noxiousdog wrote: ↑Thu Feb 18, 2021 11:46 am
2) The delivery mechanism is the biggest issue. Someone(s) at the distributors decided to not do rolling blackouts, but decided to just let people freeze for days. This (theoretically) has been addressed. If rolling blackouts had been used, the amount of pain would be SIGNIFICANTLY less. Maybe 90% less.
Demonstrably not true. Failure to roll was a factor but the biggest issue was that demand outstripped generation by 20 GW system-wide for several days. They stopped trying to maintain 60 Hz when they issued their EEA3 directive on Sunday night/Monday early morning. That is a big deal btw. One power trader mentioned they saw a slight blip below 55.8 Hz and they suspect some of the forced outages were a result of bulk electric system desynchronization that luckily didn't cascade, but in effect the whole grid almost fell over. (I think ERCOT has even acknowledged they nearly completely failed).
In any case rolling black outs would have spread the pain out but would not have helped "90%" whatever that means. The problem is Texas has had a prolonged, profound Forced Outage generation shortfall that hasn't been seen anywhere in the United States. Maybe someone can find something like this during the energy crisis but I doubt it.
More what was happening was that certain zones were kept always on because they supplied hospitals, life safety facilities, etc. In Austin, I saw a note that Austin Energy directed 60% of the available *diminished* capacity to critical customers. That 40% of the smaller pot than needed wasn't rolling around. It certainly would have helped, especially if it was communicated so people could prepare, but it would have had limited impact. FWIW I have a friend in Houston and a colleague there who've been out for days. Same thing with one colleague in San Antonio. It hasn't been addressed for them.
3) This was a once a century event, depending on whether climate change is going to make this worse, which I suspect it is. It has not been this cold in February in 130 years. Generation is offline and in maintenance because it needs to be to prepare for summer.
The weather facts
might be are true but the bit about summer prep is a stretch at best that they are throwing around. At the root of that, ERCOT can not mandate winterization or approve/disapprove scheduled outages unlike *every other* ISO in the United States. As Elon accurately said, the R is totally absent in the their mission but it isn't their fault. They don't have the power to ask for it. That lack of capability to mandate reserve coverage is in the design of the system. The architects of the marketplace expect the market to essentially provide for it through pricing mechanisms and incentives. It didn't work...like it didn't work in 2011 and to a lesser extent in 2018. It has been an epic market failure. They can argue that the system would have had failures but this scope is well beyond this type of excuse making.
5) This stuff still happens in other states with high regulation. California had the PG&E outages and there was a big Northeast outage a few years back as well. And of course thats just general items, let alone natural disasters.
This is very, very, very different from the NE outage which was much shorter in duration and had a totally different (and btw fixed) problem. A single transmission line failed. PJM, NYISO, and NE-ISO directed transmission operators to cross-connect critical links about...15 years ago after that happened in 2003 IIRC. In anticipation of climate change impact they've also directed system-wide transmission upgrades. But that is because they have the authority to do so. At the street level we have utilities that are still a huge mess though for some balance (JCPL in NJ, O&R in NJ/NY are good examples of shit shows). Still we made fixes to that failure years ago.
California's outage was localized as well. It didn't involve more than 25% of the state for almost a whole week. In other words, the scales are not comparable. This is easily the worst power failure in modern history after the energy crisis by...a lot.
That being said, there will be lessons learned, and the corporate/political interests decided not to take the recommendations out of the '89 incident. We'll see what happens going forward.
FERC issued a 400 page report after the 2011 incident. I remember when my former employer, an NRG company in Texas, basically said the upgrades weren't worth it since we would make more in a failure. Not quite that blunt obviously but that was the message. In any case, that 2011 incident has remarkable overlap "system-wide" to this one. To acknowledge it again, this event is pro-longed and hit harder but the market essentially made very few changes based on shortcomings raised in the 2011 report. They said the market will fix it. It didn't.
That said, I expect the report on this to hit in the August/September time frame. Hopefully, it'll open enough eyes to get some of these gaps closed because you have a hell of a problem down there.