Power Plants

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A few years ago my refrigerator stopped working but the outlet was fine. I could get the refrigerator working by plugging in a space heater in my bedroom but the space heater didn’t put out much heat. My electric stove and water heater was working fine. As where my lights and other small appliances.

What was wrong?

Basically, what happened is the power company was working on the line and disconnected the center tap on the utility transformer from the ground temporarily. 240 volts worked fine, and more less loaded half of 120-volt split phase worked normally, while the more loaded half of the phase only passed as much current as the less loaded portion of the split phase.
 
With split phase, if the center tap is disconnected, the maximum amperage that can flow is equal to what is on both sides of the phase. So the heavier load on phase “A” will only be able to pass as much current, and therefore voltage, as phase “B”. If you are pulling 34 amps on phase “A” and 10 amps on phase “B”, the center tap is returning the 24 amps not pulled on phase “B”. No center tap, then phase “A” can only pull 10 amps. As voltage is current times resistance, as the current reduces, so does voltage.
 
So the refrigerator wasn’t getting enough voltage to run, without space heater providing a return path to utility transformer. Split phase transformers rely on their center tap to balance out current between the split phases.

What Went Wrong With Texas’s Main Electric Grid and Could It Have Been Prevented? – Texas Monthly

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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

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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.