Strangest climate I have seen (North Richland Hills, Colleyville: calculation, to live, residential)

[turf3]

Hey! My bribes worked!

[serger]

Originally Posted by Katana49

We're on a pretty set blackout schedule in Prosper... We get power for 45 min to an hour, then out for 45 min to an hour, then back on, it's been pretty clockwork here. However, even when we get power to turn on the furnace, it's clear there is a shortage of natural gas, as they are not heating nearly as well as they normally do.

We have one water line inside that is frozen, I'm hoping it won't burst, it's a PEX line so I think we're safe but who knows. The temp inside we can get to about 65, then power goes out and it drops to 59/60, then power comes on and we get back up to 65... rinse, repeat.

I was going to say that we appear to be on 3/7 schedule. The last two sevens were pretty brutal. About 45 degrees on the second floor, and 50 on the first, but only in the family room with the fireplace, much lower elsewhere. But now we got the power back after "just" 3 hours. I just wish (after they completely dropped the ball during the preparation phase ) they were transparent what to expect. That way I would not have all this dead pool stuff. If I knew they would do a crazy 7 hour outs, would have drained and forgotten about it. Instead they kept talking about 15-45 min.

Now, not worried about pool anymore , but very worried about frozen lines. My outside spigots are just covered so I'm sure frozen.

[riffle]

Originally Posted by EDS_

4. And yes no matter how hard some deflect significant West Texas wind power being off line is a big part of the problem.

I don't know about that... Wind is too variable of a resource to be depended on much for peak capacity. Wind was less than 10% of the capacity ERCOT assumed would be available in this season's assessment, and they had a scenario where it was less than 3%.

http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lis...2020-2021.xlsx

[loves2read]

Originally Posted by riffle

I don't know about that... Wind is too variable of a resource to be depended on much for peak capacity. Wind was less than 10% of the capacity ERCOT assumed would be available in this season's assessment, and they had a scenario where it was less than 3%.

http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lis...2020-2021.xlsx

Wind power being off is not the culprit in this as much as some GOP anti-green might try to spin it

This is the TX PUC order to raise rates in shortage
Texas PUC Issues Emergency Order On Electricity Pricing -- EnergyChoiceMatters.com

[loves2read]

Originally Posted by EDS_

1. The deal about not firing up more power from older underused capacity without paying insane prices is a federal mandate. The DMN ran a long piece covering all this.......ERCOT had to beg the secretary of energy to allow some of this type of generation.

2. Facing our current shortfall some bulk buyers were paying freakishly high sport prices.

3. Some customers buy through services that charge a fee + whatever the wholesale rate is...........that's great until said customers realize they are more or less playing the futures market with their power bill. One service advised its customers to find new providers before the current bills becomes due.

4. And yes no matter how hard some deflect significant West Texas wind power being off line is a big part of the problem.

These are separate but related bits.

Texas PUC Issues Emergency Order On Electricity Pricing -- EnergyChoiceMatters.com
PUC order 2/21/21

[loves2read]

Originally Posted by k374

my sis, my co-workers (all around Dallas area) did not have outages, I have had 20 hour outage and on for 3 hours now the power is out again. This is a bunch of BS, they are repeatedly turning the same areas off and other areas are running fine.. I doubt all of them are near essential businesses.. baloney!

Because they underestimated the ability to get equipment on line

[loves2read]

Cities should start requiring developers to mandate heat pumps vs conventional HVAC
Heat pumps might be more $ but need less energy for heating and cooling

[loves2read]

Originally Posted by Veritas Vincit

I think it's interesting that people in authority say they had no way of anticipating this. Wasn't the last cold snap of this magnitude in 1989? It seems to me like you should at least plan and prepare to have safeguards in place for a 100 year event. But that does require the willingness to pay a little extra all those other years when nothing unusual occurs.

Actually ERCOT finally admitted they knew wk before the cold front hit they would need rolling blackouts to provide power to all users most of the time.
The fact is that they totally misunderstood their systems capabilities and what the weakness in their equipment t really was...

Most people would have done some things differently if they had known rolling blackouts would be part of a week long deep freeze effect

[EDS_]

Originally Posted by loves2read

Cities should start requiring developers to mandate heat pumps vs conventional HVAC
Heat pumps might be more $ but need less energy for heating and cooling

That's just not correct in this context. Heat pumps work less and less well as temperatures decrease. In the manual for every unit I've read about there will something of an efficiency per temperature graph. Most units below about 25F become quite inefficient and much below that they more or less don't work.


https://www.researchgate.net/figure/...fig2_261259472





_____________



Right now heat pumps are a big part of the problem.

[pbjyum]

Originally Posted by loves2read

Cities should start requiring developers to mandate heat pumps vs conventional HVAC
Heat pumps might be more $ but need less energy for heating and cooling

When it was 10 degrees down to -2, your "heat pump" most likely wasn't working...the electric furnace in the air handler was running which cancels out the efficiency of the heat pump versus a gas furnace in this situation. Sure in normal Texas winters, a heat pump more likely than not will be more efficient but using this extremely rare winter storm is a bad example for why cities should be mandating heat pumps only...specifically for efficiency reasons.