Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to the Texas Tribune, the state government has not done enough to secure the supply of gas against another winter deep freeze.
“People should probably be worried”: Texas hasn’t done enough to prevent another winter blackout, experts say
Mitchell Ferman and Jon SchuppeTexas Tribune and NBC News
MIDLOTHIAN — After last winter’s freeze hamstrung power giant Vistra Corp.’s ability to keep electricity flowing for its millions of customers, CEO Curt Morgan said he’d never seen anything like it in his 40 years in the energy industry.
During the peak days of the storm, Vistra, Texas’ largest power generator, sent as much energy as it could to power the state’s failing grid, “often at the expense of making money,” he told lawmakers shortly after the storm.
But it wasn’t enough. The state’s grid neared complete collapse, millions lost power for days in subfreezing temperatures and more than 200 people died.
…
No matter what Morgan does, though, it won’t be enough to prevent another disaster if there is another severe freeze, he said.
That’s because the state still hasn’t fixed the critical problem that paralyzed his plants: maintaining a sufficient supply of natural gas, Morgan said.
…
Read more: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/11/29/texas-power-grid-winter-storm/
If only there was a cheap, readily available power station fuel which could be stockpiled in a large heap using a bulldozer, which didn’t need expensive containment measures like enormous gas cylinders, or government intervention in the supply chain to secure supply, so even if extraction and shipping breaks down due to weather, power stations would have enough fuel onsite to keep operating until the crisis passed.
What are the odds of this happening in Texas two years in a row?
The February 2021 Arctic blast was essentially unprecedented…
February 16 was actually tied for the second lowest DFW temperature on record.
Thanks, David!
It really warms the cockles of my heart looking forward to the cooling of the Misanthropic Era!
The climate conmen need to get rich quickly before their funding gets frozen along with numerous energy-impoverished high latitude dwellers!
In this case, “unprecedented” really means “unprecedented.” That’s not usually how that word is used when talking about the climate.
Why is it the responsibility of the Texas state Government to fix the problem? Shouldn’t the utilities fix it?
The utilities in Texas can’t do anything without the permission of the Public Utilities Commission.
In other words, government.
You could just run the pipeline compressors on gas to much the same effect. Gas from storage was keeping up with power station demand until grid mismanagement led to major trips that cut power to electric pumping on the pipelines, starving the power stations of fuel. There was enough dry gas (not liable to hydrate icing) in store to have ridden through the incident, despite the loss of production volumes.
The real problem was lack of dispatchable capacity to allow demand to be met with sufficient reserve to handle any outages. Maybe that can be handled by trying to minimise maintenance in midwinter, shifting it to shoulder seasons when extreme demand is unlikely. But I think that is probably insufficient. So Texas is going to need a market in firm dispatchable capacity, not open to intermittent sources, to provide sufficient revenue to ensure that backup plant can afford to keep itself at the ready.
Might want to top up that storage though.
Thanks Eric. Sometimes it takes a smart Australian to see the problems right here in Texas! Thank goodness I’m not on ERCOT, I have Entergy and a backup generator that runs on natural gas. When the power goes out my neighbors hate me.
When will people notice that during the winter there is no wind? Duhhh!
I think they all know, but this is the first time I’ve seen normally outspoken Texans praise the Emperor’s new clothes for a sustained period. Very sad, given the Texas government is Republican.
The single biggest reason for the Texas grid shut down – of several – was the number of compressors that went offline as rolling electricity shut downs took place. (These initial shut downs were largely prompted by the near cessation of electricity from the wind turbines).
As the compressors stopped, there was no fuel – natgas – moving downstream to the Combined Cycle plants, causing them to shut down.
This rapidly spiraled into a self perpetuating loop of offline compressors causing more gas generators shutting down.
The excruciatingly embarrassing part is that the compressor operators merely needed to pre-notify ERCOT that they were a Critical Infrastructure (like police/fire/hospital ) and thus spared the micro precise process of targeted blackouts.
Hopefully more texas freeze to death. The more dead the more they will realize that all this alarmisim is bunk.