Texas Power Failure

[svetz]

The one and only metric that really matters is:
How much power generation infrastructure is installed - vs - How much power generation infrastructure was operational when you needed it.

I wouldn't say those are the only metrics. For example, they had advance warning of the storm, could they have scrambled and gotten more capacity on line or cleared some gas wells? What preparations did they take? They must have had an inkling what was going to happen, and if not then they're really bad at their jobs. Ditto the State level, the warning had been issued a decade earlier, why wasn't FEMA mobilized earlier? Why did it take FEMA 24 hours to mobilize once they got the call? Seems like failures of the system at all levels.

I haven't found any hard data on this. I really wanted to find a timeline of the systemic failures and responses to those failures, but being this industry is privatized in Texas, that information will be obfuscated to the maximum degree out of fear of future financial liability and litigation.

I looked for that too (although not all that hard). It would have been interesting to know how many plants were offline and for what type of maintenance. Nice to see some hard numbers before conspiracies start popping up on why those were offline.

I see it as both a management and oversight failure. Texas gets brutally cold winters, but it seems like they got lulled into a "we're saving money" mode. Of course, I though the same thing about CPUC before I heard of some of the extenuating circumstances that led to the swamp (still blame them though, it's their job to drain the swamp instead of shutting power off and perpetuating crazy rates without a plan to alleviate the problem).

 

[Hedges]

Sometimes government has a response in place, sometimes it doesn't. It is up to people to be self sufficient at least as a backup plan.

We've always been told to stockpile some canned food, bottled water, etc.
Seems like that advice should be extended to a few cans of Sterno for cooking and some kind of heating based on combustion.
No one size fits all; would require capital investment to integrate propane/coal/oil heating into a house lacking it.
I wonder if something as simple as propane BBQ on the balcony and using tongs to transfer hot firebricks inside would do enough.

We see in the news a household dying due to running a generator in the garage (with door open.) A friend of a friend had once used a Hibachi for heat in a Microbus - apparently hadn't ever been taught about the hazards. A recommendation for safe emergency heating that was disseminated in advance might help some (can't look it up on the internet when the time comes.)

Double-layer sleeping bags works pretty well in cold weather, also 2-man bags.

 

[hankcurt]

We've always been told to stockpile some canned food, bottled water, etc.
Seems like that advice should be extended to a few cans of Sterno for cooking and some kind of heating based on combustion.

This gave me pause for thought also, especially when I saw that in response to the water supply system disaster that followed the power debacle, the authorities issued a 'boil' mandate for tap water. How are people supposed to boil water without electricity or gas unless they have an emergency heat source.

I added a bag of charcoal briquettes and a rocket stove to the list of things I need to add to my emergency kit. Its no good for indoor heat, but it is one of the most efficient ways to cook or boil water, and charcoal doesn't go bad over time. The indoor heat is trickier to do safely. I really feel for the people who were so desperate that they started taking risks and suffered the consequences. Perhaps some kerosene and a 70's era heater might be the safest route as long as your house isn't too air tight.

 

[Hedges]

We TOLD you to boil the water before drinking it!

 

[Hedges]

Hydronic home heating for us DIY sorts ...

Spare gas water heater with propane bottle connected or charcoal BBQ underneath, convection loop to a car radiator inside inside house, 12V fan?

I do have gas forced-air furnace (in basement) and water heater (outside), but considering natural gas rises and propane sinks, conversion might have some risk in addition to possibly needing orifices changed.

Diesel fired would be another option for me, since that would double as spare fuel or my truck.

 

[Deleted member 23531]

There's something wrong with that project...

I don't get what you're saying. You estimated 2213 acres if they're 50% density of the ground area. Are they? To capture morning sun and evening sun without shading each other they're probably more spaced out than that. You can even tell from the thumbnail that the spacing is more than 1-out-of-2 rows. I'm sure whoever is building XXX MW solar farms knows how to maximize return on investment, and they factor in land cost, PV density, tracking systems, sun intensity at all times of day, etc. I don't think a back of the envelope critique is valid at all.

EDIT: I guess if you want to tilt to theta degrees and your panels are "x" length along the rows, you would just space them at h = x / cos(theta) to avoid shading, according to my terrible trigonometry drawing. But, I guess what I'm saying is you don't know anything about that project, the panels, the land use, etc. Maybe they're leaving a chunk of land for future expansion. Maybe it's hype. Who knows.

 

[iamrich]

Late to the party like usual.... I can only speak from my own experiences (Round Rock, TX, just north of Austin). We lost power for two days total. Almost all of Monday, and most of Tuesday. Power was restored Tuesday night/morning. We never lost water or natural gas, so the fire place was roaring for two days, and we could cook on the stove by manually lighting the burners. It got down to 40F in the house on Monday, but at no point were we at risk of anything other than being uncomfortable. We didn't have to worry about the fridge. All and all it wasn't too bad.

Don't get me wrong, I am sure a lot of people suffered, but from what I saw, big media made it out to be a lot bigger than it was.

 

[Q-Dog]

I saw pictures of houses with icicles hanging down from collapsed ceilings. I don't think media exaggerated that.

 

[svetz]

...I don't think a back of the envelope critique is valid at all...

You're correct that it might not be valid and I'm frequently wrong <sigh>, but it gets discussion going ...

You estimated 2213 acres if they're 50% density of the ground area. Are they? Even by tripling the in-between it would only go to 3400 acres... so, that's what made me skeptical. I did make an assumption of two meter spacing, but it was more than a SWAG as I'd seen some numbers before. Had to look it up, but for example, this paper gives the graph to the right for winter. So, for a latitude of 36° (Las Vegas) they predict the spacing would be about 2m, or 50% density.

​

If you're not opposed to a little earth moving, you can make each next row a little higher to minimize the row spacing.
The optimum tilt at that latitude would be about 56° and the lowest elevation of the sun about 30°. (ref)

... I'm sure whoever is building XXX MW solar farms knows how to maximize return on investment, ...

I bet most Texans and Californians thought the same thing about maintenance of their power systems. I'm way too skeptical, I have no such faith any more.

Maybe they're leaving a chunk of land for future expansion. Maybe it's hype. Who knows.

Those are excellent points!

I didn't even know about the project until yesterday, so you know way more than me. It'd be nice to see the plan details...that's a big project and integrated with solar storage so tickles my sense of sensibility.

Looked up another article on it and the project is impressive, they're using both trackers and bifacial panels. Bifacial panels take more height and may also need extra space...so that might be what's going on. Of course, the bifacials should generate more power, so there would be fewer panels too, so they'd need even less space.

In addition to the land for the panels they also have a 1,400 MWh lithium-ion battery, three substations, roads, and water storage tanks for fire protection. So all of that is going to take up some land too.

The land proposed for the enormous development is on the Moapa River Indian Reservation, 33 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

Hmmm, one article says "near" the other says "on" the reservation. The reservation is only 72k acres, so hopefully not on their land (or if so they're happy about benefits it brings).

Here's a Rub!
The 2m spacing for 36° above is for fixed panels and this project has trackers. Most sites avoid trackers as the initial cost and maintenance never have a positive return rate. I certainly wasn't expecting trackers, I wonder what they're doing differently they think it'll work?

Fixed panels would be south facing, but if they were single axis trackers the rows would run north/south. To know the inter-row spacing you need to know the maximum tilt. But is the max tilt 60°? There's a trade off here as the the higher the tilt the longer the shadow, but there's also less energy at low sun altitudes as shown to the right. Although with the dry desert at elevation perhaps it's warranted? Panels are pretty efficient even up to a 15°, so the absolute maximum angle would probably be 75°. But it's most likely lower than that. If they're using dual axis trackers, than they'd need even more space (have to worry about shadows the north/south neighbors too).

Tack on "special" needs for bifacials (no shadows should fall on the ground that reflects light back to them) and I could see them taking 2x or more space than fixed panels.

 

[Deleted member 23531]

Yeah the article says they will be on trackers. I thought pretty much all utility-scale PV installations use 1-axis tracking. I see it mentions bifacial panels, but I didn't know Sunpower made those. I guess those just collect some sun off the back side too?

I bet most Texans and Californians thought the same thing about maintenance of their power systems

I'm not as familiar with Texas's deregulated market with more companies providing energy, but if you're referring to the fires in California it's a combination of predictable things:

- a multiyear drought leading up to them
- a multi-decade suppression of fires in our forests
- investor-owned utilities having an incentive to build gold-plated facilities and other capital assets (PG&E has a ton of brand new trucks at all times, it seems) since their profit is by law just a percentage of their capital assets. Performing maintenance doesn't increase their capital assets so they don't spend as much money or effort on it.

Having said that, most of the fires this past year (and there were many and they were gigantic) were not caused by PG&E. The major ones around the bay area were caused by a huge lightning storm. The utilities caused the fires a couple years back.

I suspect the opposite happened in Texas: rather than having a regulated public company with perverse incentives, they have too little regulation and there were a bunch of smaller energy producers trying to maximize profit on the open market. It seems like they had planned for the average conditions and lacked the insurance they needed in rare circumstances (even cheap stuff like heat lamps).

 

[svetz]

...I guess those just collect some sun off the back side too?... They have a clear back-panel and can make use of reflected light from the ground and diffuse light. Ground covering with a high albedo (e.g., snow) is great for them. Looked up some comparisons: Samson Solar Energy Center, 1300 MW on 6700 acres Yellow Pine solar project, 500 MW on 3,000 acres So I bet the size does have to do with extending ground shadowing for bifacials. Although I just opened a new thread on the Samson Solar Energy Center, hopefully I just missed something.

 

[Deleted member 23531]

Looked up some comparisons:
Samson Solar Energy Center, 1300 MW on 6700 acres
Yellow Pine solar project, 500 MW on 3,000 acres

Wow, so even 40% less dense than Yellow Pine. Maybe the marketing team is going for "Worlds largest** solar farm".

...

** (by land area, not MW).

 

[svetz]

Wow, so even 40% less dense than Yellow Pine. Maybe the marketing team is going for "Worlds largest** solar farm".

Usually land is a big cost factor (possibly not in the desert), so if the bifacials need the extra area around them for the extra power, they might not be for everybody. But hard to say, like you said they might have a lot of room to grow too.

 

[Deleted member 23531]

For example, they had advance warning of the storm, could they have scrambled and gotten more capacity on line or cleared some gas wells?

One thing I learned about Texas' natural gas supply chain in the aftermath of that storm is that there isn't much storage: they tend to go directly from wells through pipelines and into wherever it is consumed (power plants and consumer homes). I read an article in the aftermath of that which said other states have more storage by comparison.

Of course, storage has its challenges as well. Just a couple years ago southern California revealed they had leaked a huge amount of methane from an underground storage reservoir which had a leak.

 

[hankcurt]

This evening, I ran across this video on the Texas power failures. It is the best thing I've found so far that keeps to a technical explanation and has some interesting charts and graphs.

 

[Deleted member 23531]

That's a nice summary, and he makes some very accessible videos.

I disagree with (or maybe just don't understand the basis of) the assertion that pricing based only on energy supplied and not on capacity favors renewables, and also disagree that it tends to favor long term investment like he says. Or, perhaps, I just don't see how you can make that statement without some really detailed economic research to back it up. It seems to me long term profitability favors long term investment, and whether or not the market has some rules and oversight has got nothing to do with long term investment, so long as they don't dramatically change profitability and the rules are applied fairly to all participants. If the market for electricity is inelastic (meaning demand is relatively price insensitive) then even costly rules and regulations would not affect profitability or investment since the cost of added regulation, if there is any, would be paid on the consumer side.

In the market he describes, if a supplier builds excess capacity it's only valuable if they use it to deliver power. This depresses the price of all the electricity on the market. I guess if you're a hawk looking to capitalize on skyrocketing prices in a crisis, maybe you would build some excess supply, but I doubt anyone is building power plants just to be massively profitable for 1 random week every 10 years. So this deregulated market seems to incentivize having no margin for error.

I don't know what a better solution would be, but here are some ideas. ERCOT could:
1) regulate that suppliers must have some reserve capacity
2) operate some reserve capacity themselves using fees levied
3) enforce procedures like basic cold weather preparedness or winterization of equipment.

Any of these regulatory strategies would tend to spread the cost of the 1 week of disaster out over time. It would be just as fair to all participants and act basically like cold weather insurance.

By "just as fair" I mean:
1) suppliers are all subject to the rule or the levy so their is no way to gain a competitive advantage (except by fraud)
2) distributors are less subject to volatile pricing (preventing them from getting squeezed between customer contracts and supplier contracts)
3) consumers share the cost of being better prepared in proportion to their demand (ie, it's built into the market rate for electricity)

I had a final paragraph here about rich neighborhoods keeping power and poor neighborhoods not, but actually I think that's unrelated to the energy market thoughts above so I removed it.

 

[Gazoo]

If the plants would have been winterized like they were supposed to be then the problems would have been less severe.

 

[svetz]

...(or maybe just don't understand the basis of) the assertion that pricing based only on energy supplied and not on capacity favors renewables...

By "Capacity", my understanding is it means running 24x7 and not just when the sun shines or the wind blows.

PV economics fell below natural gas a few years ago for power generation. Here's a comparison from Wikipedia showing solar is about ~60% the cost of natural gas:

​

So, pricing based on energy supplied favors solar/wind. That is they're cheaper overall $/W to produce power.

But, when you factor in energy storage (capacity), then the economics aren't so favorable. Ideally every renewable project would be wedded to a storage project. Some energy storage (e.g., hydro) can be economical (fortunately, the comparison $ is at peaker or storage prices). But, not all areas are suitable for hydro and location agnostic technologies (e.g., batteries, flywheels, flow-batteries) are just starting to get there.

Amusingly, the price of battery technology falling while capacity and lifespan increases is almost exclusively due to EVs. So, yet another reason why EVs are saving the world.

 

[Deleted member 23531]

Ok, that makes sense. So I guess we could all adapt the meaning of nameplate MW of renewable sources to be a time-weighted number that includes how much power they generate at each time of day, since the "peak output" rating isn't really comparable to that of a fossil fuel plant which can output the same power at all times, assuming its gas line hasn't iced up! I guess he means that pricing only on energy delivered favors intermittent sources (which includes wind and PV but also natural gas peaker plants).

That just leaves the "favors long term investment" comment in the video which I still don't get. Aren't all energy generation investments considered "long term" (15+ years)? It's not like Texas has significantly more electrical supply than they need, so I don't see how one pricing strategy can be said to encourage investment when you see similar levels of investment in highly regulated markets as well.

 

[svetz]

ref The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has announced that its Office of Enforcement is examining wholesale natural gas and electricity market activity during February’s extreme cold weather to determine if any market participants engaged in market manipulation or other violations.