Very close to a much worse disaster?

[RR 314]

I don't know how we didn't get hit but we didn't lose power for a single minute. Starting to think we have an ERCOT board member in the hood. :-)

[Burnadell]

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.

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.

Thanks for those explanations!

[AntlerCollector]

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.

Exactly! They are doubling down and blaming gas and coal for the rolling blackouts.

[AntlerCollector]

How many of y’all are prepared to keep your family warm, safe, and nourished for a month if we lost the power grid and water tomorrow?

[Geezy Rider]

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.

I have been a customer of Tri County for 38 years and I have always gotten excellent service from y’all. Thank you for all the hard work you guys do.
This recent cold snap was no exception. During this whole time I only lost power for 25 minutes. I don’t know why we were so blessed when everyone else was having extreme issues but it allowed us to help others that were in need.

Again, thank you.

[TXHUNT3R]

How many of y’all are prepared to keep your family warm, safe, and nourished for a month if we lost the power grid and water tomorrow?

Not prepared enough.

Taking steps currently to rectify this.

[Runnin4D]

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

Of course there a protection systems. yes compared to the 70s, high tech, microprocessor driven, mostly automated systems. Protection and coordination schemes and what not are primarily designed for mostly normal circumstances. An event (load conditions) like this would be impossible to predict and scheme. So, basically the only choice would be human intervention (load shedding) to keep the dominoe effect/chain reaction from taking place.

[Geezy Rider]

How many of y’all are prepared to keep your family warm, safe, and nourished for a month if we lost the power grid and water tomorrow?

I can and have lived primitive for weeks at a time. Having hard shelter and a fireplace is quite the luxury for me if things go south. I can even take a hot shower with no power.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been in this type of situation. Survived the Alaskan earthquake and the aftermath. Talk about returning to the dark ages. We were without for almost two months.

[bakin7005]

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?

Well our governor would do it but he's gonna be waaay to busy forming committees.

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[Mike D]

I have been a customer of Tri County for 38 years and I have always gotten excellent service from y’all. Thank you for all the hard work you guys do.

This recent cold snap was no exception. During this whole time I only lost power for 25 minutes. I don’t know why we were so blessed when everyone else was having extreme issues but it allowed us to help others that were in need.



Again, thank you.

We are also on Tri County and did not even have our power blink through all of this.


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[Mike D]

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.

If there are load relays then how would downstream items fail (catastrophic type failure) if the relays are properly set and function properly?


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[Big C]

Things fail. A lot more load than normal during this and was running things to the extreme. Protection settings have to be changed all the time to keep up with the system. Smaller transformers aren’t always protected with relays some are fused. But basically for a relay to see something for it to take something out there has to be a fault or overload condition (other things as well as under voltage, over voltage, frequency problems, etc..) An equipment failure, lightning strike, phases touching, animals, all kinds of things can cause these issues.

[MadHatter]

How many of y’all are prepared to keep your family warm, safe, and nourished for a month if we lost the power grid and water tomorrow?

Keeping them sane is the only the difficulty in the above statement .

[Big C]

Things fail. A lot more load than normal during this and was running things to the extreme. Protection settings have to be changed all the time to keep up with the system. Smaller transformers aren’t always protected with relays some are fused. But basically for a relay to see something for it to take something out there has to be a fault or overload condition (other things as well as under voltage, over voltage, frequency problems, etc..) An equipment failure, lightning strike, phases touching, animals, all kinds of things can cause these issues.

Also something to keep in mind that all of this equipment has only so many operations or so many days in service before it fails. Everything will fail at some point. That’s also why all of the equipment has mandated maintenance at regular intervals to try and ensure functionality. Even then stuff fails. Which is why depending on the maintenance cycles, life expectancy, regular issues with the equipment, they will get changed out to a newer piece of equipment.

[Anthonysince94]

While I wont argue about what source is used to produced the power, I can tell you that ERCOT does not decide who gets cut off. They tell the companys how much power is available for them to use. The companys decide how to divide it up. Some did very well with rolling blackouts continously around their system. Others simply just dropped load from one portion and never rotated it.

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