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

 

[1503-44]

The only way this will ever get fixed is house by house. Buy a generator and a wood (pellet?) burning fireplace.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Here in SoCal (at least) most all gas-furnaces don't even have pilot-lights as they are equipped with electronic ignition systems. And with the safety systems, without power, you can't even light it manually.

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

 

[Stick.]

...will lead to a large surge in electricity demand as soon as the ambient air temp drops below 35 F , the bottom limit for an electric heat pump.

Just a minor correction that this doesn't have to be true anymore. I just happened to check Mitsubishi's site (just as an example), and they're claiming 100% capacity down to -5°F (I didn't look to see how it drops off after that). Whether someone in Texas would opt for a model with that capability is another story...

 

[bones206]

The only way this will ever get fixed is house by house. Buy a generator and a wood (pellet?) burning fireplace.

My current tentative plan for my house is heat pumps, solar panels and battery backup (i.e. Tesla wall). I've only just started to research the feasibility and performance of such a setup, but in concept it seems more resilient and efficient than my current dependence on a propane furnace powered by the grid. If this type of home energy setup was more commonplace, would that build more overall resilience to the system and less dependence on centralized power plants? It's not my area of expertise so I'll defer to others who know better, but it would be nice in theory if we could head in a direction towards more decentralized energy production and resilience.

 

[SnTMan]

I have a newer gas furnace and it works exactly as described by others. You have to have electric power. My wife and I sleep on a waterbed. You can sleep on one of those about one day without electric power. I bought a portable generator during a power outage from our 2007 ice storm. I'll never be without one again. They are a wonderful thing to have, but trust me, you'd trade one for line power in a heartbeat

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

 

[Compositepro]

One of my previous houses was built in 1946 in Lakewood, California. It had a had a sub-floor natural gas furnace and a millivolt thermostat (powered by the pilot light thermocouple). The heat rose through a floor grate. Completely silent and extremely reliable. I'm sure it is still working well today. A ceiling fan did help to keep the floor warm but was not needed for heat.

 

[SnTMan]

Compositepro, house I grew up in had one of those. They worked great, no electric power needed. They were very common around here, and still exist in some houses. Good luck getting one worked on though.

Just about everybody anybody knows from that time has a story about stepping on the grate barefoot some cold morning

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

 

[1503-44]

My on demand water heaters are ignited by 2 x C cells, no pilots, but you'll need something else for powering air heater fans.

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

I have a reasonably large solar setup with a 6.4kWh battery. I also have a 8.5 kw ground heat pump which is much more efficient than the air heatpumps. It pulls about 2kw to output 8 kw of heat. So can get about 5 hours heating out of the battery when the outside temp is below -10 . Most air heat pumps will shut down at -20 deg C anyway and below -10 deg C the efficiency drops through the floor.

But what you can do is have an inverter that has critical loads backup off battery. Which would run your propane furnace and power the pumps and fans etc.

The USA solar lot have a lot of fixes and fiddles and tax credits, you have to start digging through the options. But what I can see is that solar is extremely expensive in the USA and most of it is due to labour and getting all the approvals done. Have a google for SMA inverters.

 

[RedSnake]

In Sweden we do have gas heating as an option, I would say there are 3 main basic choice to begin with for heating a house here.
Pure electricity or by water, or air heating or some combination of dose.
I myself would choose water heating just because it gives you more options for what kind of electrical or heat source you can use.
And I would also make it underfloor heating, it reduces the amount of heating needed.
For heating of the water you can use everything from the grid to everything els that can produce electricity or hot water, as a ground pump, solar cells both water or electric and there are even wood/pelts burners for this now.
Off course in all cases there need to be a batteri backupsystem if the grid or main electric power source fails.

Best Regards A




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

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

BTW if you go water ground heatpump and are willing to put a vertical environmental pipe in its relatively cheap and easy to get passive aircon cooling in the summer. And no refrigerants to deal with. And the only power you use is 100 watts for the pump and what every the fan coils need. In my case 70 watts each.

 

[miningman]

IMO, unless your local conditions regularly fall to minus 25 or minus 30, your opinions should be kept to yourself. Canadians regularly deal with low climatic temperatures and even then we can get ourselves into difficulties. Opinions thrown around and extrapolated by less than knowledgeable people can easily kill yourself and your neighbor.

The Texans having problems today typically have minimal insulation in their houses and their serious infrastructure is open to the elements because of pressure differentials that would occur during hurricane season.

 

[JohnRBaker]

When I was nine years old the house my parents had built was rather small and was heated by a floor mounted, oil-fired, furnace with a single large grate where the heat came out. The house was a single story and relatively well insulated (this was in Northern Michigan) but the bedrooms were always cold. Now this was very rural and the power company was a customer-owned cooperative and when I was about 13 or 14, my father had the power company install electric heat (by then he had added on to the house and that floor furnace was just not cutting it). Now to back-up the electric base-board heating system, we had a Franklin Stove in the family room and my mother still did most all her cooking on a full sized, wood fired, kitchen stove (she had a small apartment sized electric stove next to the much larger wood stove, that she used in the summer).

An interesting side note, over the years the cooperative electric company is no longer technically owned by the current network of customers, but the people, like my parents, who bought into the co-op when they had their house built some 60+ years ago, they never sold their 'shares'. My parents have been gone now for over 20 years, but as executor of their estate, that 'ownership' was transferred to me, and every year, just like clockwork, I get a dividend check. The last couple of years it's been around $65, but there have been times when it was as high as $130, but never less than $45. I probably should check sometime to see what the shares are worth if I were to cash-out. I assume that they would buy them back.

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

 

[RedSnake]

miningman
If your want your opinion to matter, I would suggest that you be more specific in what and who it is you are criticizing.
Otherwise it will just be whining.
I think most people have enough self-insight and self-preservation drive to decide or realize for themselves what information works for where they live or not.
And if not then most countries have building standards that regulate things like this, you are usually not allowed to do whatever you want, so I do not really se your problem.

Best Regards A

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

 

[SnTMan]

This just in

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

 

[dik]

Texans are tough and expendable... it's a price you pay for being tough...

Rather than think climate change and the corona virus as science, think of it as the wrath of God. Feel any better?

-Dik

 

[FacEngrPE]

The outages are not confined to texas.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-energy-idUSKBN2AG2HC

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/worl...er-weather-leads-to-power-outages/ar-BB1dK3di

But Texas is getting heat for causing the outage (unjustly).

Generating capacity has a hint of recovery but still has a long way to go.

Operating margins are still really small

http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/as_capacity_monitor.html

 

[SnTMan]

Not just Texas, my town, Tulsa, OK, has had rolling blackouts the last few days. Not sure the exact cause, but safe to say demand exceeded supply. The utility (American Electric Power) has asked us to turn down the thermostats, un plug unused devices, etc, blah, blah. So far it has missed me but I don't mind saying that my plan is, if notified I am turning my t-stat up to 80 while the power lasts. Get the house good and warm before I'm blacked out.

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

 

[dik]

Didn't know that... I thought Texas was not connected to a grid and that was the cause of their problems... don't know... only two guys from Texas, I ever met were on a sawmill project in northern Ontario... I asked them if there was any truth to the rumour that Clinton (Bill) was going to cut Alaska in half and make Texas the third largest state... the one replied, "There's nothing that *sshole could do that would surprise me." They were great guys...

Rather than think climate change and the corona virus as science, think of it as the wrath of God. Feel any better?

-Dik

 

[davefitz]

There were tremendously high spot prices for power, and there will be a suspicion that the same tricks that were used in the 2001 califonia power crisis were being used to force the price of power to spike up to crazy levels. Some plants will make more money in 3 days then in a 3 month period.

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