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Comment by geoduck14 | Hacker News Reader

Texan here!

This weather is CRAZY, I've NEVER seen something quite like this. I've seen it dip down to the teens, before, but I haven't seen: sub 20, with snow, for more than 2 days... across the entire state.

I'm not entirely certain why we are sucking hard at making electricity, but here is what I've heard: Nat Gas pipelines "close to the well" are "freezing" because they have a lot of impurities (like water) that are literally freezing amd clogging the pipes. I'm not sure why wind is down (maybe bad lubricant???). I'm also not sure why the power plants designed to run on oil (or Nuclear!!!) aren't sufficient.

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This is how I put it 2 days ago, right before the failure here:

>Crude natural gas is usually saturated with water downhole at warm temperatures and high pressures, some of which condenses as it is produced at the surface.

>At many points in a pipeline further water removal can be essential too.

>Even when not liquefied like LPG, when passing through a restriction valve or orifice, there is still additional cooling due to the product acting a bit like a refigerant.

>The water content may be small but the quantity of cold gas passing through a narrow point which is well below 0C eventually can build up kilos of ice and block the flow until the ambient temperature rises enough to open it back up.

Wind turbines that are not built for cold weather operations will have problems with lubricants for joints and bearings and icing on the blades. The icing does the same thing to turbine blades as it does to plane wings (i.e. makes them suck in terms of aerodynamics and kills lift) and as the blades slow the friction and load from the lubricant failure means that eventually the turbine will stop spinning and then just freeze up.

Thanks for this insight.

I would suspect that Coal and Natural Gas generation plants use a lot of water for cooling. When the plant is designed to dump as much extra heat as possible, as cheaply as possible (for 100-degree days and ~200-degree hot water), things start to fall over when the cooling water freezes in the uninsulated cooling lines.

Or, it's pretty much lack of winterization and lack of a plan for this kind of cold.

Just speculating.

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