Texas power issues. Windfarms getting iced up. 67

[Alistair_Heaton]

That's a lot of capacity that's been lost. Must admit being Aberdonian we always associate Texas with hot and humid... Not snow storms.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...nd-turbines-texas-power-outages-b1802596.html

 

[RedSnake]

7 mins in the North sea without a survival suit and your dead apart from you ya fatty..

This thing with cold water made me think of, Guðlaugur Friðþórssons he swam for 5 hours in the six-degree water and strong waves.
Eventually he was accompanied by a storm bird that circled above him throughout the swim.
After a couple of hours alone in the Atlantic, he began to sense the glow of the streetlights of Hemön.

They made this film about it, The Deep.

BR A

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.“
Albert Einstein

 

[Spartan5]

About 25% of the electrical energy produced in Texas comes from renewables. If you take out hydro, which Texas doesn't have much of, Texas gets close to an equal share of its energy from renewables ss California. Texas is a very green state energy production-wise but that wouldn't fit your stereotype of Texas.

Citing 2017 data, Texas ranked 21st in the US for the production of renewable energy as a percentage of total produced with 16% of their 51 GW/day coming from renewable sources.

 

[Lou Scannon]

It is mostly because Baltic Sea is a very environmentally sensitive inland sea

I've been hearing this "environmentally sensitive" phrase for the past 30 years, and I'm not really sure what it means or what differentiates such an area from other areas. And I've never heard of an "environmentally insensitive" or "environmentally tough" areas, but they must exist if their opposite exists. Anyone have an explanation?

"Schiefgehen wird, was schiefgehen kann" - das Murphygesetz

 

[Spartan5]

Some basic concepts for you:

https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/environmentally-sensitive-area

 

[Fischstabchen]

Spartan5,

Renewables have grown since 2017.

 

[Spartan5]

Fischstabchen,
Sure. To what? Do you have the hard, specific numbers?

I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around Texas being described as "very green" at 16% in 2017 with Germany sitting around 50% and the top ten states in the US at over 36%.

 

[Fischstabchen]

Spaartan5,

Texas ERCOT 2020 Generation Profile

Comparing Germany to Texas is comparing apple and oranges. No one in the U.S. is going to go around prematurely closing down plants to put solar farms ro wind turbine and in addition Germany didn't have a natural gas boom. The natural boom in the U.S. has been a golden egg and a godsend. The percentage is artificially pressed down as well due to it including cogen, which uses waste heat and should not be counted as normal "natural gas" generation.

Renewables have their place but there are a lot of things that haven't been addressed well. Germany has nuclear power plants online for system inertia. California, North Carolina, and other states with high renewable penetration have frequency problems. We are sitting here talking about "well, why don't you just match Germany" as if that is the best answer and it is definitely not the most reliable answer, which is the topic of this thread. Renewables will make their course and become more prevalent as they get cheaper, which has been the trend and EIA predicts them to be as cheap as natural gas generation in 2040. But this idea that you are going to have this super stable system with low inertia ,due to switching to inverter based, non-dispatchable generation is hogwash. In fact, in the time leading up to this cold snap you could not have met the estimated demand of 76 GW if we had double, triple, or quadruple or whatever times ten is ,tentuple, the amount of available wind and solar energy. Aside from the problems I mentioned earlier, how are you going to meet the load when wind and solar generation are low without dispatchable generation? If you say LI-Ion batteries, you couldn't make enough Li-Ion batteries in 100 years to replace every peaker unit. California has a goal of being 100% renewable by some date without any concept or answer as to how that will be done. Everyone that pushes these ridiculous goals has no concept of what types of problems are created by having that much renewable penetration. I think a lot of people have this belief that the electrical grid is no more complicated than plugging a vacuum into an electrical outlet in your house.

 

[Spartan5]

Texas was at 22% of their total production coming from renewable sources in 2020. Source:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/dat...echart&ltype=pin&rtype=s&pin=&rse=0&maptype=0

The US was at 20%. And California was at 43%, or twice Texas. Even without the hydro, Texas isn't sniffing Cali at 21.5% vs. 32.0% (50% more for California).

I didn't crunch each of the rest of the states to see where Texas ranks. But at just 2% over the US average, I'm still having a tough time reconciling your classification of Texas as "very green."

 

[Fischstabchen]

Spartan5,

Read the number from my linked post. 2020 Texas was at 25% excluding hydro. That number is higher if you don't include cogen and that puts you on a number that starts approaching 30% like california.

Texas has over 17 GW in cogen, which generates electricity using waste heat from unrelated processes.

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/11/f39/StateOfCHP-Texas.pdf

 

[Spartan5]

Fischstabchen,

The number from your linked post... you mean the picture of a pie chart from ERCOT? I shared with you the raw data that is the source of my calculations. I'm inclined to believe the pie chart with no supporting data is less accurate than the U.S. Energy Information Administration's.

And for what it's worth... California has cogen as well (8.6 GW). That appears to be the same as Texas as a proportion of total production (if not more). So what are you driving at?

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/11/f39/StateOfCHP-California.pdf

 

[Fischstabchen]

Spartan5,

EIA numbers probably include all of Texas and not just the Texas Interconnect.

Frankly, I don't really care what California is doing because their system is a mess. You can go ahead and tout California's 30% green energy vs 25ish Texas Interconnect all while residential customers in parts of California are paying around $0.30 per kwh and in Texas they are paying around $0.10 per kwh. Anything you stick into the ground in California is profitable because electricity is so expensive there. California's electrical system isn't about serving its citizens.

 

[Spartan5]

Fischstabchen,

I'm not touting anything about California. I'm trying to reconcile Texas being "very green" from a renewables standpoint and the comparisons you were making but not supporting with any kind of evidence.

First it was eliminate hydro, ok. Sure.

Then it was look at 2020. Ok. California is still 50% more.

Then it was well there's cogen and that makes them equal when you take that out. Ok. But California has it too, maybe even more proportionally.

Now it's, "not Texas, just ERCOT." And the end, at the very best, it's 5% over the national average. But really more like 2% (per the data). Texas, the place we are talking about, is 22%.

 

[Fischstabchen]

edit removed misleading post that was talking about energy in general.

 

[Spartan5]

Fischstabchen,
Per the EIA data, sans hydro, the US is at 12.5%. Texas is at 21.5% (you have to subtract out their small amount of hydro as well). Even if we hold the rest of the states steady from the 2016 data here and move Texas from their 15.6% to 21.5% in 2020, they still don't crack the top 10. Why are we subtracting out hydro anyway?

In this thread I have learned that Texas has built a decent portfolio of renewables over the last few years. Which they promptly used as a scapegoat for their inability to run their own independent power grid resulting in the death of some 70 of their residents.

 

[Spartan5]

Fischstabchen,

The latest document you have shared is total energy, not just electricity, isn't it? Haven't we been talking about electricity?

About 25% of the electrical energy produced in Texas comes from renewables. If you take out hydro, which Texas doesn't have much of, Texas gets close to an equal share of its energy from renewables ss California. Texas is a very green state energy production-wise but that wouldn't fit your stereotype of Texas.

All of my data is from the EIA link I provided. Have you looked at it? It's production. 2020 US renewable electricity with hydro 19.7%, without 12.5%. It's all right there. Wood biomass (roughly 2/3 of which is produced via cogeneration, mind you) is less than 1% of the total.

 

[JohnRBaker]

...parts of California are paying around $0.30 per kwh and in Texas they are paying around $0.10 per kwh.

I suspect that many of the people who were paying $0.10 per kwh in Texas were the same people we've been reading horror stories about who had their bank accounts wiped out by those power companies who were selling a 'wholesale program' where their bills were linked to the spot market. One $10,000+ electric bill will cover that $0.20 difference for quite a few 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

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

From what I can see in the solar groups its basically a philosophy issue in Texas with home production and who makes the money.

They make it extremely difficult for people to not pay the big producers for their electricity and produce there own. Be that fossil fuel generated or renewables by the big producers.

There is all sorts of weird and wonderful setups to get round the restrictions. And just your normal grid tied setup takes a colossal amount of red tape and time to be allowed to be turned on. And the cost of it is colossal which most of the time when compared to 10 cents per kWh makes it uneconomic. Not that it makes any difference to some Texans who will quiet happily pay through the nose to not pay any money to the big company's. So they end up with ATS setups with generators linked in. Its quiet impressive to be honest the lengths they will go to.

As far as I can tell there is very little safety benefit to the regulations and requirements, most of them are just the result of lobbying from big industry. There has just been a load of import tariffs introduced regarding inverter parts. Its pretty blatant that its being done to force everyone into using microinverters and Enphase. Big industry can use 1500V strings, currently small producers can use 600V but there is lobbying to bring it down to 450V and its a retrospective reg change so all existing string inverter installations will need to be limited to 450V per string if the lobbying gets its way. To me its just a degree of crispiness the difference getting electrocuted by 1500V 1000V, 600V or 450V, your still dead.

 

[1503-44]

My post 2 Mar 21 17:30 has the EIA info, including hydro.

The loss of sales to residential customers alone is finally starting to hurt PUtilities in a number of regions. They have seldom seen any decrease in their sales at all before, ever. But they saw that coming. Alistair is right. They have been lobbying in some very restrictive conditions the world over, notably exception being Germany for one, to attach renewables to the grid. It used to cost € 8000 in Spain just for the engineering work necessary to connect to the grid, no matter if the installation was for 1000 W, or 50 MW. Of course nobody would pay that for tying in a 2500W home system, so effectively that reserved the field for exclusive use by public utility company systems only. Rooftop solar in general is a PU's nightmare. Its like what 3D printing is for Leggos. They are scared as hell because they know one day they will pretty much lose nearly all residential and small shop mfgr customers.

With the sun in TX, there is no excuse not to develop that resource to the fullest, other than it does not fit the PU business model. Solar is more available to to the general population than natgas and can shift load off the grid during daytime peak use. Germany is far ahead of TX and works with a lesser quantity of resource. That is a direct and valid comparison between TX and Germany. The rest of the comparison was simply because of my interest. Each region must optimize its available resources, so of course there will be inherent differences, which I also mentioned and highlighted. Conclusion: TX needs more solar and should probably add more wind, if suitable wind sites still exist at reasonable prices. Many of the best remaining wind sites in the US have options on them already purchased by speculators as long as 15 years ago. Try buying a site in Wyoming today.

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

There is also a ploy in some areas that condemns your house as not fit for living in if you are not connected to the grid.

So the Texan Solution is to be connected but the only thing attached to that is the fridge. Everything else goes the off grid system.

As I say the ways round the regulations are impressive.

Where as my experience with German inverter OEM's is given in this thread so I won't post it again.

https://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=479631

The range of ability's and external control which you can make use of if you want to for the German market is impressive. Reactive dynamic power factor control turning out to be very useful for me.

 

[1503-44]

TX problem is air conditioning and ... keeping the beer cold.
They need to solve solar powered air conditioner's relatively high load. I think there are some that will work with solar now, but it has been a problem area.

Natgas for residential heating will probably always be around in TX. At least it heats air efficiently. Must be near 90%. So overall its probably less of a hit on the atmos than buying 35% eff generated electricity off the grid and then resistance heating again.

If they can make an electric pickup truck and TXns can get their heads around that bit, then they'll start buying solar chargers faster than a road runner dusting up hot asphalt.