The short, controlled outages will begin as early as Sunday night if demand outpaces supply.
By Krista M. Torralva and Jesus Jimenez
12:55 PM on Feb 14, 2021 CST — Updated at 6:26 PM on Feb 14, 2021 CST
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Rolling power outages could sweep across the state through Tuesday if demand outpaces supply as expected because of the bitter cold.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s power grid, emphasized Texans should reduce energy consumption as temperatures dropped. The grid could reach unprecedented winter demands, said Dan Woodfin, ERCOT’s senior director of system operations.
Demand is one of the issues facing the power grid, but the cold is causing other problems, too. Electric generators are vying for natural gas as people turn to that fuel for heating. Icy conditions also knocked out almost half of the state’s wind power generation capacity as wind turbines froze across the state, Woodfin added.
“Due to this high demand and reduced resource availability … we could be in emergency operations as early as … [Sunday night] and we would expect to be in emergency operations tomorrow through at least Tuesday morning,” he said.
There are three levels of energy emergency alerts, and rotating power outages are the last resort to ensure the state power grid remains stable.
Then, ERCOT directs the entities that own transmission and distribution wires, such as Oncor, to reduce the overall demand and by how much. Those providers will initiate rotating outages, turning off power to neighborhoods for about 15 to 30 minutes at a time, Woodfin said.
ERCOT hopes to reduce the possibility of people losing power for uncertain periods by spreading the outages in small, controlled amounts.
HT/Roger C, John D, k
ERCOT wind production is doing very well at the moment….
.
http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/CURRENT_DAYCOP_HSL.html
Well, is relative.
You need to compare what they are producing now, compared to an average day this time of year.
All you have shown is that they are producing, something nobody disputed.
The unreliable fossil fuels are not doing any better: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-deep-freeze-shutters-texas-oil-refineries-disrupts-pipelines/ar-BB1dHC3L
Unlike wind and solar, the output of refineries can be and usually is stored for those times when the weather cuts down on production.
What you want so desperately to believe is a big problem, has been dealt with quite adequately for decades.
Storage doesn’t help when your natural gas lines freeze, or the oil tank trucks can’t drive on ice covered roadways.
1) The “freezing” problems that are being seen are caused by poor planning. It has nothing to do with the fuel itself. If you would for once stop and actually think, then you would realize that northern states, the ones that see much worse temperatures every single year, are able to ship fossil fuels without any of the problems that Texas is seeing.
Secondly, if the storage is on site, then shipping isn’t an issue.
But, BUT, they have all of that (un)RELIABLE wind energy!
Yeah, that’s the problem.
I’ll have some “live reporting” posts on this over the next couple of days.
David, My son south of you in the Woodlands, is not doing any better. I told him to turn on the pool heater and cover the pool with 6mil plastic. I hope you will comment on the need for low gravity oil at various Gulf refineries and where that oil is and will come from. Thanks.
I’ll have some video of my ice-breaking operation in an upcoming post.
Wasn’t the lower gravity oil supposed to be coming from Canada… via the Keystone XL pipeline? The pipeline that the asshat-in-chief just killed.
David,
I imagine the Griffter will be along any minute now with some comments to warm you up! Stay safe and don’t run around the pool today! Thanks again for the Allen Barra book recommend!
Not a good day for a swim. Unless you are a polar bear.
The ice was a couple of inches thick in the downwind corners.
I saw a news item yesterday on tv where they showed police in Tulsa around a swimming pool and they had cut a piece of ice out big enough to allow a diver to enter, and they were doing cold-water underwater training! The temperature was about 5 degrees F.
How about these polar bears?
They are saying that 2 million people have now lost power in Texas. Earthnull shows temps in the north of Texas are down to -12 F. Hope all stay safe. This would be no time to not have power.
Definitely not a time to lose power. A rolling blackout where you only lose power for about an hour would not be so bad, but a power outage that lasted much longer than that would be life threatening.
In South Africa, with the ‘load shedding’ due to “unscheduled failures” in the generating systems, the switching off and on of whole suburbs is straining the transformers and switchgear, so that sometimes when the power has been switched off – it doesn’t come on again! We’ve had day-long power outages, especially after one such failure started a fire in a main switching station. Some years ago, a whole town outside Johannesburg went powerless for a WEEK, when a switching station caught fire.
Earlier today it was reported that 1.1 – 1.5 million people in the Houston/Harris County area were without power. My ex and son both lost power last night around 2AM. Hers came back on in the last hour (it’s now a little after 4PM here) and my son’s is still off. This is a major calamity. It was reported that a Nuc plant went offline as well. I have been unable to verify if this was Comanche Peak or the STNP facility.
Eight degrees F and Six inches of snow on the ground here in Austin. Below freezing until sometime on Friday, with additional snowfall. Even though it just one data point, it is a very dramatic one. I think minds will me changed in the next few days, even in this deep Blue city.
It’s been below freezing in Dallas since Wednesday, with a brief break on Saturday afternoon. It got down to 6 F here this morning, with 4-8″ of snow… More snow expected Tuesday-Wednesday.
Get 100 Texans together in a basement. At rest, each human produces about 70 watts or about 4 btu/min (per i-net sites). So you’d have 400 btu/min or 700 watts for heat.
Then, expand the cave and stuff in 10 times that number for 7,000 watts or 4,000 btu/min
Just keep stoking the cave with Texans until you get to the heat level you desire.
A very Green, AOC solution (??/lol). Renewable even.
Vote blue, turn blue.
Something similar is happening through parts of Colorado:
https://www.9news.com/amp/article/weather/cold-weather-reduce-energy-utility-providers/73-e2b54612-8dd9-4b26-a3e1-0207d7b44364
I was working at the Tolk station outside Mule Shoe, TX back in Jan 2011 when they got a -3 F cold snap. Froze up the pipes in my Clovis apartment.
Unit 1 was down for maintenance. The plant bought probably three dozen diesel fueled portable radiant heaters from Lubbock to spread around unit 2 on critical instrumentation.
The gas supplier called its interruptible contracts which meant several of the NG plants had to shut down or curtail.
Coal plants stockpile coal for such situations.
NG plants can’t do that.
Guess they did not learn.
Must run gas plants should never be buying interruptible gas for winter months.
I would look forward to Dave Middleton weighing in on this, but there was an article from last summer about ERCOT’s reserve margin estimations being an illusion and that true margins were much smaller.
Texas reserve margins are based on projected demand under certain credible scenarios during summer, most specifically August. They are based on electric demand for A/C. But in real life the “black Swan” is always a confluence of various factors that are more difficult to foresee. For example, during a blizzard one can get a good estimate of what temperatures and snowfall will be like, and, in turn, what the load will be like from these factors. But there is a potential for power lines coming down from ice load. Wind turbines and solar panels present new potential events.
Here are a couple of questions I have.
1) I don’t know if anyone looks at ERCOT reserve margins in Texas for winter conditions. Does anyone know about this? I see only summer reserve margins.
2) Are there reserve margin calculations for natural gas demand? These would pertain to gas utilities, not ERCOT. Yet we can see there is an interaction between them.
Where I live we currently have good baseload reserve from coal, but the green disease is busy trying to undermine it. The new wind farms are, ostensibly to provide power to regions west of us, and south, which have unreasonable REPs. But one has to know that increasing supplies of non-dispatchable energy will leak into local utilities.
I tracked it pretty closely yesterday and was impressed with how they managed to stay ahead of the spiking demand without ever getting close to the 3,000 MW reserve limit. This morning, we were already in rotating outage mode, generation capacity never came close to yesterday’s capacity.
I haven’t found any detailed information on ERCOT’s website regarding natural gas capacity forecasts. The focus seems to be on wind.
Thanks, Dave.
How much power do grid-backup batteries lose in cold weather?
Frozen windmills!! That will hurt because they went all in with wind power.
There are plenty of elected Dems in TX. Ask them to recite their global warming Party lines on this.
Commie-party line:
“Let them eat ice”
No “could” about it – been going on now since early morning.
I expect the blame will fall on “climate change” as the culprit for the storm being “worse than we’ve ever seen” which will be the reason things went so far bad – just given more reason to stop the hydrocarbon generation and use more “renewables”, which will lead to the same situation, which will lead to the same response, etc…
Send in Gina McCarthy with a crack engineering team from EPA to fix it like they performed on the Animas River.
The MSM and local Texas news sources bury the loss of half of their wind turbines power.
ERCOT is claiming it’s getting plenty of power from wind turbines. I still hope in a free state like Texas the truth comes out. The ERCOT communications person recommends “people keep warm”.
Peoples lives and livelihood have been put at risk since the Texas utilities went for tax subsidized unreliable power sources when the state sits on oceans of reliable natural gas.
Heads need to roll!
Gas pipelines and nuclear plants need to be built.
My granddaughter making snow angels in San Antonio this morning!
Shocker! Who, I mean WHO could have predicted this?
Shadenfreud anyone?
A major snowstorm is approaching the Great Lakes.
We call that “a warm spell” in Northern Wisconsin where I live.