Re: It's cold
Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2021 9:57 pm
When you get your power back, please go back through this thread to find the first "political" comment (other than the insulting avatars that show up on every post from those who are the worst).wbtravis007 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 16, 2021 9:00 pmNot gonna worry my pretty little head about a substantive response to this. We’re on rolling blackouts and could have an extended outage at any time. I’ve been struggling to keep my phone charged as it is.Beebs52 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 16, 2021 8:30 pmWhere? Other than you and Bob? Sorry, should have included you.wbtravis007 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 16, 2021 8:20 pm
Not sure who started it but if you’re blaming bob many numbers just on his last post for making this political you probably didn’t see or remember some the others.
It’s there if you want to bother to look for it.
Stay warm.
Well, here's some nonpolitical information that puts a different spin on what's happening.BackInTex wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 7:23 am
My earlier comment with facts about the wind turbines being down and gas plants being out for maintenance did not dismiss green energy, did not put blame. Just stated the facts and that it is unfortunate that we lost generating capacity. I never, in this thread, blamed green energy.
If I've missed something, please correct me. It's a shame we can't have a non-political discussion here, ever.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16 ... wer-storm/Failures across Texas’ natural gas operations and supply chains due to extreme temperatures are the most significant cause of the power crisis that has left millions of Texans without heat and electricity during the winter storm sweeping the U.S. From frozen natural gas wells to frozen wind turbines, all sources of power generation have faced difficulties during the winter storm. But Texans largely rely on natural gas for power and heat generation, especially during peak usage, experts said.
Officials for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages most of Texas’ grid, said the primary cause of the outages Tuesday appeared to be the state’s natural gas providers. Many are not designed to withstand such low temperatures on equipment or during production. By some estimates, nearly half of the state’s natural gas production has screeched to a halt due to the extremely low temperatures, while freezing components at natural gas-fired power plants have forced some operators to shut down.
“Texas is a gas state,” said Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin. While he said all of Texas’ energy sources share blame for the power crisis — at least one nuclear power plant has partially shut down, most notably — the natural gas industry is producing significantly less power than normal. "Gas is failing in the most spectacular fashion right now,” Webber said.
More than half of ERCOT’s winter generating capacity, largely powered by natural gas, was offline due to the storm, an estimated 45 gigawatts, according to Dan Woodfin, a senior director at ERCOT.
Attempting to be non-political.Bob78164 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 16, 2021 7:12 pmTexas's state energy folks say that wind turbines have actually exceeded expectations, and that iced-over turbines are the least significant reason for the problem. Low gas pressure seems to be the biggest contributor, followed by iced over controls at gas and coal plants. Blaming wind energy is a right-wing propaganda stunt.mrkelley23 wrote: ↑Mon Feb 15, 2021 10:57 pmI just reposted an interesting post from a friend of mine on FB. I hadn't realized that Texas had basically divorced themselves from the national power grid. And in addition to the frozen turbines, solar panels don't work well when iced over, and gas lines are freezing all over the place. I hope it warms up soon there for all y'all.BackInTex wrote: ↑Mon Feb 15, 2021 12:10 pm23% of Texas' power generation is from wind.
As of Sunday morning 48% of the turbines in Texas are inoperable because of icing. Probably more than 48% now.
Added to that, winter is when a lot of excess generating capacity (gas turbine and coal units) is taken offline for preventative maintenance. So that generating capacity is unavailable in the short term.
That's actually obvious once you think about it and do a little research. Iowa uses a lot of wind energy. So does Denmark. Neither of those locations are known for warm, toasty winters, but they seem to be doing just fine. --Bob
Thanks for the link SSS. I've no argument about what you're posting. No one prior to Bob#s "right wing propaganda stunt" comment pitted green vs fossil energy in this thread.silverscreenselect wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 7:58 am
Well, here's some nonpolitical information that puts a different spin on what's happening.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16 ... wer-storm/Failures across Texas’ natural gas operations and supply chains due to extreme temperatures are the most significant cause of the power crisis that has left millions of Texans without heat and electricity during the winter storm sweeping the U.S. From frozen natural gas wells to frozen wind turbines, all sources of power generation have faced difficulties during the winter storm. But Texans largely rely on natural gas for power and heat generation, especially during peak usage, experts said.
Officials for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages most of Texas’ grid, said the primary cause of the outages Tuesday appeared to be the state’s natural gas providers. Many are not designed to withstand such low temperatures on equipment or during production. By some estimates, nearly half of the state’s natural gas production has screeched to a halt due to the extremely low temperatures, while freezing components at natural gas-fired power plants have forced some operators to shut down.
“Texas is a gas state,” said Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin. While he said all of Texas’ energy sources share blame for the power crisis — at least one nuclear power plant has partially shut down, most notably — the natural gas industry is producing significantly less power than normal. "Gas is failing in the most spectacular fashion right now,” Webber said.
More than half of ERCOT’s winter generating capacity, largely powered by natural gas, was offline due to the storm, an estimated 45 gigawatts, according to Dan Woodfin, a senior director at ERCOT.
We mostly only notice when they underestimate. When they don't, it usually is not considered a disaster. Human nature.silverscreenselect wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 8:04 amI will say that any time that there is a major natural disaster, officials in charge of planning for it always seem to underestimate the potential severity beforehand. That's true regardless of who is in charge.
Prolly, just not as quick. I put some food coloring in ours, just for fun.
Red of course.
Thank You. It was more of a "Grasshopper/Ant" fable analogy. Is there anybody that the "Grasshoppers" would ridicule more than an "Ant" who might say something like-"You know, when we most need the electric grid, it might not be there for us."?BackInTex wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 7:23 amWhen you get your power back, please go back through this thread to find the first "political" comment (other than the insulting avatars that show up on every post from those who are the worst).wbtravis007 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 16, 2021 9:00 pmNot gonna worry my pretty little head about a substantive response to this. We’re on rolling blackouts and could have an extended outage at any time. I’ve been struggling to keep my phone charged as it is.
It’s there if you want to bother to look for it.
Stay warm.
Spock's comment is probably the first that had any "us vs them" tone, but it was not political, just human nature. HIs use of "laughing" term is no different than your use of "jealousy" . Not a political comment but a sociological one.
Well, I have a daughter in school and a wife that teaches school, plus I did not bring my work computer on vacation.Bob Juch wrote: ↑Tue Feb 16, 2021 9:53 pmI would have stayed in Orlando!Appa23 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 16, 2021 8:38 pmMy wife, our youngest daughter, and I just got back from Disney World yesterday, where we had a week of approximately high 70s and low 80s. Quite the change, seeing that it was -21, with -40 wind chill overnight. (Did wake up to see Good Morning America finally do a weather story not about East coast but my hometown. Guy did the demo of boiling water turning to steam in midair, plus showed the steam coming off of the Missouri River, which then iced up bridges and roads near the river
In the span of less than 12 hours, we had three different flight cancellations in trying to return home, and my wife had to fly home entirely separately from us, and we had to fly into Kansas City and have our son drive down to pick us up. (Wife was supposed to fly through Houston yesterday, while daughter and I flew through ChIcago. Fortunately, SWA ticketing agent got her onto a Dallas flight at the last minute, or she may still be in Houston.) Fortunately, no real issue with our car starting up when we went back to Omaha’s airport today, despite multiple days well below freezing.
No rolling power outages where I live, though other parts of the city did, as apparently Nebraska’s public power districts are part of a Southwest power collective, so customers in Nebraska had to lessen power demands to help people in more southern states not be as impacted.
He later came up with a bit of a walkback message, but has since resigned.No one owes you or your family anything; nor is it the local governments responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink or swim, it’s your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn hand out! If you don’t have electricity you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe. If you have no water you deal with out and think outside of the box to survive and supply water to your family. If you were sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your lazy is direct result of your raising! Only the strong will survive and the week will perish. Folks, God Has given us the tools to support ourselves in times like this. This is sadly a product of a socialist government where they feed people to believe that the FEW work and others will become dependent for handouts. Am I sorry that you have been dealing without electricity and water; yes! But I’ll be damned if I’m going to provide for anyone that is capable of doing it themselves! We have lost sight of those in need and those that take advantage of the system and mesh them into one group!! Bottom line, quit crying and looking for a handout! Get off your ass and take care of your own family!
Bottom line - DON’T BE A PART OF A PROBLEM, BE A PART OF THE SOLUTION!
A fair request. There's also this: "To a certain extent, the wind turbines exceeded expectations. The grid operators predict a day in advance how much power the turbines will produce. At many hours of the day on Feb. 15 and Feb.16, wind delivered more power than the engineers at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas had expected." --BobBackInTex wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 7:59 amAttempting to be non-political.Bob78164 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 16, 2021 7:12 pmTexas's state energy folks say that wind turbines have actually exceeded expectations, and that iced-over turbines are the least significant reason for the problem. Low gas pressure seems to be the biggest contributor, followed by iced over controls at gas and coal plants. Blaming wind energy is a right-wing propaganda stunt.mrkelley23 wrote: ↑Mon Feb 15, 2021 10:57 pmI just reposted an interesting post from a friend of mine on FB. I hadn't realized that Texas had basically divorced themselves from the national power grid. And in addition to the frozen turbines, solar panels don't work well when iced over, and gas lines are freezing all over the place. I hope it warms up soon there for all y'all.
That's actually obvious once you think about it and do a little research. Iowa uses a lot of wind energy. So does Denmark. Neither of those locations are known for warm, toasty winters, but they seem to be doing just fine. --Bob
Bob, can you provide any supporting facts to your "Texas's state energy folks say that wind turbines have actually exceeded expectations, and that iced-over turbines are the least significant reason for the problem. " comment? Perhaps a link?
Facts I have are:
Total generating capacity in Texas is around 77.2 Gw.
23.3% of Texas' generating capacity comes from wind. 48% of that is/was offline.
5.1% of Texas' generating capacity comes from nuclear. About 50% of it was offline Monday.
47.4% of Texas' generating capacity comes from gas.
Monday at the worst, it was reported that over 30 Gw of generation was offline.
Doing the math with the above gives:
Wind offline: 8.6
Nuclear offline: 2.0
That is 35% of the offline capacity from 28% of the generating capacity.
If all of the remaining 65% offline capacity were from gas that would mean 48% of gas was offline (this would assume 100% of coal was online).
While the significance of the loss of gas generation is more than solar and nuclear, the performance would be about the same. One difference would be the planned downtime for gas where there was no planned downtime for wind or solar. I don't think three weeks ago "State energy folks" would have said "we expect 48% of our wind turbines to be down in 21 days".
Like I keep telling people now, that's O.K. I don't want to pay for stuff I hardly ever use (once every 5 to 10 years). I don't want to pay for perfect.SpacemanSpiff wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 12:48 pmMuch seems to be made about the Texas wind turbines.
Perhaps a compare and contrast with other places that use wind turbines would be in order?
Like Canada. Or Sweden. Or even the U.S. Midwest. Places where cold is expected.
It seems that the Texas windmills were built with the same concept that Florida houses were built a few decades ago -- with heat pumps that had no strip heaters as backup (to save costs) because it rarely got cold enough to need them (surprising an unsuspecting homeowner when there was the occasional cold snap).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcarpe ... 4c20971f59
You know, it might be a public good, but when the next massive ice storm hits here and breaks thousands of miles of electric poles, followed by an extended cold snap of 40 below-me talking about how electricity is a "Public Good" and being pissed at everybody that my current is out for a week or ten days won't do me any good.SpacemanSpiff wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 12:28 pmOne (now ex) Texas mayor has his own take on the grasshopper and the ant. Or maybe he didn't take governmental economics in college to learn what "public goods" mean.
https://ktxs.com/news/local/colorado-ci ... ebook-post
Colorado City's mayor, Tim Boyd, when asked by his constituency about the electricity issue (and, in many cases, water, since that was affected as well), came up with a swell Facebook post yesterday, since deleted:
He later came up with a bit of a walkback message, but has since resigned.No one owes you or your family anything; nor is it the local governments responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink or swim, it’s your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn hand out! If you don’t have electricity you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe. If you have no water you deal with out and think outside of the box to survive and supply water to your family. If you were sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your lazy is direct result of your raising! Only the strong will survive and the week will perish. Folks, God Has given us the tools to support ourselves in times like this. This is sadly a product of a socialist government where they feed people to believe that the FEW work and others will become dependent for handouts. Am I sorry that you have been dealing without electricity and water; yes! But I’ll be damned if I’m going to provide for anyone that is capable of doing it themselves! We have lost sight of those in need and those that take advantage of the system and mesh them into one group!! Bottom line, quit crying and looking for a handout! Get off your ass and take care of your own family!
Bottom line - DON’T BE A PART OF A PROBLEM, BE A PART OF THE SOLUTION!
My companySpock wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 2:22 pmAt this point, everybody seems to be focused on the generation side of things. As that gets taken care of, I wonder how many transmission (ie last mile) problems will show up. Broken transmission lines and so forth.
I don't know how it works for Investor owned utilities, but all the rural electric cooperatives in the country use the same equipment and supplies so that crews from a Co-op in Maine can go help with hurricane damage in Mississippi (for example) and fit right in with helping out.
I imagine there are calls out to the rural co-ops across the country to start putting crews together to help out in Texas.
With all the broken water lines and so forth, it might be a slower than expected process to get power on-simply in the interests of safety.
RecBackInTex wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 2:58 pmMy companySpock wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 2:22 pmAt this point, everybody seems to be focused on the generation side of things. As that gets taken care of, I wonder how many transmission (ie last mile) problems will show up. Broken transmission lines and so forth.
I don't know how it works for Investor owned utilities, but all the rural electric cooperatives in the country use the same equipment and supplies so that crews from a Co-op in Maine can go help with hurricane damage in Mississippi (for example) and fit right in with helping out.
I imagine there are calls out to the rural co-ops across the country to start putting crews together to help out in Texas.
With all the broken water lines and so forth, it might be a slower than expected process to get power on-simply in the interests of safety.
Builds wind farms
Build transmission lines
Builds natural gas pipelines
Builds oil pipelines
My group within my company builds and maintains electric and natural gas distribution systems
I do kind of know what I talk about.
Texas is a huge cluster right now. But I hope they don’t change too much. It hurts now but we are fine.
It strikes me as somewhat problematic (by which I mean, unfair to the rest of the country) to insist on remaining isolated from the national grid in order to avoid federal regulation, while looking to the federal government to provide relief when one of the results of avoiding that regulation proves disastrous.
Two of my clients are ConEd in New York and Southern California Edison. I'm picking up NiSource next month. I'm happy that I don't have any in Texas.BackInTex wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 2:58 pmMy companySpock wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 2:22 pmAt this point, everybody seems to be focused on the generation side of things. As that gets taken care of, I wonder how many transmission (ie last mile) problems will show up. Broken transmission lines and so forth.
I don't know how it works for Investor owned utilities, but all the rural electric cooperatives in the country use the same equipment and supplies so that crews from a Co-op in Maine can go help with hurricane damage in Mississippi (for example) and fit right in with helping out.
I imagine there are calls out to the rural co-ops across the country to start putting crews together to help out in Texas.
With all the broken water lines and so forth, it might be a slower than expected process to get power on-simply in the interests of safety.
Builds wind farms
Build transmission lines
Builds natural gas pipelines
Builds oil pipelines
My group within my company builds and maintains electric and natural gas distribution systems
I do kind of know what I talk about.
Texas is a huge cluster right now. But I hope they don’t change too much. It hurts now but we are fine.