.

[NickW + 2,714]

16 minutes ago, turbguy said:

My response was meant for locations where compressing air with falling water are practical.

Sorry - read the first bit and thought you were referring to the UK. 

In England one possible option is using heavy weights on a cable over disused mine shafts. We have plenty of them. 

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

2 hours ago, Ward Smith said:

Didn't they make a movie about this? 

https://youtu.be/ZKPFC8DA9_8

DeNiro: "We're all in it together, kid."

[Symmetry + 109]

5 hours ago, Robert Ziegler said:

. A state like Texas should have an infrastructure guarantee: Every dwelling gets a gas connection.

Communist talk.   You want the state to guarantee you a gas line even if it is not profitable?

What's next? Guaranteed food, healthcare and education? Get a job hippy!

Edited February 26, 2021 by Symmetry

[Symmetry + 109]

4 hours ago, Dan Warnick said:

Sounds very ...............Communal. 

Short of being completely off grid you are already in a commune.

Groups of people pooled resources to make gas wells and giant power plants and then shared the power.  Yes, it comes with a minor amount of risk but the benefits are enormous.

Internet of things will happen, like it or not. You will like it because it prevents crap like these blackouts and lowers costs.

It is not unheard of to heat and cool whole blocks of buildings communally - it is very efficient, especially if some buildings produce waste heat.

 

Edited February 26, 2021 by Symmetry

[Old-Ruffneck + 1,246]

5 hours ago, Paul-S said:

This misinformation isn't STILL going is it? Wind turbines and solar work fine in the Antarctic. What is wrong with Texas that they can't get it to work? Maybe too cheap to winterize. And what about all the thermal plant failures that are the real cause?

 

The damn windmills were frozen with an inch+ ice. They failed the ice test!!! I posted that response because that was the failure. Too much ice on the 10,000+ windmills. 

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

2 hours ago, NickW said:

I'm not making fun of Texans - I'm taking the P1ss out pf people on here claiming that this was caused because people believed winter was cancelled and it was all the greenies fault. 

I feel sorry for the people affected by this. However to prevent a problem happening again you need to address the core issues. 

Nick you keep acting like England is "all that" because you haven't experienced a blackout event. You seem to have neglected to click on this link which I posted days ago, which puts your boasting to the lie. England routinely runs short of your much vaunted wind power and your bacon gets saved by dirty rotten coal power from Europe! In short, you have nothing to teach anyone about power and grid reliability from England's experience. 

[surrept33 + 609]

5 hours ago, Dan Warnick said:

Sounds very ...............Communal.  Dan, respectfully, I've read enough of your comments to believe your intentions are more or less pure, if not overly hopeful.  Call me skeptical, but I see a lot of room for nefarious manipulation of said systems by those who control the controls.  Go along with the (insert Communal Order here) or you might find your house suffering from a "glitch" that one cannot find anyone to explain sufficiently.

Put enough control of your life into the Commune (a nice quote taken from a Quora commenter)...

"The disadvantages are that there have to be rules, or people argue and then fight or refuse to do work a certain way, or share money. People can’t agree on who will make the rules, or how to interpret them exactly, or how to enforce them, or what to do if someone breaks them."

...and the Commune turns into a dictatorship by necessity, with those who feel "forced" into leadership positions meting out Communal punishments.  My take: No thanks.  I prefer the freedom to provide for my own and I believe humanity will overcome the planet's difficulties; not that the planet is somehow going to stop functioning "someday soon", i.e. within the next 1,000 years.

Of course, that's just my opinion.  You are free to feel otherwise.

You going to go off the grid? Passive heating and energy scavenging is fascinating.

But anyways, there is, at least architecturally, there is more oversight and transparency with such systems. Things are usually held persistent (it's a event recorder that can't be changed after the fact) just in case, and usually witnessed by multiple third parties on the fly (in a peer to peer fashion, usually called a distributed consensus protocol). Maybe the problem should be reframed as: who gets most access to power, or more access to power (but the idea is to lower vulnerability for all). I

People tend to think about zero-sum games when it's not really like that. Think about all of our ancestors - they had all of those (natural) resources sitting around, but never used them. Things that have changed include having a better idea of where resources are and figuring out how to reduce supply chain risk. More generally, allocating of resources can be done more efficiently with counterparty risk in mind. In general, more decision making under uncertainty-types of problems are more tractable and real world operationalizable for everybody these days. Free wins! 

Anyway, more specifically, I think there is a huge room for capital efficiencies with a higher frequency market design, enabled by current cyber-physical technology (so network-on-chip and system-on-chip designs in edge computing with more combinatorial logic density being retrofit pretty much everywhere). Hub and spoke model with lots of hubs and spokes for resilience in power flows:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_commitment_problem_in_electrical_power_production

That's more or less what embedded (ubiquitous computing) hardware should allow with much more flexible 'auctions' (as in chips that are coming out <1 year, of course it will take longer to make products). Not unlike your current generation phones, except more variance in the types of circuitry and probably once again a reduction in price, though things are no longer getting miniaturized in integrated circuitry (really, this is just a problem with the scale length of silicon at nanoscale). What used to take an ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) 5 years ago can be done now with this generation's chips - the game is more about capital efficiencies (finding uses for the smart building, smart car, smart grid, smart wearables) rather than transistor count die/m^2.  These days, analog circuits are making up a larger portion of the manufacturing cost. Low power communications (by this, I mean less electrical power, things like non-orthogonal multiple access need more computational power in 5g workloads because there is so much adaptive sensing of the larger parts of the EM spectrum which were once used for stuff like broadcast analog television). 

It's mostly cities that are buying a lot of (renewable) PPAs (this map doesn't include virtual PPAs which tend to hop across state lines, but are usually bought by companies that want to buy power for example, over 10 years or so). This is where ERCOT's independance gets quite murky anyways - the federal government regulates interstate commerce, so vPPAs are often the EPA's job usually. That market is rapidly expanding because of the number of carbon markets. 

 

 

Edited February 27, 2021 by surrept33

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

34 minutes ago, Old-Ruffneck said:

The damn windmills were frozen with an inch+ ice. They failed the ice test!!! I posted that response because that was the failure. Too much ice on the 10,000+ windmills. 

These guys don't pay attention, they just keep parroting the party line and hope you give up. They deice jets on the ground because once they reach 35,000 feet although it's at least 40 below zero, there's virtually no moisture there, so no icing. The problem is in the ground to 20k range, depending on weather. Typically the colder it is, the drier the air for good physics reasons. Antarctica is a desert averaging less than 8 inches of precipitation per year. All that snow there is essentially fossil and gets blown around rather than falling from the sky. 

[wrs + 893]

3 hours ago, Ward Smith said:

Debunked, multiple times yet you persist? The entire grid output "expected" by your logic at the time was 60GW from every generating source including renewables and solar by that "projection" which was a farce. You can't have it both ways, I produced the hour by hour spreadsheet that proves my point. You just keep repeating debunked narratives. You're better than that, aren't you? 

Here is a nice graph that also debunks the claim.  Wind went away at the beginning when the blades froze over, it's clear as a bell in this graph, the area in green is wind.  On Feb 11 wind went offline after the freezing rainstorm passed through.

 

 

Edited February 27, 2021 by wrs

[Old-Ruffneck + 1,246]

21 minutes ago, wrs said:

Here is a nice graph that also debunks the claim.

Damn fine graph!!!!

Rep. Dade Phelan Speaks on Texas Power Grid | Fox News Video

[turbguy + 1,545]

1 hour ago, Ward Smith said:

Nick you keep acting like England is "all that" because you haven't experienced a blackout event. You seem to have neglected to click on this link which I posted days ago, which puts your boasting to the lie. England routinely runs short of your much vaunted wind power and your bacon gets saved by dirty rotten coal power from Europe! In short, you have nothing to teach anyone about power and grid reliability from England's experience. 

I went to that link.  Funny, they never discussed WHICH WAY power flowed (unless I missed it).   Sure, it can go both ways, but no stats??

According to the charts posted, it appears that France must operate fossil facilities before (and after?), the line went into service.

Is it not possible that power flows TO France? Yup.

Is it not possible that power flows TO the UK? Yup

I need to see something with some facts. Similar to the tie power flows ERCOT has available on their site.

Are there any facts?

A quote:

"Quite simply, France does not have enough nuclear and renewable power to meet its own needs, never mind have a surplus to sell to the UK".

That could mean they could import excess (when available) from the UK, no?

Maybe EDF has a power flow chart??

Edited February 27, 2021 by turbguy

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

26 minutes ago, turbguy said:

I went to that link.  Funny, they never discussed WHICH WAY power flowed (unless I missed it).   Sure, it can go both ways, but no stats??

According to the charts posted, it appears that France must operate fossil facilities before (and after?), the line went into service.

Is it not possible that power flows TO France? Yup.

Is it not possible that power flows TO the UK? Yup

I need to see something with some facts. Similar to the tie power flows ERCOT has available on their site.

Are there any facts?

A quote:

"Quite simply, France does not have enough nuclear and renewable power to meet its own needs, never mind have a surplus to sell to the UK".

That could mean they could import excess (when available) from the UK, no?

Note that the bolded statement excludes coal. The conceit is that only "clean" energy goes to England. The intertie from Texas to Florida "goes both ways" too, but Florida didn't have spare watts to sell either. Five gigawatts would have been quite nice about 0300 on the 15th wouldn't you agree? It wasn't just Florida that had no surplus power to sell. MISO was running on fumes also, and they were glad they didn't have big wind generation or they would have been in the same "boat". Contrary to what @Boat thinks. 

[Symmetry + 109]

59 minutes ago, Ward Smith said:

These guys don't pay attention, they just keep parroting the party line and hope you give up.

People keep incorrectly saying windmills can't handle cold, which they clearly can. 

Ice != cold, yet people continue to use "cold."  Don't blame the people who understand the meaning of words.

 

Ice storms can take down power systems regardless of generation type, as evident from this event and others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ice_storm

 

[turbguy + 1,545]

40 minutes ago, Ward Smith said:

Note that the bolded statement excludes coal. The conceit is that only "clean" energy goes to England. The intertie from Texas to Florida "goes both ways" too, but Florida didn't have spare watts to sell either. Five gigawatts would have been quite nice about 0300 on the 15th wouldn't you agree? It wasn't just Florida that had no surplus power to sell. MISO was running on fumes also, and they were glad they didn't have big wind generation or they would have been in the same "boat". Contrary to what @Boat thinks. 

Sure, no coal mentioned.  And if the power flow is TOO France?  I just don't know.  If France has to send 1 unit of "non-green" power to the UK for every 1.1 units of "non-green" power the UK sends to France, it appears the UK is supporting France.  Stats,  please.  Could be either way.

I agree that MISO was tight as well, and note they NEVER went into an EEA level (that I know of). 

That said, the tie into ERCOT is from the SWPP, not MISO, and MISO actually does have a lot of wind (at least 20 GW).  So does SWPP (at least17 GW).

I still question how Texas can export power to buyers in Florida, and still avoid Federal Regulation...

Also, note that the SWPP was EXPORTING about 800 MW though their ties into ERCOT before, after, and DURING ERCOT's crisis.  Heck MEXICO was EXPORTING into ERCOT, as well (until around 6:00 AM).

Edited February 27, 2021 by turbguy

[Gerry Maddoux + 3,627]

1 hour ago, Ward Smith said:

Antarctica is a desert averaging less than 8 inches of precipitation per year. 

Exactly--it simulates what the jet goes through at 30,000 feet--there's no danger of icing over because there's no precipitation. If I have to read one more moron stating how well their windmills work at -30 I'm sure I'm going to throw up. 

[turbguy + 1,545]

22 minutes ago, Symmetry said:

People keep incorrectly saying windmills can't handle cold, which they clearly can. 

Ice != cold, yet people continue to use "cold."  Don't blame the people who understand the meaning of words.

 

Ice storms can take down power systems regardless of generation type, as evident from this event and others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ice_storm

 

As I have said, the root cause of ERCOT's event was the weather.

[Boat + 1,324]

22 minutes ago, Ward Smith said:

Note that the bolded statement excludes coal. The conceit is that only "clean" energy goes to England. The intertie from Texas to Florida "goes both ways" too, but Florida didn't have spare watts to sell either. Five gigawatts would have been quite nice about 0300 on the 15th wouldn't you agree? It wasn't just Florida that had no surplus power to sell. MISO was running on fumes also, and they were glad they didn't have big wind generation or they would have been in the same "boat". Contrary to what @Boat thinks. 

The concept of being responsible for having all the energy from Texas weatherized is something your not grasping. Like you can’t grasp votes are counted different in every state.  Regulation can fix both. The technology is there. Wind didn’t fail, somebody allowed the decision not to weatherize to happened, that ended up being the failure. Natural gas didn’t fail. The choice not to winterize exposed infrastructure was the failure. 
So yea, coal is out and the wind that replaces it you would think needs to be weatherized. 
All those electric cars and their infrastructure will need to be weatherized to boot. Not that Texas will with all the airheads, but common sense dictates these preventive measures should happen.

[Boat + 1,324]

8 minutes ago, turbguy said:

As I have said, the root cause of ERCOT's event was the weather.

Or ignoring the failure of not installing preventive weatherization. Especially when there was ample history of the dangers of storms from previous events.

[turbguy + 1,545]

7 minutes ago, Boat said:

The concept of being responsible for having all the energy from Texas weatherized is something your not grasping. Like you can’t grasp votes are counted different in every state.  Regulation can fix both. The technology is there. Wind didn’t fail, somebody allowed the decision not to weatherize to happened, that ended up being the failure. Natural gas didn’t fail. The choice not to winterize exposed infrastructure was the failure. 
So yea, coal is out and the wind that replaces it you would think needs to be weatherized. 
All those electric cars and their infrastructure will need to be weatherized to boot. Not that Texas will with all the airheads, but common sense dictates these preventive measures should happen.

Texans are FAR from "airheads"! 

As for what failed, or what didn't, recognize you are still taking a guess.  Could be right, but it's STILL just a guess.

[surrept33 + 609]

27 minutes ago, Gerry Maddoux said:

Exactly--it simulates what the jet goes through at 30,000 feet--there's no danger of icing over because there's no precipitation. If I have to read one more moron stating how well their windmills work at -30 I'm sure I'm going to throw up. 

It obviously depends. The hydrological cycle in the arctic is much more complicated for various reasons - there is plenty of wind (esp of the ocean) and precipitation/evaporation often due to all the fresh water nearby (think canada or russia). It's partially why nearby areas are tunda, not a desert like antarctica. The weather seems to be changing the quickest ever since satellites started taking images (1979). The US sees it one of our larger threats: https://www.defensenews.com/news/your-military/2019/05/06/northcom-arctic-now-americas-first-line-of-defense/

Edited February 27, 2021 by surrept33

[Gerry Maddoux + 3,627]

 

8 minutes ago, Boat said:

Wind didn’t fail, somebody allowed the decision not to weatherize to happened, that ended up being the failure. Natural gas didn’t fail. The choice not to winterize exposed infrastructure was the failure. 

Mr. Boat, this is not just a simple measure of winterizing the grid. Texas is pretty much like a lot of red states: it contains patches of blue. That is especially marked in a cute little place named Georgetown. It is in the Hill Country. They of course couldn't resist the temptation of serving as the Texas poster child for renewable energy. The following is an excerpt from a recognized energy expert. Much of this has been posted here before, but some of it is new. It was published late August 2019, right after some alarming problems arose. Since the article was written, wind energy virtually exploded in the state of Texas--despite cries of protest. Well, here it is. It exemplifies that you can die in the summer heat just about as readily as in the winter cold. Especially if the wind fails. 

Texas’ Impending Reliability Issues With Wind Power

 

COMMENTARY

Texas has the most wind capacity of any state, generating about 16% of its electricity from wind. In August, as temperatures rose above 100F and consumers increased their use of air conditioning, Texas’ grid operators struggled to meet the record demand for electricity.

Many of the wind turbines could not operate because the wind was stagnant, a common occurrence on very hot days. As a result, energy costs skyrocketed. In Houston, wholesale power prices spiked 49,000% (to $9,000 per megawatt-hour). The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) warned that reserve margins were so low that it might have to institute rolling blackouts, or controlled interruptions of power service. The independent system operator called for the construction of more gas-fired generating plants.

Facing a second consecutive year of strain on its grid, ERCOT mandated all available power plants to run flat-out, called on factories to cut power consumption, and imported electricity from Mexico.

Power reserve margins were so thin that increments of just tens of megawatts were available to meet demand. The state called the first of its three levels of emergency and hit its market price cap of $9,000 per megawatt hour to avoid rolling brownouts, or partial, temporary reductions in system voltage or total system capacity. According to ERCOT, if one of the state’s large natural gas plants had gone offline when reserve margins were thin, rolling blackouts might have been unavoidable.

Texas has a deregulated power market in which competition holds down power costs unless demand is high—and then spot prices skyrocket. Texas prepared for the hot weather this summer, allowing generators to request permission to disregard air regulations, ordering all generation assets to be available and importing power from the neighboring Southwest Power Pool market.

Aug. 13 and 15 were the toughest days because most of the state’s 26 GW of wind capacity were becalmed in the mid-afternoon, and a few power plants that had been running flat-out for days began to fail, as high temperatures increased demand across the state. As wind power slowed, ERCOT instituted its first level of emergency alerts, calling on small industrial and commercial generators to pour power onto the grid, and requesting power from Mexico from which an additional 60 MW were imported on Aug. 15. Installed capacity numbers for electricity from intermittent sources such as wind and solar mean very little when they fail to produce as wind did in the middle of the hot Texas summer.

ERCOT did not need to institute rolling brownouts since the situation did not escalate beyond the second level of emergency alert, in which it would call on about 1,100 MW of load to drop off the system.

The Texas power market does not include a capacity market that pays generators to keep power plants available. As inexpensive natural gas and subsidized renewable power pushed down power prices, coal’s market share dipped below that of natural gas and wind. Last year alone, the state retired more than 4 GW of coal-fired capacity, or almost 70 times as much power as was purchased from Mexico on Aug. 15.

The situation may get more dire as additional wind farms are built. Social media giant Facebook recently announced a deal in Texas to buy power from the largest single-site wind farm in the country. The power purchase agreement will obtain electricity from the 200-MW Aviator Wind East project, which is scheduled to come online in 2020 in Coke County, Texas. The Aviator East initiative is part of a larger 525-MW project. While there are larger U.S. wind farms, those have typically been built in phases, not in the single-phase construction planned for Aviator Wind East.

Texas’ 100% Renewable Experiment

Last October, the city of Georgetown, Texas obtained a $1 million grant from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s nonprofit, Bloomberg Philanthropies, in which the city planned to obtain 100% of its electricity from wind and solar power. The grant’s only real requirement, however, was that the city serve as a public relations platform to convince Americans to abandon fossil fuels and switch to renewable energy.

The town’s politicians promised that the renewable energy would be cheaper. But, as more wind and solar power displaced natural gas, electricity bills went up. The city’s municipal utility now has a $7 million shortfall that has to be made up by the city’s consumers through higher electricity bills.

The embarrassed City Council changed course and voted 5-0 to kill the Bloomberg PR deal. It also raised property taxes.

As part of the Bloomberg agreement, Georgetown planned to install solar panels on homes and obtain a battery storage farm to store electricity when wind and solar power were not available. For Georgetown to be 100% renewable using state-of-the-art batteries from Tesla’s Gigafactory, the city would need a $400 million battery farm weighing some 20,000 tons to avoid a blackout. And, after spending $15,600 for each household for such a battery farm, its backup power would be drained in 12 hours with a single windless night.

Conclusion

The close call in Texas in mid-August should be a lesson for ERCOT to rethink how it is valuing dispatchable, baseload power. The addition of more intermittent capacity to the market will likely make the reliability challenges Texas is facing only more difficult to manage. Further, the 100% renewable goal that several states have instituted should be viewed as a farce as the City of Georgetown recently discovered.

—Mary J. Hutzler is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Energy Research (IER). She was previously a top energy analyst for the federal government, spending more than 25 years at the Energy Information Administration, where she specialized in data collection, analysis, and forecasting. 
 

 

[Boat + 1,324]

Iowa runs at 40% renewables and is the nations leader in wind. Check a map. They have severe winters. I’ll let you research how they do it but a hint is heat for part of their winterization pkg.

[turbguy + 1,545]

Mary J. Hutzler is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Energy Research (IER).

"The IER is the successor organization to the Institute for Humane Studies of Texas, an advocacy group established in 1984 by billionaire businessman and political donor Charles Koch.^[2] After failing to pay the Texas state franchise tax, IHST lost its charter in 1989, and was later rebranded as the Institute for Energy Research, or IER, under the presidency of Robert L. Bradley Jr., the former director of public policy analysis for Enron.^["

^{Hmmm, maybe just a touch bit o' bias?  ENRON???  There's a rather trustworthy outfit, no?} 

^{Nothing as reliable as an opinion from a lobbyist.}

^{All that being said, I would never advocate or support 100% renewable power at this time, unless it had a significant hydro component.  It's still "too new".  If Georgetown wanted to get close to it, instead of a huge battery, I would have bought/installed 10-20MW of duel-fuel Wartsila, dusted off my hands and said "OK mother nature, bring it on"!}

^{Not sure, but I think you can fuel them with peanut oil...}

Edited February 27, 2021 by turbguy

[Boat + 1,324]

In Canada, where wind turbines can experience icing up to 20% of the time in winter months, special “cold weather packages” are installed to provide heating to turbine components such as the gearbox, yaw and pitch motors and battery, according to the Canadian government. This can allow them to operate in temperatures down to minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 30 Celsius). 

To prevent icing on rotor blades — which cause the blades to catch air less efficiently and to generate less power — heating and water-resistant coatings are used. 

One Swedish company, Skellefteå Kraft, which has experimented with operating wind turbines in the Arctic, coats turbine blades with thin layers of carbon fiber which are then heated to prevent ice from forming. Another method used by the company is to circulate hot air inside the blades. 
 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcarpenter/2021/02/16/why-wind-turbines-in-cold-climates-dont-freeze-de-icing-and-carbon-fiber/amp/

 

What’s typical about these types of discussions comes down to is it the human or the gun that killed. We can eliminate guns and turbines. Or we can take responsibility for bad decisions and put the responsibility on the human using machine. 
Personally I own guns but don’t point them at humans. Turbines need winterization in the South for them to kill coal. 

[Gerry Maddoux + 3,627]

1 hour ago, turbguy said:

^{Nothing as reliable as an opinion from a lobbyist.}

Mary Hutzler is arguably the world's expert on variable energy source input. 

1 hour ago, Boat said:

Turbines need winterization in the South for them to kill coal. 

Coal is almost dead in Texas. Dying as we speak. Even after the winter storm.