Texas Rolling Brownouts 4

[electricpete]

What's the scoop with the rolling brownouts statewide on 2/2/11?

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(2B)+(2B)' ?

 

[rmw]

Surely you can believe anything you read on the Internet, right?

Now to this thread.

The wind drop (and I an no big defender of wind) was on Tuesday evening per the article. The rolling blackouts were Wednesday morning early and through the day. I read another article on Energy Central that stated that on Wed wind contributed a significant amount of power helping keep it from being worse. Actually, I kind of believe that because the locale where the wind farms are would then be behind the front when the winds would be strong out of the north.

Of course, I believe everything I read on the Internet then, don't I?

rmw

 

[byrdj]

and there would not be any operating quirks (especially something like frozen lines on an out door unit) with 3 units during thier first few months of operation

 

[wayne440]

rmw - The "Tuesday" wind drop was in 2008.

 

[msquared48]

I'm really shocked that the wind power failed for Houston.

I thought that my mother-in-law moving there would sustain the region indefinitely.

Mike McCann
MMC Engineering
Motto: KISS
Motivation: Don't ask

 

[racobb]

wayne440:

Didn't you mean to say that the guy is an idiot?


Alan

 

[wayne440]

I guess an "Individual Decidedly Ignorant Of Technology" could be a reasonable definition.

 

[racookpe1978]

The following from scientific readers at

http://www.wattsupwiththat.com

about the Texas utility crisis, and the wind, coal AND gas distribution problems leading up to the rolling blackouts:

"_Jim says:
February 6, 2011 at 10:45 am (Edit)

I thought I might take this opportunity to post the time line as published in the Dallas Morning News titled:

Freeze knocked out coal plants and natural gas supplies, leading to blackouts
By ELIZABETH SOUDER, S.C. GWYNNE and GARY JACOBSON
Published 06 February 2011 12:56 AM

and do so under the Fair Use provision of the copyright act:

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - –

Texas’ power crisis timeline

Monday

Jan. 31 6:08 a.m.: ERCOT control room issues an operational message that says a cold front is approaching. Temperatures are expected to be 18 degrees or lower and remain near or below freezing, affecting half or more of major metropolitan areas, beginning at 9 a.m. Tuesday.

Tuesday

9:07 a.m.: ERCOT repeats its weather warning.

Before midnight: Gibbons Creek coal-fired generating plant near Bryan goes offline. It would be back up at midday Wednesday, off again late that day and up again early Thursday.

Wednesday

After midnight: Four of Luminant’s coal-fired units in Central Texas go offline, as does one unit at a CPS Energy coal-fired plant in San Antonio. Officials decline to give specific times. The CPS unit is back up again by 11 a.m.

2:49 a.m.: ERCOT control issues an advisory because it doesn’t expect to have enough power generation to meet demand. “Physical Responsive Capability” is below 3,000 megawatts.

3:21 a.m.: ERCOT e-mails that notification to Public Utility Commission Chairman Barry Smitherman and other top regulators. The advisory rates the probability of cutting off customers as “low.”

3:30 a.m.: Real-time settlement point price for electricity in North Texas is $80.95 a megawatt hour. Some electricity in Texas trades on an electronic spot market, where retailers and big consumers can buy power each day from wholesalers.

3:45 a.m.: Settlement price jumps to $1,117.60 a megawatt hour. Prices typically spike on the spot market when supplies are tight.

5:08 a.m.: ERCOT control issues “watch” because Physical Responsive Capability is below 2,500 MW.

5:18 a.m.: ERCOT declares Level 2A of Energy Emergency Alert, meaning the grid has less than 1,750 megawatts of available reserves, a thin margin. ERCOT cuts power to customers who agreed to be part of an interruptible load program.

5:20 a.m.: ERCOT CEO Trip Doggett is in the shower when the emergency notification comes in. When he sees the notice, he calls Ken Saathoff, ERCOT’s vice president of grid operations, to gather information. He then spends half an hour calling the three PUC members, the PUC executive director and one of the governor’s advisers. He then drives to ERCOT’s back-up control room in Austin and begins calling legislators.

5:43 a.m.: ERCOT declares a Level 3 EEA, the highest emergency level, meaning the grid is struggling to maintain system frequency at 59.8 Hz or greater. ERCOT instructs power line utilities to use rolling outages to cut demand.

5:52 a.m.: PUC chairman Smitherman gets a call from ERCOT’s market monitor, Dan Jones. Smitherman, sick in bed with a sinus infection, doesn’t answer. He takes a call from Doggett at 6:23, and heads to the backup control room, canceling a speaking engagement at Texas A&M University. He will spend much of the day coordinating with leaders of other state agencies to move more fuel to power plants.

6:14 a.m.: Austin Energy issues a news release about rolling blackouts statewide.

6:15 a.m.: Settlement price hits $3,001 megawatt hour.

6:54 a.m.: ERCOT issues a news release about rolling blackouts statewide.

8 a.m.: ERCOT asks Oncor to exclude natural gas compressor facilities from the rolling blackouts. Oncor asks for specific customers, but ERCOT isn’t able to provide names.

After 8:30 a.m.: A coal unit at NRG Energy’s Limestone plant near Jewett goes offline. It comes back just after 2 a.m. Thursday.

9:30 a.m.: ERCOT asks Oncor to exclude from the blackouts five counties in the heart of the natural gas production zone: Jack, Palo Pinto, Wise, Parker and Hood. Oncor does. Half an hour later, ERCOT asks Oncor to exclude areas west of Fort Worth from the blackouts, and Oncor complies. Oncor sends crews to repair lingering outages.

11:04 a.m.: ERCOT sends an e-mail to Atmos and other natural gas companies asking for the location of any facilities affected by the outages. Atmos’ pipeline equipment runs on natural gas and is not affected.

Midday: Natural gas supply to Atmos’ system drops off as gas well equipment freezes. Producers struggle to get workers to the field to repair the equipment in the cold. Atmos curtails supply to industrial customers between Interstate 30 and the Red River.

Luminant asks Atmos for a large supply of natural gas to fire up the Lake Ray Hubbard natural gas plant. Atmos declines, saying the request would shut off its residential customers and shut down part of Atmos’ system, requiring weeks to return everyone to service. Atmos offers to move the large supply to Luminant’s DeCordova plant in Hood County, but Luminant doesn’t take the offer.

2:13 p.m.: ERCOT calls off rotating blackouts. ERCOT warns it may have to initiate another round of outages that evening or the following day, but it doesn’t have to do so."

 

[racookpe1978]

Continuing from that discussion at

http://www.wattsupwiththat.com:

"#
Mike Smith says:
February 4, 2011 at 12:50 pm (Edit)

Hi everyone,

Mike Goggin of the American Wind Energy Assn. is posting both here and at meteorologicalmusings.blogspot.com because he has so far avoided the questions I am posing to him at my blog. Yesterday afternoon (5:21pm), he agreed to provide the wind energy data for Wednesday night (2nd) and Thursday morning (3rd). After now FIVE requests, he still hasn’t provided it. This is pertinent because, according to even the pro-wind people the PEAK load was Wednesday evening in Texas, not Wednesday morning! I want to see if wind can be a genuine contributor in extreme weather and load conditions.

I have stated, over and over, that if there was significant wind energy being generated during the time of the peak load I am open to revising my opinion. He keeps avoiding the issue.

There WERE reports of wind turbines doing down Wednesday morning during the blackout period, so my “guess” was correct:

http://www.texastribune.org/texas-e...lling-chain-of-events-behind-texas-blackouts/

There are so many comments, here and at my blog, and so many emails I have personally received it is getting difficult to sort it all out. That said, let me try to reconstruct the “best case” for wind power. Even though there are 10,000MW installed, only 6,800 are possible at any given time due to transmission constraints. Mr. Goggin says that, at best, 3,900 were available from wind during the blackout period. If my math is correct, 39/68 = 57% availability, even though ERCOT had asked for maximum output.

If your car (which is about the physical size of the turbine itself) failed 43% of the time, I do not believe you would tout that fact as a “success.”

Finally, valid points about coal plants going offline, etc. If you will read my original post, that very issue IS acknowledged at the end. But here is the problem: Wind energy requires “spinning reserve” from conventional power plants because of its inconsistency. My contention is that if we had simply build more nuclear (or coal) plants with the money spent on wind, the crisis (which interrupted power to hospitals!) could have been avoided.

Again, please come over to my blog if you would like to follow this, although I’m going to shut this topic down soon as there is only so much time and space I’m willing to devote to it.

Mike
#
someoneintheknow says:
February 4, 2011 at 1:27 pm (Edit)

Goggin fails to provide these numbers from Tuesday night to Wednesday morning. The wind output decreased by 2585 MW from 3 pm Tuesday to 6 am Wednesday. That is about the same capacity lost as the two coal plants that tripped offline Wednesday morning. Roark is correct that they were generating 3630 MW at 6 am Wednesday, but that was down 41% from Tuesday. There is a history of this happening in ERCOT:

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/pdfs/43373.pdf

"

Note: I strongly recommend the the link to the pdf file about the earlier Feb 2008 ERCOT loss of wind power for its timeline, and the huge loss of wind power available in just minutes during that event, compared to the several hour loss of over 3500 Megawatt of potential wind power this year on Feb 2-3.

Overall, demand grew from 25,000 Megawatt to just over 50,000 Megawatt in less than 10 hours as teh cold front moved through. Demand then stabilized at over 50,000 Megawatt for the next two days.
Theoretically available (nameplate capacity of wind power in the Texas system was 10,000 Megawatts, but apparently only 6800 Meg's can be connected to the grid. (Boondoogle, anybody, about certain politically-connected "players" building more wind farms using tax money incintives faster than building (non-taxpayer-assisted power lines?????)
Actual delivered wind power decreased during this time from 3800 Megawatts down to less than 1200 Megawatts, but the wind power associations have consistently not answered questions about how much was actually delivered when during the crisis - other than their initial claims of 3800 Megawatts during the highest wind period/lowest demand period early during the Feb 2 event.

 

[racookpe1978]

This repeats my own submittal to that discussion on Feb 2 - Feb 3.

"racookpe1978 says:
February 3, 2011 at 7:45 pm (Edit)

Too many numbers are not adding up to reality.

The Wind Energy groups are presenting (wild) claims, but have no graphs showing their delivery of actual electricity at actual times of day.

Worse, they appear to be claiming credit for theoretical power generated during the actual arrival of the cold front (very high winds for a short amount of time) but not for the long hours of much, much calmer winds but very cold temperatures over the long hours AFTER the cold front moved through west TX (the Lubbock are and high plains), central north TX (Dallas and Fort Worth, then east towards Texarkana, south to about Austin), nor the different winds but still temperatures that crossed San Antonio, then Houston then (a little) of deep south TX.

Until the wind energy groups release their specific hour-by-hour delivery of power for the full three days, I do not believe the press release represents reality. I could be wrong. But making a claim that “Wind power played a major role in keeping the blackouts from becoming more severe. Between 5 and 7 A.M. this morning (the peak of the electricity shortage) wind turbines was providing between 3,500 and 4,000 MW ..” implies that they themselves do not know how power was provided to what region at what time. Further, the newer (largest) wind turbines today are 1 Megawatt at max power.

Varying just their claimed output between 3500 and 4000 Megawatts means that some 500 wind turbines dropped off line. (Or 1000 wind turbines suddenly and without control dropped 50% of their “claimed” nameplate power.) Gee. What reliability.

Now – There are several other troubling indicators. We see a power demand suddenly and rapidly rise (literally overnight) from a seasonal 25,000 Meg’s to 50,000 Meg’s of power needed. “Nobody” in Texas uses fuel oil for heating homes and workspaces (unlike the northern states where steam heaters, boilers, and home heating oil is more common) – everything is natural gas burners with electric fans to distribute the hot air, or electric-driven heat pumps, or electric resistance heaters.

There were (and still are) limits to how much natural gas can flow through the large pipelines that criss-cross the state. Nat gas shortages (the gas simply can’t flow any faster@!@#$%!!!) will limit both home heating AND power plant delivery to power and gas turbine. (Few steam plants are natural gas driven any more – most were converted to coal between the 70?s and early 90?s.)

The “average” gas turbine plant is about 150 Meg’s to 200 Meg’s. A few new ones are starting construction at 250+ Meg’s – but they aren’t on line yet anywhere. The most common GT is two 150 Meg GT generators plus a third 150 Meg steam turbine-generator being driven by the waste heat recovery boilers from the GT exhaust. So, if I lose the two GT generators because they can’t get natural gas, then the third steam driven unit drops off as well. Result? I lose not one 150 Meg generator, but three.

I don’t accept the answer that only 2 large coal plants dropping out caused the rolling blackout either. We saw from the graph loaded above that power demand rose by 25,000 that night from seasonal averages. If the two coal-powered plants were 2700 Meg each – which might be the case, but seems grossly high; then we still need to account for the rest of the shortage. By the way, the largest nuclear plants are “only” 1100 Megawatts – so the claim that a single coal plant is 2700 Meg’s needs to be scrutinized. (At least as carefully as the wind energy group’s claims need to be verified.) An “average” older coal-powered plant is 250-300 Megawatts. The larger (“newer”) coal-power plants built from the mid-70?s through the late 80?s was 500 – 800 Megawatts.

Did 50 large plants go out at the same time? (50 x 500 Megawatts?) Doesn’t seem right.

Were the output from 50 “new” plants suddenly and unexpectedly needed in 10 hours? Yes.

Was wind power available to provide that power? No.

Was nuclear available? Yes. All nuclear plants in the TX grid were at 100%.

Could 150 large gas turbines make up the missing 50 large coal plants overnight? No.
1. They were not built -> Could not be built in Obama’s regulatory environment, which demands ONLY wind power and does not permit solar.
2. The gas turbines that had been built for summer peak electrical loads were being repaired (Sweeny 2, Magic Valley 3, Magic Valley 2, etc.) or could not get natural gas.

Was the Texas “isolated” national grid to blame? In some ways yes, in some ways no. TX IS an isolated grid system with only AC-DC-AC conversion links at only a few places. (You MUST go back to DC to shift load between grids because of synchronous generation problems. Mess up the synchronous HZ of either grid and you blow up generators with billion dollar electric arcs at 48,000 volts apiece. ) The TX grid is larger than France, or Germany and Eastern Europe, or the UK grid, or the entire Scandinavian-Denamrk-Germany grid. “Hooking it” to the US national grids – Yes, Virginia, there are several US grids – is impossible, impractical, and BAD.

You cannot “ship” electricity further than 900 miles without losing over 70% to heat losses in the power lines. You “can” exchange voltage that far easily, just as you can get water pressure through a 1/2 garden hose 800 feet to a neighbor’s garage. But open the faucet to get water “flow” (current x voltage, or power) through that little garden hose? You get a dribble.

TX is larger than most people realize: getting power across the state, getting natural gas across the state reliably is HARD. But getting the politicians – including the wind power propagandists – to deliver the truth may be much harder.

The questions remain:

Who was generating what amount of power where during those hours of the blackouts?
Who was generating what amount of power at what time?
How many plants had mechanical problems?
What were those problems? Frozen coal? Frozen 1/4 inch instrument lines? No gas pressure? Freezing cooling water lines? (The cooling ponds could not have frozen in that short amount of time.)"

The actual Texas power demand curves are ataggering as load ramped up over 25,000 Megawatts in just a few hours - while wind power delivered was ramping down by the equal of two or coal-powered conventional plants, and instantaneous power prices went sharply up:

See this link from another WUWT writer:

_Jim says:
February 3, 2011 at 11:53 am (Edit)

Graphical plot of power consumption under ERCOT’s supervision for the last five days here in Texas:

http://oi51.tinypic.com/mkhd93.jpg

Data series begins 1-29-2011 and extends through 2-03-2011 1300 CST (Thursday)

Notes:
1) The cold front made it’s way through the northern part of the state 2-01-2011 in the AM accompanied by multiple forms of precip
2) The rolling blackouts started somewhere around 2 or 3 AM on 2-02-2011 the next day when overnight temperatures in North Central Texas reached 12 deg F.

.

 

[electricpete]

Great analysis Mr Cook. I will have to study that for awhile.

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

 

[byrdj]

Thank you for your research and posting.

 

[m3ntosan]

@racookpe1978

TX grid bigger than France or Germany power grid? You're kidding, right? Rather similar to the UK.

May you grow up to be righteous, may you grow up to be true...

 

[dpc]

Everything is bigger in Texas.







David Castor

http://www.cvoes.com

 

[m3ntosan]

and very important too!

May you grow up to be righteous, may you grow up to be true...

 

[racookpe1978]

Size of the grid in terms of area covered:

Area of France? Land area (excluding the island of Corsica) : 545630 sq km, or roughly 213,000 sq miles.

Area of Germany? 137800 square miles

Area of Texas? 268820 square miles.

 

[waross]

A few years ago, a southern company bought into a large operation in a cold part of Canada. When the southern engineers arrived they had some issues with some hoardings protecting some equipment. When told that the hoardings were needed for protection in the winter, the reply was;
"We get winter in Texas too!"
With the hubris of experts (More than 50 miles from home) they decreed that the hoardings be removed.
"We get winter in Texas too!" has become a buzz phrase in a cold part of Canada after the plants first shut-down due to cold weather in it's 30 years of operation.
I guess that we have differing expectations.
In Canada we strive to keep the plants going no matter what the weather.
In Texas, winter is short enough that some engineers believe that it's OK to stop for winter.
Now that Texas did get a winter, I wonder if any of the same engineers were involved with the plants that froze up.
Yes I know, these folk were not representative of the majority of the excellent engineers working in Texas.

Bill
--------------------
"Why not the best?"
Jimmy Carter

 

[m3ntosan]

OK let's just pick France for instance, HV transmission system 100,000 km (62,000 mi), Texas HV transmission 41000 miles, record peak demand around 70000 vs 95000 MW in France.

May you grow up to be righteous, may you grow up to be true...

 

[dpc]

Texas megawatts are bigger than French megawatts. This is well known.

 

[QBplanner]

This maybe another classic one - politician lead power industry. Wind power is the god in the power generation development in North America. People did not learn the lesson happened in 2008. Politician do not want to hear that wind power can not be produced when the customers really need it.
In Canada, we have been told the same that we have to push wind IPP to the maximum capacity because of its Green.At the very beginning, we put 15-20% maximum penetration limit. It was removed later.
No surprise, all our big bosses are politician.

 

[Marmite]

This has nothing to do with the non dispatchability of wind generation. That's just smoke and mirrors from people trying to deflect attention from their own incompetence and failings. The system was already in crisis when the wind output dropped. It reminds me of British Rail blaming the shutdown of the UK rail system on the "leaves on the line", or the channel tunnel rail link shutdown by the "wrong kind" of snow. You might as well blame the customers for switching the heating on.
Regards
Marmite