Possible rolling blackouts

Traxion

Founding Member
Founding Member
Joined
May 29, 2015
Posts
1,634
Likes
243
Points
253
Location
Western Sodak
It is surely a bad sign for renewables.....no matter how poorly they are prepared for cold weather in Texas. I'd argue a bigger issue is our piss poor electrical grid. We don't have the capability to get power where we need it, when we need it, in cases when SHTF. Instead of the New Green Deal, we need to be putting money into our utility and other public infrastructure. Until then, get a generator and more importantly for the lineman out there, a transfer switch to keep them safe when you're running it!

But I still say renewables keep gaining ground. We'll be running our country on renewables and gas powerplants, with "peaker" plants ready to take on addtional load. If our power grid can get it where it needs to be!
 
Last edited:


raider

Founding Member
Founding Member
Joined
Apr 22, 2015
Posts
3,397
Likes
45
Points
256
Location
williston
you smell that??? it's my impeachment candle...



HOW!!! could our current president ignore the science and forecasts of the past few days and leave americans (legal and illegal) vulnerable to the biggest winter storm event in our history???

THIS needs endless investigation and 24, maybe 36 hour per day news coverage!!!

OBVIOUSLY his naps are too long and need to be shortened up to prevent the next crisis like this...

WHERE is air force 1???

WHERE is geraldo???

WHERE is chris quomo???

WHERE is his boss kamala???
 

tikkalover

Founding Member
Founding Member
Joined
May 10, 2015
Posts
7,941
Likes
902
Points
473
Location
Minot
Google this dumb ass.

[h=1]Rep. Joaquin Castro blames Texas Electric grid failure on ‘people who are married to fossil fuels’[/h]
 

7mmMag

Founding Member
Founding Member
Joined
Jun 25, 2015
Posts
951
Likes
129
Points
228
Location
SE ND
This whole situation might be a blessing in disguise. I think its going to open peoples eyes and they will realize that we aren't anywhere close to being able to rely on renewable resources and that fossil fuels saved the day again.
 


JMF

Founding Member
Founding Member
Joined
May 19, 2015
Posts
1,700
Likes
69
Points
248
Location
Mandan
For those of you with facebook, check out the faces of coal page.
 

Skeeter

Founding Member
Founding Member
Joined
May 16, 2015
Posts
3,696
Likes
866
Points
403
Location
Beulah nd
For those of you with facebook, check out the faces of coal page.
Mark does an excellent job of running that page and puts out the real information that you will never see in the liberal trash printed Bismarck tribune or on any of our local news networks.
He has been saying for months now that our power grid is in serious trouble due to renewables but nobody cares or would listen. Now maybe they will realize that renewables can be a supplement but never a base load.
 
Last edited:

Fritz the Cat

Founding Member
Founding Member
Joined
May 11, 2015
Posts
5,009
Likes
552
Points
413
Instead of the New Green Deal, we need to be putting money into our utility and other public infrastructure.



ecmweb_10787_crazy_wiring_india_2.png
 

Twitch

Founding Member
Founding Member
Joined
May 14, 2015
Posts
2,456
Likes
493
Points
318
Location
Mandan
This whole situation might be a blessing in disguise. I think its going to open peoples eyes and they will realize that we aren't anywhere close to being able to rely on renewable resources and that fossil fuels saved the day again.


Go on literally any liberal site right now from local kfyr/tribune all the way up to npr/cnn and look at the comments and tell me how much hope you have for this being a blessing in disguise. The comments range from it being Trump’s fault to you can’t blame the weather on biden, to if we’d have more invested in renewables and less in fossil fuels this never would happen. I’m convinced we are doomed.
 


ORCUS DEMENS

Founding Member
Founding Member
Joined
Oct 17, 2015
Posts
824
Likes
157
Points
208
Location
Minot
When you have only localized energy and have a region wide event, regardless of cause, you will have serious issues. Oklahoma is on the grid that stretches to ND. Hence they have power. Most of Texas relies on one supplier not tied to grid, hence the power failures. natural gas power generation is down at five to six times the rate of wind turbines. Texas has dealt with this before and did not invest in protecting their power generation from issues like this. Not surprising. Thought and prayers to the people of Texas...
 

Twitch

Founding Member
Founding Member
Joined
May 14, 2015
Posts
2,456
Likes
493
Points
318
Location
Mandan
I read a similar article with all the info provided in that one but it also included the failing numbers provided by renewables. It stated there definitely were problems with oil and gas but they got almost 0 of what they expected from renewables. It also stated that this crisis showed how nuclear can be safe because those automatically shutdown when they see a potential problem. Now that didn’t provide extra power needed now but probably saved bigger problems from happening. Basically what I gathered from it is all the different power producing sources were not prepared for such an event in Texas but what little base energy they did have came from fossil fuels for the most part. Hopefully Texas can prepare more in the future.
 

eyexer

Founding Member
Founding Member
Joined
Apr 20, 2015
Posts
13,730
Likes
708
Points
428
Location
williston
Here’s how much people trust the power grid now. One of our well sites has a large generator running off wellhead gas. It provides power to a small building sitting next to the generator. Guess what’s in that building? Servers for Bitcoin. They can’t afford to have those servers go offline.
 

wjschmaltz

★★★★★ Legendary Member
Joined
Jun 26, 2018
Posts
989
Likes
376
Points
218
Location
Southcentral ND - Southcentral AK
This whole situation might be a blessing in disguise. I think its going to open peoples eyes

Nope. It’s causing a hard double down. One of the lead headlines on Bloomberg this morning was “Texas Shows What Happens When you Ignore Climate Change.” AOC is going off on how this is what happens when you don’t support a green new deal. I don’t trust the party that saw Hillary as a pillar of integrity to have any self reflection on what is happening. It will be seen as an opportunity to incentivize more renewable infrastructure. Renewable energy is feasible with enough infrastructure once they resolve the main weak spot - energy storage. It’s a legit and very feasible 50-year plan as we advance technology, the problem is that politics has convinced people the time is now.

Joe Rogan released a really good podcast last week with Elon Musk. I actually find Elon to be very level headed and he’s someone that seems actually increasingly conservative in his views (he tweeted “take the red pill” earlier this summer after moving Tesla because of California’s covid and tax BS). He stresses the importance of keeping fossil fuels around and that people have to realize it’s a 30-50 year transition to renewable energy. It’s part of why he put up a personal reward to whoever can create the best carbon capture/recycling system. He also goes into energy storage and how feasible it will be for us to access the necessary amount of materials. I don’t agree with everything he has to say, but he seems to be one of the most objective thinkers in the renewable space - mainly because he legit wants what is best for the environment and mankind. His talk about the semis they’re creating at Tesla and how the drive systems will eliminate jack-knifing was pretty cool too.
 


JMF

Founding Member
Founding Member
Joined
May 19, 2015
Posts
1,700
Likes
69
Points
248
Location
Mandan
The story of how Texas was brought to its knees by crippling cold weather leaving millions without power is a complex one, yet entirely predictable and avoidable.

The details matter, so it is important to know the long story, but let’s start with the short version: For years, Texas’ grid operator (ERCOT) has overestimated the ability to maintain a reliable grid without a sufficient supply buffer, known as a “reserve margin.” That margin is the difference between demand for electricity and what the grid can produce. When demand exceeds production, you get blackouts. That buffer has been shrinking because reliable sources of energy have been retired, few reliable plants have been constructed, and the grid is depending more and more on weather-dependent renewable energy that repeatedly fails to perform when we need it most.

When wind and solar production predictably dropped as the winter storm hit, the buffer collapsed. ERCOT needed to execute a series of balancing measures that would have protected the grid. But it did not act soon enough, which caused many more gas and some coal power plants in the system to “trip.” (Think of it as a circuit breaker that triggers to prevent a fire or other emergency at your house when there is a system imbalance.) Other weather-related issues caused problems too but ERCOT’s failure to act sooner was a major factor.

Usually, a system trip wouldn’t last long and we’d have power back in a few hours. But this time, many of the units that were tripped off the system had difficulty coming back online for a variety of reasons, including the fact that some were not designed to be taken off and put back on the system quickly, as well as other cold weather issues that exacerbated the problem.

So when people blame ERCOT for not acting quickly, they’re right. And so are the people who say that both renewable energy and fossil energy plants are not generating what they should. But it doesn’t begin there. Our overdependence on unreliable energy that caused the razor thin reserve margins started the ball rolling years ago.

Here’s the long story.

Keeping the power on is a bit of a guessing game played out every day by the grid operator to make sure we have the right mix of energy getting on to the grid. There’s that buffer, the reserve margin, which ERCOT uses to give it some leeway in making moves. As with anything, the more reliable and predictable the source of energy, the better moves ERCOT can make.

However, the race to add in renewables pushed out more reliable forms of energy and kept new reliable energy from being built. That resulted in the buffer in our electric grid being stripped out—going from more than a 20% surplus years ago to single digits in the last couple of years.

Without that buffer, our system has become much more vulnerable to outages when we see extreme heat or extreme cold. The problem is made worse by the fact that renewables have grown to become a significant percentage of our fleet, making our power grid much more susceptible to weather-related shortages. That is because renewables do not show up when we need power the most (high heat, freezing cold, big storms, etc.)

For example, starting on Sunday night through Wednesday, our nearly 32,000 MWs of installed wind capacity was delivering less than 10% of that capacity and, for several key hours of this event, less than 3% of that capacity. Since the blackouts started at night, solar energy wasn't going to be any help. Still, by mid-day Monday it was only producing about half of its 5,700 MW of installed solar capacity.

On Valentine’s Day, the lack of buffer and predictable failure of wind and solar had ERCOT on alert to do what all system operators do when they anticipate razor-thin reserve margins—they start to implement rolling, temporary outages across the system to keep the level of demand in balance with the level of supply.

This practice of bringing parts of the grid down and back up again in series has been done before, often, and across the country, with success. When done properly, brief power outages are little more than an inconvenience and normalcy is quickly restored. What happened late Sunday night and early Monday morning was that ERCOT waited too long to commence this balancing activity. Add to that some other, not-yet-fully-understood interruptions, the result was an imbalance in the grid that “tripped” large numbers of previously operating gas and coal plants off the system. While technically complex, this “tripping” phenomenon occurs when the system operator allows voltage and frequency in the transmission system to drop too dramatically, thereby triggering safety equipment at the power plants to “trip” off to avoid destroying equipment with an overload.

Because of ERCOT’s errors, among those losing power were many of Texas’ natural gas producers in the Permian Basin, which were then unable to continue providing fuel for the grid, potentially exacerbating the problem.

To be clear, if the Texas grid had more reliable energy available, ERCOT would never have had to start implementing rolling outages. The mistakes they made in not starting soon enough and then subsequently making poor judgments about how to fix the problems they caused would never have happened had we not allowed our system to grow too unreliable to begin with.

Because of the severe cold, when a large number of gas and coal plans were tripped off the system, many had difficulty coming back online. This is a common problem with all power plants—other than a subset of smaller “quick-start plants,” most plants are designed to be running and online all the time. So restarting them takes time, even when the weather is good. On Monday morning, when we had single-digit temperatures and below-zero wind chills (which have persisted to keep things frozen throughout the week), a long list of complications hit the power plants—ranging from frozen gas lines to interrupted gas service to frozen pipes and other equipment. We may find that some of those failures occurred before the “trips,” but the majority of the problems experienced occurred afterward, once the plants went cold because of ERCOT’s mistakes.

Renewables were the dominant factor in why Texas got into this situation to begin with, which led to the need for action by ERCOT, their resulting mistakes, and the problems with getting coal and gas back online. Just pointing the finger at downed gas plants is a bit like steadily replacing the bricks holding your house up with straw and masking tape, and then blaming the chimney when the whole thing collapses.

A final thought: Power plants that use gas, coal and nuclear energy have proven to have extremely high reliability and availability factors (over 99%) over peak conditions in Texas for the past several years. Although extreme cold is more of a challenge for these units than our normal peak—extreme heat—they are still a proven reliable source of energy across the northern parts of our country and across the globe that experience much colder temperatures than we did this week.

Many weatherization improvements were made to the Texas fleet after a 2011 winter peak, and it may be that additional weatherization is called for based on the experiences of this week.

But it is critically important to understand that never before have so many of the Texas units been subjected to the mistakes ERCOT made on February 14-15, which undermined their ability to stay online and to maintain reliable energy’s stellar performance record during peak conditions.

The lessons learned from this utterly predictable episode may lead to more winterization efforts. But we can’t forget that we got here through years of adding unreliable power to the grid, reducing the margin of error for mistakes, and undercutting access to reliable energy

- - - Updated - - -

https://lifepowered.org/heres-what-happened-seeking-answers-for-the-winter-2021-texas-blackouts/
 

701FishSlayer

Founding Member
Founding Member
Joined
Apr 12, 2015
Posts
2,247
Likes
342
Points
308
Location
701
If Trump was president right now the media along with the libtards would be all over his ass about this. Notice how there's not a peep about Biden. Somehow it's still Trumps fault I'm sure.
 

lunkerslayer

Founding Member
Founding Member
Joined
Apr 12, 2015
Posts
18,957
Likes
2,966
Points
748
Location
Cavalier, ND
If president trump was in office he wouldn't have given China access to our American power grid like slippery Joe Biden oh did also you know that black and Latinos don't know how to use the internet well atleast that is what your fake president said.
 

tikkalover

Founding Member
Founding Member
Joined
May 10, 2015
Posts
7,941
Likes
902
Points
473
Location
Minot
I have a couple questions.

When they build things (homes, apartments, buildings, ect.)in Texas, do they not install a valve in the main waterline to shut off the water in a situation like freezing temps? SHUT THE VALES OFF YOU DOLTS!

Why rag on Ted Cruz for going to Cancun? What was he going to do to keep the power on and things from freezing up? Hold the torch?

Have a friend in Washburn who's husband works at the coal mine. He has to work tomorrow and Sunday loading a unit train with coal to send to a power plant somewhere in the southern U.S. that was switched over to natural gas because they can't get enough gas thru the pipeline to the power plant.
 

sl1000794

Founding Member
Founding Member
Joined
May 10, 2015
Posts
4,730
Likes
161
Points
298
My guess is that the underground city shut-off valve takes a special wrench that is not for sale to the general public to stop tampering from occurring.
 


Recent Posts

Friends of NDA

Top Posters of the Month

  • This month: 167
  • This month: 137
  • This month: 121
  • This month: 110
  • This month: 105
  • This month: 88
  • This month: 84
  • This month: 79
  • This month: 76
  • This month: 76
Top Bottom