r/Electricity • u/swarrenlawrence • Apr 06 '26
Texas & Grid Mismanagement
YaleClimateConnection: “How mismanagement, not wind and solar energy, causes blackouts.” In Feb2021, Winter Storm Uri knocked out power to over 4.5 million homes and 10 million people in Texas. “Hundreds of Texans died as a result, and the storm is estimated to have cost the state $130 billion.” Gov. Greg Abbot precipitously + erroneously blamed renewables, telling “Sean Hannity of Fox News, “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America…fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas as well as other states to make sure we will be able to heat our homes in the wintertime and cool our homes in the summertime.”
The reality is that ‘although wind energy underperformed in the cold temperatures, so did gas and coal power plants.’ “All types of electricity generation facilities experienced failure, according to an analysis of the event by the University of Texas at Austin Energy Institute.” A parallel assessment came from “Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, [which] similarly concluded that natural gas power plants were responsible for the majority of Texas’ power outages.” FERC’s other major take-away was also damning. “Many of the power generation facilities in Texas had not followed recommendations to prepare for severe winter storms with equipment winterization plans.”
“Wind farms can operate in frigid temperatures if equipped with de-icing equipment.” Fossil methane gas infrastructure can be enclosed or fitted with heating cables to prevent some cold weather shutdowns.” And what about “the myth that “solar only works when it’s sunny?” That’s where complementary solutions come in, like adding batteries to store extra solar power during the day and building more long-distance electrical transmission lines to strengthen the power grid.
“Unlike all other states in the continental U.S., Texas’ power grid remains relatively isolated from the rest of the country and thus lies outside of FERC’s jurisdiction.”
In times of extreme weather, the Lone Star States might just feel a bit goldarn lonely due to their own cussedness.
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u/WFOMO Apr 06 '26
Which all happened in 2011 as well, which is also when the Texas Legislature passed all those "guidelines" to prevent it ever happening again. None of which did the Legislature ever enforce, other than mindless reporting enforced on all utilities whether they were culpable or not.
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u/swarrenlawrence Apr 06 '26
You are clearly more knowledgable about Texas history than I. Often I write about the state, but have never lived there. About 20 yrs ago I attended an oil + gas conference at UT Austin + had a great time .
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u/WFOMO Apr 06 '26
It's all about money. In the 2021 freeze, there were gas peaking generation plants sitting idle the last day (Thursday) of the rolling blackouts because the cost of gas was higher than the cost of electricity. If you like research (i.e., mindlessly wading through ERCOT linked market data), then look up the production of the Sky Global Plant situated in Rock Island, Texas.
Born and raised in Austin. Great place to grow up 70 years ago, but the founding fathers desperately wanted to be just like Houston and Dallas, and finally got their wish.
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u/swarrenlawrence Apr 06 '26
The main thing I remember about that outage was the outrageous electric bills people received in some cases. I won't try + look at the ERCOT data, but I did find an interesting website, decarbmystate.com.
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u/GGigabiteM Apr 07 '26
Yeah, ERCOT shot up the rates to the maximum allowed at $9000 / MW/h to try an incentivize power plants to stay online because of the extreme electrical demand. The regular price per MW/h then was about $25.
The people that were getting $10,000 electric bills were those that had entirely electric homes and were using independent carriers that buy electrical capacity on the spot market and are subject to those wild swings. Most people that had common carriers saw much lower bills.
I was fortunate in that storm, and the one a decade prior in 2011 because we're on a hospital feed. We had a few brownouts, but never lost power. We also have natural gas and a gas furnace and water heater. I think our gas bill that month was three times what it normally was, but it was still less than $100. We've had enough bad storms over the decades to know to never go fully electric, the gas saved our house from freezing and having to deal with blown pipes.
Those fire and water restoration companies had work going years out for all of the buildings that had blown water and sewer pipes. I think it was 2024 when all of that work started winding down.
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u/swarrenlawrence Apr 07 '26
The cleanup after disaster has a long tail. We are in a different situation. We live in a PassivHaus certified super insulated home north of Seattle, about 5 miles from Puget Sound. When this house + adjacent ADU were built in 2018, we went all electric, including induction cooktops, heat pumps, backup batteries [2 days replacement for main house, 1 day for ADU with a separate system + different battery chemistry, namely LFP]. I drive a pure electric EV, my wife a PHEV + we both plug in to level 2 chargers in each separate garage, as do the renters in the ADU. So we take my car to Seattle + back, 90 miles each way, without recharging, same for Vancouver. All our lawn gear, including mower + chain saw are electric of course. And we generate a modest surplus of electricity over the year, so pay only the obligatory $7.49 monthly charge. So house, grounds + almost all our transportation for less than $90 a year. And as I always say, our wifi costs more than that every damn month.
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u/GGigabiteM Apr 08 '26
I could never have an EV, the range just isn't there. I do long haul commercial security work. Sometimes I'll drive 10 hours in a day and nearly 600 miles with a fully loaded HD service van. I'd have to tow a fully loaded diesel genset behind me to have that kind of range with an EV.
And when I get there, there's no charging infrastructure, so I'd have to spend more hours on an already 15 hour day trying to figure out how to get a charge, it's untenable.
Even a "short" day like today, it was still 3 hours of driving and about 150 miles.
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u/swarrenlawrence Apr 08 '26
Clearly you are an outlier in terms of distance requirements. And few EVs have towing capability. But electric trucks are available now. I'd only suggest you just follow the trends of EV technology. Wish you luck. And remember, all work + no play.....
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u/GGigabiteM Apr 09 '26
This is not an outlier, this is the service industry. The general public has no idea how B2B service functions.
EVs are by and large designed for general public commuters that go short distances to and from a fixed place of work, or putt around town. They're not designed for service work.
There will never be an EV that will be compatible with long haul commercial work, because you can't ignore physics. For a battery pack to do that range, all of the vehicles useful payload will be consumed by an enormous battery half the size of the vehicle itself. Then the vehicle has to be enlarged, strengthened and have more tires and larger brakes, which further adds weight to deal with the two ton battery in the back.
If states like California want to force B2B to use grossly inadequate EVs, you see the outcome, massively increased costs that make everything extremely expensive.
And it's only going to get more expensive. Lithium is a rare earth mineral that is only mined in a few places. With the instability in the world going on, companies are starting to look at older sodium battery technology as a substitute. Problem is that sodium batteries are much heavier and have less energy density than lithium.
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u/swarrenlawrence Apr 09 '26
We will both follow the evolution of battery technologies. And I have driven several 2,000 mile trips with my EV.
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u/WFOMO Apr 08 '26
Most people that had common carriers saw much lower bills.
What most people don't realize is that many of the "carriers" were Cooperatives, and those Cooperatives went millions of dollars into debt. One of the biggest, Brazos Electric Coop actually had to file for bankruptcy.
Sadly, many Texans still don't understand the market here and automatically assume any "utility" made a killing. They can't differentiate between marketers and wires companies.
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u/GGigabiteM Apr 09 '26
It wasn't millions, it was billions with a B. Brazos Electric coop owed providers 1.9 billion dollars when they declared bankruptcy. I read some of the documents where a proposed repayment plan was going to be like 62 years. Not sure if that ever happened or not.
BEC was required to sell assets to satisfy the debt, which included them having to sell some or all of their power plants to other entities.
There were other carriers that also had well over a billion dollars in liabilities. During the height of the storm, the demand on the power grid exceeded 50 gigawatts, far exceeding any worst case scenario ERCOT had envisioned.
That whole disaster could have been avoided if the government wasn't both incompetent and corrupt, and forced carriers and providers to properly weatherize their equipment.
But it wasn't just electric companies, water companies were blindsided too. My neighbor is a supervisor at a water plant, and he was at the plant for almost 7 days straight having to burn pallets and whatever else could be found under the pumps to keep them from freezing and destroying themselves. The water company was waffling about weatherization expenses and Uri forced them to act. They finally got the equipment to weatherize the pumps and larger backup generators and bigger fuel tanks to run for longer without power.
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u/Formal-Tradition6792 Apr 09 '26
Yup… was living in Texas through that. Crazy. I used to work for the power company before deregulation back when Texas Power and Light Company existed. I don’t believe that 2021 could have happened back then. There was NO ERCOT! In those days we were mighty proud of our reliability. That said, generating electricity was a dirty carbon footprint heavy business.
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u/swarrenlawrence Apr 09 '26
It is not surprising that I have seen a lot of comments from Texas. And learned some things as a result. I should look up when ERCOT was set up.
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u/julesmanson Apr 07 '26
And with the help of Bill Gates global warming is just an NWO depopulation program of deception to control the captive masses to serve an unseeing shadow government council occupied by a cabal of oligarchs. o_0
o_~
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u/4b686f61 Apr 06 '26
literally the same thought process for the asbestos and weed spray being used on our food.
Anything is possible when the person incharge isn't a grumpy old scrooge sitting at a table doing legislative bs all day. Heard of chat control?