Texas power issues. Wind farms getting iced up (Part II)... 38

[cranky108]

Maybe NERC rules for power markets. Same thing I can not discuss plant, or project schedules with the power markerters down the hall.

 

[1503-44]

Keystone XL Pipeline, long a flatliner, has finally died. RIP

https://www.engineering.com/story/v...els-fa-18-hornet-in-flight-and-is-keystone-xl

 

[waross]

How that oil will get to market, and to whom is an open question.

That's an easy one.
When the XL was proposed, it was to carry synthetic crude oil.
Then the Alberta Government decided on long term pain for short term gain.
They allowed the export of bitumen and jobs.
Instead of upgrading the bitumen to synthetic crude in Canada, the bitumen is now upgraded in Texas.
Now every day there are trainloads of DruBit leaving Alberta bound for the Southern upgraders.
The energy transport market has changed quite a bit.
There is already a pipeline corridor from Alberta to the south.
The XL was a short cut.

Bill
--------------------
Ohm's law
Not just a good idea;
It's the LAW!

 

[davefitz]

It was strange that Alberta chose not to refine the crude; globally it seems that the decision to build refineries is over the heads of political leaders and some other market force or externally imposed rule prevents the building of more refineries. Looking into the medium term future, there may be an effort by global leaders to reduce refining capacity for gasoline and bias the production toward diesel for heavy trasnport vehicles only, pushing consumers toward EV's. Too bad that VW recalled all its diesel cars- they may become valuable in that instance.

"...when logic, and proportion, have fallen, sloppy dead..." Grace Slick

 

[waross]

There was a recession and oil revenues dropped.
Rather than tighten the budget belt, the government bowed to the US interests and started to issue permits to export raw bitumen.
It doesn't take a lot of manpower to run a SAGD operation and the many jobs associated with an upgrader went south with the bitumen. i consider those jobs to be part of our children's future lost.
Some of the numbers:
Suncor was building a new upgrader with a budgeted price of around 13 Billion dollars.
Conoco Philips build a large SAGD operation with a budget of 2 Billion dollars that over ran the budget by another billion dollars.
With the shift to bitumen export, the demand for synthetic crude dropped and Suncor cancelled the upgrader when it was partly built.
Intelligence and foresight don't seem to be prerequisites for political office.
Some other numbers:
Moving DilBit by pipeline; add 30% diluent, and the diluent is often returned to be reused.
So to transport 70 barrels of bitumen requires 30 barrels of diluent plus 30 barrels of diluent returned.That's 130 barrels of pipeline capacity to move 70 barrels of product. A utilization factor of 70/130 = 54%
On the other hand when bitumen is transported by rail it is often in the form of DruBit; Diluent Removed Bitumen. When you ship 100 barrels you get 100 barrels.
The trains are rolling south every day.
The industry is changing and my information may be out of date but the main point is the changes rather than exact percentages.
Updates with new information are welcome.

Bill
--------------------
Ohm's law
Not just a good idea;
It's the LAW!

 

[electricpete]

Interesting details there about XL, which has always been a complicated picture to me. If I can summarize the need for XL is not so strong because Canada has not invested to create synethetic crude but it rather focusing on exporting bitumen coal to US for processing. (did I get that right?).

About the nuc unit that went down in Texas: Comanche Peak... it appears they had a main transformer failure / fire.

=====================================
(2B)+(2B)' ?

 

[JohnRBaker]

Another issue with the XL pipeline was concern that much of the 'crude' may have eventually ended-up at a refinery operation in Texas where the final products would have been exported overseas, thereby not providing any direct benefit to American consumers. And added to that was a report that since the oil flowing through the XL pipeline would have been from a foreign source and since the products refined from the oil would have been exported, that technically this oil could have been considered as having never actually been in the United States, and therefore, any profits earned would not have been subject to state and federal taxes.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-'Product Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[JohnRBaker]

I guess we shouldn't be surprised to learn that someone is looking into this as a way of learning more about what happened when this past winter's power interruptions in Texas happened. Data is being gathered continuously by these smart meters and I'm not surprised that they're easy to 'hack' into, if only to collect the metadata.

We have smart meters in our neighborhood here in SoCal and I can go into the power company website and see our usage on an hour-by-hour basis for the entire billing cycle each month. And if there are outages, these are flagged as such when you look at the historical usage charts:

Hacker reveals smart meters are spilling secrets about the Texas snowstorm

Power companies won't disclose who was protected from blackouts—but smart meters may be leaking insights.

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/hacker-smart-meter-texas-snowstorm/

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-'Product Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[cranky108]

And that is the reason people don't like smart meters.
They think more intrusion into there lives.

In this case they are right.

 

[JohnRBaker]

But if this guy's research shows that there was some selective outages, or more importantly, selective non-outages, which shows a pattern of favoritism, for whatever reason, be it political, social, racial, etc, then perhaps having this data made public could be a good thing.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-'Product Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[stevenal]

I fail to see what's intrusive here. Anyone can walk up to any meter and see the meter number, and use a hand held GPS to get the coordinates. He did not gather any customer account information(it's not transmitted)and he did not get any usage readings.

If favoritism is a concern, I would think the PUC could get by any CEII restrictions to investigate.

 

[davefitz]

It is my understanding that one can pay extra for uninterruptible power supply,such as hospitals, police stations, communication centers, etc. Likewise consumers with special health needs that require continuous production of oxygen or some other service also may get special treatment. The deregulation of the industry also brought with it various fine print excusions and waivers of liability from some providers, if you selected such providers. I do not think the special treatment is due to a nefarious cabal deep in the heart of the ISO, it is just the way we let it evolve.

"...when logic, and proportion, have fallen, sloppy dead..." Grace Slick

 

[JohnRBaker]

Yes, there was a period of time when my wife's mother was living with us and she had to be on an oxygen concentrator at night. There was a program where we could apply for a reduced electrical rate due to having to support medical equipment, however, this meant that we could not participate in the AC cycling program. It was one or the other, but it did mean that they couldn't cycle our AC since we had a person living with us who could have been harmed by excessive heat in the home. She lived with us for nearly seven years.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-'Product Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[FacEngrPE]

The gas must flow —
New report suggests Texas’ grid was 5 minutes from catastrophic failure
It comes with a long list of recommendations for avoiding a repeat. John Timmer - 9/23/2021: arstechnica

The preliminary report has been put together by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in combination with the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit set up by utilities to help set standards and practices that keep the grid stable. The draft itself isn't being released at this point, but the two have posted a detailed presentation that describes the report's contents. A final version will be released in November.

Link to the FERC presentation

https://www.ferc.gov/media/february...preliminary-findings-and-recommendations-full

 

[JohnRBaker]

An excerpt from the item FacEngrPE referenced above:

But a major problem was loss of power to the gas distribution and supply system. Apparently, Texas grid operators had taken no steps to identify natural gas facilities and prioritize power delivery to them when starting the rolling blackouts. "Most natural gas production and processing facilities surveyed were not identified as critical load or otherwise protected from load shedding," the report indicates.

This started something of a snowball effect. As processing and handling equipment lost power, the supply of natural gas dropped, which caused gas-fired power plants to shut down, cutting the electricity supply further, and potentially cutting off even more of the gas infrastructure. As of right now, the full extent of the power cuts to the natural gas infrastructure isn't clear, and it's not certain we will know by the time of the final report.

Hadn't these people ever heard of 'feedback loops'? What appears to have taken place, and it seems to have been by design (read underlined sections), was a classic 'positive feedback loop', where a change resulted in the magnitude of that change being made even greater. Yes, the state of Texas came very close to being completely shut down (note that our oldest son and his family live near Houston and they were without power for a couple of days, and some of the restaurants in the state that he was responsible for were shut down for much longer than that).

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-'Product Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[1503-44]

All they had to do to find that out was read some of my comments above. Not that I'm so brilliant, it's just that that exact same thing has been happening since I worked in the so tx gas fields in the 80's. Never fixed in 40yrs.

This never had anything to do with wind turbines.

 

[SnTMan]

Saw a local news story last night, the local gas utility Oklahoma Natural Gas is upping their green game by switching their pipelines to electric pumps. Great. I'm hopeful they have absorbed the lessons from Texas. Hopeful, but not confident.

Edit: Actually Oneok, the midstream provider to utilities. Press release. Quote from same "Opportunities for reductions include the electrification of certain natural gas compression assets across ONEOK's operations..."

The problem with sloppy work is that the supply FAR EXCEEDS the demand

 

[1503-44]

Some are installing solar electric as well.

 

[cranky108]

I believe part of the thinking is they can always cut rural electric service and save the light of the city people, where many of the operators live.
But many in the electric industry forget that gas well mostly exist in the rural areas, as do compressor stations.

That said, we don't serve much rural area, but our gas storage is on the edge of town.