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Millions of Texans were left without electricity Monday as a rare winter storm boosted demand and crimped supplies, demonstrating that California isn’t the only state with a power grid vulnerable to extreme weather conditions.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the state’s electricity grid, began calling for rotating outages overnight on Sunday to avoid widespread blackouts that can occur when demand exceeds supply. But the severe power shortages forced companies to curtail power beyond short rolling blackouts, with many customers losing electricity for much of the day.
The imbalance occurred as residents cranked their thermostats amid record-breaking lows in some areas of the state, causing electricity demand to surge amid a precipitous drop in generating capacity. The grid operator said it lost about 34,000 megawatts of supply as freezing temperatures forced natural-gas- and coal-fired power plants offline in quick succession. The weather also reduced natural-gas supplies to power plants and caused wind turbines in West Texas to freeze.
Clearly, the national electric grid will need to become robust and fault-tolerant in an era of mass-deployment of EVs.
edit:
Wholesale power prices also surged, at times exceeding the market price cap of $9,000 per megawatt hour, according to ERCOT data. Prices had hovered below $50 per megawatt hour before the winter storm.
Interesting bottom line having to do with price hikes. Who would have known.
I think the national grid held up pretty good in this cold spell. Which leads me back to my earlier post.
Texas actually has an advantage in the future being an oil producer. I would thought all their steam boilers were duel fuel capable.
Steam boiler duel fuel upgrades are not a big deal to implement even if they never thought them necessary in Texas. (as in combination natural gas / bunker #6 oil fired boilers.
Texas is 3.8 times bigger than Oklahoma in size, and over 7 times larger in population. That all makes the issues harder to deal with, but there's no good reason for the power to be out to 4 million people.
What do you think happens when the East Coast and Northeast are hit with winter storms? Quite often there's power outages. We deal with them all winter long. People complain but there's nothing we can do except bury all of our power lines underground which isn't feasible. We have blackouts here in the summer because there's not enough electricity. It happens. People will survive. Sure it sucks. I went without power for 3 weeks because of an ice storm years ago. I survived. I'm here today to talk about it. No one changed anything even with folks out of power for 3 weeks. That also meant we didn't have water since we were on a well. We made do.
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Charging a Tesla averages about 50 kWh. Because home charging is mostly done at night, when there is lower use due to people sleeping, it shouldn't be much of a problem. In areas with extreme het or cold, however, with a lot of electric home heating, or air conditioning it could definitely impact the grid at times.
Ironically, the place with the highest EV use (California) has large areas of the grid shut down now for fire danger. This is a great time to be a generator dealer there!
What do you think happens when the East Coast and Northeast are hit with winter storms? Quite often there's power outages. We deal with them all winter long. People complain but there's nothing we can do except bury all of our power lines underground which isn't feasible. We have blackouts here in the summer because there's not enough electricity. It happens. People will survive. Sure it sucks. I went without power for 3 weeks because of an ice storm years ago. I survived. I'm here today to talk about it. No one changed anything even with folks out of power for 3 weeks. That also meant we didn't have water since we were on a well. We made do.
In the northeast, large scale power outages are usually due to ice storms that weigh down tree branches along the roads - when the branches come down, so do the power lines running underneath them. If the conditions are just "right" (wrong?) for heavy icing, there can be hundreds (or more) of these breaks. You're right that burying all the power lines, everywhere, would be technically straightforward, but really expensive because of thousands of miles of power lines to be buried.
In Texas, it's not the power lines that are down. It's the actual generating equipment that's frozen, water lines burst, etc, in the power generating plants due to a cost-sparing decision by utilities not to fortify them against cold temperatures (as they already do in most of the nation). Most years it's fine, but it seems about every decade, they have a big problem. It's definitely feasible to make these changes - nearly all states already do it.
Excellent discussion from Engineering Explained. The short answer is yes, switching to EVs, over a period of decades, appears very doable for power companies to increase service for.
I don't see a strain on the grid occurring. At worst, it will create a second, nighttime "peak" period for which they may eventually rate, and thus bill differently.
At best, EV adoption may be slower than anticipated and the demand from overnight charging may never create a blip on the radar for power companies.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ddm2k
I don't see a strain on the grid occurring. At worst, it will create a second, nighttime "peak" period for which they may eventually rate, and thus bill differently.
At best, EV adoption may be slower than anticipated and the demand from overnight charging may never create a blip on the radar for power companies.
Good insight, in fact I would expect them to take advantage of the opportunity to make more money by raising rates during that time when a significant increase in EV charging happens in 10-15 years.
There will be a bunch of inquisitions, with the executives of the power companies and ERCOT, the grid operator, in front of legislators and others, explaining what happened. The unregulated power generators have no incentive to winterize their plants, since it cuts into profits. Regulated generators can make their case to the Public Utilities Commission to get the costs put in the rate base. However, that does nothing to resolve the issues where natural gas is unavailable due to gas plants shutting down or wells getting shut in due to freezing of lines and other issues.
As far as I know, none of the NG plants can use bunker crude. Their emissions permits won't allow it, and they don't have storage for the oil.
The issues can be avoided, but the Legislature or the PUC will have to start using their big sticks to get hte generators in line.
Texas is 3.8 times bigger than Oklahoma in size, and over 7 times larger in population. That all makes the issues harder to deal with, but there's no good reason for the power to be out to 4 million people.
No duel fuel in Texas generating stations.
How is that even possible that they missed that opportunity for 75 years, and yet they share their grid with Mexico and not the U.S.
Interesting.
Now Mexico is blaming Texas for it's power outage. Go figure. I'd say potential electric car owners might want to be aware of these facts.
Northern Mexico imports natural gas from Texas because the Texas gas fields are much closer than the ones in Mexico. Mexico can feel free to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get gas to Northern Mexico, but that doesn't make a lot of economic sense.
In the northeast, large scale power outages are usually due to ice storms that weigh down tree branches along the roads - when the branches come down, so do the power lines running underneath them. If the conditions are just "right" (wrong?) for heavy icing, there can be hundreds (or more) of these breaks. You're right that burying all the power lines, everywhere, would be technically straightforward, but really expensive because of thousands of miles of power lines to be buried.
In Texas, it's not the power lines that are down. It's the actual generating equipment that's frozen, water lines burst, etc, in the power generating plants due to a cost-sparing decision by utilities not to fortify them against cold temperatures (as they already do in most of the nation). Most years it's fine, but it seems about every decade, they have a big problem. It's definitely feasible to make these changes - nearly all states already do it.
Right now there are people in NY without power. It's not from trees or branches coming down. Winter power outages aren' usually from the trees because the leaves are gone. There's not much breakage that comes from the snow. Ice gets a bit more from the weight. The real weight is the leaves. When the leaves are still on the trees, that's when we have MAJOR problems with trees breaking.
Our summer power outages don't have anything to do with trees. There's simply not enough electricity to go around when it's hot here and everyone has cranked up the ac.
Texas has numerous problems right now. Most of which no one probably ever thought would happen. Definitely not to this magnitude.
I don't see a strain on the grid occurring. At worst, it will create a second, nighttime "peak" period for which they may eventually rate, and thus bill differently.
At best, EV adoption may be slower than anticipated and the demand from overnight charging may never create a blip on the radar for power companies.
Thats' assuming people only charge their cars overnight. Millions of people don't work 9-5. Ever have a meter that charges based on peak usage? It SUCKS! It's ridiculously expensive.
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No duel fuel in Texas generating stations.
