Texans asked to turn up thermostats after heat knocks six power plants offline

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/14/us/texas-heat-wave-ercot-conserve/index.html

by lakis • 4 years ago

30 20 4 years ago

cyanydeez2• 4 years ago

Everything's bigger in Texas unless it's a privatized electric grid. Then it pretends it can be infinitely usable, just burn money and pray.

phendrenad2• 4 years ago

This article calls it "historic" but that's just because it's not peak heat season. This temperature isn't unusual for July or August. So yeah, there's a problem here, and it's not the heat.

downrightmike• 4 years ago

Decades of pocketing money that should have been used to modernize.

sonotathrowaway• 4 years ago

A small price to pay for the privilege of running an unregulated government sanctioned monopoly.

rasz• 4 years ago

Wonder if they asked bitcoin farms to turn off.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/26/fort-worth-tx-the-first-city...

https://fortune.com/2022/02/10/texas-world-capital-bitcoin-m...

cyanydeez2• 4 years ago

Since they're capitalists, they likely just assume energy is limitless as long as someone can pay for it

mrlonglong• 4 years ago

How well maintained are the roads in Texas?

notreallyserio• 4 years ago

Not well at all, in my experience. I didn't use the private toll roads though.

hedora2• 4 years ago

Great, unless you're in a city.

cjohnson318• 4 years ago

Can confirm: driving from Shreveport, you can tell when you cross the Texas line, and then you hit Dallas, and it's just like Shreveport again.

hedora2• 4 years ago

Did they ever get global PVC production back up to scale after the last Texas grid collapse? I wonder how the Texas grid screw up will impact the global economy this time.

Mid-90's aren't even hot for Texas, so this looks like a short term capacity planning issue. This was certainly avoidable.

However, Texas structured the energy market so that there aren't any strong incentives to keep the grid online. Instead, producers make a killing by price gouging during these events.

Cannabat• 4 years ago

Power supply issues like this are why I am very skeptical of our whole planet going electric (vehicles and everything else). Perhaps in places like Norway where power is plentiful due to hydroelectric plants [1], electric vehicles make sense.

[1] Even though Norway has plentiful power at the moment, this is a limited resource - melting glaciers provide the flow. Once the glaciers are gone, Norway will need another power production method to keep up. I think they have a while until the glaciers are gone, but we seem to be chronically underestimating the rate of the planet's ice melting.

admax88qqq2• 4 years ago

Electricity is a great basis for energy exchange and usage.

You can always generate electricity on site from other fuels in an emergency.

You can't generate gasoline on site.

GauntletWizard• 4 years ago

Electricity is far easier to move, but far harder to move in a crisis. Gasoline can be trucked in for weeks at a time. High voltage power lines take months of planning. Smaller capacity lines en masse are impossible to route.

sidewndr46• 4 years ago

You can create synthetic fuel from the air, not very effective but it works.

You can grow corn (or any high sugar crop) and convert it to ethanol using fermentation and distillation.

Making fuel isn't really that difficult. Making it cheaper than the oil industry can refine it from crude, that is nearly impossible.

tuatoru• 4 years ago

Why not "Texans asked to add insulation"?

yourapostasy• 4 years ago

Capital costs. People by and large are loathe to spend hugely upon invisible home improvements.

One way to address this is to exclude from Texas property taxes the entire square footage of the insulating envelope of any building with 4"+ insulated envelope thickness, and locally recycle polystyrene into Styrofoam insulating blocks sold back to the public at cost to keep them out of the landfills. My personal preference is foamed glass made with a blowing agent that is cradle-to-grave net neutral on CO2 release and acidification, but that hasn't been invented yet so I'm still researching a way to manufacture foamed glass that can capture and entrain 100% of the released CO2 in the production line.

Offer further property tax incentives for blower door-confirmed tests of airtightness, in a graduated scale for more property tax discount for more airtightness, calibrated against state-projected tax giveaways to energy companies so every X00,000 homes that get the discount is covered by avoided tax giveaways in the same amount as the discount gave away. The savings come from the property tax giveaway is one that returns dividends for ~30 years, whereas most corporate tax giveaways are ~10-15 years.

Passive house to Net Zero is possible with a 15-20% increase in cost (or equivalent reduction in scope), with a concomitant 70-95% reduction in energy costs. But there are no incentives to construct that way. If property taxes were structured so such houses get increasingly more tax discounts the more years they sit (back-loaded discount) and return energy dividends and keep passing efficiency tests every 3 years such that over a 30-year span the house reaches net 80% property tax savings, with a phase out and grandfathering as the number of Texas residential properties under the program reach 50%, it would drastically alter the demand for such houses.

freemint• 4 years ago

I wonder how many of these power plants are "green power plants". The article does not mention what kind of plants are hit.

yakak• 4 years ago

Being taken down by demand sounds like load following plants, are there any green load following plants in Texas? That sounds like a camel fitting through a needle to me.

Texans asked to turn up thermostats after heat knocks six power plants offline

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