Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid

Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by Scoundreller on Monday February 15, 2021 @02:27AM (#26140078)

Now at level 3: Situation Critical:

"has declared an EEA 3. Energy conservation is critical. Rotating outages are underway to reduce demand on the electric system. We urge Texans to put safety first during this time. Traffic lights and other infrastructure may be temporarily without power. 01:25:40 150221"

https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO

"Rotating outages primarily affect residential neighborhoods and small businesses and are typically limited to 10 to 45 minutes before being rotated to another location."

http://www.ercot.com/eea_info/show/26464

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by atian on Monday February 15, 2021 @02:46AM (#26140183)

I’m in North Texas (Oncor) and my place just got hit by the rolling blackout 3 minutes ago (1:44am). See http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/main/currentDayForecastSyst... for dramatic shedding of load.

Edit 1:54am - First blackout lasted exactly 10 minutes. They got this down to a tee.

Edit 2:37am CT - Second blackout started.

Edit 3:00am - Second blackout ended.

Edit 3:17am - Third blackout started.

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by enraged_camel on Monday February 15, 2021 @03:47AM (#26140561)

I lost power at 2 am. It’s 2:48 am and still no power...

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by atian on Monday February 15, 2021 @03:59AM (#26140657)

I’m charging my portable batteries with the power left on my Macbook.

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by godtoldmetodoit on Monday February 15, 2021 @04:34AM (#26140916)

Same here, been an hour and a half with no power in Austin.

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by enraged_camel on Monday February 15, 2021 @11:24AM (#26144162)

Austin here also. 8.5 hours and counting. They need to find a solution soon...

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by Rapzid on Monday February 15, 2021 @02:40AM (#26140152)

I'm curious how they coordinate between the transmissions providers as to what gets cut off when and by whom.

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by Scoundreller on Monday February 15, 2021 @02:43AM (#26140166)

The second link says:

"each utility is required to lower the demand on its system based on its percentage of the historic ERCOT peak demand.

"each utility is responsible for determining how to implement the required demand reduction, most utilities use rotating outages for this purpose."

There's about 25 different utilities, so who knows what each does.

I'm surprised voltage reduction isn't used. It's very effective at reducing resistive loads (ie: heaters and incandescent lights).

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by JimNasby on Monday February 15, 2021 @02:59AM (#26140262)

The grid has basically zero capability to change the voltage; frequency is all that matters. Frequency is so low that in the past hour any power line time base has fallen over 5.5 seconds behind. That’s a massive drop in frequency.

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by Animats on Monday February 15, 2021 @03:11AM (#26140318)

No, voltage can be dropped a bit. "Brownouts" are a thing. But they're less effective than they used to be, because everything with a switching power supply will draw more current if the input voltage drops. That's now a big fraction of the load.

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by LeoPanthera on Monday February 15, 2021 @05:14AM (#26141186)

Surely it’s not a big fraction of the load tonight. This whole problem is being caused by heaters.

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by puetzk on Monday February 15, 2021 @11:22AM (#26144135)

But heaters on thermostats will just run more if they are putting out less wattage. So across your whole population of houses, you won't move that part of demand much (maybe a few were already running at 100% duty cycle).

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by Scoundreller on Monday February 15, 2021 @03:03AM (#26140281)

It's a tool where I am. The grid operator does tests for 3% and 5% reductions:

https://www.ieso.ca/Corporate-IESO/Media/News-Releases/2019/...

Would be very effective with the space-heater (or oven?) driven demand right now in Texas. Not effective for A/C-driven demand (motors will draw more current).

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by DavidPeiffer on Monday February 15, 2021 @10:59AM (#26143912)

>Frequency is so low that in the past hour any power line time base has fallen over 5.5 seconds behind. That’s a massive drop in frequency.

Out of curiosity, where did you find this?

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by nottorp on Monday February 15, 2021 @04:59AM (#26141090)

> "Rotating outages primarily affect residential neighborhoods and small businesses and are typically limited to 10 to 45 minutes before being rotated to another location."

I don't understand. Here they shut down a couple large factories (that have agreed beforehand to emergency shutdowns) when there are capacity problems. Those eat so much power that it usually solves the problem.

They don't shut down power to residential just for capacity, if you're without power at home it means something blew up on the path that delivers to you.

Also, how can a gas pipeline freeze? Almost everyone is heating with natural gas here, we have a cold wave, and the only question is if they can deliver enough volume. Which is again fixed by shutting down some large industrial consumers, not by freezing homes.

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by bombcar on Monday February 15, 2021 @05:22AM (#26141234)

They've already done that - that is EEA 1 and 2 (1 being voluntary shutdown, 2 being involuntary shutdown).

They've asked everyone who CAN go to backup generators (think: hospitals, datacenters) to do so. If short-term shedding of residential load doesn't work, the next step is to blackout commercial players - think Walmart, etc. Those usually occur for longer periods of time and have security risks involved.

Natural gas pipelines have some water in them, they can freeze if they're not buried deep enough.

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by nottorp on Monday February 15, 2021 @05:39AM (#26141361)

> the next step is to blackout commercial players

Yeah, my point is they have the order wrong. They're shutting down residential first with the associated health risks instead of shutting down commercial which will just send people home for a day or three.

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by bombcar on Monday February 15, 2021 @05:51AM (#26141446)

I was wrong - there is no EEA 4. It's up to the local utilities to determine how to shed load; I suspect many office parks are already without power (but at 4 AM they're also probably not using much power).

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by baq on Monday February 15, 2021 @07:01AM (#26141918)

that's the scary part: daytime demand is much higher.

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by cwhiz on Monday February 15, 2021 @09:49AM (#26143239)

http://www.ercot.com/

You can see the forecasted gap on the home page. It’s going to her worse.

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Re:Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid by bombcar on Monday February 15, 2021 @05:16AM (#26141197)

Look at the projected capacity graph on the main page - they expect to be 10 GIGAWATTS short by 9 AM!

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