Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

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Texas grid still isn’t reliable.

https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/fed-report-says-texas-grid-...

Remember when they had the power outage and people died? Wind turbines in Texas aren’t winterized so usage drops to around 10% in the winter. The natural gas also stopped working because it wasn’t winterized either.

Remember when the governor of Texas blamed frozen wind turbines for the disaster?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/02/17/texas-abbot...

Remember 45 years ago we were warned not to burn all that coal or we would cause climate change?

We’re still at 40% coal for electricity globally and it’s now too late to prevent a significant amount of warming.

But hey, the batteries are almost ready? We can’t be more than 10-20 years from widespread adoption?

While winterization did effect the generation of renewables during the outage, a larger issue was just.. a lack of wind.

Thermal generation was and is the leading cause of the outage - namely a lack of gas supply which offlined much of the states thermal generation.

And during that big winter storm outage, the sudden loss of a nuclear power plant's output.

I wasn't aware the nuke plant went down, why did that happen?

My understanding wasn't that our gas supply wasn't winterized, but that with residential heating usage, the pressure in the lines was too low to safely turn on the auxiliary powerplants. Apparently it is bad if instead of leaking tiny bits of gas out of the pipes, you start leaking tiny bits of air in...

https://atomicinsights.com/south-texas-project-unit-1-trippe...

Failure of feedwater supply attributed to cold-related failure of sensors.

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1004840920/the-disconnect-power... - the episode "The Fixes" about 24:00 in gets into the specifics of the natural gas issues.

Once the rolling blackouts started, the rolling blackouts shut off the gas wells as the wells weren't on critical circuits... and even if they were winterized with heaters, they wouldn't be able to heat as there was no power.

I agree, the savings from not maintaining the system could also add up to real $.

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