| Envirowatchers
|
[
Envirowatchers ] [ Main Menu ] |
|
|
|
17541 |
|
|
Date: March 02, 2021 at 11:18:22
From: JTRIV, [DNS_Address]
Subject: The Texas Blackout Blame Game |
URL: The Texas Blackout Blame Game |
|
Interesting article on a topic recently discussed
here.
The Texas Blackout Blame Game
Neither wind power nor deregulation are
responsible for the Texas power disaster.
JOSIAH NEELEY | 2.22.2021 10:00 AM
"If I owned Texas and Hell," Gen. Philip Sheridan
once said, "I would rent out Texas and live in
Hell." He probably was thinking about our hot
summers, but after last week Hell's central heating
is starting to seem appealing. Millions of Texans
were left without electricity, heat, and in some
cases water service.
The Texas blackouts are shaping up to be the
costliest disaster in state history, and the loss of
life remains unknown. People are justifiably very
angry. And when people are angry, politicians look
around for someone to blame. Many have trotted out
their favorite villains for the occasion. Many on
the right have picked Don Quixote's old enemy, the
windmill, while many on the left jumped at the
chance to blame deregulation. Neither explanation
really holds up. While it will be some time before
all the specifics are known, what we do know doesn't
support any easy political narrative.
The central fact about the chain of events that led
to the blackouts is deceptively simple: It got super
cold.
In order to keep the lights on, electric generation
must match demand on a minute-by-minute basis. For
that reason, the system's planners and forecasters
focus their attention on the times of the year when
demand is typically highest. In Texas, that's the
heat of summer. Many features of our electric grid
are designed to work optimally during the summer,
with the understanding that in the winter we will
usually have far more electric capacity that we
need.
The state was not prepared for record cold
temperatures stretching across all 254 Texas
counties. This generated summer levels of electric
demand, and it also caused significant amounts of
generation to become unusable. Because really cold
temperatures are rare in Texas, many plants contain
components that are not protected from the elements.
This is true for generators of all fuel types, from
wind to nuclear. In addition, Texas typically relies
heavily on natural gas to meet its peak electric
demand, as natural gas plants are easier to ramp up
or down on short notice. During the summer that's
not a problem. In the winter, though, gas is also
used for heating, and many gas plants did not have
firm contracts to deliver fuel and had trouble
buying it on the open market. Finally, the winter is
a time when some plants shut down for scheduled
maintenance.
The result: In the early morning hours of February
15, the state's grid operator—the Electric
Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT—found itself
facing a supply shortfall with more than a third of
the grid's thermal generation capacity (natural gas,
coal, and nuclear) unusable. To prevent total system
failure, ERCOT ordered utilities to curtail service,
plunging millions of homes into darkness and cold.
The sheer size of the supply hole makes it hard to
blame either wind or deregulation for the failure.
While pictures of frozen wind turbines may be
evocative, ERCOT's forecasts do not rely on a large
amount of wind to sustain the system—and wind ended
up meeting those expectations. Some have argued that
the low cost of wind power over the last decade has
forced the retirement of more reliable power plants
that could have helped make up the gap had they been
there. I've addressed those arguments at length
elsewhere; here I'll add that many of the recently
retired Texas plants were rendered unprofitable not
by wind but by the fracking-induced fall in natural
gas prices. And given how many thermal plants
failed, it doesn't seem plausible that having a few
more of them would have made the difference.
Similarly, there is little reason to think that
Texas' competitive electric system is to blame.
ERCOT's most recent winter forecast included a
worst-case scenario for the grid that roughly
predicted the needed demand but underestimated the
amount of generation that would be unusable by
almost half. A more centralized or state-run
electric system almost certainly would have relied
on the same forecast and ended up in the same
situation. In retrospect, it's easy to blame
generators for not doing more to protect their
plants from cold. But if a plant had known that
unprecedented cold was coming and had weatherized,
it would now be reaping millions in benefits. The
problem was not a lack of incentives but a lack of
imagination.
One outstanding question has to do with the fact
that Texas maintains its own separate electric grid
(the rest of the continental United States is split
between an eastern and western grid). This has given
the state more control over electric policy, and the
state is large enough that historically not being
part of a larger grid has not been a problem. Would
Texas have been able to avoid its problems if it had
been part of one of these larger interconnects? So
far I don't think we have the data to answer this
question one way or the other. In theory, a larger
geography should help, and while neighboring states
also had to resort to rolling blackouts, they did
not do so on nearly the same scale. However, I've
yet to see any detailed analysis of whether being
part of a larger system would have reduced the
overall number of outages or simply spread them out
over a greater area.
That's not a very satisfying answer, and I'm sure
that there are many decisions made in the days and
years leading up to the blackouts that will and
should be second-guessed. But fundamentally the
blackouts happened because across the entire system,
people did not anticipate how bad things could get.
It was a failure to expect the unexpected.
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
[17546] [17547] |
|
17546 |
|
|
Date: March 07, 2021 at 06:37:40
From: Akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: dishonest |
URL: https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/fact-check-were-texas-leaders-warned-of-potential-power-blackouts/ |
|
“The state was not prepared for record cold temperatures stretching
across all 254 Texas counties.”
The state made a choice not to prepare, despite warnings.
“It was a failure to expect the unexpected.”
No, it was a failure to expect the inevitable. It was a failure to act
responsibly and proactively. Warnings and recommendations were given
and ignored.
excerpt from:
Texas Was Warned a Decade Ago Its Grid Was Unready for Cold
“Federal regulators warned Texas that its power plants couldn’t be counted
on to reliably churn out electricity in bitterly cold conditions a decade ago,
when the last deep freeze plunged 4 million people into the dark.
They recommended that utilities use more insulation, heat pipes and take
other steps to winterize plants -- strategies commonly observed in cooler
climates but not in normally balmy Texas.”
source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-17/texas-was-
warned-a-decade-ago-its-grid-was-unprepared-for-cold
linked article:
Fact Check: Were Texas Leaders Warned About Potential Power Blackouts?
Our weekly check in with the Texas Truth-O-Meter.
From PolitiFact Texas:
Beto O’Rourke said Texas was warned for years about power grid
The massive power outage in Texas that left millions with no heat amid frigid
temperatures should have come as no surprise, according to former El Paso
Congressman Beto O’Rourke.
“Texans are suffering without power because those in power have failed us,”
said O’Rourke in a Twitter thread, calling out Republican Texas Gov. Greg
Abbott.
“State leaders don’t get to say that they didn’t see this coming. Energy
experts and State House Dems, among others, were warning of this for
years. Abbott chose to ignore the facts, the science and the tough decisions
and now Texans will once again pay the price,” tweeted O’Rourke, a 2019
Democratic presidential candidate.
We found that O’Rourke spoke accurately — there had been years of
warnings by energy experts about the state’s power system following cold
weather in February 2011, when around 200 generating units faltered,
causing power outages for 3.2 million customers, according to a post-
mortem of that crisis.
Federal report warned about lack of winterization
In August 2011, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North
American Electric Reliability Corp., wrote a 357-page report about the
February 2011 outage.
The report stated that in 1989, after cold weather caused many generators
to fail, the Public Utility Commission of Texas issued a number of
recommendations aimed at improving winterization of the generators.
However, “these recommendations were not mandatory, and over the
course of time implementation lapsed. Many of the generators that
experienced outages in 1989 failed again in 2011,” the report stated.
The report found that in 2011 “the generators did not adequately anticipate
the full impact of the extended cold weather and high winds.” More
thorough preparation for cold weather could have prevented many of the
weather-related outages, the report found.
There are a lot of similarities between the deficiencies in the grid cited in the
2011 report and those now, said Dave Tuttle, an Energy Institute research
associate at the University of Texas at Austin, in an interview with the Austin
American-Statesman…
Read the full story and see how O’Rourke’s claim rated at PolitiFact Texas,
and listen to an interview with PolitiFact’s Brandon Mulder in the audio
player above.”
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
[17547] |
|
17547 |
|
|
Date: March 07, 2021 at 14:51:41
From: JTRIV, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re:is it? |
|
|
Hi Akira,
But is it dishonest? This winter storm was
unprecedented, far worse that the pervious storms
that have been brought up while discussing
preparation. Still ERCOT seems to have thought they
were prepared, but we must remember that ERCOT is a
non-profit that keeps energy prices low and only
pays for power generation. But ERCOT doesn't
actually own all the power generating stations.
From the article:
ERCOT's most recent winter forecast included a
worst-case scenario for the grid that roughly
predicted the needed demand but underestimated the
amount of generation that would be unusable by
almost half.
And again ironically the corporate owned El Paso
electric seems to have been better prepared.
Cheers
Jim
|
|
|
|
|
Responses:
None |
|
[
Envirowatchers ] [ Main Menu ] |