.
| Did water seep inside and freeze it?
| rodgerd wrote:
| A nuclear plant stopped generating because the turbine froze;
| components were exposed to open air because Texas doesn't
| normally get that cold.
|
| People built to a certain set of assumptions, with an implicit
| risk, and the risks came due. The only way to avoid another
| event like this would be to make the generation more resilient
| to extreme cold, which will cost more.
| cbmuser wrote:
| > A nuclear plant stopped generating because the turbine
| froze; components were exposed to open air because Texas
| doesn't normally get that cold.
|
| That's not true. The plant tripped because of a false alarm.
| The operators said the reactor would be back online shortly
| after safety checks.
|
| A whole turbine doesn't freeze. The turbines are in
| buildings, not outside.
|
| Edit: Apparently, South Texas has its turbines outside. But
| these didn't freeze but pressure-sensing lines failed.
| Source: https://atomicinsights.com/south-texas-project-
| unit-1-trippe...
| yborg wrote:
| This is wild - they built a nuclear plant that has its
| generator sets just sitting out in the open? This seems
| like a bad idea regardless of what is generating the steam.
| s0rce wrote:
| Different choice of lubricants? I have no idea really, I also
| read they have wind power generation in Antarctica so its not a
| fundamental problem just a result of certain design/engineering
| choices.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| I hate it when I get the wrong lubricant. It can pit a real
| damper on my own household activities.
| nrmitchi wrote:
| > just a result of certain design/engineering choices
|
| I think this is the point. Things are engineered for the
| environment which they are expected to operate, and to be
| optimized for those environments[0]. I would not expect a
| wind turbine that operates (and is designed to operate) in
| Antartica to not fail (potentially catestrophically) when
| operating in 100 degree Texas heat,
|
| [0] One could (and should) argue that these systems should
| take climate change and more extreme weather events into
| account, but that is a political problem more-so than an
| engineering problem.
| ecnahc515 wrote:
| Except Texas has had one of these winter storms roughly
| every 10 years, so it's not like it's unexpected.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Cars operate across a spectrum of climates... no reason
| your power plant should not.
| billh wrote:
| A car is engineered to operated in multiple climates
| through the use of specific fluids designed for the
| operating temperatures of the climate they are used in.
|
| Further, power plants operate on error margins
| significantly more narrow than your average consumer
| automobile. The temperatures, pressures and mechanical
| stresses are orders of magnitude higher.
| bendbro wrote:
| The same model of car physically exists in multiple
| climates. A powerplant (usually) doesn't.
| dathinab wrote:
| > [0] One could [...] climate change [...]
|
| As far as I can tell weather like this happens once in a
| while even without climate change, something like once in
| ~25 years or so (just guessing the number).
|
| Given the serve effects it can have infrastructure should
| always be build to still be operational.
|
| But if you are a company and there are no regulations you
| might be very tempted to ignore something which normally
| happens "just" around 4 times in hundred years. (Again
| guessed values could be a bit more or a bit less, with
| climate change likely more then just a bit more in the
| future).
| ashtonkem wrote:
| You're really close! A lot of cities in Texas got really
| cold in 1989, so about 32 years.
|
| There was also a freeze in 2011 that didn't break
| records, but broke the energy grid.
| evgen wrote:
| If you hunt around a little you will find info on the cold
| weather packages for wind turbines. Easiest for me to find
| was info about GE's 'Cold Weather Extreme' package for some
| of their mid-sized commercial turbines. You are looking at
| different lubricants, heating systems that use parasitic load
| on the turbine to warm joints and other critical points of
| the structure, and systems to prevent icing on the blades.
| rconti wrote:
| I would assume they use different technology for different
| climates, or use different maintenance regimes, or simply their
| operating procedures have different parameters. (that is to
| say, it might be "safe" to operate them, but they're not
| "allowed" to). But those are all just guesses.
| brundolf wrote:
| I've read that ice can build up on the blades and impede
| function, just like on airplane wings, and that de-icing
| mechanisms exist but it's likely they simply didn't spend the
| money on them because nobody thought they'd ever be needed in
| Texas.
| masklinn wrote:
| Same reason why the coal and gas plants froze, and pipes are
| bursting in apparemment buildings, and houses are unable to
| retain any heat: cheaping out.
|
| Since cold is a rare event, Texans figure they can save a penny
| by making nothing cold-resistant, then skimp on maintenance,
| all while bragging they have the cheapest rates of the country.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| -15C the other night, watching the wind turbines in Southern
| Ontario spinning away.
|
| It's probably that theirs are cheaper because why pay for more
| hardened tech if the typical range isn't this?
| pwinnski wrote:
| Wind turbines have not been the issue here in Texas. They've
| been delivering more power than expected, despite some of
| them freezing. The problem is with natural gas/coal plants.
|
| That said, yes, we don't use lubricant for super-cold
| weather, because we don't normally _have_ super-cold weather.
| So we use cheaper stuff that is suited for our normal
| climate, where heat is usually a bigger problem than cold. It
| 's been ten years since the last time it would have been
| important, and 12 years before that.
| t0mbstone wrote:
| Frozen wind turbines aren't the problem.
| https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-...
| landemva wrote:
| Natural gas doesnt really freeze, so something else is going
| on here.
|
| Misleading text in linked article: "We didn't run out of
| natural gas, but we ran out of the ability to get natural
| gas. Pipelines in Texas don't use cold insulation - so things
| were freezing."
| pixl97 wrote:
| Natural gas right out of the well does freeze, and the
| dewatering systems freeze. Been out on a site trying to get
| one working in 10F weather a number of years ago.
| fulafel wrote:
| Yep, LNG boiling point is around -160C so Texas weather
| would still have to cool a fair bit before you even get to
| the previous phase change that comes before solid form.
| woeirua wrote:
| Natural gas doesn't freeze, but the pipelines that supply
| the gas have valves and other control components that can
| and _do_ freeze during severe weather. Also, the wells
| supplying the natural gas can suffer temporary shut-ins due
| to the commingled water freezing and effectively shutting
| in the well. That drops overall supply.
|
| Natural gas wells and pipelines in other parts of the
| country are designed to handle extreme weather so they
| don't have these problems. This is entirely a problem
| caused by Texas' unwillingness to regulate that wells,
| supply lines, and generators be able to handle extreme
| cold.
| zamadatix wrote:
| https://www.genscape.com/blog/record-freeze-offs-result-
| wide...
|
| It's not the natural gas itself that's freezing and the
| article never claimed it was. Things aren't misleading just
| because you didn't know about it - that's the point of
| articles in the first place.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Quebec has the "winter package" on the wind turbines Texas does
| not. Keep in mind, these conditions are almost unheard of in
| Texas and the infrastructure just isn't designed for it. Like
| when it's 95F in Chicago for a week and all hell breaks loose.
| Different regions are geared for the norms of their climate.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Which is dumb because it's not that much more to make the
| system reliable in all climates. Especially considering
| climate change.
| TedShiller wrote:
| Cold weather.
|
| It's not always someone's fault.
| woeirua wrote:
| No, it really is someone's fault this time. Texas has had these
| events occur multiple times in the past, and they had grid
| failures in almost the exact same way. This happened because
| the Texas legislature decided to put their head in the sand and
| avoid doing what was necessary to ensure that their grid, and
| subsequently their constituents, would be safe in these kind of
| storms.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| It's in the headline:
|
| "Texas"
| pier25 wrote:
| Because of what happened in Texas, the higher demand of gas
| affected electricity generation in Northern Mexico which has been
| without electricity too. As as I understand it, not only the
| price of Gas wet up 5,000% but also there were shortages.
|
| The federal government has started doing electricity cuts in most
| Mexico to control the gas reserves and distribute energy to the
| Northern states.
|
| Edit:
|
| Here is an article about this in English:
|
| https://www.8newsnow.com/news/international/mexico-suffers-a...
| texasbigdata wrote:
| One of my smartest Austin friends predicted the outages by
| watching nat gas spot prices as early as last friday. Weird
| world
| sjg007 wrote:
| Next time you need to buy nat gas futures.
| skybrian wrote:
| Spot prices are up dramatically. Futures seem to only be up
| slightly.
|
| Maybe a natural gas supplier that was prepared could have
| done something, but could an investor have profited from
| this without being able to do physical delivery?
| zozin wrote:
| Sounds like traders predicted the outages.
| HNfriend234 wrote:
| Mexico is smart though because they have LNG import terminals.
| There is an incoming LNG carrier coming in less than 24 hours
| which will restore their power.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Second question: how much storage do they have?
|
| Apparently one of the issues in Texas is that they use just-
| in-time gas delivery from their wells .... which just froze.
| michelb wrote:
| This must be great for the Silicon Valley companies that are
| moving to Texas.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Lots of folks in these comments seem to want to use this event to
| litigate wind vs. solar vs. gas vs. nuclear vs. coal, but it
| seems like, across the board, power generation facilities in
| Texas were simply unprepared to operate in such low temperatures.
|
| All of these technologies can and do work well in very cold
| climates.
| jdkee wrote:
| Solar panels don't work well under a foot of snow.
| ckemere wrote:
| The people down the street from me in Houston are currently
| powering their house with their solar panels, actually. They
| were able to loan their generator to their neighbor. We had
| to abandon our house.
| tmotwu wrote:
| Last year, I went on vacation to Alaska. Me and my friends
| airbnb'd an off-grid home/cabin in Talkeetna, about several
| hundred miles north of Anchorage. It was powered entirely
| on solar panels on the roof and right by the house. Water
| from the rivers. Granted, it had a wood stove, like most
| cabin/homes are in the north. Just want to chime in and say
| that renewables are absolutely very prevalent in colder,
| remote climates.
| 8note wrote:
| Miles north of anchorage? How many hours of sun were you
| getting? 3? 1?
| kingaillas wrote:
| I was curious so I used sunrisesunset.com to see.
|
| Looks like at June 21 (picking a day around the summer
| solstice) sunrise is at 4:04 am and sunset is midnight.
| That's a nice 20 hours of sunshine.
|
| On the flip and dark side, Dec 21 it is sunrise at ~10:30
| am and sunset at ~3:30 pm. A sadly short 5 hours of sun.
| Ouch.
| snowwindwaves wrote:
| it isn't that big a deal to run a fridge and some led
| lights on solar pAnels. As you identified heating and
| cooling are the big energy users.
| favorited wrote:
| Solar panels provide less than 1.5% of Texas electricity
| generation, so the fact that they can't be used under snow
| isn't the cause of the deficiency today.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Texas is pretty large and their solar resources are way the
| hell out in Pecos County where it hasn't been snowing. This
| is actual ideal to have your solar power plant far to the
| west of your population centers, to handle the evening load
| peak. If Texas had California-scale solar power
| installations, they would be warm and happy right now.
| HALtheWise wrote:
| In cold climates, solar panels will have builtin heaters that
| makes the snow slide off, but it seems likely that they
| didn't bother to install that for a solar plant in Texas.
| [deleted]
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Turns out you can actually design around that. Heck, my solar
| panels cleared themselves of the foot of snow we received
| (Idaho) without any intervention on my part. If necessary I
| could've gotten up there with a broom and ladder.
| redisman wrote:
| Natural gas plants also had to shut down. This was a
| systematic failure to plan for cold weather,
| gameswithgo wrote:
| i have solar panels in texas, snow slid right off.
| windexh8er wrote:
| Live in MN. We have _a lot_ of solar and wind here. In fact
| solar gets a boost from ground cover snow based on the
| reflective property. Do panels lose out on snowy days or some
| accumulation? Yes, but there 's a solar farm a mile from my
| house that covers probably 40 acres with solar - and I've
| never seen the panels covered.
|
| As for the wind turbines - they work fine in cold weather.
| It's just that with ice build up on the blades the operator
| will force the unit to lock down so it doesn't become
| unbalanced and destroy itself.
|
| Edit: To add some additional color I know Texas is not the
| only state dealing with some rough weather over the last few
| days / week - but for context, where I live, today was the
| first day we broke 0F since February 10th. Yesterday morning
| it was -27.6F in my backyard (Ambient weather station - air
| temp). I'm curious to see what the actual root cause of the
| outages really was in Texas. Curious if it was all naturally
| related or if we see any inklings of strategically timed
| cyber related events.
| azernik wrote:
| Huh. Hadn't thought of the snow-reflection boost.
|
| But yeah, cleaning off solar panels is a totally doable bit
| of maintenance in snowy conditions, or even just tilting
| and coating them so snow falls off. A human with a broom
| could make rover solar panels work for decades on _Mars_ ,
| we can do it in Minnesota.
| windexh8er wrote:
| I've never seen anyone cleaning them anywhere. Pretty
| sure the solar farms either have slightly warmed panels
| that will reduce the friction of any coverage enough to
| leverage the panel tilt - or since a lot of the installs
| will follow the sun anyway they probably have a mode of
| operation to "dump" the panels clean.
|
| I have someone coming out to go over a solar quote I had
| done, so have some new questions to ask!
| ashtonkem wrote:
| The solar panels in my roof shed snow way faster than the
| shingles do. I suspect it's a combo of the angle plus
| them being slick glass rather than rough asphalt paper.
|
| Maybe they're warmed too, I've never actually touched
| them.
| 8note wrote:
| If they're still producing any power, they'll have some
| self heating just through waste.
|
| I'm fairly certain that solar panels catch some power off
| of infrared and the like, so they should still be getting
| a little bit warm. Snow is a great insulator, so that
| heat has nowhere to go but melt base layer of snow off.
|
| After that I imagine it's like a glacier, slipping on a
| small layer of water
| bluedino wrote:
| Wind farms have been freezing up in texas
| jwolfe wrote:
| Yes. That's their point. So have solar farms. And gas plants.
| And a nuclear reactor.
| heurist wrote:
| They didn't invest in the weatherproofing needed for these
| extreme events. It wasn't worth the expense for them to ensure
| that people would have heat if we had a record-breaking cold
| snap (only have to go back 30 years to match the one we are in
| now). I wonder if that equation will change once the state is
| back up and running again.
| ip26 wrote:
| _I wonder if that equation will change..._
|
| It seems like there is no shortage of scapegoats, so my money
| says "no".
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Seriously, there are already disinformation agents hard at
| work across the internet, at least one in this thread. By
| November this cold snap will be tied to Benghazi and a pedo
| ring run out of a pizza joint.
| reddog wrote:
| It will. You can bet on it. The Texas Legislature is
| currently in session (it only meets every other year). Maybe
| a quarter of them will have personally experienced this power
| outage and all of them will have a parent, sister, son,
| neighbor, friend who suffered through it. And while these
| people may not know much about same sex bathrooms, a lot of
| them know a lot about energy. When this session is out
| weatherpfoofing will not be "suggested" or "recommended", it
| will be law.
| tryptophan wrote:
| IIRC solar panels are actually more efficient at low
| temperatures.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Also: I live in Texas and have 100% renewable energy, so I feel
| sidelined by such comments.
| gruez wrote:
| >Also: I live in Texas and have 100% renewable energy
|
| Are you living off the grid, or living on the grid but paying
| for a "100% renewable" provider? If it's the latter it's
| likely that you're only being 100% renewable on a net annual
| basis, and still using non-renewable sources during peak
| hours. https://energy.stanford.edu/news/100-renewables-doesn-
| t-equa...
| fastball wrote:
| Seems like an unnecessary quibble. If everyone was using a
| "100% renewable" provider, would non-renewables be
| consumed?
| saghm wrote:
| It sounds like GP is saying that at current capacity,
| there isn't enough renewable energy to supply all of the
| demand 100% of the time.
| gruez wrote:
| But at this moment people aren't so whether it's actually
| helping the environment is debatable. It's like selling a
| vegan burger that's made with beef but claiming it's
| totally fine because that's offset by some other guy
| eating a plant burger.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| Just an FYI, unless you're off the grid you aren't actually
| 100% renewable. I live in Texas and found this to be super
| confusing when I signed up for power for the first time. If
| you think about it for a second it makes sense that you're
| getting the same energy as the rest of your neighbors and the
| grid is made up of many many different types of power plants.
| The "100% renewable" bit means that when the power broker
| gives a cut to the state that money is used to fund only
| renewable projects. Hope you learned something new today!
| soulofmischief wrote:
| That's how money works. It's a transactional abstraction.
| It doesn't matter how many times it changes hands as long
| as it ends up in the right place.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Think of it like you pay for grain harvested by well paid
| workers. But you don't get that grain directly. Instead all
| the grain harvested by everyone, even underpaid near
| slaves, is put in one big pile. When you go get your 5
| pounds from the pile you are getting the mix from everyone,
| but the well paid workers are the ones earning the money.
| bdcravens wrote:
| The issue is that the plants weren't built to handle these
| temperatures, and the deregulation and political climate in
| Texas makes it difficult to incentive those plants to make
| those changes. (Pre-pandemic) you'll see some random electric
| company setup outside of a grocery store asking everyone who
| walks in what their rate is, and offering to beat it.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Many of those places are calling their customers and telling
| them to cancel their service as fast as possible.
|
| https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/texas-
| power...
| [deleted]
| masklinn wrote:
| > Lots of folks in these comments seem to want to use this
| event to litigate wind vs. solar vs. gas vs. nuclear vs. coal
|
| That's simply not true. The only people "litigating" do so in
| response to dishonest indictments of wind power.
| danans wrote:
| > All of these technologies can and do work well in very cold
| climates.
|
| The technologies can work, but only if measures are taken to
| make them work that way, and those measures are expensive.
| Texas' grid, like most of the nation's grid, is optimized to
| keep prices low for consumers and profits steady for generators
| and distributors, and it's worked amazingly well at that.
|
| But "running lean" is great and everyone wins until you get hit
| with a highly consequential long-tail event (Taleb's Black
| Swan), and then you sometimes get caught without any backups.
| oivey wrote:
| They aren't that expensive, seeing as probably most states
| can operate their power grid at reasonable cost at these
| temperatures. They definitely aren't expensive compared to
| the economic damage of an event like this every 15 years.
| danans wrote:
| "Expensive" is all relative. If it costs say ... 2% of the
| utility shareholder dividend, would shareholders be ok with
| that?
|
| Before this happened, what exactly were the incentives that
| led them not to prepare? Was it really an unforeseeable
| event? Was the risk understood but downplayed (like the oil
| industry with climate change)? The answers to these will
| hopefully come out in time.
| da_big_ghey wrote:
| I've had power out for over a day and am fine. I would not
| pay any more money to avoid this once every thirty years, or
| even once a decade, for a few days. Mostly because paying the
| cost to prepare for one of these is reasonable, but preparing
| for all of them would be very expensive and I will trade
| cheap power for the occasional inconvenience.
| worik wrote:
| It is a valid point of view.
|
| It may be true in a lot of places that we should step back
| from 100% coverage as the cost is just too high, and it is
| better (cheaper) to put the resilience in housholds than in
| utilities.
|
| But your anecdote is just that - a anecdote. We need to
| carefully weigh those options.
|
| Elected politicians have a bad reputation for making these
| trade offs sensibly. I have heard it said (by a fictional
| character I think - no source) that (in popular opinion)
| the present trumps the future every time
| dv_dt wrote:
| Really it means that many many people end up paying for
| safety measures individually - if they can afford them.
| The total social cost is likely higher than building
| adequate infrastructure in centralized places.
| worik wrote:
| Yes. It depends on whether individual house holds pay
| their own way or if the costs are shared.
|
| I guess it would depend a lot of the local political
| culture.
| dminvs wrote:
| Hey great. My blue-lipped toddler is very happy for you.
|
| Hour 42.
| da_big_ghey wrote:
| I get that cold isn't fun, but if that's something you're
| worried about, why not get a small generator or back-up
| heater ahead of time? We had a close call with this back
| in 2011. Unless you're really saying that you want to
| socialize the cost of keeping your toddler warm.
|
| All that aside, I hope y'all stay warm. I know many
| cities are opening warming facilities, so maybe check if
| there's one near you.
| Hiopl wrote:
| > socialize the cost of keeping your toddler warm
|
| This seems like one of the whole points for having a
| society. Ensuring basic necessities like this are covered
| at a marginal cost. But I guess the neoliberal capitalist
| haven of America thinks it's "socialism", and thus evil.
| advaita wrote:
| Hey man, ignore the comment above, I hope things get
| better quickly and ya'll are safe, special the little
| one!
| ghaff wrote:
| The real issue is frozen pipes which can be pretty
| expensive/catastrophic. As someone in New England, if it
| weren't for that, I wouldn't find a power outage all that
| big a deal--at least for a couple days. But frozen pipes
| can lead to $10K's of damage.
| shagie wrote:
| There's a .gif on Imgur -
| https://imgur.com/gallery/yvIAcvB
|
| Its... yea. That's going to be rather expensive.
|
| Also, part of the power problem is frozen pipes - and not
| just water pipes:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/texas-
| pow...
|
| > Operations in Texas have stumbled because temperatures
| are low enough to freeze oil and gas liquids at the well
| head and in pipelines that are laid on the ground, as
| opposed to under the surface as practiced in more
| northerly oil regions. The big question now is how
| quickly temperatures return to normal.
|
| For nuclear... the cooling ponds froze:
| https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/shows/town-
| squar...
|
| > First, Representative Gene Wu, Texas House of
| Representatives District 137, walks us through the
| "cascade" of problems that caused multiple generators to
| go out without back-ups in place. Including, water vapor
| inside natural gas generators that condensed and froze
| shutting down the machines and nuclear power plants whose
| cooling ponds froze, setting off automatic shutdowns.
| Rep. Wu also advocates turning off all non-emergency
| electronics to reduce the strain on the energy grid.
|
| Imagine the fun of having those pipes freeze (this is the
| cooling loop - not the reactor loop so "just" power down
| the reactor - it's not the loop that deals with the water
| that passes through the core).
| ghaff wrote:
| I have a colleague where an upstairs neighbor had a pipe
| freeze and leak because of a crack in the outside
| brickwork. Had to move out for a year. And, for many
| people, insurance won't really fully cover this sort of
| thing.
|
| I often debate if I should get a generator for outlier
| events in a house.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| Thank you for having a sane reasoned look at this.
|
| People use extremely low probably exceptions to attempt to
| radically rewrite the way things are done.
|
| Bad shit happens very rarely. Sometime the best action can
| be just to do nothing.
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| > every thirty years
|
| Climate change says hi.
| jshevek wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| myko wrote:
| People are dying because of this.
| myko wrote:
| This is not hyperbole:
|
| https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/salvadorhernandez/de
| ath....
|
| Folks are dying as a direct result of these
| infrastructure failures.
| bitbearr wrote:
| Glad you are doing so well. There are a lot of people out
| there who are not.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Your perspective is very self-centered. People die when
| power goes out for extended periods like this. Especially
| if the weather is exceptionally hot or cold.
| jshevek wrote:
| The parent stated their experience (one day without
| power) and the willingness to pay more for a specific
| change, they didn't say anything about longer time
| frames. If a single day of power outage will cause a
| person to die, such as those with certain medical issues,
| you must make preparations for backup power. I hope you
| can agree at the extreme that treating the entire power
| grid as if it were a hospital's internal power network
| would be absurd.
| [deleted]
| majormajor wrote:
| "I wouldn't pay any more money to avoid this" is a
| remarkable low cost tolerance.
|
| I would love to know just how much we'd be talking about
| per-customer. Ten cents over ten years? A dollar over ten
| years? Twenty dollars? More?
|
| Without knowing that "I wouldn't pay any more" seems
| foolhardy.
| _jal wrote:
| Well, one thing you know is that poster knows no one
| reliant on powered medical devices.
| jshevek wrote:
| > Well, one thing you know is that poster knows no one
| reliant on powered medical devices.
|
| No, this is simply a baseless assumption made by you,
| with an effect similar to poisoning the well. I know
| people on medical devices, and one day of power loss per
| 30 years is absolutely acceptable to them, give that they
| arranged to have backup power.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| California has rolling blackouts every summer (and
| winter) with power that cost about 3x more than Texas.
| Rolling blackouts also affect hospitals. I think OPs
| sentiment is that overall Texas is a better system.
| Compared to CA I agree.
|
| Now that doesn't mean that it can't or shouldn't be
| improved, but spending 3x more and looking more like
| California is a huge net loss.
| rconti wrote:
| It seems unlikely and reductionist to think that taking
| Texas' existing power system, and investing more money in
| reliability, would make it LESS reliable. But this is
| what happens when you compare two very complicated things
| (different states' utilities) and consider price of
| service to be the only relevant factor.
|
| I'm not familiar with rolling blackouts in the winter in
| CA. And, in fact, I've never been part of a rolling
| blackout, period, in my 20 years in CA.
|
| But the rolling blackouts that some areas experience now
| are by and large due to (fire) risk avoidance by the
| utility, not by generation issues.
| shagie wrote:
| When I was living in California (no, not a large scale
| event - just a suicidal squirrel and power to 8 small
| houses)...
|
| The mother in law of the guy who handled the property
| would fuss at him about his RV. She didn't like it and
| would have loved to have him sell it.
|
| And one day, there was a suicidal squirrel. Took out
| power for six hours. She only has two tanks (1h each) of
| backup oxygen... and shortly into the outage when we
| found out that PG&E would be awhile before repairing it
| he powered up his RV and plugged her oxygen into the RV.
|
| She didn't fuss about the RV after that.
|
| If you don't have an inverter and a long lasting source
| of power, an outage like this can (and probably has) kill
| many people who depend on the consistent power to keep
| their medical devices working.
| bdamm wrote:
| Isn't it reasonable to expect people reliant on powered
| medical devices to include a plan B in case the grid goes
| down? It's not like the grid is perfect. Even in high-
| reliability countries like the USA there are unforseen
| events.
| da_big_ghey wrote:
| Exactly, and it almost certainly makes sense for the few
| people who rely on them to get generators rather than to
| pay to improve the entire grid.
| _jal wrote:
| You can expect whatever you like. But the reality is that
| lots of people don't. Maybe they're short-sighted, maybe
| they're poor, maybe their backup plan wasn't tested to
| best-practice standards.
|
| I'm sure everyone has seen the bit about half the country
| lacking a $400 emergency buffer. You can blame them for
| their own plight if it makes you feel better. Or you can
| blame a skewed economy. Or god, or me.
|
| You're still left with a grid buckling due to
| underinvestment, and a future that's likely to
| demonstrate that this was just a warning.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| If California is a guide, the "optimization" is for share
| holder dividends. PG&E in particular, in the last twenty
| years in particular, gutted needed repairs, a gutting which
| has lead to periodic shutdown due to different bad weather
| (high winds). I don't know the exact situation of Texas but
| if this is a similar situation, I would be unsurprised.
|
| All of this is somewhat conditioned by advancing global
| warming, which _known_ to lead to more severe weather
| conditions (more specifically, with the slowing of the
| jetstream, the polar vortex migrates South, has been doing so
| for the last few years).
| dv_dt wrote:
| In southern california too, once So Cal Edison discovered
| the risk of liability for fires, power has been shut down
| more and more for frequent high wind events.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| I don't know what people expected. You provide an entity
| with certain incentives and it will tend to follow those
| incentives to their logical conclusion. If you make fires
| much more expensive for power providers, and you prevent
| them from charging any more money for the service they
| provide, they are going to have to reduce risk
| elsewherre. They'll do this either by cutting service
| when fire risk is the highest or by doing more
| maintenance, whichever is least expensive.
| cobookman wrote:
| There is little to no fine for stopping service during
| the high wind events.
|
| The incentive pushes them to shutoff, its simply cheaper
| than repairing the grid.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by "people expected".
|
| The power companies muscled into place a system where
| they could scrimp in improvements and pocket the savings.
|
| The disastrous result was devastating fires. The system
| of civil courts still existed so they wound-up liable for
| their despicable maneuvers and has to pay a bit back from
| gains. So their next maneuver was turning off their lines
| when winds got high rather than engaging in the now even
| great expense of repairing them.
|
| PG&E is a literally criminal enterprise, found
| _criminally_ (not civilly) liable for the death of more
| than 100 people (29 gas explosion, 85 fire, etc).
|
| The well-known Judge Alsop rightly denounced their
| vicious chicanery but sadly failed to put them in
| receivership and forfeit the value of their shareholder's
| assets (IMO, shareholder assets should be forfeit and
| previous dividends clawed back but natural they can do
| that to people in nursing homes and Madoff shareholder
| but they can't do it to these shitheals).
|
| https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/05/28/regulators-
| appr...
| dv_dt wrote:
| It's a matter of externalized costs - the company could
| have taken slightly less profits - accounted for the
| known coming of climate crisis weather shifts in the
| decades they've had and made the proper decisions. By
| deciding the way they have, they bring higher regulation
| on themselves.
|
| I expected the correct maintenance costs to be taken on
| to maintain a better than third-world power grid
| availability.
| _jal wrote:
| > a highly consequential long-tail event
|
| Hip jargon aside, planning for low-probability events was
| invented a long time ago.
|
| Unfortunately, so were politicians, who will operate within
| the parameters they are given. If you want real resilience,
| you want better governance.
| jshevek wrote:
| That "hip jargon" is concise, specifies characteristics,
| and clarifies meaning.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| I've lived through years of load-shedding. The biggest difference
| was we were entirely decoupled from the system - well/handpump,
| gas cylinder, overhead tank to store water, ..etc. It's not by
| choice - we just can't rely on any of the city provided services.
|
| Even today, homes are built with an overhead tank and anyone who
| can afford it has a UPS capable of powering the home for a few
| hours under load or a few days if used sparingly.
| daniellarusso wrote:
| My municipality is planning to replace the majority of the
| water supply infrastructure this spring, so I am planning for
| extensive outages and boil-water advisories.
|
| I plan to have a water tank or two with several hundred gallon
| capacity and a pump to service the house.
|
| I would be curious to see a recommendation for a whole home
| UPS.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Where is this?
| ipv6ipv4 wrote:
| A social political decline is what happened and continues to
| happen.
|
| When California encountered power issues, it was easier for Texas
| politicians (and many of their followers) to espouse malicious
| soundbites about Commifornia than to empathize, offer support and
| self reflect on what lessons can be learned and applied locally.
|
| Now that Texas is reaping its own fruits of decades of
| anti-"other side" politics and political mismanagement it's all
| too easy for whatever "other side" to treat Texas with the same
| derision and malice instead of empathy and support.
|
| The government run Texas grid is ill prepared because the
| responsible parties are more interested in playing division
| politics than in governing.
|
| Cold and snow are not novel, it's not a technical problem.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| What can we, private citizens with entrepreneurial skill and
| talent, do to combat this partisan schadenfreude?
| comeonseriously wrote:
| Vote?
| creato wrote:
| Stop giving cover to politicians that think government
| _always_ sucks and private business is _always_ better?
|
| I think that's true _most_ of the time, but not when it comes
| to things like this. Preparing for a once in decades event is
| something private business has a hard time doing without
| getting eaten by more aggressive competitors. The only way to
| get this kind of preparedness is to have it be part of the
| level playing field (i.e. regulation /government).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| What can we do with our unique skills that every other
| American cannot?
| creato wrote:
| I don't understand where you are going with this. I can
| think of two significant things that would make sense to
| do here:
|
| - More transmission lines with the rest of the US to
| spread the load.
|
| - Improve the natural gas infrastructure to better
| withstand freezing temperatures.
|
| Neither one of these things are about unique skills, let
| alone ours.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Get rid of party primaries and move to ranked choice,
| approval, or straight ranked voting, like Alaska did.
| klyrs wrote:
| besides getting a government job and not participating in
| partisanship?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| As a Californian, it is also very easy to espouse malicious
| soundbites about our self inflicted dysfunction...
| ausbah wrote:
| the weather patterns induced by climate change are novel though
| stephencanon wrote:
| Novel, but predictable (and, indeed, they were predicted
| decades ago, which should have given plenty of time to
| prepare).
| [deleted]
| azernik wrote:
| They make weather extremes more common, but those weather
| extremes have always existed.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| No, the extremes not only get more frequent, but also more
| intense.
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads further into regional flamewar.
| We're trying for something opposite to that here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| spamizbad wrote:
| Governing is hard. Owning the libs/cons is fun and easy!
|
| Anyway seems like this storm is so bad Texas would be in
| trouble no matter what, but letting utilities under-invest in
| winterizing and not joining either of the major grid corridors
| just made a bad situation 100x worse.
|
| The good news is this is fixable going forward, and hopefully
| Texans will demand their politicians address it.
| jojobas wrote:
| If you invest in winterizing and the winter doesn't come till
| the next election your opposition will have you voted out.
|
| Yes governing is hard.
| tw04 wrote:
| >Anyway seems like this storm is so bad Texas would be in
| trouble no matter what, but letting utilities under-invest in
| winterizing and not joining either of the major grid
| corridors just made a bad situation 100x worse.
|
| The weather in Texas is in the single digits. The weather in
| Minnesota is in the double digit negatives.
|
| Texas would not be in trouble "no matter what" if they had
| bothered to spend the money on winterizing their power
| plants. They chose not to, and this is the end result.
|
| The roads shut down due to lack of snow removal is completely
| understandable - and quite frankly most people should be
| perfectly capable of surviving in their homes for a week if
| they have heat and water.
|
| The lack of updating power plants so they can function in
| below-freezing weather is just straight incompetence. This
| type of weather isn't some 1,000 year storm. They have
| extended below freezing temperatures on a fairly regular
| basis.
| oivey wrote:
| The most bizarre part is people referring to this as a once
| in a century storm. It's more like a once in a decade or 15
| years storm, seeing as similar temperatures were seen in
| 2011 and 1989. Things that happen on that cadence shouldn't
| result in people freezing for days in their homes.
| ebilgenius wrote:
| From what I understand the average low temperature in Texas
| around this time usually doesn't go below 30-35 degrees.
| Meanwhile the average _high_ temperature around this time
| doesn 't get _above_ 20-35 degrees in Minnesota.
|
| To demand every state spend the same resources that
| Minnesota does to winterize their infrastructure is
| completely unrealistic.
|
| >This type of weather isn't some 1,000 year storm.
|
| Not according to this professor of meteorology:
|
| >"We're living through a really historic event going on
| right now," said Jason Furtado, a professor of meteorology
| at the University of Oklahoma, pointing to all of Texas
| under a winter storm warning and the extent of the freezing
| temperatures.
|
| https://apnews.com/article/2-dead-texas-subfreezing-
| winter-w...
| 8note wrote:
| Is Texas as a state poorer than Minnesota or something?
| What makes it unrealistic, other than laziness?
|
| It's not more taxing on Minnesota to implement the
| infrastructure than anyone else
|
| It's as unrealistic as it is to expect a credit agency to
| encrypt their data, because credit agencies don't get
| hacked
| tw04 wrote:
| >From what I understand the average low temperature in
| Texas around this time usually doesn't go below 30-35
| degrees. Meanwhile the average high temperature around
| this time doesn't get above 20-35 degrees in Minnesota.
| To demand every state spend the same resources that
| Minnesota does to winterize their infrastructure is
| completely unrealistic.
|
| I don't recall saying every state, I said Texas. Because
| this type of weather happens on a somewhat regular basis.
|
| >Not according to this professor of meteorology:
|
| I guess finding a soundbite from one individual isn't
| very interesting to me. The entire state of Texas was
| told in a report in 2011 after a similar storm that they
| needed to winterize their power plants and chose not to.
| If by "historic" you mean "first time in 10 years" - I
| guess? I don't really consider that "historic".
|
| >Ed Hirs, an energy fellow in the Department of Economics
| at the University of Houston, blamed the failures on the
| state's deregulated power system, which doesn't provide
| power generators with the returns needed to invest in
| maintaining and improving power plants.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. It's like "where can I vote for a
| political party that just wants government to _work_. " I know
| that's kind of an amorphous statement, but I do feel like both
| sides are more interested in tribal warfare and ideological
| battles than functioning government. Republicans have long
| derided "government is the problem", until they find out
| citizens _really_ want government to work when it comes to
| things like ensuring reliable power delivery or distributing
| vaccines during a pandemic. On the flip side, I feel like
| Democrats are so keen on social justice issues that they ignore
| policies most people actually want to keep in their cities,
| like a functioning police force and streets not covered in
| homeless encampments.
|
| It's just so depressing that the extremes control more and more
| of the political discourse.
| refurb wrote:
| That goes both ways. It seems like you can't live in CA without
| shitting on the middle of the country despite the govt here
| being in worse shape generally.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jostmey wrote:
| I would say the situation is getting bad. Many of my colleagues
| don't have heat. Water pipes are bursting everywhere. I never
| imagined this would happen in Texas, which from my observations
| was well run compared to other places I've lived
| zamadatix wrote:
| Pipes bursting has absolutely got to suck right now. No power,
| no water, probably not the greatest of roads still, and getting
| everything fixed is going to take quite a while.
| putzdown wrote:
| Please help me understand this. Why is deregulation causing
| suppliers to be unable to charge enough to cover their costs? I
| should think that would be the opposite. " Ed Hirs, an energy
| fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of
| Houston, blamed the failures on the state's deregulated power
| system, which doesn't provide power generators with the returns
| needed to invest in maintaining and improving power plants...
| 'For more than a decade, generators have not been able to charge
| what it costs them to produce electricity.'" How could that be
| correct?
| seanalltogether wrote:
| I don't know the specifics, but decreased regulation and
| increased competition can have the affect of a race to the
| bottom. Without regulation that imposes certain standards, you
| can't afford to protect your business against rare events
| because none of your competitors are doing it either.
| Matumio wrote:
| Not an expert, but if it was a purely deregulated market,
| wouldn't you expect the cheapest supplier to win? The power
| grid is a shared medium, and you get a "tragedy of the commons"
| situation. Everyone profits from a resilient grid, but no
| single supplier has an incentive pay the cost to stabilize it
| for everyone else.
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(page generated 2021-02-17 21:03 UTC)