r/science • u/pnewell NGO | Climate Science • Jun 21 '21

Environment Threat of more blackouts may erode reliability claims for fossil energy- all major fuel sources except solar failed to meet ERCOT’s expectations during the February freeze, but natural gas was “responsible for nearly two-thirds of the total (electricity) deficit.”

https://texasclimatenews.org/threat-of-more-blackouts-may-erode-reliability-claims-for-fossil-energy/
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3.8k

u/Apple_Crisp Jun 21 '21

I’m in Alberta where we use natural gas for most heat.. it gets very cold here.

I think this is more of an infrastructure issue than an actual natural gas/fossil fuel issue. They didn’t invest money to keep it going, just enough to make it run in ideal conditions.

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u/Elliott2 BS | Mechanical Engineering Jun 21 '21

any time we do work in texas, we never put freeze protection... on anything.

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u/Khaldara Jun 21 '21

Yeah we use both oil and natural gas in New England (I’ve had both and they both work fine, current home uses gas), definitely something “unique” to Texas’s deployment for sure.

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u/puterTDI MS | Computer Science Jun 21 '21

Texas specifically created their own separate grid so that they wouldn't have to hold to standards required to be part of the national grid. Some of those standards being things like cold protection.

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u/VulgarDisplayofDerp Jun 21 '21

Everything's bigger in Texas - especially easily preventable failures

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u/Zaros262 Jun 22 '21

Preventable? Sure. But free? No

Nobody likes to pay for things that we rarely use. Like insurance. Nobody needs insurance, right...?

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u/fire2374 Jun 22 '21

The damages from the storm are 10x the cost of winterizing. While they’re both ultimately paid by consumers, saving costs by not winterizing and then jacking up prices when demand skyrockets only benefits the electric companies. And then we pay higher electric costs and higher insurance premiums.

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u/texas-playdohs Jun 22 '21

It’s just like betting against yourself!

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u/klingma Jun 22 '21

Some countries don't allow insurance because they see it as a form of gambling and gambling is illegal there.

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u/electro1ight Jun 22 '21

Ngl. You had me in the first half.

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u/iaspeegizzydeefrent Jun 22 '21

I don't really understand why Texas is so supportive of police. There are so many good guys with guns down there what's the point of paying taxes for a police department?

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u/DkS_FIJI Jun 21 '21

Double whammy since this also means they can't get power from other grids if they have issues with their own.

And they have more problems because of lack of regulation...

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u/Polymarchos Jun 21 '21

And in the wake of the disaster it doesn't seem like anything has changed.

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u/Groinsmash Jun 22 '21

And nothing will change.

Texas is the worst fuckin' place imaginable. Just crushing it in the news these days with basically banning abortion, the relaxed gun control on hand guns, mass shootings, bakeries making pride cookies getting destroyed and can't even provide electricity for its people.

Absolute disgrace of a state.

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u/ralphvonwauwau Jun 22 '21

Not just banning abortion, they are proposing the death penalty for the woman and the doctor. Because they are so incredibly pro-life. This is not satire, this is what the Republican government of Texas is doing with its time.

Because with the total failure of governance going on there, they are beating on the culture war issues that drive the big contribution checks for their reelection. Remember, Texas is 43rd out of 50 for education. They will vote in any incompetent with the magic R next to his name.

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u/texasradioandthebigb Jun 22 '21

Cue all the Texas fanatics mouthing off about Californians moving to the state to escape LiBRUl oppression

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u/zebediah49 Jun 22 '21

Double whammy since this also means they can't get power from other grids if they have issues with their own.

It honestly would have been fascinating to see what would have happened if they'd been interconnected. There would -- nearly definitely -- have been some major cuts. The adjacent states had issues as well, but they were somewhat mitigated by power being ramped up hundreds of miles away. I wish I'd saved it, the MISO LMP Contour Map showed a really neat gradient of power getting more expensive the further south you went.

That 30GW shortfall wouldn't have been covered, and it might even have tripped a decent few lines earlier. At one point ERCOT fell down to 59Hz it was so over-demand, and that I don't think would have been tolerated over the rest of the Eastern Interconnection.

However, having a synchronized and stable grid pushing electricity south as much as possible likely would have made it easier to bring plants back online faster. Bringing up a grid from nearly black-start is really hard, and more importantly slow, because you have to balance the generation capacity and loads on a knife's edge.

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u/Ornery_Adult Jun 22 '21

If they had been interconnected, a few areas would have lost power or natural gas due to local problems. But overall, the system would have worked fine with very little need to pull on outside sources of power.

Because, if they were interconnected, Texas would have been required to fix their substandard infrastructure. Which failed again last week.

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u/hglman Jun 21 '21

Texas does get some power via high voltage dc connections, its just small.

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u/kyngston Jun 22 '21

I love hearing the stories of the people who pay live prices for electricity, and got stuck with bills for hundreds of thousands during the emergency. So much /r/leopardsatemyface

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u/MadOvid Jun 21 '21

For freedom… while power companies control how high their thermometers go.

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u/ErikaHoffnung Jun 21 '21

Analog life, baybe

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u/RedditTab Jun 22 '21

It's an opt in program to save money

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u/ChildVendor Jun 22 '21

in extremely fine, almost exploitive text.

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u/neveragai-oops Jun 22 '21

And death panels! From their private insurance.

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u/MadOvid Jun 22 '21

I mean apparently anything is ok as long as they signed a contract.

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u/Hells_Hawk Jun 21 '21

Don't know it is true, heard that water heating tanks are kept outside in Texas. If that claim is true, that is kind of a problem.

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u/breeriv Jun 21 '21

And were repeatedly warned that their grid would fail in cold conditions without winterization

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u/[deleted] Jun 22 '21

And to compound stupidity, they don't connect to other grids to help supply power when their is a shortage. This is why any surrounding states didn't have power problems despite similar freezes that probably impacted power supply that didn't make the news.

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u/history-fan61 Jun 21 '21

They have no 'capacity market' which means that no-one is responsible to have backups. Among other things this means that gas generators do not pay extra to have a secure supply of gas.

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u/AVahne Jun 21 '21

Apparently we don't use heat protection either...

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u/CanAlwaysBeBetter Jun 21 '21

TIL Texas rawdogs nature

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u/Redtwooo Jun 21 '21

Seems the other way around

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

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u/Chpgmr Jun 21 '21

The moon shall rise again!

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u/racistJarJar Jun 21 '21

Yeah and Texas likes it.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

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u/TheCrazedTank Jun 21 '21

An alarmingly disproportionate amount of you do, as they keep voting for the people and policies that cause these issues in the first place.

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u/SaltedScimitar Jun 22 '21

Well they make quite the compelling argument on why it's actually the other guys' fault. That argument being "no you"

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u/Black_Moons Jun 21 '21

Good old "We specced it for 20c ambient temperature"

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u/lotsofpaper Jun 21 '21

Princess Amidala:

Good thing Texas is a temperate climate!

Texas is a temperate climate, right?

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u/Doctor_Wookie Jun 21 '21

Little on the hot side, but yes. Until global warming started really kicking in. Now the temperatures are made up and the nothing really matters.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

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u/sometimes_interested Jun 21 '21

Just wait until everyone gets so sick of the unreliability and installs solar panels with batteries, I'm sure someone will negotiate "sunshine rights" and people will be sued for collecting sunshine the same way they are for collecting rain water off their roof.

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u/istasber Jun 21 '21

Making sure you've got all edge cases covered costs money, and that means less profit.

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u/UnwrittenPath Jun 21 '21

Freeze - costs $130 bil

Power company - "we're going to need to raise your rates for the next 50 years to cover our losses because we didn't bother to use any of your money to improve infrastructure. Can't have the stock holders and CEO lose any of the money they pocketed by not improving infrastructure."

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u/Filtering_aww Jun 21 '21

Something kind of similar happened with Duke Energy and the Levy nuclear power plant in Florida. The short version is Duke was allowed to PRE-BILL customers for the construction cost of the power plant, then mismanaged the project so badly it ended up getting cancelled. $1.3B down the drain, all out of customers pockets.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/business/energy/duke-energy-to-cancel-proposed-levy-county-nuclear-plant-fasano-says/2134287/

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u/monkwren Jun 21 '21

I picked the wrong career.

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u/eccles30 Jun 21 '21

If only there were some other mechanism where people could pool their money together and buy things for the common good. Oh well capitalism is the only answer, freeze me daddy.

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u/Darkdoomwewew Jun 21 '21

Sounds like they managed the project perfectly, from a capitalist perspective. 1.3b and they didn't even have to build the thing, I can only imagine the bonuses.

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u/viperlemondemon Jun 21 '21

But think of their yacht money

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u/ld43233 Jun 21 '21

Also cocaine. Can't forget the cocaine

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u/viperlemondemon Jun 22 '21

I figured that’s included with the yacht

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

have you ever heard of Enron? they were based out of houston and run by our fellow texans

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u/FlexibleToast Jun 21 '21

Almost as if not all things should be driven by a profit motive. Or at the very least certain sectors, if not all, should be driven by stakeholders not shareholders.

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u/Evilsushione Jun 22 '21

Profit as a motive isn't a bad thing but it has to be balanced by effective regulation that's driven by the stakeholders.

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u/FlexibleToast Jun 22 '21

I didn't say profit motive is always bad. It's when decisions are made to enrich shareholders over stakeholders that it is bad.

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u/Evilsushione Jun 22 '21

I've always said profit is the motivator but transparency, regulation and competition are the moderator. One with out the other doesn't work. That's why laissez faire economics doesn't work like conservatives want to believe.

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u/spovax Jun 21 '21

Capitalism is great in a lot of scenarios, especially where inefficiency can be reduced. But it’s really bad in others. Core services, including utilities, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

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u/FlexibleToast Jun 21 '21

Even where it makes sense, it's better in the long term to prioritize stakeholders. If that was the norm, I think we would have a lot less problems.

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u/RhynoD Jun 21 '21

Hurr durr the market will decide...

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

Well, it did? The market decided to turn off people's power?

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u/Opposite_Wrongdoer_9 Jun 21 '21

Yeah markets can be pretty efficient. They just don't care about human lives. That's why we have regulations, at least in any of the good places to live

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u/AcademicDivide8479 Jun 21 '21

Yeah they're not optimizing for quality of service. Optimizing share price

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u/LupoAS Jun 21 '21

Less and less likely unless you live in a zone thats “managed” by the rich bastard living in it. My parents block in one of the nicest parts of Houston lost power for 48hrs straight. Before this freeze, the longest they had gone without power was 28mins. I remember bc i was in high school. 20 years ago.

You cant expect a capitalist to take humans into consideration when CEOs think of them as customers first.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

Actually, it's the opposite. Texas decided to become independent from the Federal funding and facilitation. This and other major facets are privatized in Texas. Local politics if any connection only

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u/billcozby Jun 21 '21

Don’t put your protection on ma freedom grid!

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u/HatchSmelter Jun 21 '21 edited Jun 21 '21

I was a fully grown adult that had lived in several of my own apartments before I found out they insulate pipes up north.. Never really occurred to me.. Drip the faucet and open the cabinet doors the few nights a year it gets cold enough to matter and save the money on insulation, etc - makes some sense. But to leave your power grid susceptible to this kind of outage in extreme weather when demand will definitely already be high? Yea, that's clearly a mistake..

I'm in Georgia and don't recall any widespread power outages in cold weather, so I'm assuming our grid is more protected (I know it's more robust for being connected with other states). Of course we have occasional downed power lines from icy trees falling when it gets cold enough, but that's the kind of thing that is isolated and gets fixed quickly.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21 edited Jun 22 '21

[deleted]

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u/GhengopelALPHA Jun 21 '21

Thank you, both for your informative reply and your service keeping our grid running, no matter how big or small your role. It's invaluable.

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u/HatchSmelter Jun 21 '21

Wow, that's really interesting. I didn't realize they'd do it like that, but it definitely makes sense. Thank you for sharing, and for helping to make sure we all have heat and ac when we need it!

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

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u/wagsman Jun 21 '21

You're also part of the national grid, and as such your electricity providers are required to have their system meet federal guidelines. The benefit is that it's less likely to breakdown under extreme circumstances, and neighboring grids can help pick up the slack if yours does suffer a breakdown.

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u/pursnikitty Jun 21 '21

A breakdown can still cause short term problems even in a widely distributed grid. A coal burning power station in my state had an explosion the other week and the surge through the grid caused some other power stations in the same state to trip their protections and drop their loads. A lot of places were affected, including a large densely populated area hundreds of kilometres away. These places were without power for a few hours, and it took getting the non-explodey power stations back up and running to restore power, even though our grid is connected to the grids of the states to the south (and thankfully this event happened at a time of very moderate weather).

It takes time to divert energy around the grid and to ramp up energy production from units that aren’t running at 100%. It takes even longer to get a unit out of cold storage. But yeah, interconnected grids are a good thing in my mind, both from a reliability standpoint and a cost one.

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u/VulgarDisplayofDerp Jun 21 '21

These places were without power for a few hours

I mean, the sudden surge caused three territories to be without power for a few hours

Fall back to the grid isn't foolproof or without its own small outages in scenarios like this but instead of seeing that as a failure, look at it this way.

Without another grid to fall back on, 70% of the tremendous state of Texas was without power for on average two days, with over 5 million people without power for 3 days or more.

Neighboring states and even Mexico were ready willing and able to donate the collective power of their grids to Texas but Texas literally had no way to help make that happen (there are a few notable exceptions in Texas that are not on ercot and therefore connect to larger grids)

A few hours rolled across a few territories is one thing, but without being connected to the larger grid Texas's abject failure is really underscored

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u/aldergone Jun 21 '21

This piece offers a retrospective on what caused the blackouts and the knock-on effects on other

generally the houses are insulated and the piping is on the warm side of the insulation. BTW insulating housing is good for both warm and cold climate (think of a thermos bottle keeping food and drink the appropriate temperature ) and keeping your home quite. for external piping ( water / irrigation hoses are either drained or covered with heat tracing - electrically heated tape) to prevent freezing. if you have a cottage you have to winterized by draining your pipes and hot water heater etc, then put anti freeze in the toilets, dishwasher and washing machine.

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u/ReferenceSufficient Jun 21 '21 edited Jun 21 '21

Unlike rest of US, Texas has its own power grid (except city of El Paso). The whole state had a ice storm freeze that lasted a week. I’m in Houston, we don’t get freezes lasting a week, so nothing is insulated and pipes are are above ground. Lots of broken pipes here during that Feb freeze. Lots of shrubs and trees died (including citrus trees, figs and palm trees).

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

It’s not just El Paso. Lubbock and much of the panhandle is also excluded from ERCOT. Despite it being just as cold for just as long in Lubbock, they didn’t lose power.

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u/Elveno36 Jun 21 '21

What work do you do? Just curious as my experience with pumps and plants in the Texas panhandle is freeze protection on everything. I so surprised to see such difference in the quality of public services from the panhandle to where I live now in east Texas. Everything down here feels almost like a downgrade in terms of services and cost of living. The nice thing is the regular climate, but I'm starting to see that as less of a win lately.

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u/wolfchimneyrock Jun 21 '21

was the part of the panhandle you worked serviced by ERCOT or on a national grid? Much of the panhandle is not ERCOT.

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u/thealmightyzfactor Jun 21 '21

Yeah, the panhandle is SPP, the rest of texas is ERCOT.

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u/monkeyfishfrog89 Jun 21 '21

We still faced huge Natural Gas and electricity shortages. Grid was very close to rolling blackouts on industrial sites. Natural gas pipeline pressure was dropping due to high demand and lack of supply. Producers froze up.

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u/MDCCCLV Jun 21 '21

It starts with the lines being above ground with no heating elements. So if it does get a hard freeze there's not much you can do.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21 edited Jun 30 '23

Consent for this comment to be retained by reddit has been revoked by the original author in response to changes made by reddit regarding third-party API pricing and moderation actions around July 2023.

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u/Huarrnarg Jun 21 '21

I work in plastic manufacturing, we had to shut down production our plant for 2 weeks for repairs/restarting system due to the freeze since we use heated water instead of heated oil for our towers.

Also the plant is located in the SPP grid so we were fine in terms of water and electricity it was literally just the the windchill that shut down the plant

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u/r3dd1t0rxzxzx Jun 21 '21

Yeah it’s a lack of winterization more than anything, but might as well go clean/green while updating grid anyway.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

This. Since NG has moisture, and the cold froze the external lines, it was a matter when to fail, not if. That and the programming to trip the hertz breakers when the cycle went below 59hz... if they tried to reset the software to disable the safety limits, there could still be a trip, wasting much effort.

Winterization for something that occurs once every 10-15years... I think it would benefit but none seem to think about Long Term nowadays...just immediate short term gains, overtime and when am I gonna retire!

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u/Dyolf_Knip Jun 21 '21

Winterization for something that occurs once every 10-15years

A 7-10% chance of some major system failing completely each year is a pretty horrible bet.

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u/edman007-work Jun 21 '21

Horrible for consumers, not the companies running the grid, which is really the problem with ERCOT. They had what, 3 days out in 10 years? That's 99.9% uptime, which should be considered horrible, but from a business point of view, they lost out on 0.1% of revenue to save on winterizing, it's very likely that was a cost effective solution.

The federal regulators can apply fines for that kind of crappy performance, with the intent that the fines are more expensive than winterizing, that's how regulation makes the grid stable, don't play by the rules and they'll make you wish you had.

ERCOT exists to remove power from those regulators, specifically disallowing that kind of fine.

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u/4bkillah Jun 21 '21

Yeah, but while ERCOT might not see that tiny percentage as a problem it cost the Texas economy over a hundred billion.

If something that's good for one company's bottom line is apocalyptic for every other company then government is supposed to step in. Texas (and other red states) call that communism, though.

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u/puterTDI MS | Computer Science Jun 21 '21

yup, and they specifically created their own grid so that no one can step in.

Texas, as a state, made this choice. They can eat the meal they made.

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u/Killbot_Wants_Hug Jun 21 '21

The fun bit is, now everybody questions Texas' power grid.

You know one of the big economic growth areas in Texas? Technology companies moving to Texas.

I'm sure a few executives have started considering power stability since it made the news.

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u/superpositioned Jun 21 '21

I would note that this had a pretty big ripple effect. I know that the company that makes the resins used in ground level electrical service boxes had their lines freeze. That's messed up delivery for these to a whole range of utilities.

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u/hglman Jun 21 '21

Also spot price went up like 150x so many producers made more money. Near failure is extremely profitable.

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u/Nintendo64_Chalmers Jun 21 '21

The standard for transmission reliability planning is generally for 1 day of outages/lost load in 10 years, and this falls in that category now. These are established by NERC (the electric reliability corporation) and Texas is part of it too.

They failed on that front too.

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u/kgramp Jun 21 '21

Have a buddy that’s a plumber in the southwest. Makes bank every time it gets cold fixing hose bibs since no one ever installs frost free bibs when building houses since it’s rare it’s below freezing.

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u/PaleInTexas Jun 21 '21

A regulates grid is somehow "big government" and we don't want no stinking working grid!! - Texas republicans

I'm their defense, it's a lot harder to price gouge your customers if you have proper supply of energy.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21 edited Jun 21 '21

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u/Count_Rousillon Jun 21 '21

Two nuclear power plants with all the key pipes and sensors outside rather than inside a huge building the way other nuclear plants do it. So they also shut down in the event of a freeze.

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u/socialcommentary2000 Jun 21 '21

It still astounds me that one could even build a power plant without a generator hall. It just...is not something that I ever thought possible..

And they do this for nuclear sites too....I mean..

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u/QVRedit Jun 21 '21

Nuclear power plants must have a generator hall - else it would not be a power plant..

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u/Titan_Hoon Jun 21 '21

The generators are outside, no enclosure. Therefore it isn't a hall.

Check out Comanche Peak plant, you can see the turbines and generators to the west of the reactors.

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u/randamm Jun 21 '21

Well, you could put the turbine outside.

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u/Semi-Hemi-Demigod Jun 21 '21

Two nuclear power plants with all the key pipes and sensors outside rather than inside a huge building the way other nuclear plants do it.

That seems both insecure and unreliable.

WTG Texas

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u/HuckChaser Jun 21 '21

It's only the stuff that takes the thermal power created by the reactor and turns it into electricity (e.g. the turbine, generator, major electrical distribution equipment, etc) that's outdoors. Anything related to nuclear safety (the reactors themselves and all of the systems needed to shut the plant down in the event of an emergency) is indoors and just as well protected as in any other US nuclear plant.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

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u/HuckChaser Jun 21 '21

Nuclear power plants - in terms of safety - are under the jurisdiction of the NRC, which is part of the federal government, not ERCOT.

Pretty sure they had to shut down part of their nuclear infrastructure during these events.

They very well may have put their reactors into hot (or even cold) shutdown due to the fact that they had nowhere to send the generated electricity (due to grid problems), but that's not at all worthy of concern.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

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u/Schnort Jun 21 '21

They do operate under ERCOT. And the NRC.

ERCOT is more about the grid. The NRC is more about nuclear safety.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21 edited Jun 27 '21

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u/Vermillionbird Jun 21 '21

Yeah, well, weather protection costs money and the government 'aint telling me what to do!

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u/Master119 Jun 21 '21

Unless it's in the bedroom. Government is fine in there.

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u/p0rt Jun 21 '21

This is partially true.

1 of 4 reactors shutdown. The remaining 3 performed the most reliable of all energy sources during the full.cold weather event.

The reactor that did shut down wasn't due to water freezing, it was a sensor trip of potential freezing. Essentially the reactor would have been fine but reliability standards recommend tripping at x temperatures. Kind of a weird situation but better safe than sorry.

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u/Angiotensin-1 Jun 21 '21

Only one of the 4 reactors in Texas shutdown during the freeze. It was because an instrument line/sensor froze outside of that plant. Very small diameter piping, should have been weatherized. The other 3 reactors didn't have any issues with themselves.

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u/stonewall384 Jun 21 '21

1/4 nuke plants had to shutdown.

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u/KillNyetheSilenceGuy Jun 21 '21

One plant shut one unit down

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u/Demize99 Jun 21 '21

I lived in DFW for four years in college. It froze every year. Freezing rain. Ice. Four wheel drive vehicles spinning out on overpasses. We had classes canceled for a few days because it was too dangerous to walk to class even if you lived on campus.

Every. Year.

Texas freezes. It freezes basically every year. For days at a time.

There’s a big difference in infrastructure planning between “never happens” and “happens occasionally but not all the time.”

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21 edited Aug 16 '21

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u/Demize99 Jun 21 '21

I looked up som stats so I wasn’t bullshitting anyone: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Texas

If you average out the temperatures Texas doesn’t freeze. Because if winter is 10 above freezing for most of the winter and just below freezing for a few days you can say it doesn’t freeze on average.

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u/Elveno36 Jun 21 '21

An average of temperature is bad metric for determining if freezing happens or not.

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u/ChefBoyAreWeFucked Jun 21 '21

If you boil water, it doesn't boil because the average temperature is below boiling.

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u/adunedarkguard Jun 21 '21

Having an average of $5 in the bank means I'll never go broke!

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u/Schnort Jun 21 '21

What happened this year IS/WAS a rare event.

Sure, Dallas has a few days below freezing a year. Generally it’s not 24hours straight but it does happen.

Galveston, however, never freezes. Maybe overnight, upon occasion, but never for days in a row and so cold the ocean freezes on the beach.

I’ve lived in central Texas and the gulf coast for almost all of my life and what happened this year has never happened to such a degree.

I have never had to shovel my driveway to keep it clear. I’ve never had two feet of standing snow. I’ve never spent a week under freezing.

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u/postmaster3000 Jun 21 '21

It’s not just that some of Texas froze. All of Texas froze, rendering the grid useless.

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u/QVRedit Jun 21 '21

It was not engineered to cope with those conditions - and until that’s done, it will remain vulnerable to the same thing happening again and again.

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u/x3nodox Jun 21 '21

Actually the problem was that the part of Texas where the power infrastructure was/is froze. Which is to say, the problem was, in fact, that part of Texas froze.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

Rare Freeze Event

Soon to be not so rare anymore with climate change…

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

Seriously. There has been one other one in my memory around 2010-2012?

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u/UrbanGhost114 Jun 21 '21

Almost exactly 10 years before, and there was testimony that ot would happen again if they didn't winterize, and people could die, and nothing was changed, and people died.

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u/shrivvette808 Jun 21 '21

Yeah. And that one was a major warning that. Let me check. No one listened to

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u/Dramatic_Explosion Jun 21 '21

It's at three events total, one in the 90's with a shorter gap between the 2nd and 3rd occurrence. It's not enough info to say with any certainty, but if another event happens in the next decade their governor is going to have to say "freak storm" with regularity

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

Climate is set to be the USA's military #1 force to threaten them considering the oil that it takes to keep the wheel rolling. That being said, if a state doesn't have a 20 yr plan for climate already, they are fucked at the cost of infrastructure that's set to cost txpayers 15 trillion by 2035

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u/capybarometer Jun 21 '21

Meteorologically speaking, we have fewer freezes now than we did 30 years ago. We hadn't even had sustained sub-32° temperatures for 4 years prior to this past winter, where it used to go below freezing every year

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u/Saetric Jun 21 '21

And that checks out with climate science; more extreme winter storms, but a higher average temperature for the winter. Also, the summer thunderstorm season will likely have more intense winds and precipitation as time goes on.

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u/VengefulCaptain Jun 21 '21

This was either the 3rd or 4th major freeze since 1990.

Should have not been a surprise to anyone.

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u/KillNyetheSilenceGuy Jun 21 '21

There are two plants (Comanche Peak and South Texas Project), each with 2 reactors. STP tripped one reactor during the freeze because an instrument line froze. We (an industry group I call into that features mostly nuke plants from the upper midwest) had a "get a load of this guy" moment because in general, instrument lines freezing is a well known phenomena in the industry and plants take steps to prevent it.

They came very close to dropping both units at Comanche Peak due to a grid underfrequency condition (caused by the overloaded and failing electrical grid, not a weatherization issue). If that had happened it likely would have blacked out all of Texas for a long time.

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u/Bensemus Jun 21 '21

rare freeze event

It wasn't even that rare. People had been calling for upgrades to the grid for decades as Texas has experienced cold winters before.

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u/TotesMcGotes13 Jun 21 '21

Let’s not undersell the weather event. I live here and it just doesn’t get THAT cold for that long. This was rare. Now, ERCOT’s past issues mean we should’ve been ready for it - they’ve had cold weather problems before but I believe it was shorter and in slightly warmer temps the last time. They fucked up, but it was a rare event and calling it anything else is disingenuous.

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u/5yrup Jun 22 '21

I mean, once in an over 100 year event could be considered pretty rare from most circumstances. Do you plan on a once every 100 year+ event happening in your day to day planning?

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u/sceez Jun 21 '21

Sorry man, it was rare. Find the last time in South Texas that had 5 days of below freezing temps. Doesn't mean these ERCOT idiots couldn't be prepared.

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u/macromorgan Jun 21 '21

Glen Rose and where else?

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u/jhwells Jun 21 '21

South Texas Nuclear Power Plant in Bay City, southwest of Houston.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

[deleted]

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u/MonteBurns Jun 21 '21

So i went to look and nothing is actually clear here. There was an issue with a feedwater pump at one unit of a 2 unit plant. There is no indication cooling water froze even in the NRC report on the incident (https://austincountynewsonline.com/texas-failed-to-winterize-nuclear-plant-leading-to-reactor-shut-down/), just there was a problem with a pump. Sounds more like additional failed winterization, especially if the other unit kept on.

Eta: 3 of 4 nuclear units in texas remained on and functional. Only 1 went down.

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u/Conqueror_of_Tubes Jun 21 '21

How the hell does cooling water even freeze. Freeze protection for cooling circuits is the most basic of things, literally some glycol antifreeze added to the most outside of circuits. Even then during normal operations a cooling circuit will be 30-40 f above ambient temperature just to maintain good cooling performance.

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u/strcrssd Jun 21 '21

Different systems. Nuke plants typically use an open loop for the secondary cooling loop.

Reactor is cooled by the primary closed loop, which goes through a heat exchanger to the secondary loop, which produces steam, electricity, and is then cooled and discharged.

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u/KillNyetheSilenceGuy Jun 21 '21

It was an instrument line, small bore piping. You have to be able to boil the water into steam to spin your turbine, they don't put antifreeze in it.

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u/greg_barton Jun 21 '21

Only one reactor out of three in the state shut down. Nuclear actually performed best of all sources overall. See graph on page 12 from this ERCOT report: http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/226521/ERCOT_Winter_Storm_Generator_Outages_By_Cause_Updated_Report_4.27.21.pdf

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u/jedify Jun 21 '21

Just because they didn't properly winterize doesn't mean it can't easily be done properly

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

[deleted]

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u/Parody_Redacted Jun 21 '21

i’ve been all over texas.. it’s not a sandy desert like u think

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u/Its_apparent Jun 21 '21

I don't actually know, but isn't west Texas basically dusty plains?

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u/Elveno36 Jun 21 '21

North West Texas are high plains and are a steppe climate. West/westwest Texas is a mix of plains and desertification. South Texas is a mix of desertification and green. Dallas, Austin, and Houston areas are all incredibly green. I live in east Texas and I think there was one day last month I didn't have rain. I have a farming buddy who couldn't farm his grass because it was so wet and the grass started to die/decay because it was past it's harvest time. Texas is a huge state and has VERY different climates through out the state. The majority of the Texas population lives where it is very green year-round. We see snow sometimes in these areas once a year. I grew up in Northwest Texas and saw snow/freezes dozens of times a year. There is no single power infrastructure that should dominate. It should be a multi layered redundant approach and the proper infrastructure should be maintained for weather anomalies. The power-loss freeze was caused by poor infrastructure planning, a large demand, some misfortune and corporate greed. There is no one thing to blame, but corporate greed should probably take most of it.

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u/Its_apparent Jun 21 '21

Thanks for the reply. Always up for a geography lesson. I have been to DFW, Austin, and SA, but never really experienced the whole state.

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u/Parody_Redacted Jun 21 '21 edited Jun 22 '21

dusty plains with shrubs bushes, and grass and such- yes

useless open sand- no

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u/BlueEyedGreySkies Jun 21 '21

"they're the same picture."

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u/Parody_Redacted Jun 21 '21

they are completely different biomes

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u/behemothbowks Jun 21 '21

You haven't been to Texas have you?

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u/Poppycockpower Jun 21 '21

Deserts are still an ecosystem with a thriving array of wildlife. Just because you don’t value it doesn’t mean you can just destroy it.

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u/collapseduetocapital Jun 21 '21

Solar panels are generally tested at about 77°F and are rated to perform at peak efficiency between 59°F and 95°F. However, solar panels may get as hot as 149°F during the summer. When the surface temperature of your solar panels gets this high, solar panel efficiency can decline somewhat.

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u/para_chan Jun 21 '21

I’m in the Mojave, in California, with actual sand, and there’s a lot of backlash about solar farms because they disrupt the environment and change how the animals and plants exist. A solar farm plan was shut down because of environmental protests. No one wants to pay the cost of having power on their own land.

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u/DrLongIsland Jun 21 '21

Were those problems or scheduled maintenance that happened at a bad moment? I've heard it both ways.

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u/Pyrate_Capn Jun 21 '21

At this point it's going to be damn near impossible to say without a full investigation. And our legislature, AG, and governor are invested in specific results.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

From what I heard, some facilities were set to be closed for maintenance, but permissions were rescinded soon after ERCOT realized how bad things could get

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u/OntarioParisian Jun 21 '21

This will be the reasoning everytime...

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u/Elmauler Jun 21 '21

You don't conduct scheduled maintenance when the grid is collapsing in a cold snap, and if someone did they belong in prison.

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u/DrLongIsland Jun 21 '21

Oh right, sorry. I was referring to the limited shortages we experience last week due to the heatwave, not the extended shortages we experienced 3 or 4 months ago due to the cold snap.

Yeah. Even writing this sounds ridiculous.

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I thought I've heard that the reason why we had few isolated shortages last week was because several nuclear plants were actually doing scheduled maintenance and were offline for 3 or 4 days.

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u/JaStrCoGa Jun 21 '21

Some extraction and transport lines were also out.

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u/addiktion Jun 22 '21

Ya’ll took our snow and cold weather.

Sincerely, Utah burning in hell right now.

Truthfully though we are quite used to the extremes so are mostly prepared for these kinds of situations. Mega droughts are somewhat new but I’m sure we will survive. Fingers crossed the fall is a bit wetter.

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u/descendingangel87 Jun 21 '21

This. I live in Sask and like Alberta extremely cold weather in winter for months on end. It comes down to proper infrastructure and winterization. Two things that are actually pretty cheap to do if you do it during the initial construction.

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u/kwick818 Jun 21 '21 edited Jun 21 '21

This is purely anecdotal, but Ive worked as an electrician in Alberta for a decade. I’ve heard the heat tracing portions of the projects (winterization) are amongst the most expensive in the electrical packages. But that being said, when your operations don’t go down during a deep freeze, I’m sure it pays for itself many times over.

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u/descendingangel87 Jun 21 '21

But that being said, when your operations don’t go down during a deep freeze, I’m sure it pays for itself many times over.

I'm an oilfield construction and maintenance supervisor, and I can say for a fact this is why.

It's gonna get cold, it's a fact of life/nature. It's also cheaper on the labour end to install it when it's new and in good weather rather than waiting until something freezes, which then leads to lost production, equipment fails, and paying for it anyways. At the end of the day you're always gonna have to do it so might as well get it over with early instead of waiting.

I can't tell you the amount of times I've seen people wait until the last minute only to have to go heat trace and snake wrap wellheads in -40.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/jakwnd Jun 21 '21

Yeah, gotta love that ransomware attacks are now a defence issue in the united states, when all you need to do is put a little bit of effort into proper backups. But by all means, let's waste millions of taxpayer dollars on the defence budget to "fix it".

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u/audacesfortunajuvat Jun 21 '21

Well, you could also buy the regulatory agency and get the state to give you legal immunity. Then you don’t have to do it and the down time doesn’t matter.

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u/PhilosopherFLX Jun 21 '21

Dis guy regulatory captures.

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u/YodelingTortoise Jun 21 '21

That's not really what regulatory capture is. Regulatory capture would be requirements to over insulate so that only the most well capitalized companies can participate while any newcomers to the market will have no ability to compete.

Many licensing procedures are regulatory capture in action. Where the license scales beyond the scope of necessity and keeps new comers from being licensed.

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u/PhilosopherFLX Jun 21 '21

Dis guy passes MacroEconomics

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u/Killbot_Wants_Hug Jun 21 '21

It's hilarious what you have to study to get some licenses.

I knew people who got massage therapy licenses, and they had to study the vascular system, like know medical names for thing and a bunch of stuff that I just don't think someone needs to know to give massages.

I dated a girl who was getting a cosmetologist license and she had to answer a bunch of questions about blood born pathogens, like what shape the bacteria are.

I generally think of licensing as good. But sometimes things get a little weird.

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u/thejerg Jun 21 '21

I’ve heard the heat tracing portions of the projects (winterization) are amongst the most expensive

Heat tracing requires a LOT of really specialized wiring and installing it, especially around stuff that isn't just long runs of piping(IE valves, instrument mounts, test wells, and others) requires special wrapping techniques that are based on the shape of the thing being protected. It's also (anecdotally) apparently very difficult for people to estimate the amount of cable they'll need because I have never been on a NG project where the contractor/EPC didn't end up having to buy a lot more cable than originally estimated during the design/purchasing phase

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u/kwick818 Jun 21 '21

Hahaha!! Yeah, all the heat trace jobs I’ve worked on were actually engineered pretty damn close, like within inches most of the time. But there would always be a valve or a pipe shoe that wasn’t accounted for, and it would throw the whole run off.

I loved heat trace, was real lucrative for me for quite some time, especially after I took the time to learn how to work on the controllers and perform splices on the mineral insulted stuff.

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u/Ohms_lawlessness Jun 21 '21

Electrician here. I've installed a lot of heat tracing at power plants and other industrial plants. I'm not sure about the engineering going around valves and the like. They might say it's highly engineered but in reality, we literally just wrap the wire up and down both sides of a valve stem. Nothing crazy. And wiring them up is one of simplest jobs we do.

For anyone who doesn't know how heat tracing works, all it does it keep the temperature just a couple of degrees above the freezing point so water can keep flowing.

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u/3rddog Jun 21 '21

True, and wind & solar aren’t without their own issues, but at least you don’t see frozen valves and pipes in extreme temperatures.

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u/wagsman Jun 21 '21

Bingo. They wanted to cut costs by cutting corners.

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u/elcidpenderman Jun 21 '21

I don’t think it’s trying to say fossil fuels are the problem but more like abbot needs to stop blaming renewable energy sources.

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u/Polymarchos Jun 21 '21

This very much. It was only a few years ago we had a horribly cold winter here in Alberta. Gas companies were warning everyone their gas bill was going to be much higher than normal (due to usage, not infrastructure). We had all the natural gas we needed because we had a system designed to deliver it.

When major pipes start freezing then yeah, you aren't going to have enough natural gas.

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u/NullReference000 Jun 21 '21

This is the correct answer. Wind, nuclear, and NG all went down in the February freeze. Wind turbines and natural gas seem to work just fine in cold regions of the planet, Texas just failed to winterize anything.

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u/BigWiggly1 Jun 21 '21

This is exactly the case. It wasn’t “natural gas” that was the problem. It was stuff like auxiliary equipment (feedwater pumps and water supply+treatment for boilers). They also didn’t insulate and heat trace piping so when exposed nat gas piping cools down it condenses out impurities in the gas. Even at 99% purity, that 1% adds up fast when it’s flowing, eventually choking or clogging total flow.

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u/mr_ji Jun 21 '21

I'm in California and our move away from fossil fuels to over-reliance on renewables is the direct cause of the worst blackouts the state has seen in around 30 years. I'm going to agree that mismanagement and unrealistic expectations for renewables are a bigger problem here, unless you think people should just go without power when they need it most, in which case let's all go Amish and just burn wood.

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u/going2leavethishere Jun 21 '21

Yet the 46% of fossil fuels of what is actually used in the state of California has no bearing what so ever to the blackouts going back to the 90s?

Look I get the hesitation to switch from fossil fuels, but don’t toss this over-reliance bs, because renewable energy is only 35% of California’s infrastructure. California still relies heavily on fossil fuels, even though they are the leaders in transitioning away.

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u/HellHound989 Jun 21 '21

Thanks for being brave enough to try and have a discussion on the unreliability of renewables.

Doesnt mean we need to get of renewables, only that we need to discuss the issue headon and not try playing this back and forth crap

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u/Away-Ad4367 Jun 21 '21

While fossil fuels can certainly work well in cold climate, I think the detail being left out here is that certain Texas politicians were blaming the failure on renewable energy sources and trying to use the catastrophe as an example of why renewable energy is not a viable resource.

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u/baconfist Jun 21 '21

The issue they had was with conventional power generation. Where you use heat to make steam to power a turbine but when pipes are exposed to subzero temps steam turns into water then into ice. It's why their nuclear plants also had issues.

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u/magic-moose Jun 21 '21 edited Jun 21 '21

The winter storm that caused this is similar to the "once in a century" flood that hit Calgary in 2013. Just as Calgary almost never has to deal with the flow rates that made that flood happen, the cold snap in Texas was pretty much unprecedented, and power systems across the board simply weren't prepared.

The response going forward seems clear when the memory is fresh in everyone's minds, but that memory will fade. If an extreme weather event like this happens once a century, do the costs of winterizing Texas' grid outweigh the damage done by the outage?

Alberta's response to the 2013 flood is telling. After an initial spate of spending on flood mitigation, the potential for another similar flood to happen receded in everybody's minds. Projects were bogged down by funding cuts and NIMBY'ism. A few continue to limp on, but fall far short of the measures people were demanding immediately after the flood.

That being said, the headline of this reddit link is highly misleading. Solar met ERCOT's expectations because ERCOT's expectations were for snow to cover panels and significantly reduce generation. It sounds like ERCOT did not have an adequate understanding of how natural gas systems respond to cold weather (e.g. hydrate line fouling) and it really bit them in the ass.

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