Weekend Rolling Blackouts

[91cavgt]

Fear!

Only the ignorant believe that stating of facts is spreading fear.

[STX_Shooter]

Looks like we will be firing up 1 of our turbines tomorrow evening for a few hours.

[PondPopper]

Looks like we will be firing up 1 of our turbines tomorrow evening for a few hours.

With blackouts already occurring I wonder why it wasnt already running?
Maintenance issues??

[DaveC]

I work at a plant in the SPP market. I work maintenance on was at the plant during that week. I can tell you the ones that were here worked our butts off to keep things from freezing up. We were the only "big units" to not trip. For our dedicated work we got a jacket

Our plant was close to going down as well, right there at the tipping point.

We got a decent plantwide "spot" bonus....it wore much better than a jacket.

[STX_Shooter]

With blackouts already occurring I wonder why it wasnt already running?
Maintenance issues??

We are a peaking plant, basically we only run when the demands are high “when the money is good”. The power plant is part of a city municipality, the market is played everyday. Some days it’s worth running and some days it will cost us more than we would make.

[Killer]

This right here. There was a heroic effort by plant workers and lineman that week.

Our grid runs at 60 hertz and is incredibly intolerant to deviation from that. It got really bad overnight 2/14 into early morning 2/15. Most of the outages people experience prior to that was due to damaged lines from ice, car accidents, etc. ERCOT went from EEA 1 to EEA 3 in the course of about an hour. At that point we had about 35 GW of generation offline. Then we lost another 2GW that triggered the first involuntary load shed order. We then lost another 2GW that triggered additional load shedding. We dipped below 59.4 Hz for about four and half minutes. 5 more minutes of that and we could have lost the whole grid. Load shed worked and restored the grid, but instead of these being “rolling” blackouts we couldn’t restore service. When they got the green light to add load back, TDSP’s were restoring circuits and then all kinds of stuff was breaking. Lineman were having to go out and isolate circuits to restore them and do numerous repairs. It’s why it took so long for people to be restored. The surge load from all these shut down circuits were crashing equipment when they tried to restore power.

We have so many hurdles to repair the problems though. I think we need several nuke plants built for baseline load. We need cost effective battery storage for the wind and solar that’s already deployed to be utilized more efficiently. We need to have a couple of designated, fully winterized nat gas plants in the northern part of the state. I also think we need to consider options and possibly move away from the energy-only pricing market ERCOT currently uses. The problem is we have tremendous growth and no projects in the pipeline to address this. Power plants don’t get built quickly. It is an extremely long process to get through all the red tape just to get approval to break ground. If we got fired up about it today, it would be a decade or more before we found ourselves in a more favorable position. In the current energy only market, tight supply/demand is the only thing that causes prices to rise. These current companies that own generation have no incentive to build new plants because the tighter the supply/demand is in the state, the more money they make as prices rise.


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Spot on explanation of the problem; Energy-only wholesale pricing market We have got to get away from this. The state government has got to change this. We as consumers and customers have got to demand it. We have got to have a balance between cheap power and a stable electric grid. It will ruin the state and the country with out it.

[100%TtId]

This right here. There was a heroic effort by plant workers and lineman that week.

Yes indeed, they were big heroes as were the ERCOT workers watching the boards. They prevented a horrible disaster from becoming a LOT worse.

The politicians and lobbyists who kicked the can down the road from 2011 shoulder the blame for getting us in this mess.

[STX_Shooter]

Most folks don’t understand how hard folks worked to keep things online. I spent 13 days in a gas plant and it was all hands on deck to stay running so power plants had gas to fire the turbines. Producers froze off or couldn’t get crude/water trucked out and caused a lot of production to go offline on the natty gas side. That was not a fun time lol

This past winter was my first working at the power plant. We had a few days where we hit almost freezing temps. I was cold, wet, and miserable, luckily I was able to go home rest and warm then back at it again. I can’t imagine what y’all went through back in 2021.

[BigCohiba]

Any idea how many other plants are doing repairs or maintenance right now and won’t be at full capacity by the weekend?

Many plants are down for maintenance this time of the year. It’s outage season. I work for one of the large OEM’s. Spring is always our busiest time of the year…

[trophy8]

This past winter was my first working at the power plant. We had a few days where we hit almost freezing temps. I was cold, wet, and miserable, luckily I was able to go home rest and warm then back at it again. I can’t imagine what y’all went through back in 2021.

My comment somehow got deleted? Strange.

Yeah we hit -11 ambient. Had stuff freezing all over.

Hoping they start building more power plants. We have the gas to fire them

[Zmaxhunter]

Yalls population is part of the problem.. millions of illegals and californians with no new generation.. wind turbines suck. All those turbines suck power from the grid.

Not to mention, the 800+ lbs of copper in them.. the ave electric vehicle uses about 4 times as much copper as a normal car.


My county population peaked in 2010 with about 6096.. 2020 has us at 5560. Perfect as far as im concerned

[RiverRat1]

All due respect, but I have to call BULL**** on that. The expectation of electrical service has long been established well before ******* politicians and environmental activists got involved. I realize it’s not the power generators fault, but people have long payed for, and come to expect dependable electric service, and that shouldn’t be too much to ask in this country.


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Lol. When I had to pay what I paid to get electric lines to my house and paid to have it all hooked up I **** sure expect to have electricity coming through it. That's some bs! What's the point of forking over thousands and thousands of dollars to get lines to my house if they can't keep power coming through it?

This ^ Keep in mind most people have electric in their home when they buy so they don't see what it cost to get it started.

If electric is a luxury does that make water a luxury also?

ERCOT is just one piece of the puzzle that is being used by this corrupt admin to further their anti-American agenda.. Their end goal is a total collapse.
Power plants will now go down for maintenance and no Chinese made parts will be available to repair them, due to the democrat created shipping fiasco.. That is the next democrat made crisis we will be faced with.. And it goes on and on..

Hell Im rebuilding an old 350 engine and can't even find a crank or a camshaft in stock. It's just stupid.
If you are a full time fishing guide you better hope and pray your boat doesn't break down because there are no new parts available to fix it. Especially on the electronics side..

And all of this destruction in just a year and a half.. LORD help us.

Some will say this is fear mongering but refuse to see what's taking place. They act like if nothing bad happens next week or year you were proven wrong. People need to wake up and see we're literally on the verge of very bad things. Could happen any time or not for 10 years but China has us by the nads. One day we will wake up to a different world IMO but it won't take near as much as people think.

[60 Deluxe]

It is all of those electric vehicles consuming power that was once used in our homes. I'm being facetious. Lots of things go into the reason, as we all know. But it is really stupid to push electric vehicles prior to pushing (and building) a power generation and grid large enough to support EVs,

[Big Lee]

We need more hamsters to spin the wheel.

[Txhunter3000]

With rain at a premium so far this year just wait until this summer and watch the blackouts and water rationing overwhelm a lot of people.