Texans forced to have rolling black outs. Not from downed power line , but because the wind energy turbines are frozen.

[turbguy + 503]

8 hours ago, LANDMAN X said:

Has anyone mentioned the electricity going out to the gas pumps because of the pumps going down for lack of electricity?   They used to be gas driven ones but were told by regulations to GOTO the nice green ones driven by the juice that went down because of the down green wind mills and no solar?  Just wondering...Gerry is right on about our need for NG and oil......

Didn't some pumps used to have hand cranks, with mechanical metering?

[turbguy + 503]

8 hours ago, Coffeeguyzz said:

The extreme cold certainly drew down line pressure as gas went for heating purposes ... so it is possible that all 3 reasons just stated may have been major contributors to gas-starved plants being shut down, but I think not.

Several recent statements by officials from the utility commission and ERCOT expressed surprise that 'exempt-from-power-cutoff' status was neither sought nor given from the ERCOT folks to ... some ... in the natgas industry.

Pure speculation on my part, but I believe that electricity shut off to the gas line compressors may be revealed to have played a huge role in the massive grid shut downs.

It does not take many big compressors to stop working on big transmission lines for pressure to drop quickly and steeply.

As you have pointed out (and I mentioned way upthread), compressors routinely used to be powered by the gas right at hand but "pollution" concerns have been mandating the use of electric drive compressors.

If this 'circular firing squad' scenario turns out to be the case, embarrassed officials may release the findings in the small print 5 years from now.

I was also surprised that the Texas RRC was unaware of the the availability to be on the "critical infrastructure circuit" list with electric distributors/transmitters.  Or even why ERCOT did not recognize that and implement it itself!

With gas available at a compressor station, don't SOME stations have a back-up generation (I know that ain't cheap)?

This situation somewhat reminds me of some of the damage arising from the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965.  Remember "Big Allis",  the million kilowatt cross-compound unit at Ravenswood Station in NYC?  There were no DC-powered backup oil pumps, by design, as Allis-Chalmers was told "the grid will never go down".  That turbine-generator (and some others) "coasted down" with zero oil supply to the bearings (and generator hydrogen seals).  What a mess...

Why Texas thermal plants tripped (or were derated) will eventually boil down to one or more of four reasons (in no particular order of probability).

1. Extreme cold weather caused a plant process/control error.
2. Owners/operators decided to remove the plant from service voluntarily.
3. Owners/operators made an operating error.
4. Plants could not obtain sufficient fuel to operate.

 

Edited March 17 by turbguy

[Ecocharger + 207]

11 hours ago, turbguy said:

The've started already...

Just barely started...it doesn't get real until you ramp up for hundreds of millions of vehicles. Different world then.

Edited March 17 by Ecocharger

[Ecocharger + 207]

10 hours ago, surrept33 said:

 

Well, then that incentivizes people to exploit up new supply, which there is plenty, especially in the US, it's just been long underexploited. I think there will be a push for fast track permitting, and there is also very attractive (US treasury rates) title17 loans not unlike Tesla got before 2008 that probably will get expanded from manufacturing to mining/extraction: https://www.energy.gov/lpo/title-xvii

There has been an ongoing massive effort by the USGS lately to focus on surveying these "critical minerals":

https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/emri/#3.19/35.74/-90.69

The materials they were evaluating were (just in phase1) were: aluminum, cobalt, graphite, lithium, niobium, platinum group elements, rare earth elements, tantalum, tin, titanium, and tungsten.

But these surveys should be invaluable in the future, since the methods they are employing are much more modern than traditional data: https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/earthmri/science/why-earth-mri-needed?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects

Supplies are very constrained for many of those, you will get ramping-up demand for them which will send the prices sky high. The surface is only just scratched now, when hundreds of millions of vehicles are being produced the input prices will be prohibitive.

[turbguy + 503]

5 minutes ago, Ecocharger said:

Just barely started...it doesn't get real until you ramp up for hundreds of millions of vehicles. Different world then.

Yup.  Just started.  And started.

Since when hasn't the world "been different"?

Ever since humanity found something to burn that could be delivered by a pipe, the world's been different.

Edited March 17 by turbguy

[Eyes Wide Open + 2,458]

13 hours ago, Dan Clemmensen said:

The Tesla haters publish these stories every quarter. Tesla's sales are cyclical for a reason, and will remain so until the two big new factories (Texas and Germany)  come online. Tesla has a customer for every car that comes off the production line, and the customer gets an e-mail with that car's VIN when the car is produced (no dealers, remember?) For the first month of the quarter, the Fremont factory produces European Teslas (different charger plug)  for European customers. These are then shipped to Europe, which takes awhile, so there are no sales in the first month. the next two months the factory builds the US Teslas and delivers them quickly. When the German factory (Giga Berlin) comes online, it will handle Europe and this cycle will (mostly) end.

In addition, a lot of Tesla customers waited for the higher-priced and bigger Model Y, and purchased it instead of a model 3. The demand for the model 3 is (probably) still there, but there was not enough production capacity for it and the Model Y at the same time.

Mr.Clemmensen I do not "hate" Telsa nor EV's, EV's/ Hybids are merely a commodity nothing more nothing less. A unsustainable commodity at that, when one loses objectivity and passion rules the decision making process it is time for a pause to reflect.

 

[Eyes Wide Open + 2,458]

20 hours ago, turbguy said:

Perhaps it is all the illegal immigrants, running air conditioners full blast while charging their Teslas?

Plz don't give Gov Newsom any bright ideals, the social justice warrior is finally on the way out. 

[Eyes Wide Open + 2,458]

20 hours ago, Symmetry said:

Unrelated to the thread, different problems, different state.

I understand that this forum will enjoy mocking a blue state when discussing a red state problem.  Red oil price losers love to mock the winners, and employ "what about" illogical arguments such as this.

 

 

BIG E your back to moderating already? Let us not forget the last time you went there the broom you experienced was abrupt. 

As to mocking I merely illuminated some of California Green Energy forays, now as to the bridge to nowhere..mocking you say..  California's direction seems to be headed nowhere each and every time they attempt such maddeness.

California’s High-Speed Rail Failure Shows the Insanity of Green New Deal

https://www.heritage.org/transportation/commentary/californias-high-speed-rail-failure-shows-the-insanity-green-new-deal

California’s $100 Billion Nightmare High-Speed Rail Project

The WasteWatcher

 

[specinho + 212]

 

On 2/16/2021 at 7:08 AM, 0R0 said:

We are at the start of a solar minimum cycle that is going to last at least another 20 years. it will be worse each year into the intermediate future. 

If global warming is real, we need as much of it as we can get for another 20-30 years. Subsidize CO2 emissions if that is required.

We often wait to find out what gives, to clear up the mess after disasters hit, to fork out astronomical size of fund for long term humanitarian aids and occupied with the same news for some times..........

 

 

Shall we are able to predict the weather via satellite images, there shall be ways to prevent disasters, no??

On 2/16/2021 at 6:49 PM, NickW said:

The point here is how much do you spend to insure against 1 in 10/100/1000 year events? 

Do you double the cost of your networks to prevent 1 day blackout in 10 years? 

(shall the above measure is taken, this would have been solved, no?)

 

On 2/16/2021 at 2:23 PM, Dan Warnick said:

2021:  The year the (frozen) chickens came home to roost.

Would that not be " the frozen chickens stay fresh in the snow pile till used or found" ??.......

 

Edited March 17 by specinho

[Ecocharger + 207]

3 hours ago, turbguy said:

Yup.  Just started.  And started.

Since when hasn't the world "been different"?

Ever since humanity found something to burn that could be delivered by a pipe, the world's been different.

When the EV production breaks into the hundreds of millions, then you will see something big happen to the prices....maybe even before that.

[turbguy + 503]

3 minutes ago, Ecocharger said:

When the EV production breaks into the hundreds of millions, then you will see something big happen to the prices....maybe even before that.

I can wait...

[Ecocharger + 207]

2 hours ago, turbguy said:

I can wait...

You won't have to wait very long....there is already concern about the cobalt story, supplies are currently questioned about human rights issues.

Edited March 17 by Ecocharger

[Ecocharger + 207]

15 hours ago, LANDMAN X said:

Has anyone mentioned the electricity going out to the gas pumps because of the pumps going down for lack of electricity?   They used to be gas driven ones but were told by regulations to GOTO the nice green ones driven by the juice that went down because of the down green wind mills and no solar?  Just wondering...Gerry is right on about our need for NG and oil......

You hit the nail right on the head. This is the domino impact in the Texas debacle, the gas generation ramped up to replace the failure of wind generation due to freezing, and then the lack of green electricity took down the gas generation capacity. 

A classic example of what happens when a system is over-reliant on wind and solar, and plans on using gas electrical generation as a backup instead of the mainstay, then leaves the gas sector vulnerable to the failures of green electricity. A system that was designed to fail in a cold weather scenario.

[Ecocharger + 207]

23 hours ago, surrept33 said:

Yeah, pretty much this. Renewables and storage are just going to get cheaper (worldwide), if nothing else because of economies of scale, and regulations related to decarbonization. It's going to balloon in the next 15 years, I think, we have barely seen anything yet.

 

Just look at lithium battery production for example (which will help both distributed grids with EV cars and grid storage).  Many countries have already announced ICE bans in the future (California one of them, along with PV mandates on all new construction. this will need a lot of grid and microgrid spend).

EU, as part of the European Green Deal, is about to go on a building spree to meet decarbonization targets.

One of the historic bottlenecks, cobalt, is probably not going to be the bottleneck forever as it gets phased out:

Here is how much cobalt is being used these days.

NMC622 is already in a lot of EV installs in the US, 811 is being introduced into the market, 955 (9 parts nicklel, 0.5 parts cobalt will probably by 2025). 

 

I have a close friend who is an engineer in the battery industry for a major battery manufacturer, and he tells me privately that cobalt is a necessity for EV's going forward...keeps the batteries from catching on fire, very useful contribution, don't you think?

[Eyes Wide Open + 2,458]

4 hours ago, Ecocharger said:

When the EV production breaks into the hundreds of millions, then you will see something big happen to the prices....maybe even before that.

Breaking into millions will never happen, the automotive market is subject to the whims of the market aside from trucks in recent years. Have some fun with auto trends, models and mfg's trends go up and down startling clarity. The name plate Camary once was the pinnacle of the industry today its grandma's car who cares..Or the PT Cruiser..that was extraordinary.. for over two yrs production was sold out, two later later they were scrapped for boat anchors. In 2004 the ford Mustang was on fire, two yrs later just another bone in the pile.

Auto's are like husbands or wives, with one caveat. Divorce is dirty cheap and everyone is happy to see you with a new model....And that my friends is just the way the fat lady sings.

Edited March 17 by Eyes Wide Open

[Ecocharger + 207]

Basic input materials for batteries are already seeing their prices run up at fast rates this past year, and that rate of increase will continue at an accelerating pace going forward. Reach for your wallet.

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Three-Commodities-Set-To-Boom-As-The-Global-Economy-Recovers.html

Edited March 17 by Ecocharger

[waltz + 138]

Ecocharger, so correct and that will not be changing anytime soon.  Vehicles will be getting more expensive for a myriad of reasons.

Can’t seem to get links correct but you can google, estimates say electronics account for 40% of the cost of a new car.  Also, tire and brake wear are said to be higher than current EU tailpipe emissions allowed to be.  We have a shortage of chips (probably short term), lack of raw materials for exponential battery growth (though that is what is desired by some) and are arriving at a point where a non-regulated input (clearly will “have to change” at some point) is worse than emissions from an ICE vehicle.

         waltz 

 

Edited March 18 by waltz

[surrept33 + 317]

1 minute ago, waltz said:

Ecocharger, so correct and that will not be changing anytime soon.  Vehicles will be getting more expensive for a myriad of reasons.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.caranddriver.com/features/amp32034437/computer-chips-in-cars/

 

Well, it's a prelude to self driving cars and other more and more advanced assisted technologies. You need a beefy ECUs and any more types of sensors to do sensor fusion so you can sense the environment in real time (machine vision). That being said, I think the cost of all of this is all getting commoditized. I remember when LIDAR  was military only, now the prices since 2016 have plummeted.

Over the long run, when there is much penetration v2v (vehicle to vehicle) and v2i  (vehicle to infastructure) network transmissions of multple view pgeometry, both of which the SAE and IEEE have more or less standardized, at some point some roads will be no human driving allowed, which makes sense because at that point, insurancing a human will be cost prohibitived vs a self driving car that is effectively in a mesh network, and thus has ESP. 

[turbguy + 503]

Politics, the "art of the possible" (until those generators that remained on-line take it to the courts, then refuse the nat gas bills)...

Some wind machines made out like bandits!

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/15/ERCOT-winter-storm-pricing/

Edited March 18 by turbguy

[Dan Clemmensen + 845]

22 hours ago, Eyes Wide Open said:

Mr.Clemmensen I do not "hate" Telsa nor EV's, EV's/ Hybids are merely a commodity nothing more nothing less. A unsustainable commodity at that, when one loses objectivity and passion rules the decision making process it is time for a pause to reflect.

 

I have no reason to believe you are a "Tesla hater". I was referring to the authors of those papers, not you.  The term is used by the Tesla Fanbois. I drive a Tesla and I'm interested in Tesla, but I'm not a Fanboi, and in particular I think Elon Musk is an arrogant bastard. You must look at both sides to try to get a balanced picture of Tesla since the two are so polarized.

[Dan Clemmensen + 845]

18 hours ago, Ecocharger said:

I have a close friend who is an engineer in the battery industry for a major battery manufacturer, and he tells me privately that cobalt is a necessity for EV's going forward...keeps the batteries from catching on fire, very useful contribution, don't you think?

Cobalt and nickel are necessary for Some battery chemistries, including the currently dominant NCM.  The are not needed for LFP. Tesla is building its lower-end "standard range" versions of the Model 3 and Model Y in China using LFP.

The other main constraints are lithium and copper. Their prices will go up, and then new sources will be opened up and prices will go back down. This is no different than what happens with Oil. Lithium and copper are both relatively abundant.

Going forward, we will see stationary batteries shift to chemistries that use much cheaper materials on a $/kWh basis, because nobody cares about kg/kWh or L/kWh in a stationary battery. This will free up the lithium and copper going into those big batteries. If this is not enough to drive down the prices, then the high prices will drive recycling, especially of those old stationary batteries but also of the EV batteries.

[Dan Clemmensen + 845]

21 hours ago, Ecocharger said:

When the EV production breaks into the hundreds of millions, then you will see something big happen to the prices....maybe even before that.

The world currently produces about 92 million vehicles of all types per year. The industry will not make "hundreds of millions" of EVs per year. There are currently about 1.4 billion vehicles on the road worldwide. The cobalt and nickel in those batteries is not consumed. By the time EVs become an appreciable percentage of the vehicles, those batteries will be recycled if the price get high enough. The recycling operation will also recover the lithium and copper as (barely-profitable) side-streams.  Thus, the total amount of new mining will top out at the rate needed for worldwide fleet increase plus recycling losses.

All of that assumes no advances in battery technology. But battery cost has come down by 80% in the last ten years, and there is a tremendous amount of ongoing research, especially in reduction of material cost. I am quite skeptical of most of the research announcements (there are several each week), but surely there will be a few nuggets in this huge pile of manure.

If you want to worry about cobalt demand, you should probably look at motors and generators instead of batteries. Especially EV motors and wind turbines, but those are not the only ones. My personal guess is that as the price of cobalt rises, we will see a shift away from permanent magnet motors to less-capable induction motors that do not use cobalt. The cost tradeoff depends on the cost of cobalt relative to the cost of electricity. For wind generators, this translates to the generator consuming some of its own power, so the same blade diameter provides less net electricity: it's all a cost tradeoff. For EVs, the less-capable motor will consume more energy to do the same job, so the EV will need a bigger battery, but if the battery is sufficiently cheap, this is also a good tradeoff. Just like ICE, high-performance cars will use more expensive motors and cost a lot more, while the average commuter car will be a lot cheaper.

[turbguy + 503]

5 minutes ago, Dan Clemmensen said:

The world currently produces about 92 million vehicles of all types per year. The industry will not make "hundreds of millions" of EVs per year. There are currently about 1.4 billion vehicles on the road worldwide. The cobalt and nickel in those batteries is not consumed. By the time EVs become an appreciable percentage of the vehicles, those batteries will be recycled if the price get high enough. The recycling operation will also recover the lithium and copper as (barely-profitable) side-streams.  Thus, the total amount of new mining will top out at the rate needed for worldwide fleet increase plus recycling losses.

All of that assumes no advances in battery technology. But battery cost has come down by 80% in the last ten years, and there is a tremendous amount of ongoing research, especially in reduction of material cost. I am quite skeptical of most of the research announcements (there are several each week), but surely there will be a few nuggets in this huge pile of manure.

If you want to worry about cobalt demand, you should probably look at motors and generators instead of batteries. Especially EV motors and wind turbines, but those are not the only ones. My personal guess is that as the price of cobalt rises, we will see a shift away from permanent magnet motors to less-capable induction motors that do not use cobalt. The cost tradeoff depends on the cost of cobalt relative to the cost of electricity. For wind generators, this translates to the generator consuming some of its own power, so the same blade diameter provides less net electricity: it's all a cost tradeoff. For EVs, the less-capable motor will consume more energy to do the same job, so the EV will need a bigger battery, but if the battery is sufficiently cheap, this is also a good tradeoff. Just like ICE, high-performance cars will use more expensive motors and cost a lot more, while the average commuter car will be a lot cheaper.

I beleive DFIG's are the predominant type used in modern Wind Turbines rather than permanent magnet generators these days.  They don't need (much) cobalt.

[Dan Clemmensen + 845]

4 minutes ago, turbguy said:

I beleive DFIG's are the predominant type used in modern Wind Turbines rather than permanent magnet generators these days.  They don't need (much) cobalt.

Sorry, I was behind the  times.  This means the cobalt from the early-generation machines can be recovered and recycled, so all of the cobalt needed for wind turbines has already been mined.

[turbguy + 503]

33 minutes ago, Dan Clemmensen said:

Sorry, I was behind the  times.  This means the cobalt from the early-generation machines can be recovered and recycled, so all of the cobalt needed for wind turbines has already been mined.

Maybe not for direct drive machines.  The elimination of the gearbox is a reliability plus, but the generators got lotsa PM poles, and begin to look like hydro-generators turned on their sides, like so...

The yaw bearings gotta be impressive!

Edited March 18 by turbguy