Bitter COLD in Oklahoma!

[OranGE-KK]

Working my 7th straight night to get my plant through this. Man there is some grade A top shelf BS being spouted off from every direction. I know how the medical folks feel seeing all the discussion on COVID by all the weekend "experts".

Glad to see temps coming back to normal, we have had our hands full & need a break. Lots of folks busting ass to keep the lights on.

 

[TexanCowboy]

Funny thing about those 100-yr, 200-yr, etc events is that we've had several of them in last decade. And, they don't have records that go back that far but are based on statistics which might be OK if basis of assumptions never changes or there is linear growth but that's not reality.

Take for example the 100/200yr FEMA flood plains. Those studies take years to complete meanwhile in Houston the building is exponential. By the time the study is complete, there are countless new developments completed that render the study obsolete before it is official.

During Hurricane Harvey several folks at my church who live in old Katy, TX and never flooded, but were now flooded by several feet. The consortium of builders have a lot of political influence here. New neighborhoods are built 3/4/5-ft up above adjacent homes. They supposedly have 100yr retention to offset their runoff, but they just push the water to the folks unfortunate to be next door. Generally speaking, every new home built to N/W is better off than those to S/E until someone else does the same to them.

Everyone knows its a problem but it will require someone sticking their neck out politically to push for HUGE cash to fix it. Apparently it's same problem with Texas grid. I have seen very little done to mitigate another Harvey situation. People have short term memory and the news changes fast. I'll bet nothing is done, same as always.

It will take a ridiculous amount of money to get me to even consider moving back to Houston. Born and raised in Dallas, thought I'd give Houston a try. 3 years, 3 floods, I was done. Wife and I packed the bags in 2017, went back to Dallas and are never going back. The lack of zoning in that city is atrocious. People can pretty much build whatever they want, where ever they want. The bayous cannot function as natural drains, there's simply too much water. The city needs an adequate pumping system.

 

[OranGE-KK]

This whole thing has hopefully shined a light on the need to continue to have strong diversity in our energy sources.

Also, I like hearing the input from @Donnyboy

 

[oldguy]

“I hope people are sitting down when they open their bills, because it’s going to knock their socks off,” Stillwater City Manager Norman McNickle said.

So at least we have that to look forward to.

 

[Cody51]

This whole thing has hopefully shined a light on the need to continue to have strong diversity in our energy sources.

Also, I like hearing the input from @Donnyboy

Except all of the the diverse energy sources failed in this storm.

 

[oldguy]

Except all of the the diverse energy sources failed in this storm.

I was unaware their was any problems with Nuclear during the storm.

 

[Cody51]

I was unaware their was any problems with Nuclear during the storm.

It was smaller as nuclear is not a big part of the mix in texas, but it dropped off just like coal did, frozen instruments and water lines would be my guess as to why.

 

[olderschool]

The nuclear plant shut down because of frozen water.

 

[olderschool]

I am sure as hell glad the we still have the OCC providing oversight of the public utilities here in Oklahoma! God bless Mr Robert Anthony!.

 

[ashpkt]

The nuclear plant shut down because of frozen water.

This. If you take away water/steam in any refinery or power plant it is a total shut down...especially nuclear.

 

[Cody51]

if you want to talk about which power source faired best it would be solar, but it is so small it didn't make any difference

 

[ashpkt]

It will take a ridiculous amount of money to get me to even consider moving back to Houston. Born and raised in Dallas, thought I'd give Houston a try. 3 years, 3 floods, I was done. Wife and I packed the bags in 2017, went back to Dallas and are never going back. The lack of zoning in that city is atrocious. People can pretty much build whatever they want, where ever they want. The bayous cannot function as natural drains, there's simply too much water. The city needs an adequate pumping system.

So I work for a major EPC that was looking at solutions. One of them was to basically to install a giant cistern system with hundreds of 'missile silo' like containments peppered throughout city with many millions of cu ft of volume. It sounded tailor made for an Engineering Marvels TV show.

 

[Binman4OSU]

if you want to talk about which power source faired best it would be solar, but it is so small it didn't make any difference

Solar actually OVER performed their expectations. One of the reasons was due to the bright sun glare off the snow and ice that allowed the panels to capture even more light than normal.

And if you think of it. Solar IS nuclear power. Capturing the energy of Nuclear Fusion in the sun. It is the biggest nuclear reactor in our solar system.

 

[olderschool]

Nuclear is a nonstarter.

 

[Binman4OSU]

https://twitter.com/FOX23/status/1364303524880908288

 

[Donnyboy]

if you want to talk about which power source faired best it would be solar, but it is so small it didn't make any difference

Nope

 

[llcoolw]

We used a fairly small generator to survive for 2 weeks without power during in ice storm on the East Coast. We also had a wood burning stove. That combo worked really well.

I'm not saying people shouldn't be prepared to lose power. I'm just wondering about people spending BIG $$$ to prevent another scenario like this when it's ridiculously unlikely to happen again anytime soon.

Because of the ever increasing feeling of losing control. It’s one thing they can control until bureaucracy funds a way to knock out natural gas. Regular gas generation ran into trouble the 3rd day as some gas couldn’t pump and others were closed.

 

[Cody51]

Nope

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/19/climate/texas-storm-power-generation-charts.html

 

[Donnyboy]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/19/climate/texas-storm-power-generation-charts.html

Right another horribly written story. First and foremost all plants submit a winter and summer readiness program. ERCOT has a group dedicated to monitoring these plans. This is the single biggest piece of misinformation. The second is that Texas doesn’t answer to the feds. All as all power generation in the country must meet NERC and FERC standards.....Texas has the TRE which acts as the regulatory body over the reliability coordinator ERCOT all TRE standards meet or exceed FERC so technically FERC doesn’t call the utility commission but the stories of lack of oversight are short sighted and the standards are identical or more rigorous where they apply.

Capacity factor is the NERC/FERC defined performance metric for the percentage of an assets possible output over time. For example if an asset of any technology has a max output of 100 MW and it averages 80 over a day/week/year it has an 80% capacity factor over that time. The technology with the highest the capacity factor was natural gas. Yes it had the most outages but it was far and away the most available options. They are also posting installed gas numbers when some gas facilities were planned outages that were planned months in advance and physically couldn’t be returned to service and calling them “failures”. Solar this time of year will never have over a 50% capacity because of well night. It also produced zero when winter precip was falling. What it did do was at the end of the event exceed forecast. Forecast and installed capacity are two different things. Years ago it was the responsibility of the renewable asset to submit its own capacity based on its own forecast. Well the weather is crazy in Texas so this created chaos so now ERCOT uses a single forecast to predict all renewable assets. Solar didn’t perform to installed capacity it exceeded the very small forecast.....ercot may only forecast as little as 10% of installed solar capacity based on weather and again the forecast is zero at night so exceeding forecast can still be a dismal amount of production...... for the days at the end as mentioned above the reflection helped. When load was cut on both occasions solar was zero cause it was in the middle of the night. The statement that 5 times as much gas failed as wind is also a dubious statement. There is over 20K Mw of installed wind it was 600 when load was cut Monday morning so unless 100MW of gas failed (hint there isn’t that much) the guy is wrong. The difference is when wind poops the bed due to weather they don’t have to take an outage they simply change their capacity so they can make zero or 10% without taking an outage but they aren’t there as a resource. So this is an either outright false statement or at minimum very misleading. Gas carried the grid....plants operating outside of their design criteria carried this thing. . And it’s not close. The other thing the stories never reference is you can’t just make all the power you can. FERC rules require you carry ancillary products and maintain reserves so gas was always backed down some by rule. For example in ERCOT at a minimum you must have as much reserve as your single largest failure contingency (or a percent of total which ever is the larger) which the biggest single point is the nuke plant of 2200MW so you have to have up products in the form of reponsive reserves or plants not at their max at all times so when the grid was intact in anyway gas generation was capable of producing more than wind and solar combined produced during the event on average during the worst days. And people like this writer just grab screenshots in a vacuum and apply them to most complex grid conditions because they don’t know what they are talking about. If the nuke plant in south Texas hadn’t tripped it would have been nuke but gas performed the best based on available assets and megawatt production vs capacity rating.

 

[Cody51]

Right another horribly written story. First and foremost all plants submit a winter and summer readiness program. ERCOT has a group dedicated to monitoring these plans. This is the single biggest piece of misinformation. The second is that Texas doesn’t answer to the feds. All as all power generation in the country must meet NERC and FERC standards.....Texas has the TRE which acts as the regulatory body over the reliability coordinator ERCOT all TRE standards meet or exceed FERC so technically FERC doesn’t call the utility commission but the stories of lack of oversight are short sighted and the standards are identical or more rigorous where they apply.

Capacity factor is the NERC/FERC defined performance metric for the percentage of an assets possible output over time. For example if an asset of any technology has a max output of 100 MW and it averages 80 over a day/week/year it has an 80% capacity factor over that time. The technology with the highest the capacity factor was natural gas. Yes it had the most outages but it was far and away the most available options. They are also posting installed gas numbers when some gas facilities were planned outages that were planned months in advance and physically couldn’t be returned to service and calling them “failures”. Solar this time of year will never have over a 50% capacity because of well night. It also produced zero when winter precip was falling. What it did do was at the end of the event exceed forecast. Forecast and installed capacity are two different things. Years ago it was the responsibility of the renewable asset to submit its own capacity based on its own forecast. Well the weather is crazy in Texas so this created chaos so now ERCOT uses a single forecast to predict all renewable assets. Solar didn’t perform to installed capacity it exceeded the very small forecast.....ercot may only forecast as little as 10% of installed solar capacity based on weather and again the forecast is zero at night so exceeding forecast can still be a dismal amount of production...... for the days at the end as mentioned above the reflection helped. When load was cut on both occasions solar was zero cause it was in the middle of the night. The statement that 5 times as much gas failed as wind is also a dubious statement. There is over 20K Mw of installed wind it was 600 when load was cut Monday morning so unless 100MW of gas failed (hint there isn’t that much) the guy is wrong. The difference is when wind poops the bed due to weather they don’t have to take an outage they simply change their capacity so they can make zero or 10% without taking an outage but they aren’t there as a resource. So this is an either outright false statement or at minimum very misleading. Gas carried the grid....plants operating outside of their design criteria carried this thing. . And it’s not close. The other thing the stories never reference is you can’t just make all the power you can. FERC rules require you carry ancillary products and maintain reserves so gas was always backed down some by rule. For example in ERCOT at a minimum you must have as much reserve as your single largest failure contingency (or a percent of total which ever is the larger) which the biggest single point is the nuke plant of 2200MW so you have to have up products in the form of reponsive reserves or plants not at their max at all times so when the grid was intact in anyway gas generation was capable of producing more than wind and solar combined produced during the event on average during the worst days. And people like this writer just grab screenshots in a vacuum and apply them to most complex grid conditions because they don’t know what they are talking about. If the nuke plant in south Texas hadn’t tripped it would have been nuke but gas performed the best based on available assets and megawatt production vs capacity rating.

So when I said performed best through the storm I meant experienced the smallest drop, from those charts, solar did not experience a drop off, everything else did, I didn't say it had the best capacity factor, or availability, just the drop off. I am not trying to say any one generation type is at fault, but that they all took a hit. Except apparently solar.