Little Raven wrote: ↑Tue Jul 12, 2022 8:57 pm
ND beat me to the punch, but yeah, the "Texas Power Grid Collapse" isn't real. It's one of the long running jokes of the forum, like Smoove pouring whiskey on his Cheerios or Chris Hemsworth calling hepcat for hair tips. (Patrick Dempsey locked hepcap into an exclusive retainership almost a decade ago.)
It is absolutely real. There are several assessments that talk about the problems in ERCOT. It is no means the only system with risks -
NERC 2022 Summer Assessment but again it has unique risks. If you want to get nerdy, you can compare multiple years. I'll give you a hint which region have seen Elevated or High risk in similar reports for the last 10 years at least. Still it is absolutely true that several regions have problems. This year saw more western regions fall into Elevated or High risk vs. 2020/2021. They are generally totally different problems but don't let that impact any analysis.
Still only one has one that comes from a flawed decentralized market design that could totally be solved with some market restructuring. It is very different from the rest of the grids in the United States. There are different takes on solutions (
here is one) but the peel back is that there all sorts of problems with its incentives that impact its resilience in very real ways. For example, outages cause price spikes that act like a windfall profit lottery for operators that don't fail. If you don't run, it's shucks you didn't win the lottery but you also don't get fined for your failure like other grids do to drive maintenance investment. We now know enough that this lottery hasn't worked as an alternative mechanism that causes operators to focus on reliability.
That's a chief component why Texas has a history of a lot of forced outages. Which in layman's terms mean the plants went offline outside a planned maintenance window. In addition, power prices are only average there despite the heavy reliance on relatively cheap wind power. The price is only average if you aren't exposed to extreme prices (which happens without much backstop). Prices can spike to hundreds or thousands of dollars a day in extreme circumstances. Or it might be half the price of NY. The chief difference is in NY you'll never experience that financial risk at all.
In real life, Texas is
thoroughly average in the energy department - power is less reliable than it is in New York, but it is also much much cheaper.
FWIW this is not an authoritative source used by anyone who works in the power industry or wants to understand power grid reliability. The metric they use for power grid reliability doesn't make any sense. Averaging outages across a region or state don't tell anyone much. When I worked in the industry we tracked actual customers who had outages, forced outages, uptime for power plants (which included allowances for planned maintenance outages), revenue + lost revenue, etc. This isn't a useful way to compare reliability because too much detail is getting chopped out that tells the real story.
In any case, new capacity is almost always solar + wind energy because it requires low cash outlays. Hot days + low wind are going to be continuing risk for the foreseeable future because no one wants to invest in 'big boiling water' generation at the moment. They require large cash outlays, multi-year projects with high risk, fuel prices all over the place, etc. Investors hate any mention of them.
Another thing to consider is that the markets are not all structured the same. While NYISO is one of the highest priced market in the nation, this is a choice driven for reliability. They heavily leverage "must run" contracts to reserve capacity that make power much, much more reliable than the Texas market. The local Independent System Operators also have incentives/contract structures that drive regular maintenance. This applies to PJM (Penn/NJ/Maryland). They also have interconnect agreements between systems which brings more reliability. More they've raised rates to make upgrades in anticipation of climate change with proactive upgrades. On top, both regions also tap into Canadian hydro markets. Texas in comparison whispers thoughts and prayers to the market fairy and hopes it works out.
It is at highest risk but it isn't uniform. The outages in California tend to be concentrated in PGE territory (which isn't all of California). Outside of PGE reliability is much higher. Another factor in California is that outages are often related to fire activity (though sometimes PGE starts the fires themselves.
) This results in long-term outages that leave places sometimes off the grid for weeks/months. Another reason the average outage per customer metric isn't that useful.
Power grids are big, expensive, complicated things, and we're asking them to change very quickly on both the supply and demand fronts. There are going to be issues. But nobody is actually falling apart....at least, not yet. (Depending on how serious we are about achieving renewable energy goals, though....Hawaii may have some real problems.)
It isn't about 'falling apart'. It is about systemic risks and Texas has taken on excess risk. Where are the outages elsewhere due to poor maintenance elsewhere in the nation that led to hundreds of deaths? Where do we see multiple generation assets failing simulataneously at peak load periods? Where did these problems cause catastrophic failures twice in a decade? Texas.
In any case, I started this thread because I worked in the industry. I was in the industry when this happened a decade ago. I wasn't in when it happened recently but I did have a conversation with folks that cold week at my former employer. And all of this was predicted. It's been long discussed (I posted multiple deep dives earlier in this thread). They still haven't made changes that address the root causes of their problems. They are however very real and very likely to get worse with climate change impacts.
Alefroth wrote: ↑Tue Jul 12, 2022 10:52 pmI guess it just gets etched into our consciousness when hundreds of people die due to a failure. And it's not just the failure of the grid, it's things like surprise multi-thousand dollar electricity bills.
I'll repeat it but I think people don't really know they had a major grid failure twice in 10 years. Both were "hundred year" failures. Except for the fact that experts predicted extreme weather failures were a risk before it happened. Also one of the economists who designed the market design says it doesn't work. But fuck experts amirite?