2020-21 Winter weather; bring it on

[atomheartbevo 90077]

[Brisketexan 105614]

Friend in Frisco posted this.
 

That don’t make no sense....where’s the spiral staircase?

[atomheartbevo 90077]

 

[clapclapclap 9000]

1 hour ago, hookemATL said:

Ignorant cuntwaffle neighbor on hour 96 of keeping these lights on. Even during the day they stay on. Any creative remedies for this jort wearing puddle of zebra jizz?

Don't shoot a light out, you might shoot your eye out.  Or end up in jail.

Try to talk to them first:

 

[Biff Tannen 45774]

5 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

 

Just went out again in 78751. Had an hour and 10 min almost exactly. 

Edited February 18, 2021 by Biff Tannen

[bolverk 29826]

9 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

That don’t make no sense....where’s the spiral staircase?

Start at 1:08 but the whole thing is worth watching.

 

[Brisketexan 105614]

 

Yeah....they’re lying.

[Okie State 3865]

thanks.  I guess I should do it but if they are frozen does it matter?  did you do anything with your water heater(I have gas)?
did you rewrap them?

Mine drained so I guess they weren't frozen. I'd think it would release some pressure if they were frozen, but I don't know.

I turned my water heater to pilot mode. Not sure if that's necessary, but I'd at least turn it down.

I did rewrap, but I don't really know why.

[phdhorn 6224]

Update:

POWER!  Yes, they finally got it fixed.  It wasn't a grid shutoff but a faulty transformer or something. No doubt the snow/wind on Sun. night knocked it out.  Terrible timing.

I feared that since it was mechanical that we would get lost in the pigeonhole with all the focus on grid routing, etc.  So I wrote our mayor and city manager and said plz haz not forget us.  Manager wrote me back and said that they'd fwd it to AE Field Operations. He was on it and found that if he flipped us onto the grid it wouldn't make a dent (only 160 homes).  So he sent the crews out this evening, it took them 3 tries to get us lit up (apparently the hardest part about re-entering the juice is to make the initial connection - think of pull starting a lawnmower or something).

Anyway, my thoughts, prayers, and heart goes out to you still in the cold/dark.  45 straight hours is enough to feel like I've earned my cred badge, but some of you are hitting near 70, trust me, I understand the madness.  If you have anyone to help take you in for a few hours even, and get warmed up, take it.  It makes a big difference.

Now tomorrow I have to go out and re-pressurize all my water, hopefully it'll work (was working great until the power cut off).  A little afraid of the spigots, since they likely froze again, but inside not too worried (I depressurized it).  Will try to defreeze the spigots tomorrow and SLOWLY pressurize the house.  Hopefully my pipes held and there won't be a weak spot.  We'll see.  One day/crisis at a time, right?

Weather Update:

I can type now on my desktop, and by now I'm sure the weather is almost academic... stop telling me about the fucking snow/cold, etc. Yep, I get it.  I'm sick of it too.

All I'll say is that this next, last storm will hit hardest in counties west and south of ATX (Uvalde, Blanco, Kendall, Comal, Bandera, Kerr, etc.  However, the very northern belt of mostly snow (maybe starting out as sleet) will graze Travis.  SW part of county maybe 2-3 inches, NE part, maybe 1-2 inches.  North of that, a dusting.  This is a southern-tracking storm.  However, I realize that who gives a shit, I'm sick of snow by now, even 1/2 fucking inch.

Yeah.

So let's talk about temps:

- Thurs day forecast calls for about 35° ATX, but like almost all of the last 7 days, probably high; instead, probably at or near freezing for ATX, 2-3 degrees below on W/N sides.  Normally stuff would melt like today, but with the precip coming down, probably a wash.  Thurs night unfortunately a colder night than tonight, lows around 22° ATX. probably about 20° N/W.  Geez, have we gotten so used to this now that that seems warmer than it used to?  Anyway, hang on one more night.

- Fri day noticeable warm up to mid-40's.  This will be a significant melting day, enough to get the secondary streets passable (and the food and gas riots to begin in earnest - but it's a step forward).  Fri night sorry, another cold one (about 22° ATX).  But after all-day melting, this will be easier to deal with.

Then unicorns and rainbow:
 

- Sat day near 50°, decent!  But the big thing here is that Sat night, above freezing!!! Lows about 37°.

And from there on the temps stop fucking freezing, for good - night and day!!  Fuck off you fucking cold bastard.  Go back to the Fucking North Pole, where you belong.

- Sun-Tues:  50's/30's
- Wed-Fri: 60's/40's (normal!!)

And, a week from this coming Saturday, we'll be near EIGHTY FUCKING DEGREES.  Please chase that Polar Vortex bastard out of Texas and bury its corpse at Santa's Workshop!

That's it.  Continued T&P's for the Big Melt and as little damage as possible.  Talk to you all later.  God bless, esp. those who haven't gotten warm in the last EIGHT days.  It's coming!


 

[Chopper 17362]

ERCOT

https://www.nbcdfw.com/investigations/federal-regulators-plan-to-investigate-massive-texas-power-outage/2555819

Quote

 

NBC 5 (DFW) Investigates has uncovered new information showing, less than a week before the storm, ERCOT officials gave assurances that the state’s power plants were ready to weather the elements, raising more questions about how such a massive failure of the state’s power system could happen...

NBC 5 Investigates found ERCOT meeting records on ERCOT’s website showing, just five days before the storm hit, ERCOT CEO Bill Magness assured the group’s board of directors in a meeting, "We're ready for the frigid temps to come our way". 

He said the agency had issued a notice to power plants to ensure they were winterized properly.

In September ERCOT’s annual winter assessment designed to ensure the state is prepared, assured the public there would be enough power to meet peak demand this winter.

 

 

[Storm the Field 5305]

After a few more rounds of whack-a-mole, came home to power on again at 10:30. We'll see how long it lasts.

According to Centerpoint, Houston area has had massive improvement in the last 4 hours. Went from 55% with power at 7:00 to 84% now. Just 425K without at the moment.  ERCOT now saying they're down to just a 4 GW of load shed vs. 14 this morning. 

[clapclapclap 9000]

So does Emergency Management do anything other than hurricanes and terrorist attacks? 

Because there's a whole lot more coordinating that could be taking place.

For example, this leg session needs to put them specifically in charge of mapping out and updating non-essential businesses and govt facilities or their non-essential elements (parking lot lights) that can be minimized or completely cut off during declared emergencies.  The utilities already have the ability to do much of that on a customer level (every not pay your bill for a few months?) but apparently are refusing to do that.  Probably don't want the lawsuits, or perhaps overwhelmed staff.

So we're still big time short of power in Houston and Austin, meanwhile my part of north DFW has stabilized, going in 36 hours from increasingly shorter rolling blackouts to full power since 10am.  Yet non-essential bullcrap closed since Sunday, like Top Golf, Nebraska Furniture Mart, film multiplexes, and other retail and entertainment venues are still lit up like Christmas trees.  That damn Top Golf has blared 2 50' outdoor TV's the entire length of this crisis. 

Oncor was asked specifically about these types of non-essential abuses and cutting off individual biz customers, and she admitted that while they can do that, they aren't.  Some bullcrap about they're probably all on generators.  Um, no, a lot of those did temp go dark in rolling blackouts, but every report I've heard, and once with my own eyes, that major retail strip's rolling blackout was less than an hour.  Much shorter and not nearly as frequent as the residential neighborhoods surrounding it.

I realize there's a lot going on behind the scenes, and I think a lot of the rolling blackouts versus days long outages is infrastructure and grid fragility issues that are simple fixes.  But there's a hell of a lot of missed opportunities to cut down on waste and reduce the power load.

Edited February 18, 2021 by clapclapclap

[Brisketexan 105614]

So does Emergency Management do anything other than hurricanes and terrorist attacks? 

Because there's a whole lot more coordinating that could be taking place.
For example, this leg session needs to put them specifically in charge of mapping out and updating non-essential businesses and govt facilities or their non-essential elements (parking lot lights) that can be minimized or completely cut off during declared emergencies.  The utilities already have the ability to do much of that on a customer level (every not pay your bill for a few months?) but apparently are refusing to do that.  Probably don't want the lawsuits, or perhaps overwhelmed staff.
So we're still big time short of power in Houston and Austin, meanwhile my part of north DFW has stabilized, going in 36 hours from increasingly shorter rolling blackouts to full power since 10am.  Yet non-essential bullcrap closed since Sunday, like Top Golf, Nebraska Furniture Mart, film multiplexes, and other retail and entertainment venues are still lit up like Christmas trees.  That damn Top Golf has blared 2 50' outdoor TV's the entire length of this crisis. 
Oncor was asked specifically about these types of non-essential abuses and cutting off individual biz customers, and she admitted that while they can do that, they aren't.  Some bullcrap about they're probably all on generators.  Um, no, a lot of those did temp go dark in rolling blackouts, but every report I've heard, and once with my own eyes, that major retail strip's rolling blackout was less than an hour.  Much shorter and not nearly as frequent as the residential neighborhoods surrounding it.
I realize there's a lot going on behind the scenes, and I think a lot of the rolling blackouts versus days long outages is infrastructure and grid fragility issues that are simple fixes.  But there's a hell of a lot of missed opportunities to cut down on waste and reduce the power load.

You presume that our leaders care.

They don’t.

[Machinator 32099]

 

[Helobious 9509]

I’d love to hear one argument for why cold weather is superior to warm weather after all of this shit. Christ.

[Hate 20164]

All of you "I want some winter weather" dickheads can go to fucking hell.  If you want winter weather, go fucking visit it. 

[Chopper 17362]

Washington Post has a couple op-ed explainers opinion pieces on how Texas got into this jam. First up, Julie Cohn is a historian of energy, technology and the environment, affiliated with both the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute and the University of Houston’s Center for Public History.

The tldr is pretty much this: "The power system that serves 95 percent of the state is intentionally isolated from the rest of the country; our competitive wholesale power market offers scant incentives for investment in backup power, and Texas generally does not have winter storms like this one."

 

Quote

Writing from in front of my gas fireplace, wearing multiple layers of clothing and sipping a hot beverage, I await the
end of this week’s apocalyptic winter storm and the return of reliable electric power. I am contemplating the grid — the
term we use to describe a collection of generating plants, transmission lines, substations, and sometimes even the
smaller distribution lines and electric meters that transform gas, coal, falling water, uranium, wind and sunlight into
usable electricity and bring it to our homes and workplaces. When asking how the Texas grid operator happened to fail
so miserably at keeping people here warm and well-lit for the past couple of days, though, we get so much wrong.
There’s a big picture, and a Texas picture, and both illuminate some of what is happening.

First, the big picture: The grid is shorthand for a collection of technologies owned and operated by thousands of
entities — from government agencies to homeowners with rooftop solar panels. There are, in the contiguous United
States, three major interconnected systems — one covering everything east of the Rocky Mountains, one for everything
west of the Rocky Mountains, one for Texas. The Eastern Interconnection and the Western Interconnection are made
up of multiple grid operators and dozens of smaller networks that serve power needs through continuous coordination,
across state lines when necessary. In Texas, we have one grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas
(ERCOT), one control area, hundreds of infrastructure owners and lots of coordination to make it work. So the casual
use of the term “the grid” results in the common misconception that everything is under the control of, say, an
electricity czar. But in the United States, even the federal government does not have that role. When something goes
wrong, as happened here this week, it is a mistake to look in one direction for one culpable party.

Then there’s the Texas picture. There are three things to remember: The power system that serves 95 percent of the
state is intentionally isolated from the rest of the country; our competitive wholesale power market offers scant
incentives for investment in backup power, and Texas generally does not have winter storms like this one.

Let’s start 80 years ago. During World War II, America needed lots of power to build planes, tanks, bombs and other
war materiel. Power companies and the federal government alike focused on expanding interconnections among power
systems as the fastest and cheapest way to meet defense needs. In 1941, Texas investor-owned utilities did their part by
connecting into two networks serving the northern and southern parts of the state. Congress had already given the
Federal Power Commission (now the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) authority to regulate interstate power
sales. Texas didn’t have any state level regulation of power companies, and the utilities liked it that way. They also
didn’t want federal regulation. So they were pretty careful to avoid selling or buying power across state lines. With two
time zones, every type of generating resource and lots of different kinds of customers, Texas utilities were able to
achieve economies of scale and power-sharing efficiencies — all within the state’s borders.

In 1970, the Texas utilities formed ERCOT to comply with reliability guidelines established in the wake of the nation’s
first devastating power failure — the 1965 Northeast Blackout. In 1981, ERCOT took over as the grid operator. Between
1996 and 2005, the state legislature passed laws to create a competitive wholesale power market, increase renewables
with hard targets and invest in new transmission infrastructure. These decisions created a very friendly environment
for renewables, and as a result, Texas leads the nation in wind power and in renewables of all kinds. But the success of
these initiatives hinged somewhat on the autonomy of the Texas grid: The state could set goals, foster investment and
expand transmission without input from other state or federal agencies. In a sense, this is the beauty of ERCOT’s
isolation.

Other factors also contribute to the unique characteristics of Texas’s power system. First, the state’s fleet of generators
has been shifting gradually but steadily from coal-fired to natural gas-fired and wind-powered plants. This winter,
Texans are depending far more on wind turbines and gas-fired power plants than on coal. Second, the way the state’s
wholesale power market works, utilities have very few incentives for investment in backup power. The state does not
say to a generator, “Please build us some extra backup power plants, and we will charge that cost to our customers.”
Instead, the market allows a generator to charge excessively high prices when available supply falls short — which, for
an investor, could be a long shot. As a result, ERCOT’s backup power, called the spinning reserve, is lower than most
other areas in the United States.

So this week, when temperatures dropped to all-time lows across the state, wind turbines that have not been
winterized froze. Gas-fired plants tripped offline. And while ERCOT had anticipated rolling blackouts and warned
customers to reduce power use and expect brief outages, the demand for power far exceeded the available supply,
leaving millions of us stuck in the dark and the cold.

Now where shall we point our frigid fingers?

The highly centralized, isolated power grid has served Texas really well for many decades. It allowed us to accelerate
renewables development and, notably, to avoid cascading blackouts — of the sort that plagued the Northeast in 1965,
1977 and 2003. But this week, it means we are unable to import large amounts of power from the gigantic eastern and
western interconnections when we need it.

We don’t have a large enough backup system for when power demand shoots way up, or when our regular generators
go offline, as they did this week. It is a problem that plagues ERCOT every year as the hottest part of the summer
approaches. This is the fault of our wholesale market structure. Of course, additional reserve power may not have been
sufficient to offset our losses over the past two days, but surely it would have helped. The cost of these extra power
plants that will sit idle for most of the time wouldn’t be so bad if shared by everyone connected to ERCOT. Instead,
based on how the Texas wholesale market works, backup plants charged an eye-popping $9,000/mwh rate this week
(the price was $30/mwh just six days ago, a more typical rate).

Ultimately, this outage, like many of the biggest blackouts before it, reflects the challenge of unanticipated events and
consequences. In 1965, power system experts felt sure they had built in enough redundancy to prevent any cascading
power failure from ever happening. But they did not envision the way dozens of different operators would respond
when one relay setting caused unexpected power movement across the networks. In Texas, we know that our summers
will be exceedingly hot, pushing our power system to the limit, but the last time it was this cold was in 1989, and this
year’s winter storms will last longer. Our wind turbines do not have the cold protection that turbines do in the cold
north. Our overall system is not winterized. The conditions of this cold front and its effects on the power system were
simply beyond what power experts generally planned for.

From my chilly living room, I can reflect on our state’s unique approach to power systems, both the benefits and the
shortfalls, and simply hope that we will learn quickly from this weather event. No doubt there will be accusations,
investigations, pontifications and extrapolations in the weeks and months to come. Surely, we can plan for our weather
extremes more effectively, winterize our system more thoroughly, back up our renewables more completely, and (dare
I say it?) ask customers to pay more for resiliency. I imagine there are a few million Texans ready to chip in right now.
And maybe we can even reconsider links east and west to facilitate sharing more power when it gets really, really hot or
really, really cold. Texans shouldn’t have to start shopping for generators to prepare for the next hot summer or winter
storm.

 

Edited February 18, 2021 by Chopper

[Patricio Swayze 17058]

so if I cut off the water(my water went out 8 hours ago) I should open up all the outside spigots along with internal faucets?  I've been team no drip and no check since Saturday.
I don't have power to heat them up if they are frozen.

Seeing this late, maybe someone else has answered, but yes, I think that was my mistake. I should have also bled all the outside spigots (as well as all indoor faucets). I suspect the damage happened the night the power went out.

[J-Mart 60]

According to the Austin Energy outage map in the tweet a few post above, I have power!!!

(I don’t.)

[Machinator 32099]

 

[4th&Five 41709]

24 minutes ago, Machinator said:

 

Wood. 

[Patricio Swayze 17058]

All of you "I want some winter weather" dickheads can go to fucking hell.  If you want winter weather, go fucking visit it. 

Fuck winter. Fuck cold. Fuck snow.

[Chopper 17362]

The next one is from an energy reporter in the Post's financial section. The tldr is that it's going to take a huge statewide financial investment to ensure that this type of failure doesn't happen again. 

 

Quote

The Texas grid got crushed because its operators didn’t see the need to prepare for cold weather

by Bill Englund

When it gets really cold, it can be hard to produce electricity, as customers in Texas and neighboring states are finding out. But it’s not impossible. Operators in Alaska, Canada, Maine, Norway and Siberia do it all the time.

 

What has sent Texas reeling is not an engineering problem, nor is it the frozen wind turbines blamed by prominent Republicans. It is a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service.

 

It’s a “Wild West market design based only on short-run prices,” said Matt Breidert, a portfolio manager at a firm called Ecofin.

 

And yet the temporary train wreck of that market Monday and Tuesday has seen the wholesale price of electricity in Houston go from $22 a megawatt-hour to about $9,000. Meanwhile, 4 million Texas households have been without power.

 

One utility company, Griddy, which sells power at wholesale rates to retail customers without locking in a price in advance, told its patrons Tuesday to find another provider before they get socked with tremendous bills.

The widespread failure in Texas and, to a lesser extent, Oklahoma and Louisiana in the face of a winter cold snap shines a light on what some see as the derelict state of America’s power infrastructure, a mirror reflection of the chaos that struck California last summer.

 

Edward Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, said the disinvestment in electricity production reminds him of the last years of the Soviet Union, or of the oil sector today in Venezuela.

“They hate it when I say that,” he said.

 

The immediate question facing the Texas power sector is whether its participants are willing to pay for the sort of winterization measures that are common farther north, even for a once-in-a-decade spell of weather.

 

Gov. Greg Abbott (R) called Tuesday for reform of the state’s electric grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT.

“Far too many Texans are without power and heat for their homes as our state faces freezing temperatures and severe winter weather,” he said in a statement. “This is unacceptable.”

 

He said he would work with the legislature to find ways to “ensure that our state never experiences power outages like this again.”

The Republican speaker of the Texas House, Dade Phelan, announced immediate hearings into “what went wrong.”

Fossil fuel groups and their Republican allies blamed the power failures on frozen wind turbines and warned against the supposed dangers of alternative power sources. Some turbines did in fact freeze — though Greenland and other northern outposts are able to keep theirs going through the winter.

 

But wind accounts for just 10 percent of the power in Texas generated during the winter. And the loss of power to the grid caused by shutdowns of thermal power plants, primarily those relying on natural gas, dwarfed the dent caused by frozen wind turbines, by a factor of five or six.

 

 

As the cold hit, demand for electricity soared past the mark that ERCOT had figured would be the maximum needed. But at a moment when the world is awash in surplus natural gas, much of it from Texas wells, the state’s power-generating operators were unable to turn that gas into electricity to meet that demand.

 

In the single-digit temperatures, pipelines froze up because there was some moisture in the gas. Pumps slowed. Diesel engines to power the pumps refused to start. One power plant after another went offline. Even a reactor at one of the state’s two nuclear plants went dark, hobbled by frozen equipment.

 

“At a time when the need is the greatest it’s ever been, it’s a strain on the system like we’ve never seen,” said Tom Seng, director of the School of Energy Economics, Policy and Commerce at the University of Tulsa.

Throughout the Southwest, he said, there has been a scramble for gas as sources have gone offline. Most surplus gas is stored underground, he said, and bringing it to the surface becomes more and more difficult in such prolonged low temperatures. March futures for natural gas are selling for $3 per million BTUs in Oklahoma, he said, but the spot price hit $600 over the weekend.

 

In Texas, production of natural gas Tuesday fell 6 billion to 7 billion cubic feet per day from earlier in the month, Anne Swedberg Robba, head of American gas and power analytics for S&P Global Platts, wrote in an email. Nationally, production has dropped by about 14 percent.

 

“But this is not the first time we’ve had this issue in Texas,” said Hirs, of the University of Houston.

There was a severe cold spell in the Southwest in 2011, and frigid weather in 1983, 1989, 2003, 2006, 2008 and 2010. A study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. of the 2011 event, which also led to widespread blackouts for much the same reasons, found that “the massive amount of generator failures that were experienced raises the question whether it would have been helpful to increase reserve levels going into the event. This action would have brought more units online earlier, might have prevented some of the freezing problems the generators experienced, and could have exposed operational problems in time to implement corrections before the units were needed to meet customer demand.”

 

 

On Tuesday, both agencies announced that they would now investigate the causes of this year’s failure.

Texas shares with California an unwillingness to compensate generation companies for maintenance, Hirs said, unlike most of the rest of the country. He said that what happened to California in the heat last summer has now been reflected in Texas’s winter.

“Both Texas and California have failed spectacularly this year,” he said. “There’s a tremendous human cost. People died in California. People died in Texas.”

Texas is unique among the states in having a grid all its own that is almost entirely cut off from the rest of the country. That has prevented Texas from importing much electricity as its power plants went down, but Hirs said that the cold is so widespread across the heart of the nation that no one has any electricity to spare anyway.

 

Bill Magness, chief executive of ERCOT, said in an interview with the WFAA TV station in Dallas that he thought the state grid was better prepared for winter than it once was.

 

“In 2018 we had some very cold winter times, but we saw the generation fleets performed very well through that,” he said. “I think we really made some progress getting ready for these winter times. And this storm has been extraordinary. We are seeing a whole lot of units coming off for reasons that have to do with the weather, so certainly winterization is something that constantly needs to be looked at.”

 

Although temporary, one factor that may have hurt was that the sudden high wholesale price of electricity may have caused ERCOT’s computers to order companies to “shed load” — that is, cut off customers — rather than deal with the spike in costs.

The state’s Public Utilities Commission ordered ERCOT on Monday to allow for those high prices. They almost certainly will not last long, as temperatures are already rising. The cost of that electricity, at least in the short run, probably will fall most heavily on the retail utilities.

 

[Brisketexan 105614]

The next one is from an energy reporter in the Post's financial section. The tldr is that it's going to take a huge statewide financial investment to ensure that this type of failure doesn't happen again. 
 

The Texas grid got crushed because its operators didn’t see the need to prepare for cold weather
by Bill Englund
When it gets really cold, it can be hard to produce electricity, as customers in Texas and neighboring states are finding out. But it’s not impossible. Operators in Alaska, Canada, Maine, Norway and Siberia do it all the time.
  What has sent Texas reeling is not an engineering problem, nor is it the frozen wind turbines blamed by prominent Republicans. It is a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service.
 
It’s a “Wild West market design based only on short-run prices,” said Matt Breidert, a portfolio manager at a firm called Ecofin.
  And yet the temporary train wreck of that market Monday and Tuesday has seen the wholesale price of electricity in Houston go from $22 a megawatt-hour to about $9,000. Meanwhile, 4 million Texas households have been without power.
  One utility company, Griddy, which sells power at wholesale rates to retail customers without locking in a price in advance, told its patrons Tuesday to find another provider before they get socked with tremendous bills.
The widespread failure in Texas and, to a lesser extent, Oklahoma and Louisiana in the face of a winter cold snap shines a light on what some see as the derelict state of America’s power infrastructure, a mirror reflection of the chaos that struck California last summer.
  Edward Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, said the disinvestment in electricity production reminds him of the last years of the Soviet Union, or of the oil sector today in Venezuela.
“They hate it when I say that,” he said.
 
The immediate question facing the Texas power sector is whether its participants are willing to pay for the sort of winterization measures that are common farther north, even for a once-in-a-decade spell of weather.
  Gov. Greg Abbott ® called Tuesday for reform of the state’s electric grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT.
“Far too many Texans are without power and heat for their homes as our state faces freezing temperatures and severe winter weather,” he said in a statement. “This is unacceptable.”
  He said he would work with the legislature to find ways to “ensure that our state never experiences power outages like this again.”
The Republican speaker of the Texas House, Dade Phelan, announced immediate hearings into “what went wrong.”
Fossil fuel groups and their Republican allies blamed the power failures on frozen wind turbines and warned against the supposed dangers of alternative power sources. Some turbines did in fact freeze — though Greenland and other northern outposts are able to keep theirs going through the winter.
 
But wind accounts for just 10 percent of the power in Texas generated during the winter. And the loss of power to the grid caused by shutdowns of thermal power plants, primarily those relying on natural gas, dwarfed the dent caused by frozen wind turbines, by a factor of five or six.
    As the cold hit, demand for electricity soared past the mark that ERCOT had figured would be the maximum needed. But at a moment when the world is awash in surplus natural gas, much of it from Texas wells, the state’s power-generating operators were unable to turn that gas into electricity to meet that demand.
 
In the single-digit temperatures, pipelines froze up because there was some moisture in the gas. Pumps slowed. Diesel engines to power the pumps refused to start. One power plant after another went offline. Even a reactor at one of the state’s two nuclear plants went dark, hobbled by frozen equipment.
 
“At a time when the need is the greatest it’s ever been, it’s a strain on the system like we’ve never seen,” said Tom Seng, director of the School of Energy Economics, Policy and Commerce at the University of Tulsa.


Throughout the Southwest, he said, there has been a scramble for gas as sources have gone offline. Most surplus gas is stored underground, he said, and bringing it to the surface becomes more and more difficult in such prolonged low temperatures. March futures for natural gas are selling for $3 per million BTUs in Oklahoma, he said, but the spot price hit $600 over the weekend.
  In Texas, production of natural gas Tuesday fell 6 billion to 7 billion cubic feet per day from earlier in the month, Anne Swedberg Robba, head of American gas and power analytics for S&P Global Platts, wrote in an email. Nationally, production has dropped by about 14 percent.
 
“But this is not the first time we’ve had this issue in Texas,” said Hirs, of the University of Houston.
There was a severe cold spell in the Southwest in 2011, and frigid weather in 1983, 1989, 2003, 2006, 2008 and 2010. A study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. of the 2011 event, which also led to widespread blackouts for much the same reasons, found that “the massive amount of generator failures that were experienced raises the question whether it would have been helpful to increase reserve levels going into the event. This action would have brought more units online earlier, might have prevented some of the freezing problems the generators experienced, and could have exposed operational problems in time to implement corrections before the units were needed to meet customer demand.”
    On Tuesday, both agencies announced that they would now investigate the causes of this year’s failure.
Texas shares with California an unwillingness to compensate generation companies for maintenance, Hirs said, unlike most of the rest of the country. He said that what happened to California in the heat last summer has now been reflected in Texas’s winter.
“Both Texas and California have failed spectacularly this year,” he said. “There’s a tremendous human cost. People died in California. People died in Texas.”
Texas is unique among the states in having a grid all its own that is almost entirely cut off from the rest of the country. That has prevented Texas from importing much electricity as its power plants went down, but Hirs said that the cold is so widespread across the heart of the nation that no one has any electricity to spare anyway.
  Bill Magness, chief executive of ERCOT, said in an interview with the WFAA TV station in Dallas that he thought the state grid was better prepared for winter than it once was.
 
“In 2018 we had some very cold winter times, but we saw the generation fleets performed very well through that,” he said. “I think we really made some progress getting ready for these winter times. And this storm has been extraordinary. We are seeing a whole lot of units coming off for reasons that have to do with the weather, so certainly winterization is something that constantly needs to be looked at.”
 
Although temporary, one factor that may have hurt was that the sudden high wholesale price of electricity may have caused ERCOT’s computers to order companies to “shed load” — that is, cut off customers — rather than deal with the spike in costs.
The state’s Public Utilities Commission ordered ERCOT on Monday to allow for those high prices. They almost certainly will not last long, as temperatures are already rising. The cost of that electricity, at least in the short run, probably will fall most heavily on the retail utilities.

 

The good news: I’m confident our leadership will help insure that dollars get invested.

The bad news: that investment will be to help donors, not citizens. No problems will be solved. Not one.

[InkaUtexas 26382]

2 minutes ago, Chopper said:

The next one is from an energy reporter in the Post's financial section. The tldr is that it's going to take a huge statewide financial investment to ensure that this type of failure doesn't happen again. 

 

 

Floods and hurricanes fuck up texas more than this storm will. States need to think long term. The population needs to think short term. This was not hard to prep for. The failure I see what people were not ready and local government's shrugged off planning and reporting. 

Keep 5 days of food in your house. Have extra blankets. It is cold as shit in my house, but I am not going to freeze tonight. My tea is already in my thermos. 

Vote local and watch the news.

[InkaUtexas 26382]

3 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

 

The good news: I’m confident our leadership will help insure that dollars get invested.

The bad news: that investment will be to help donors, not citizens. No problems will be solved. Not one.

Invest in what? gonna bury the cables across the state? Shit, even the NE gets hammered every 20-40 years. It was our turn. I was in both Bastrop Fires. My neighbors at the time we saying we need more helicopters. So where do we invest? 

[phdhorn 6224]

I mentioned in an earlier post about my future in-law (the dad of son's GF) is a big-time plant operations manager for some 15 power plants.  He was going to give me the scoop on things, but as you can imagine, he was pulled to the phone and in his office for work. Guy slept ONE night since Friday.  He's a great guy, hard-working, prefers hands-on fixit to management, but they kicked him up the ladder he's so good.  Also, he has no stake in, nor any "ol boy" relationships with any of the playes (ERCOT, energy companies, etc.).  He's a great, honest dude, so I trust him - he has NO agenda, just a hard worker and very competent engineer.   

Anyway, all he would say with the little time we had, mostly in the ride to/from his house (where he volunteered in the midst of his crises to pick me and the missus up and bring us back to his powered house) is that not all, but most of the blame is ERCOT's really screwing up preplanning and not cutting a lot further back over the past week gradually.  He also said that although he couldn't confirm it, he did some simple math (to him) and told me that all through this ERCOT has been overstating on their graphs and PR stuff what their capacities are, by about 15K to 20K megawatts.   Makes sense to me, perfectly explains if you do the numbers why despite these "increased capacities" which should have serviced almost all Texas households out of power, the reduction in those without power was slow, and even rose when it looked like demand was way below capacity.

tl;dr:  don't believe everything you're told.

The other thing is that he has again, no agenda for or against any power companies, he just happens to live near Austin's.  He said that many of these companies have done a bad job of management, that they rolled off people too fast in response to ERCOT to leave space for rolling blackouts (kind of like a sliding puzzle where you have little tiles you move up and across with one empty space.  Well that empty space was supposed to be the place to roll people to/from.  But they filled all the tiles in as they shed to meet the grid, so there was nowhere they could roll people without risking busting the grid.  Apparently the DFW area did a much better job than especially Austin and Houston (not sure about other places) in doing it right, which is why I believe you've heard a lower percentage of huge straight-hour outages for the same people/sections.

He was spending his days trying to get his engineers and operators maintaining plant operations in subfreezing temps - and some of those plants are open-air(!!) (i.e. no freaking buildings, just a roof essentially!).  It's like he was given a shit sandwich of bad designs and was constantly getting trucks to deliver gas, oil, etc. to these plants to keep them going.  I think he had like 11 of 15 or something of his plants maintaining operations - incredible.  Again, these plants simply make electricity and supply the grid for ERCOT to divvy up - he has no say in who gets the power, he just sends it to the "pot" so to speak.  This guy undoubtedly helped at least 2-3 million people stay on (or at least roll off and on decently) during all this.  He should get a fucking medal.  But no one will even know what he or some of these other plant operators have done - I believe they're the unsung heroes in all this.  Anyway, that's what he said.

Oh yeah, this is the guy who, in the middle of his own crises, insisted that he could come over and in 10 mins. hook up a generator to my breaker box, punch it on, and give me electricity.  I mean, who the fuck does that?  I had to practically repeat several times not to.  Of course he loves doing that kind of hands-on stuff so I get it.  But my god, this guy is something else.  Fortunately we got power and I feel good about keeping him at his house so he could get some freaking sleep.

There are some good eggs in the middle of this rotten omelette.

Edited February 18, 2021 by phdhorn

[Storm the Field 5305]

If Centerpoint's map is right, this disaster is wrapping up as far as Houston is concerned. 92% coverage, only 195K without power, according to latest update.

[ztejas 43748]

20 minutes ago, InkaUtexas said:

Floods and hurricanes fuck up texas more than this storm will.

[Gatorubet 30418]

[dcar00 14614]

"But they filled all the tiles in as they shed to meet the grid, so there was nowhere they could roll people without risking busting the grid.  Apparently the DFW area did a much better job than especially Austin and Houston (not sure about other places) in doing it right, which is why I believe you've heard a lower percentage of huge straight-hour outages for the same people/sections."

And this is where Austin Energy should take a shitload of blame.  fuck them too along with ERCOT.  It appears to me Austin has been a complete fucking disaster because their plan for rolling was shit from the get go.

as I go on my 3rd 15+ hour outage(one 33) of this with another 10 hour one thrown in for good measure.

 

[Anastasis 23514]

I hope that one day I can find someone that looks at me the way phd looks at his son’s girlfriends father. 
 

 

[ChickenSandwich 9856]

1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

 

Horse shit

[TKthunder2 5024]

Pedernales said this afternoon that they’ve stabilized and we’d start seeing 3 hours of power followed by 90 minutes without until the blackouts are over.  I got my first 90 blackout (since having power restored late last night, and after the 4 hrs blackout this morning) at ~4pm and sure enough it came back on at 5:30 which impressed the hell out of me (which is sad, but not the point).  But I haven’t had another blackout since.  Don’t get me wrong 7 hours of power has been great, my devices are charged and the indoor temp is almost normal (though Spectrum internet and Austin water are still fubar’d) but I’m feeling guilty as hell and now like I’m rooting for the blackout to hit.

[bluto 4947]

Floods and hurricanes fuck up texas more than this storm will. States need to think long term. The population needs to think short term. This was not hard to prep for. The failure I see what people were not ready and local government's shrugged off planning and reporting. 
Keep 5 days of food in your house. Have extra blankets. It is cold as shit in my house, but I am not going to freeze tonight. My tea is already in my thermos. 
Vote local and watch the news.

Insurance council said today they’re expecting this to top Harvey’s damage tab

[Pato del Muerto 52893]

1 hour ago, InkaUtexas said:

Floods and hurricanes fuck up texas more than this storm will. States need to think long term. The population needs to think short term. This was not hard to prep for. The failure I see what people were not ready and local government's shrugged off planning and reporting. 

Keep 5 days of food in your house. Have extra blankets. It is cold as shit in my house, but I am not going to freeze tonight. My tea is already in my thermos. 

Vote local and watch the news.

Are you under the impression that the event will be over once temperatures go back up on Friday?  Even if power is back 100%, that’s when we find out how much damage has occurred via broken pipes, house floods, etc. then it will be months before it all gets repaired. People will be without water for a long time.  Insurance companies will be buried with water damage claims, plumbing claims, claims from people burning wood furniture and fence pickets, auto accidents, injuries sustained from ice slips and falls, from the auto accidents, maybe from the lack of climate control. This is a months long disaster like harvey, but it has happened to all the major population centers in the state instead of one of them. Which makes the damage more widespread, and the repair materials and people who perform them more scarce. 

[InkaUtexas 26382]

Money vs. People is not something I really consider to be honest. And you are right. I spent a few years as a reponse person for FEMA and 10+ years doing humanitarian operations in fucked up countries and may be a bit jagged. I apologize. I know this will take time for full recovery. I did not mean to imply that this was over tonight. 

All your points are well taken. Again, sorry for a quick reaction. on this board. 

[MissingInAction 25316]

3 hours ago, InkaUtexas said:

Are you 11? 

11 inches in your mom.

[InkaUtexas 26382]

10 minutes ago, MissingInAction said:

11 inches in your mom.

Good job man. Mom died in April. Have a great night. 

[atomheartbevo 90077]

Bunch of us in 78756 have no water coming out of faucets, and it’s popping up all over our areas FB and ND.  

I’m finding mixed answers on whether to fuck with hot water heater or leave it going until a good 12 hours or so have passed.  Like @Okie State going to turn water heater down to pilot   

 

[atomheartbevo 90077]

This tells me jack shit.  

 

[Dahobbs 17818]

4 hours ago, InkaUtexas said:

Floods and hurricanes fuck up texas more than this storm will. States need to think long term. The population needs to think short term. This was not hard to prep for. The failure I see what people were not ready and local government's shrugged off planning and reporting. 

Keep 5 days of food in your house. Have extra blankets. It is cold as shit in my house, but I am not going to freeze tonight. My tea is already in my thermos. 

Vote local and watch the news.

Go fuck yourself with this bullshit. You can't just wrap three month old girls in fucking warm blankets and 5 days of food. Just go fuck off.

Edited February 18, 2021 by Dahobbs

[Dahobbs 17818]

4 hours ago, dcar00 said:

"But they filled all the tiles in as they shed to meet the grid, so there was nowhere they could roll people without risking busting the grid.  Apparently the DFW area did a much better job than especially Austin and Houston (not sure about other places) in doing it right, which is why I believe you've heard a lower percentage of huge straight-hour outages for the same people/sections."

And this is where Austin Energy should take a shitload of blame.  fuck them too along with ERCOT.  It appears to me Austin has been a complete fucking disaster because their plan for rolling was shit from the get go.

as I go on my 3rd 15+ hour outage(one 33) of this with another 10 hour one thrown in for good measure.

 

Houston shit the bed the worst. Pretty much half the households without power have been in Houston. Fucking ridiculous. 

[FizzleFish 137]

5 hours ago, MNLonghornFUKM said:

Lol. 90k Denali in the woods. Someone’s husband Isnt sleeping tonight.


Those roads don’t even look bad. The people with their phones blatantly out taking pictures of the fire engine need to be ran over by denali gal

They weren’t that bad when the folks who took these pics finally ventured out to take pics of all the “stupid Texans who can’t drive on a wet road”.  There were several points where they were all ice. Add in the hills, wind and non winter tires and most of us have never driven in these conditions, I think us dumb Texans did a damn good job (i will say this is all anecdotal as I haven’t watched a bit of news and can only go off my experience. Also, I’m talking about citizens and not the power shitshow.).  My neighbor had to get up and drive his nurse wife from Lago vista to westlake every morning at 5 am. Hospital didn’t have enough beds for all the staff to camp there for a week so they gave up their space for others. I had to get out on the roads at daybreak to check on my elderly mother and to help a couple of friends who had to be on the roads for their reasons each day and there were several points that puckered my butthole. Out here and around a lot of the Austin area the hills are a crapshoot(some of which can be long and steep) when they are iced over.  The people I helped had very valid reasons to be on the road. 
 

Although I quoted your post Minnesota this response isn’t really a response to anything you said. Was just something on my mind sitting here wide awake since 2am. 

[HenryJames 66286]

 

[Telegraph_it 3374]

2 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Bunch of us in 78756 have no water coming out of faucets, and it’s popping up all over our areas FB and ND.  

I’m finding mixed answers on whether to fuck with hot water heater or leave it going until a good 12 hours or so have passed.  Like @Okie State going to turn water heater down to pilot   

 

It may depend on your model of water heater. I lost all pressure for 8-12 hours and just left the heaters alone. Once the pressure was back they went right back to working. 
 

I did go up into the attic to check them when they were without pressure and it seemed to me they went dormant and that’s why I left the heaters alone. 

[FizzleFish 137]

53 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

Go fuck yourself with this bullshit. You can't just wrap three month old girls in fucking warm blankets and 5 days of food. Just go fuck off.

I get your anger and fear (especially having babies in the house and probably being a first time father you’re very protective) you’ve probably experienced over the last several days, but damn with the fuck yourself part. I think inkas point was missed with the way he said it (I think he even came back to add context and apologized before your response). I wasn’t as prepared for this as I should have been and I have some regret. My oldest is off at college and went 48 hours without power and an extended time without water. I haven’t slept for days due to my worries about him. I wish I would have prepared him better for something like this (they’re fine and have had power and water off and on since this morning). I never thought to advise him to buy candles and his biggest issue wasn’t the 46 degree apartment or no water or no warm food. It was the total darkness all around him. Nothing had power. He just wanted to have a bit of visibility. Talking to him last night he stated that it’s on us to do our best to be prepared and not depend on others and I agree.  I mean read these threads. None of us know what we should do regarding our damn faucets. Full blast, stream, trickle, cut off main water at street, should we get out and blast them with blow dryers. I don’t know the best thing to do regarding faucets. I’ve always just wrapped my spigots outside and covered them with the styrofoam covers.  Should we all have generators? Should we all carry a set of winter tires? should we all go buy propane heaters? Should we all buy 4x4s? Look at the thread Is pools worth it? Should we all go and no whatever northerners do with their pools during winter? I mean the list goes on.  I don’t know, but I’m going to be better prepared next time. 

The power issue I get. I’m pretty damn frustrated with how our state handled it.  Also, hobbs I totally understand where you’re coming from. I just hate this site when we start cussing and hating one another. 

[BradInATX 9208]

 

The good news: I’m confident our leadership will help insure that dollars get invested.

The bad news: that investment will be to help donors, not citizens. No problems will be solved. Not one.

Yep. The taxpayers will send some welfare money to the energy producers to make repairs and invest in infrastructure so this doesn't happen again. The energy producers will put pool noodles around their pipes and give the C suite and the board seven figure bonuses. As is tradition.

[HenryJames 66286]

3 minutes ago, FizzleFish said:

I just hate this site when we start cussing and hating one another. 

You new here?

[FizzleFish 137]

1 minute ago, HenryJames said:

You new here?

Henry I needed that. Woke my wife up laughing so hard and she can sleep thru anything.  I should have expected that comment. No, not new. I’ve loved this group going back to hornfans.