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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

I seems to me that the owners of natural gas fired power plants in Texas are being incentivized to find a way to store a few days of natural gas on site, and winterizing that storage, so they can win the lottery the next time things freeze over.

[edit - back of the napkin math]

Extrapolating from https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=667&t=3 it looks to me like it takes about 8 ft^3 of natural gas for 1 kwh of electricity. So, to run a 1 GW plant for 24 hours would take 192,000,000 square feet... a cube about 575 feet on each side. That's a huge tank farm.

Coal is about 1 lbs/kwh, according to https://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/fuel.html#:~:text=Nat.... so the 24 Gwh pile would be 24,000,000 pounds, or 12,000 tons. (an 80 foot cube)

This matches up fairly well with https://www.brighthubengineering.com/power-plants/52544-basi...

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> So, to run a 1 GW plant for 24 hours would take 192,000,000 square feet... a cube about 575 feet on each side. That's a huge tank farm.

Isn't that why most gas is stored as LNG?

Reading about natural gas, it sounds like storage in underground natural geological pockets is common. And also in tanks, but liquified/LNG which is 600x more dense.

As for coal, it sounds like they already typically receive coal in 120 train car shipments daily which is close to your 12000 ton figure. I imagine keeping lots of spare train cars around isn't a big engineering task.

>I imagine keeping lots of spare train cars around isn't a big engineering task.

The solution I've seen in person is the "coal pile", with Caterpillar bulldozers on it, keeping the surface from combusting, and moving things around. They are proven simple technology, and work in winter.

Keeping the coal in the train invites disaster, as rail infrastructure has issues with icing conditions.

Point taken, though disaster might be a strong word. It sounds like the net result is up to 20% of the coal sticking to the sides of the car. And there are ways to reduce that.

You generally can’t offload a coal railcar from just any point in a yard, and switches can freeze over and lock in place.

This is why metra (Chicago commuter rail operator) literally lights switches on fire sometimes

That doesn't seem that unreasonable compared to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_holder - and those are somewhat above atmospheric pressure.

As someone who just went 6/7 days the past week without power, I'd love to incentivize them via rigorous government regulations requiring winterizing. Just to be sure they're properly incentivized.

At what pressure? Sounds like atmospheric.

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