I received an email from TXU- my electric provider.
It had a message from Ercot asking us to conserve energy-turn up thermostat, etc.
But one of their points included the following:

“Raise your thermostat a few degrees or more. Running your fans counter clockwise will also keep cool air from rising”

Cool air rises now?

Ercot needs to be done away with and something worthwhile put in place.

So is the list of people on the ERCOT board published?

I just want to make sure the right motherfuckers are sweating it out.

I spent 5 days freezing my ass off and catching 2 hours naps sleeping in a greenhouse with wet feet.

Do we really need to go back and regulate the power industry?

Cummins needs to hurry the fuck up and deliver my big generator.

Apparently some generating plants went down for maintenance unexpectedly.

Just need to add accountability to the board. Make shit criminal and start handing out jail terms for the next fuck up.

I wouldn't be surprised if ex Enron people work there. Enron 2.0

Quite few on the ERCOT board got fired, head of the PUC go fired. New guy comes in lasts 3 weeks and Abbott fired him.

The plants are required to schedule with ERCOT when plants are down for maintenance, but the plants shut down without contacting ERCOT.

Board members

ERCOT is merely the power distribution grid in Texas. They aren't involved with power generation...only it's distribution.

The power generating companies need to spend some of the exorbitant electric bills that we pay every month to better maintain their equipment/facilities.

The winter fiasco this year was due to natural gas well-heads freezing. Not anything ERCOT did.

Estimates I heard was that it would cost roughly $20k per wellhead to freezeproof them...and there are 10's of thousands of them that were affected.

Increases in demand for power is due to the thousands and thousands of people moving here and is the biggest factor in power shortages...and yet we readily brag about how 'Texas has its very own power grid'...until there is a shortage that can't readily be solved via connecting to other national grids. Then we throw ERCOT under the bus.

The well head freezing was only part of the problem. Most of the wind turbines froze up, many damaged by the long untimely cold weather. This little conserve energy out of ERCOT was not only caused by regular plants off line, but wind being very light at wind farms. I drove through 2 wind farms yesterday and next to none of the turbines were turning in the afternoon.

So what's my role in it as a consumer? The electric company sets the price and I pay it.

They don't seem to be listening to us when we bitch about the power being turned off.

And $20k per well head? Is that like $10k for him and $5k for us, and $5k for the sub-sontractor, and $500 for the guy who actually installs it?

Was the gas supply better protected before the power generators were forced to buy their fuel on the market?

Please stop with the "wind caused it" February bullshit.  That farce has been disproven so many times, it's unbelievable.  Go do a little research if you don't believe me.

The problem in February was that Texas has not had as cold or cold for that length of time in over a hundred years. Usually when it gets below freezing in Texas it is for 24-36 hours, not 8-10 days. Weather that does not cause problems in places like Minnesota, cause big problems here. Just getting stores restocked was brutal because most truck drivers here have no ice and snow experience and no chains on the trucks. Hell most people in Texas don’t have clothes to be outside in freezing weather all day.

I have lived here all my life-63 years.
I thought I remembered reading something about a problem caused from a requirement for generators to buy natural gas on the market.
I could be mixing things up.

Time and materials, bro, time and materials.

There are a bunch of different components that came together at the most inopportune time last Feb. Not the least of which is the decommissioning of a number of coal fired power generating facilities to replace them with cleaner natural gas fired facilities. Thank the EPA for that one.

Now add a freak freeze to all the unprotected wellheads - and the natural gas in quantities to operate all the NG generation stations just wasn't available.

Natural gas coming from the well usually has some amount of 'condensate' in it which ranges from salt water to oil or some combination of both (in liquid or vapor form).

All those wells are connected by 'gathering system pipelines' to 'drying plant/compressor stations'. The moisture is removed, odor is added, and it then goes through the pipeline system to the final user. In this case the power generation stations.

If the 'condensates' freezes between the wellhead and the 'drying/compressor station'....there's nothing to send to the power plants.

Again, it was pretty much a freak 'perfect storm'.

Here are the key issues:

1) Since 2011, we’ve had a 20% increase in population but only a 7% increase in electrical generation and a lot of that increase was in wind and solar, which are sources of power that can’t ramp up like nuclear, natural gas or coal.

2) Pretty much the entire ERCOT board circa February 2021 has resigned because they were professionals making money in a lot of places and didn’t need the stress of random yahoos threatening to kill their family (which was a threat made so often in February we’d have to build a new jail just to hold all those people).

3) ERCOT is primarily an industry organization and relies on the market.  More than one electrical provider who was unable to produce their promised electricity during the winter storms went bankrupt from the penalties imposed by ERCOT,

4) Because our electricity grid is market driven, electricity providers are encouraged to do the least possible to meet expected problems.  After 2011, we regeared to address failures in this model.  2021 was three 2011 storms in a one week period.  Nobody planned for that and there were failures across natural gas, nuclear, and wind.  Wind failed kind of dramatically compared to the others; but it certainly wan’t the only issue by a lot.

At the end of the day, new people are arriving faster than we planned infrastructure for - way faster - and that’s not just energy either.  Though God knows, if you’re with Austin Energy, you’d better buy a fucking generator because the insanely optimistic wind and solar performance predictions in their model are absolutely going to bite you on the ass hard and repeatedly.  And Dallas and San Antonio have adopted a lot of those dumb ideas secondhand.

A lot of Texas homes either out in rural areas or apartments have electric heat and electric heat is the most inefficient way to heat a home.

My house is all gas, only 220 is my A/C  and welders. We were lucky that we never lost electricity and I kept the entire house at 70 with only my downstairs heater, maybe running 15% of the time. But I had replaced my windows with a killer triple pane window and had the house rewrapped and all Hardy siding. My electric bill during the freeze compared to the same period the year before was not even $20 more. I also reduced my electric bill in the summer by over $100 a mouth.

We lost power for up to 12 or more hours at a time.
We has gas heat but couldn’t run it without power.
Still it never got below 50* in my house. That was mostly due to me going around to all of the doors beforehand and putting new weatherstripping. I could still feel cold air during the freeze so i used backer rod in the gaps. That sealed all drafts.

BTW this thread was created because the notice sent said to run your ceiling fans counter clockwise- to stop cold air from rising.
Unless I have misunderstood my whole life hot air rises-cold air sinks.

Well, ask me again in 60 days and I can give you a better answer because I’ll know what’s been released to the public then.  Short version is some plants went offline for maintenance to try and gear up for summer and then we got hit with weird June heat.

People are *intensely* angry about February right now.  Crews that were out trying to restore power then were physically attacked.  A fair portion of the ERCOT board was “Yeah, I don’t need that shit in my life” and quit.

The legislature is still in special session and this exact issue is up.  I guarantee you, if one of these electrical companies could get the plant online now by throwing the CEO’s daughter into a volcano, they’d do it.

I run my fans to keep the WARM air closer to the floor instead of rising. It still rises, since my upstairs stayed warm without turning the heater on.

The power generators are supposed to schedule plants down for maintenance with ERCOT, so a bunch of plants are not down at the same time. June is normally pretty warm, in fact this last week where everyone runs around with their hair on fire is pretty normal for June. It was just raining the last 2 weeks before.

ERCOT needs to make sure all the generators are scheduling their maintenance in the fall and spring.

We need more nuclear plants.

I don't think this will bode well for keeping Abbott in office.

Well, as we all know, there’s planned maintenance, and then actual maintenance.  Which, some of these guys are doing having worked 48 hours+ straight back in February while people were literally threatening to go to their homes and kill their families (some as specific as you live at X address and your children go to school here).  It’s hard to appreciate the level of disfunction out there until you start reading the complaints even a small city gets.

Not that I don’t think there shouldn’t be accountability for failure to plan; but Texas is a state of 27 million something people.  This is the kind of event where every mentally ill person in a 30 mile radius could conceivably show up on the doorstep of your home because of a weather event nobody foresaw.

And while I have great admiration for Gov. Abbott, I don’t think his bill to address this made any substantial changes to the problem.  It looked good for political purposes; but it just imposes extra fines on companies that were already going to be bankrupted by bad decisions.  We’re not building the electrical infrastructure to receive the people we’ve already got, let alone the people we might receive in the future.  And we can’t do that overnight in any case.

And the models of electrical service we are using, well, God save us there.  Your elected government doesn’t know anything more than you do about those things and so they defer to “consultants”, which is a nice way to say “paid Democrat law firms” who give them advice on what to do.  Austin Energy has this absurdly optimistic assessment of wind and solar reliability that was provided by such a firm.  The assessment literally says in the assessment something like the numbers we have planned around have never been met by any electrical provider; but we think this will happen in the future. Now, San Antonio and Dallas are looking at relying on the same mix of electrical providers.

So, short form - if you live in Austin, Dallas or San Antonio, and don’t want days long outages, buy a generator; because it will get used based on the planning I see.  The city governments (at least pre-Winter storm) aren’t pushing back or even questioning these assessments.  Austin made a dumb ass decision and everyone else is like lemmings over a cliff because “It’s working in Austin.”

I am a member of a co-op, where we elect the board of directors by area. Because of electing on areas, no high population area can have too many board members. Some co-ops are strictly distribution, other generation and distribution.

Governor Abbott has to get the right legislators to write the bills, then getting enough to support the bill. Power in Texas is pretty confusing between different well operators, the gas and electrical distributors. Some companies sell both gas and electricity, others just one or the other.

I used to get my electricity through Coserv, which is a shining example of a smart, well-run coop.  The problem is generally that many elected officials, whether they represent a town, coop, etc., lack the knowledge they need to effectively oversee utilities, so they farm that out to “consultants” who are maybe 95%+ Dem law firms or their “non-profit” proxies.  And that’s not strictly a utility problem but an education, government, etc. problem.

And it basically goes “We’ve run NYC, Chicago, and Austin into the ground with our advice.  You should follow it too; because we’ll sell your shit bonds and fund whatever stupid decision we recommend if you do.”

I mean, I’m a child in these things.  I literally do not know what the fuck I am talking about.  I do legal work for some small municipalities and one of them said “Ey, what do you think of this?”  and with my very basic oil & gas background, the first thing I thought was “Well, how’s that going to fucking work?”  And then when I started looking at the propaganda that came with the recommendation with lawyer eyes, I started thinking “Well, fuck, you say right in your own literature that the model you are using has never worked in the real world ANYWHERE.”  But you can’t even tell the client those people are full of shit because those people have multiple billion dollar international law firms behind them and it will be 20 years til you even get into a court room even if they filmed themselves burning down your house and raping your family (which they probably did and they’ll happily turn it over on discovery as well, which shocked me tremendously as a young lawyer until I understood).

We do, nationwide. The biggest problem is it's something like a 20 gestation period from plans to production.

What we are feeling the full force of now is the number of gas and clean coal plants shut down by Obama-era regulations. There were two major coal plants shut down in Mt. Pleasant on Montecillo lake and numerous gas plants in the Dallas area (and others across the state) and have been demolished. We are in this mess because of a lack of that generated power. Solar and wind have not made up for what we lost.

The problem with solar and wind is they produce what they produce.  If you need more, you’re SOL.  You can ramp up nuclear, natural gas, or coal to meet a problem.  You can’t shit more wind or sun.

You're never going to see new nuclear power in the United States in the next 50 years.  

The debacle with SCANA and their expansion of V.C. Summer saw to that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal

How does the city of Dallas have any say in the power generation mix?   Dallas is an oncor area regulated by the puc and ercot . It is not a coop.  

Eta many of our capacity problems are due to the fact its in the generators best interest to limit supply to drive up prices.  If anyone remembers when Blackrock canceled a dozen or more permits for plants?  Yes they were coal but could of been converted to NG but the point is those plants were needed years ago.  Now we're dropping 1000s of MW of capacity and replacing it with renewables. Which ignores basic grid design principles of things like grid Inertia.  

This dereg has been a failed experiment and if its not fixed soon we'll be on rolling blackouts with everyone installing gens solar and whole home batteries.  I'd rather have cheap reliable regulated power which works in many other places and worked fine before Bush and his pals showed up.   Last I checked my NG is inexpensive and damned reliable......and regulated.    

I’ve no idea how Dallas may affect power generation mix.  I do know they didn’t even question the Austin Energy brochure they got, which was actually produced mostly by a Colorado Dem non-profit.  They were all onboard with it.  Not that this would shock anyone watching Dallas politics these days.  Fucking Stalin didn’t have people as reliably red as Dallas County judges.

I can’t say I’d disagree with you on dereg.  At the same time, one of the big issues was NG suppliers prioritized delivering to residential homes over power plants.  There’s not a limitless supply of NG either.  It won’t be a popular opinion here; but the biggest failure of dereg isn’t supply but that it hasn’t delivered lower prices - unless you do something like Griddly.  But then you’re fucked in a February situation because you won’t get a month’s notice and you won’t get switched to another provider in less than a month usually.

So...what runs your air handler fan to circulate that gas heat when the grid goes kaput?

I only need 110 to run my air handler, so setting up a disconnect with the ability to run a 110 generator would work for me. Couple guys here have done it. It does not automatically switch over, but keeps the food in the refrigerators good and the heater on. Now I also have a gas fireplace, my plan was if I lost power was to heat the downstairs with the fire place.

Austin energy is a coop.....they are not part of dereg and thier customers will pay for they're stupidity.   Unfortunately we're all going to pay in higher prices and a less reliable grid if we don't let get the beaN counters and tree huggers out of the way.  

Austin Energy is run by the city council, it is not a co-op like PEC or Bluebonnet, where the customers elect board members to run the co-op.

https://www.fox4news.com/news/despite-public-information-act-requests-ercot-refuses-to-release-records-on-februarys-power-grid-failure

You are correct, I lumped in municipal owned with co-ops. There is a distinction, but both are exempted from dereg.

https://www.puc.texas.gov/consumer/facts/faq/Muni.aspx

My plan is a big enough generator to keep heat on, both refrigerators running and a few lights on, even TV, internet working. I was thinking of a 3500 watt inverter and able to run on propane.

My Champion 4250/3500 inverter generator will be here sometime today. I’m not going to wake up to a cold dark house again.

Let me know how you hook it up. I love seeing other people ideas.

I am planning on a manual interlock like Falarak did.

We recently moved out into the country, into a area already know for outages every time there is a thunder storm.

We have been without power one 11 hour stretch, one 4 hours a period, and several more 15 min to an hour blips ... and we have only been living here 2 months.

Luckily a Whole House generator was already budgeted when we made the decision to move.  I finished installing and testing it on Sunday.  Were ready for whatever ERCOT in all of their glorious incompetence.

Even with the Generac, I'm keeping my 2000 inverter and a little window unit for the bedroom...a backup for a backup is never a bad idea.

There was a fire at Comanche Peak Nuclear Powerplant that put one of the reactors off line. The fire knocked out the transmission transformer.

Happened back around June 6th but they kept quiet and sat on the problem for about a week till news leaked out about the lack of electricity output from the facility. That alone knocked out 1100 MW of power.

Pretty sure it's safe to say that idiots are in charge of all this and the legislature is giving them a free pass.

Transmission transformers are not something sitting on a shelf either and there is a very limited number of manufacturers out there.  Hopefully they can repair it.

ETA:current conditions show we're running around a 10% reserve and exporting from the grid.  But it also cloudy and over cast in DFW at 85.  Be curious to see how this looks when we get back to sunny in the high 90's

Attached File

I don’t think we even make transmission transformers in the U.S.  The lead time for a new transformer is over a year out. In the U.S. I heard there are very few spare transformers sitting around.

I as thinking the same, not automatic, but even 20-30 minutes to get out a generator and propane tank is better than nothing.

We do there's an Old GE factory in Shreveport off the top of my head.  A lot of it depends on they type and size of transformer.   I forget who bought that group from GE but it's now GE Grid.  Of the other majors there's been a consolidation  in the industry and unfortunately there's really only one US based company left Eaton, the rest are all foreign owned Schneider ABB and Siemens.  There's a definite line in the sand for equipment above 26kV what's considered Medium voltage by most.  Above that it's considered high voltage.  

Ge Grid Siemens and ABB (HV division bought by hitachi) play in the HV area.  I think all of these play in the HVDC market as well but where that's manufactured i don't know.  But 12 months is not an unheard of lead time.