Very close to a much worse disaster?

[JTeLarkin08]

I work for Tri County Electric.. It seems we got really lucky in the fact that we dont have tons of equipment damage after the freeze.. We had 0 outages in our district at 5pm yesterday and were able to go off of storm rotation..

I think we were very close to this being extremely bad with the Texas Grid. That said I guarantee that Ercot makes some positive changes after this.

[PYBUCK]

I'll be interested when the post mortem is written to know what percentage of the outages were from what causes:
* "normal" winter storm damage (downed lines, etc)
* Power plants going offline due to extreme weather
* ERCOT mandated rolling blackouts.

The rolling blackouts caused a lot of the problems. Those idiots at ERCOT didn't realize that when you shut down oil field production it eliminates your source for fuel for the generators. They need to understand how the oil field works and they need to examine how they administer blackouts so it will remove demand on the grid but still leave the source of power generation intact, or mostly intact.

[Playa]

LOL That's funny. Let me know when you see one of these greenies admit anything. I don't think a single one will change their tune.

Surely he jests! AOC tweeted that her Green New Deal would have completely prevented the failures, something about low income equality, blah, blah. Basically Unicom farts and pixie queefs would have saved the day. Who knew those were combustible!

[OrangeBlood]

I call BS, I read that article and they are just doing a CYA campaign to make it sound like they "saved" us from a much larger disaster, even though the created said disaster.

[LWC]

The same way the whole east coast was blacked out in the mid 70's. One plant went down and the remaining could not handle the load. Rest fell like
dominoes.

So we don't have some sort of fuse or breaker type system to protect our generation units or transmission systems? One plant goes down and the whole system blows? I could see a localized failure but surely there are stop gaps to prevent system wide failures. This ain't the 70's

[Shinesintx]

How long would it take a governor with some balls to tell the EPA to kick rocks, and build/rebuild the necessary power plants to avoid such a problem?

I want Texas to use 100% reliable energy. They can sell other states all the wind energy they want.

[tps7742]

From working in a plant setting that had generators coming back up from cold or other is a very slow process. As a small example heating up all the thick metal piping and associated equipment has to be performed per specifications. It depends on the type of metal, operating temperature, pressure etc. At times you will have a lengthy hold in the process because of you do not want the metal to the embrittlement stage etc. Again this is just one example of a step depending on the process.

[LWC]

I call BS, I read that article and they are just doing a CYA campaign to make it sound like they "saved" us from a much larger disaster, even though the created said disaster.

^^^^^This

They are trying to take the heat off themselves. It is like saying if we didn't have those 15 days to flatten the curve, this covid stuff would have been really bad.

[Big C]

Long story short if the grid collapses, bringing it back up is more than just closing things in. Generation ties have to be matched voltage and frequency wise. Stations are ran off of battery stacks so that in case of a station going dark you can still operate equipment and go in. The longer the outage the higher chance you lose your dc system and then you can’t close anything. The dc system is required so that you can protect the equipment and lines via relays. Lots of the smaller stations would take a while to get up and running with the batteries shelled. A lot more to it but yes it would take a while to get the grid going again if collapsed system wide. There would be loading issues just like we all experienced where you can’t just bring everything online at once. You have to do it slowly so load stabilizes. Bring too much on too fast it will collapse again.

[Playa]

I want Texas to use 100% reliable energy. They can sell other states all the wind energy they want.

That seems like the perfect answer, Texas should be using Texas nat gas to make electricity and selling lubbock wind to other states with the option to pull from it if need be

[Runnin4D]

I call BS, I read that article and they are just doing a CYA campaign to make it sound like they "saved" us from a much larger disaster, even though the created said disaster.

not going to argue that they "created" the disaster. But it is true, they did save us from a much larger disaster. It is two different subjects. How close we actually came, well I don't know.

I was very surprised last Friday when ERCOT made a statement that they did not foresee grid issues, during an upcoming, state-wide, historic weather event. At that time, it was not going to be a surprise to me that rolling blackouts may possibly occur.

[Runnin4D]

Long story short if the grid collapses, bringing it back up is more than just closing things in. Generation ties have to be matched voltage and frequency wise. Stations are ran off of battery stacks so that in case of a station going dark you can still operate equipment and go in. The longer the outage the higher chance you lose your dc system and then you can’t close anything. The dc system is required so that you can protect the equipment and lines via relays. Lots of the smaller stations would take a while to get up and running with the batteries shelled. A lot more to it but yes it would take a while to get the grid going again if collapsed system wide. There would be loading issues just like we all experienced where you can’t just bring everything online at once. You have to do it slowly so load stabilizes. Bring too much on too fast it will collapse again.

really good explanation. and i will add that on top of the DC systems (which are only for emergency control power, basically), auxiliary plant equipment (pumps, heaters etc.) need auxiliary power to run right? well, where is that power going to come from if the whole, electrically isolated texas power grid is de-energized??

[Arrowsmith]

How big of a propane tank will I need for my whole home generator to run for a month? 40K gallons?

If you ran it 24 hours a day for a month (which would toast you generator) you would use between 1400 and 2200 gallons of propane.

I am paying $1.20 a gallon here in Iowa.

I just checked the average Texas price per gallon is $2.42

[Mike D]

Long story short if the grid collapses, bringing it back up is more than just closing things in. Generation ties have to be matched voltage and frequency wise. Stations are ran off of battery stacks so that in case of a station going dark you can still operate equipment and go in. The longer the outage the higher chance you lose your dc system and then you can’t close anything. The dc system is required so that you can protect the equipment and lines via relays. Lots of the smaller stations would take a while to get up and running with the batteries shelled. A lot more to it but yes it would take a while to get the grid going again if collapsed system wide. There would be loading issues just like we all experienced where you can’t just bring everything online at once. You have to do it slowly so load stabilizes. Bring too much on too fast it will collapse again.

really good explanation. and i will add that on top of the DC systems (which are only for emergency control power, basically), auxiliary plant equipment (pumps, heaters etc.) need auxiliary power to run right? well, where is that power going to come from if the whole, electrically isolated texas power grid is de-energized??

Agree with all points above. I’ve worked just enough in heavy industrial with medium voltage systems to agree with what he said regarding the DC systems on this gear. I’ve got a couple of scars from being burned by it.

Anyway the part I’m having a hard time understanding is, I’ve seen statements saying that generators (the power generating part, not the engine or turbines) were very close to literally burning up, transformers across the grid, switching stations and even power lines were on the verge of failing. What I can’t wrap my head around is the ONLY means of overload protection is Manila load shedding?

I don’t buy that part.


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[Big C]

Yes the only way is load shedding. The relays offer load protection but you are still cutting load off. The issue is as cold as it got. There was way more load demand than normal. They did not have generation to meet the load. Also the equipment (xfmrs, lines, etc..) are built to handle a set amount of load continuously. Over loading a xfmr can mean catastrophic failure. And cause cascading problems. Only way to fix a system that has too much demand is find more generation or cut load or move load around if possible.