Texas Power Companies Remotely Raise Temps Amid Energy Shortage | Hacker News Reader

Texas Power Companies Remotely Raise Temps Amid Energy Shortage

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36 pointsJerry226 comments

Not to berate the family, but I live in the deeper, hotter, more humid south than Houston. We keep the thermostat on 80 all day, and lower it to 78 at night, as our house is old and not well insulated and it costs a fortune to cool.

This makes me wonder, more specifically, my parents had no AC until later in life. My gradparents had none until much later in their life. They lived in the same town as I do. People seem to really get upset about it being relatively mild in their house, and I note this with many of my colleagues (I went to a torture high school with no AC, and my folks did not turn it on much at home as we did not really have the money for it)...

Not trying to be an old grumpy person, but we seem to lack a little "eh, Ill be uncomfortable for a short while to help out a straining system that, oh, I don't know, needs to stay on to power hospitals and nursing homes and such".

OTOH, I would never consent to having someone else remotely control my IoT device. Sheesh, can you imagine a ransomware attack on that system?

The house I grew up in had central A/C once, but I think it broke before I was born, and my parents who grew up in the 1930s/40s without such things never bothered to fix it.

They never told me it was bad or selfish to have/use A/C though.

What I don't like about relying on fans is the bugs that find their way through the window screens.

Can I ask why you don't/haven't insulated your house?

I'm not asking to pick on you, I was wondering if it's just impossible given the construction of the homes, or what. During the power failure, I saw it mentioned that homes were poorly insulated. What gives?

Our homes are usually very well insulated to keep our cool air in, we also don't usually have multi-stories, just a long ranch home that's easier to cool.

What you saw mentioned during the freeze was the conflating of pipe insulation with wall insulation.

We usually don't insulate our pipes because we don't have freezes, this led to bursting of pipes, that was the main damage during the freeze.

There's flex piping that doesn't need insulation, but squirrels and such can chew through them and it's just expensive to re-pipe your home.

I'm sure everyone that had their pipes freeze most likely has flex piping now, at least partially.

There is no freeze proof piping, sadly. Up here in the northern states all the piping has to be protected and the stuff that's outside the walls needs heat tape.

Copper usually bursts if the water in it freezes. But PEX can freeze without bursting. It has just enough flex to handle the expansion of water into ice. It still might burst, but it’s much less likely than copper. At least that’s my understanding of it. It’s not freeze proof. But it is less prone to freeze damage.

People are paying for the resource, they should be able to use the resource. If there's not enough resource then the supplier should not sell the resource. No need to shame people for having a preference and using something they paid for.

The hospital and nursing home bit is nice fear mongering but unless you have an instance where that has happened it's not relevant. If we neared too close to capacity due to over demand the electric companies would due controlled brown outs for residential areas. There's also backup generators at hospitals for natural disasters incase a brown out is not possible, and those would not have been prevented by rationing.

I might agree with you generally, but the more I learn about power generation the harder the problem looks. A power grid requires balancing load with a higher degree of precision than you might think, and not just total sums, but also in different areas of the grid.

‘Ideally’ people would be paying spot pricing, so they’d be incentivized to ration properly. But we saw how well that worked out for the people doing that during Texas’ winter storm.

Now if everyone paid spot pricing eventually we’d have lots of smart outlets shutting off all but the most important power consumers in a house, and it wouldn’t be as big an issue to pay spot pricing, you could be asleep and know that only the refridgerator and thermostat are going to blow up your bill.

I don’t see a system like remote thermostat adjustment being an absolutely horrible solution to the general problem, when used sparingly and treated as the failure that it us, so it’s not relied on. Particularly when the alternative might be a total blackout. I’m not sure, but I suspect this might also be preferrable to rolling brownouts.

People are digging on power companies, but this is likely the future of America- and Texas will be on the leading edge.

For power generation, infrastructure is the BIGGEST cost. All of the power lines and generators are sized for the single hottest day of the year. So companies pay big bucks for big power lines and generators that are under used 95% of the time. And "peak heat" only lasts for a couple of hours.

There are 2 solutions to mitigate this:

1) Solar. Local solar panels can take the edge off of "your house needing power from the grid" - and this helps everyone

2) PRE COOLING houses. Our houses can act as storage. At 3:00 pm, 50% of the houses cool down 3 degrees. At 6:00 pm their AC turns off, and the other houses turn their AC on. Thus distributing the load over time.

texas is behind in realy future tech if you consider theres _no such thing as external costs_.

they are ahead if you think maximizing the value of the social construct

3) Open a window

Americans can survive a few hours without AC during peak hours.

Electrical users typically agree to this demand shedding/response [1] in return for electrical bill credits, and it requires opt in. I expect Texas will see a pretty rapid uptake in rooftop solar and distributed storage after these events. For homeowner's, you can capture a 26% federal tax credit for both solar and storage, and finance the entire system (if you don't want to or have the cash) to get a monthly payment that replaces your utility bill (mostly) with the benefit that you're self sufficient when the grid fails (if you purchase storage).

Until the Texas grid operator and the Texas legislator are comfortable enacting and charging for a capacity market [2] to ensure adequete electrical supply during periods of high demand, you should be prepared to go it on your own [3] [4], which is a very Texan sort of attitude I would think.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_response

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-weather-power-prices-... (control-f "What makes the state’s grid different from other grids?")

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27551254

[4] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/06/14/texas-power-grid-con...

I am getting pretty tired of the Texas energy market. I've got a contractor working up a quote for a generator install right now. WFH with the concern of constantly losing power (especially like in Feb where people actually died) is too stressful for me to deal with anymore.

How do we feel about every Texas homeowner installing a very inefficient ICE from a car next to their house and relying on it as a means to power their homes for days on end? What would the emissions from 500k+ of these units look like over the course of days or weeks (assuming natural gas supply holds)? Perhaps these questions should be considered when decisions are made that could potentially compromise the stability of the power grid, presumably in favor of certain environmental factors. A combined cycle power plant, even burning some shitty thing like coal, is probably better for the environment than 500k cars driving around at 50% load.

Pretty overblown, been WFH in Texas for 8 years now, the big freeze was the only time we had a power outage, and the only time in my life in Texas we had ice for more than 3 days for that matter.

Is it much better WFH in California during fire season? Seems worse with controlled shutdowns vs friendly letters to conserve energy.

edit: actually a squirrel blew itself and a transformer up on our street one time, that took down power for an hour or so.

edit2: to the poster below, it's possible Oncor in that area is mismanaged like most of ATX, but your experience does not align with my experience.

Overblown? I disagree. The situation has degraded substantially since I have lived here (going on 4 decades now).

From 2011-2014, the ATX power grid was so stable, that I was able to run a TS3 server out of my apartment with 100% uptime. It was plugged directly into the wall with no hope of survival if any power disruption occurred. 3 years. Probably didn't even miss a single 60hz cycle.

Fast forward to 2021, I can expect to reset the clocks in my house about once every other week.

I’m a native Texan and have had several power outages this year including one last week outside of San Antonio. Also pretty sure I had at least one in 2019. I remember frequent blackouts during the hurricane season in the TX city I grew up in ~20 years ago.

There have been a lot of (I'll charitably say) misleading stories about how bad the power system in Texas is lately, and this is one of them: these folks opted into this program, most people foresaw this exact sort of thing happening and did not. Just like the meme about multi-thousand-dollar power bills: they opted into paying whatever the spot price was, and then expected a bailout when the bet didn't go their way.

The City of Austin actually sent me a check (~$100 I think?) YEARS ago for opting into this when I first installed my Nest thermostat. It’s very transparent/obvious and easy to override when a rush hour activates (usually between 4 and 6 p.m.). It cranks your A/C for a bit before turning the temp up to 78° or so during the “rush hour” as it better distributes the load on the grid. If I was home working I would often turn it down some. I did like knowing when it was more expensive to run A/C, and it’s a no-brainer to let them adjust when you’re away. This article is very disingenuous, at least for how my utility implemented this capability.

> these folks opted into this program

I like "personal responsibility" as much as the next person, but we both know that companies love to bury things like this deep into contracts in the smallest font sizes know to man.

So while I do agree that "they signed up for the program" I doubt the fully read the TOS and other jargon associated with this part of the plan.

When compared to losing power in a rolling brown out, it seems a reasonable option. I only set the AC to 78 anyways. I guess humidity may require lower norms?

Without a dedicated dehumidifier attached to your HVAC, and those aren't very common from what I've seen, you need to run the AC side to remove humidity.

Reliant/NRG offered me a one-time $25 bill credit for joining the program, as a Nest thermostat user. Not worth it.

https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9244031

We typically keep the thermostat at 78 or even higher. If I wear shorts and a tank top around the house, without shoes and socks, that's not at all uncomfortable. And a simple electric fan makes it even more comfortable. Either Texans are wusses or this article is clickbait.

For me it wouldn't even be about the temp. Our HVAC is essential for controlling humidity in the South. Ceding control over that ability is bonkers.

It's amazing how bearable 80-85F is when you have a small fan pointed at you. We started setting the thermostat to 82 and using fans. Very comfortable and the A/C barely runs now.

Cool. I think those folks could simply use a fan and sleep fine during the energy rush hour.

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