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 had no idea that they had de-icing equipment on wind turbines in New York. I just thought they shut them down when they iced up like they do when wind conditions are too fast or slow. But instead what they do in colder climates were icing is common, is they stop the blades, de-ice them then restart them. Makes sense as it would otherwise lead to a lot of a loss of a lot of operating hours in the winter.
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.
I wonder how much of the spike in demand and electricity shortage down south is due the common air-source heat pumps having to kick on their electric pre-heaters due to extreme cold conditions (at least for the south). In the south with warmer temperatures being the norm, they rely on heat pumps to pump heat out of buildings in the winter (air conditioning), and pump heat into buildings during the winter. Many large buildings, especially down south, use air conditioners with reversing valves, that allows them to pump heat into buildings, by compressing the heat in outdoors air.
Such systems work well, and are very energy efficient in moderate temperatures. You can typically compress enough heat out of 35 or 40 degree air to keep a building a comfortable 70 or 75 degrees. But the problem is when the air temperature drops below 35 degrees — there is simply not enough heat in air for compressor to work. Such air-source heat pumps then contain electrical resistance pre-heaters, similar to electric space heaters that a lot of people have. The pre-heaters are activated to heat the air when it’s cold to compress it out of outdoors air. While resistance heaters release all of the heat in electricity, power plants are lossy and 55-70% of all heat in fuel is discarded and not turned into energy. So when they fire up the electric heat, it’s quite lossy.
The extreme shortage of natural gas that has idled thousands of workers across the eastern United States worsened yesterday, although some factories reopened by switching to alternative fuels.
The National Fuel Gas Corporation in Buffalo, which had previously escaped cutbacks, announced that following new curtailments by its suppliers it was eliminating service to, schools and industrial customers. HoweVer, the company said later that it would permit industrial customers to resume use of natural gas today, but at reduced volume.
The nation's four major automobile manufacturers, which had furloughed 56,000 employees on Monday, reduced the cuts to 20,000 by late yesterday afternoon.
And as the record cold of Monday eased, electric companies in Ohio and Michigan as well as across the Southeast were able to restart frozen generators and end rotating blackouts.
A lot of people are talking about the power shortage down south. But in January 1977, Buffalo through Detroit had a shortage of both electricity and natural gas due an extended period of cold that shuttered factories and lead to mandated cuts to building heat to 55 degrees.