Meanwhile, in Greece....



https://apnews.com/article/sno...79cc4d105d025d0fb2b6

It rained here last night.

Kluurs is probably still digging. His town got almost 19 inches of snow; he was in the band of heavy lake snow. My town only got 3 or 4...

Downtown Houston all lit up.

https://twitter.com/kimisnotam.../1361541386059862017

Unfortunately, I don't think the issue is as simple as turning off the lights downtown and somehow "moving" that power to residential. The issue is that the grid to the residential areas is down--can be as simple as downed power lines, transformers out, etc.

But Texas is looking sad right now, for sure. There's a lot of schadenfreude happening, but plenty of time to deal with that after people's power is back on. Right now it's literally a life or death situation.

quote:

Originally posted by Nina:
Unfortunately, I don't think the issue is as simple as turning off the lights downtown and somehow "moving" that power to residential. The issue is that the grid to the residential areas is down--can be as simple as downed power lines, transformers out, etc.

From what I have read, the power issues in Texas are more complicated than the same power issues if they happened on the east coast or in the midwest. Yes there are lines down and such, but they have bigger problems than that.

Texas produces more natural gas than any other state but most of their power comes from wind. (See "Pickens, T. Boone" for history). It's green and it's very cheap (cheapest in the country), but their wind turbines are not equipped with the de-icing setups used in colder climates. When the temp dropped, they stopped working They do have natural gas "peaking" plants, but those are in trouble too. No one ever expected it to be this cold and a lot of them won't run because the cold weather has interrupted natural gas service.

The result is that generation capacity has been cut way down just as people are demanding more power. In other states you could pull in some of that power from other parts of the country but not so Texas. Because they generate power so cheaply they never really wanted to tie in with the rest of the country. The result is, that with the exception of a small-ish tie in around El Paso (which still has power), they are not able to bring in power from elsewhere.

I'm not slamming Texas here. The same thing would happen (minus the inability to tap the national grid) if a freak storm like this hit California. Indeed, when a freak cold snap hit Tucson a few years back they had to discontinue gas service for about a week - with temps in the single digits in some areas. The Tucson area uses mostly nuclear, and is tied in to the national grid, so the power mostly stayed on, but a lot of people got mighty cold with no gas to run their furnaces.

To make it worse, a lot of AZ towns (like Mesa) don't have natural gas in the street and rely on heat pumps for heat. When the temp drops below about 35F those heat pumps stop working and backup electric heat kicks in. This increases the draw on the system and makes things worse yet.

The thing to watch for is how they handle the "spot market" price for power. The utilities have had to pay as much as $900/KWH for power they normally sell for about 10 cents. Electricity is a competitive market in Texas and people can choose who they want to provide it. At least one local provider has warned that their next bill may show charges as high as $90 per KWH, rather than the the 10 cents they usually charge, and are recommending that their customers find another company.

Is this the new normal? No one knows, but if it is they are going to have to beef up their systems to handle it, much as Huston is going to have to do deal with record rainstorms that produce 100 year floods every few years.

quote:

Originally posted by Nina:
Unfortunately, I don't think the issue is as simple as turning off the lights downtown and somehow "moving" that power to residential. The issue is that the grid to the residential areas is down--can be as simple as downed power lines, transformers out, etc.

But Texas is looking sad right now, for sure. There's a lot of schadenfreude happening, but plenty of time to deal with that after people's power is back on. Right now it's literally a life or death situation.

I thought the biggest problem is that they can’t generate enough power to meet the increased demand. And Their grid is isolated so they can’t buy more power.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16...nightmare/index.html

Here’s an article that talks about the challenges Texas utilities are facing:

Best you take your business elsewhere.

Explanation of what’s going on as far as the rolling blackouts and bringing people back online.

https://www.click2houston.com/...-and-others-are-not/

quote:

Originally posted by wtg:
Explanation of what’s going on as far as the rolling blackouts and bringing people back online.

https://www.click2houston.com/...-and-others-are-not/

I wouldn’t want to have that guy’s job right now.

quote:

Texas produces more natural gas than any other state but most of their power comes from wind.

From what I have read, that's not accurate, at least in terms of the current shortage. What I have seen suggests that there is 5x the power loss in Texas from oil and natural gas plants as there is from wind, because their power plants were not built to operate in weather this cold. They simply decided that weatherproofing wasn't worth the cost, because it never really gets that cold.

Until it does.

You reap what you sow.

Here you go, Steve.

quote:

wind accounts for just 10 percent of the power in Texas generated during the winter. And the loss of power to the grid caused by shutdowns of thermal power plants, primarily those relying on natural gas, dwarfed the dent caused by frozen wind turbines, by a factor of five or six.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...ectric-grid-failure/

Viola is heading towards Virginia. Could be up to half an inch of ice.

I’ll take my three feet of snow doled out over three weeks thankyouverymuch.

Texas mayor tells residents to fend for themselves during power outage: ‘Only the strong will survive’

Wow.

[Edit] Look for this guy to run for senate at some point.

Aw hell. First the snow and now this.