Black start – Wikipedia
How do you start a power plant when there is no electricity being supplied to it? It's an interesting question, as a power plant has to be up to speed before it can be synchronized to grid.
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Practical Engineering – What Really Happened During the Texas Power Grid Outage?
When disaster strikes, the flurry of political positioning and fingerpointing can make it difficult to understand what really happened. This video provides a summary of the facts of the 2021 Texas winter storm.
Using Narrative to Tell the Blackout Story – Nieman Foundation
Reporting from inside a power plant helped to tell the dramatic story of decision-making when the lights went out.
What Went Wrong With Texas’s Main Electric Grid and Could It Have Been Prevented? – Texas Monthly
After winter storms continued to barrage the state Tuesday night, officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the body overseeing the grid that serves 90 percent of the state’s homes, couldn’t offer a timeline for when power for every Texan would be restored. Over the long weekend, the council had advised local utilities to shed energy use with rolling outages in order to maintain the reliability of the electric system after a surge in demand, or otherwise risk uncontrolled blackouts that will take longer to reverse. Some four million homes in the state had been left in the lurch without energy in the bitter cold—many for over fifty hours—and as of Wednesday morning, 2.7 million homes still lacked power.
I think folks are reading too much into the hullabaloo about the cold outbreak down south
I think folks are reading too much into the hullabaloo about the cold outbreak down south.
- Sometimes it gets very cold in the winter, even in places where you might not think it would get get very cold.
- Engineered systems, such as power plants and the electric grid work under certain parameters, and when you exceed them, they fail.
- The extreme electricity demands of resistance heating and air-source heat pumps pre-heaters, overloaded the grid to the point it couldn’t keep up.
- It doesn’t mean the grid is defective or bad, it’s just that it’s a rare, outlaying case, when parameters were exceeded and an engineered design failed
- While maybe the it wouldn’t have been an issue in cold weather areas, where the temperature regularly gets that cold, they don’t have the natural gas and fuel oil burners down south to take energy demand off the grid.
- I think it’s foolish to blame politicians, power plant operators or electric companies for a once in a lifetime disaster that is exceedingly rare, and overwhelmed their infrastructure.