> Maybe having more nuclear power plants instead of wind would have helped?

No. Most of the missing production was not wind, and several nukes went out (unclear whether that was because the grid was dying though).

What would have helped was proper standards (avoiding emergency being much of the reason why Texas still has its own grid) and properly winterising.

The wind thing is just a bullshit excuse, the vast majority of the missing generation is in fossil power plants. Even with half the turbines frozen over (which still has to do with Texas’ lack of proper winterization, those things work fine in Canada, Washington State, Montana, etc…) wind performed above expectations for the period.

Gigawatt scale nukes would need to go down in an unreliable grid. They have virtually no demand response compared to LNG and other fossil fuels. Frequency stability is the ultimate constraint.

I think a really good question to ask: Why was there missing generation in the LNG and other fossil fuel plants? Was it because they all froze over at the same time, or was it because the price of LNG went to the moon on Sunday night? Was this price increase caused by natural supply-demand mechanics, or was there an artificial component as well?

The way I see this - LNG generation providers shutdown to avoid incredibly expensive fuel costs, which they were unable to pass onto the customer. PUCT did make a change last night to try and alleviate this market model issue. Fundamentally, the whole thing is broken. I was looking for some historical precedent for all of this, and you would probably not be surprised to know this has happened before and would certainly not be surprised to find out which company was involved:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%9301_California_ele...

Now, I am not alleging that the current situation has any sort of malicious or criminal element, but there are some direct quotes from sources in that above article that trouble me as a Houstonian going through this exact kind of hell right now:

https://www.cnn.com/2005/US/02/03/enron.tapes/

Almost all nat gas storage in Texas is very short term when demand is high. Texas already had 3 days of cold weather before this even and stored supplies where low. This means most gas will come straight from the field or from wet storage, this is having a high water content, so it needs dewatering before burning.

A number of years ago I was helping a relative attempt to restart one of these wells/dewatering units because it froze in at somewhere between 10-15F. And that was the next day when the temps had warmed up to around 25.

It's been far colder than that in the last two days so these units are staying frozen and its icy so techs cant get to them easy. I've not seen wells in colder climates, I guess they equip them so they dont freeze.

I’ve read that the tussle between opec and Russia dropping the prices of fossil fuels also lead to many producers halting production, which in turn led to difficulties filling up reserves, so Texas didn’t / doesn’t have much headroom there.

What is "proper winterizing" for a state where the 99th percentile design temperature is mostly 25-30ºF? Properly sized heating systems should run 24 hours a day when the temps are well below the design temp.

If almost all of those systems are electric (because they are simple and cheap to install and don't get a ton of use), you get a lot of constant demand for electricity. Smart load-shedding (to dump large 240VAC loads in rotation) would allow the grid to survive these periods, while keeping houses livable but chilly.

I agree the wind excuse is (almost entirely) BS. Some amount of production is offline all the time, at least enough that you have to design for that.

as long as they're an independent grid, optimizing for the 99th percentile isn't really acceptable. that's only two nines.

if you have a contingency plan for winter storms, then it makes sense to skip the winterization. but it appears their plan for a winter storm was just to fail.

You’re conflating two things. The 99th percentile design temp for winter heating systems only implies a steady load would be imposed on the grid. Optimizing HVAC systems for the 99th percentile load is proper engineering. A higher powered electric resistance heating plant would make the grid problem worse right now (as houses could draw enough energy in a day to maintain temp rather than only drawing enough energy in a day to not quite maintain temp).

It doesn’t mean you design the grid to only sustain the loads 99 percent of the time. This is going to turn out to be a grid implementation problem, not an insulation or a renewables problem.

Yep, this is the thing no one is talking about. Dallas has easily added 10k apartment units in the past 5 years. Almost all of them are all electric (no gas heating).

Considering it’s more energy efficient to cool with Air Conditioning on the hottest summer days than it is to heat with electricity in the winter, it’s no wonder the grid collapsed when the region was below freezing for several days and some generating capacity was lost.

Pretty sure you are off by a large factor. It looks like Dallas added almost 300k apartments in the last 5 years.

I think Texas as a whole has seen a huge growth in population in the last 10 years.

Resistive electricity will be close to 100% efficient, and heat pumps even higher depending on the outdoor temperature.

What kinda of air conditioners beat that for efficiency? I don't think we covered those in heat engines

Air conditioners are heat pumps. Resistive heating is inefficient compared to burning something, and very inefficient compared to heat pumps

In addition to the other comments your missing the heat delta.

We commonly cool from 100 to 70F, or 30 degrees.

Yesterday we were warming from 0 to 65, or a 65 degrees delta.

> What kinda of air conditioners beat that for efficiency?

All of them beat resistance electric.

The power infrastructure is also failing from the cold. Some big fraction of that could probably be prevented for cheap.

Long-range interconnects probably would help, the rest of the US isn't having this problem, just Texas's mini-grid.

The regional grid above TX is also instituting rolling blackouts due to this weather.

Yes, that's the Southwest Power Pool, which covers 14 states. Here's some news from them,

https://www.ozarksfirst.com/local-news/local-news-local-news...

Oh, fair enough. But if they really are rolling than that's not nearly so bad as the areas in Texas that have been out for days.

I don't know enough about importing capacity in that other grid since they're hooked up to the western half supposedly but I agree with your points. TX being hooked up to the rest of the US could have saved them and this other regional grid appears to be managing it better than TX.

That is debatable. Close grids could not have supplied 30GW of power, they were also under near record loads. You would have had to pull from many states away which is insanely inefficient.

Also people miss how big the TX grid is. FL and PA are the #2 and #3 power generation states. TX produces as much as both added together.

We had two hours without power due to rolling blackouts

One nuke went out and was restored. Almost all missing generating capacity is natural gas.

At the worst wind only provided 0.7GW on 30GW installed, with capacity they count on during winter peaking events for wind of 6.2GW it only 11%.

That’s a cherrypicked low point, which is unsurprising given wind is not a permanent energy source. 30GW nameplate capacity is nowhere near the production you’d expect of wind (hell even nukes are not expected to come close to 100%).

Texas’ electric mix is 75% thermal, and that’s what shat the bed, at peak 34GWe of thermal was offline. Even if wind actually accounted for 6GW missing dieting the entire event it would have accounted for a small minority of the missing production.

And more specifically Texas gas is 66% of expected winter capacity. That’s also where most of the outages are.

Nuclear tripped too, just like gas, because of a pump failure in the cold.

In the 2011 cold snap, the problem was all about frozen lines like the pressure sensing line that caused a problem yesterday for the nuclear reactor. Likely similar things are causing problems for natural gas.

The answer is weatherization of all these sources. Wind turbines work great in other settings with icing wind, you just have to have the hardware for it. Just like you have to have the hardware to keep your pressure sensing lines from freezing.

We are likely to experince more events like this before a single nuclear plant could be built. And the idea of building 30GW of new nuclear, the amount of gas/coal/nuclear that was lost, is so daunting that not even China is trying to build that much nuclear, and they're pretty much the best at doing it of anyone out there.

Honestly, building 60GW more of wind and solar, and 10GW/40GWh of storage would be a lot easier and cheaper than building 30GW of nuclear. Solar delivered an extra GW when it wasn't expected, wind dropped 4GW from what was expected, and gas/coal/nuclear dropped 27GW.

Adding more wind capacity doesn't help because you still need a substitute for when it isn't windy.

As far as I can tell we still don't have reasonable grid-scale power storage and until we do increasing the ratio of intermittent generation capacity (wind, solar) to non-intermittent generation (hydro/gas/coal/nuclear) will increase the probability of not being able to meet demand at times (all other things remaining unchanged).

> 60GW more of wind and solar, and 10GW/40GWh of storage

These all complement each other, not sure why you pulled out only wind from that.

We do have reasonable grid-scale power storage, last year there were 17GW of batteries in the interconnection queue for ERCOT alone, from independent investors. The major holdup from this happening, say, 5 years ago, were ERCOT regulations that made it hard to be both a generator and a consumer on the grid. But there are huge arbitrage opportunities on ERCOT because of the huge price swings, which make it a perfect place for batteries. Other energy markets, like PJM, which have capacity markets in addition to energy markets, will also see huge amounts of batteries installed since FERC order 841 forced all grid operators to allow batteries to compete.

Other regulated utilities will only install batteries when they are forced to by their regulators. As a money-saving device, it's generally bad for utilities' profits, and it also requires them to learn something new. Far more profitable to rate-base unnecessary transmission or another natural gas plant that will never be fully used.

> These all complement each other, not sure why you pulled out only wind from that.

I wasn't trying to call out wind. I just should have said "intermittent'

17GW seems like a strange unit for storage. That should be GWh I think. So my question would be for the demand that exists right now in Texas, how long would those batteries been successful in providing power to delay the rolling blackouts?

My understanding is that batteries are mainly used in grids to react to short term demand changes and not to continuously feed energy into the grid.

Totally willing to be educated on this though. I'm not an expert.

As I got heavily downvoted a month or so ago for saying. In TX the wind backup is NG plants. The storage is really only there to cover tiny glitches, and its quite expensive. Which I why I keep pointing out that the price of wind conveniently ignores the storage costs and NG generators required to back it up.

At least part of the problem here seems to be the fact that the NG plants can't start due to lack of gas because the supply is frozen.

The other problem is of course that backing up wind with NG means that its not actually "green" anymore. Its reduced the carbon footprint, but at the growth rates in TX its only slowed the increase in CO2 output, not decreased it.

The economics are changing quickly, and storage is replacing gas plants. There are now more GW of battery backup in the pipeline than gas plants, and many multiples of solar and wind GW for each new gas GW.

https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/

Texas is experiencing the interchange first because it's one off one of the few places where independent operators can connect and undercut those who have made bad long term capital investments.

So, remind me again how much storage it takes to keep a grid going for a week? And please don't confuse GW for GWh.

There is nobody who is saying "let's fix the grid and design a system that will be reliable" in Texas. It's just people raising money to build projects that they think can make money.

Right now, there's more and more people thinking they can make money with batteries, and fewer and fewer people thinking that gas can make money on the grid.

Which, if we are to believe the hypothesis that markets make good capital allocations decisions, says that they future of the grid is battery backup, and no more gas backup.

This is a process of transition, so pointing at the current amount and saying "that's not enough" is going to be obvious.

At worst wind provided only 2% of its capacity, 40GWh would be gone in minutes, please count on TWh.

It was just an offhand number, there's already 17GW of storage in ERCOT's interconnection queue for the next few years, which is 40GWh - 70GWh. By 2035, the soonest we could expect to see a new nuclear reactor powering on, we will have many multiples of 70GWh. Not sure if TWh will every be needed for a grid that only peaks at 80GW. The cheapest solution will be a tradeoff between excess renewables capacity and storage, it will be interesting to see what the market picks for Texas.

70 GWh of battery storage would have kept the lights on for an extra 2 hours during this event - assuming the batteries themselves aren't affected by temperature. While battery storage might be nice to increase the capacity factor of a solar or wind farm it isn't going to make a difference in an event like this where a weather system moves in for a week.

The current grid took a looot longer than 2-4 years to build, and that 17GW/50GWh is just 2-4 years of replacement equipment at the very beginning of a transition. So I'm not sure why this amount of batteries needs to power the entire grid, or how that's a helpful or even interesting comparison.

The article clearly states that many natural gas plants were knocked out due to the cold.

So why aren't you asking "maybe having more nuclear instead of natural gas would have helped?"

Since nuclear uses water, which freezes, the reason why the gas plants were knocked out, maybe the problem isn't the power source itself but the lack of weatherization?!

> Since nuclear uses water, which freezes

I suspect that the water involved in the steam generation (heavy water or otherwise) wouldn't freeze since it's inside/near the core, and constantly temperature regulated.

The water used for cooling would go through heat exchanging and would also not freeze, especially if it's underground, or deep in a lake somewhere.

This isn’t theoretical. A nuclear plant was knocked out of service due to water freezing at the current temperatures.

I stand corrected.

I had trouble finding articles detailing how the nuclear plant was brought down, but then I found this:

> On Monday, Feb. 15, 2021, at 0537, an automatic reactor trip occurred at South Texas Project in Unit 1. The trip resulted from a loss of feedwater attributed to a cold weather-related failure of a pressure sensing lines to the feedwater pumps, causing a false signal, which in turn, caused the feedwater pump to trip. This event occurred in the secondary side of the plant (non-nuclear part of the unit). The reactor trip was a result of the feedwater pump trips. The primary side of the plant (nuclear side) is safe and secured. […] We evaluated Unit 2 and have confirmed that we do not have the same issues that caused the feedwater pump trips in Unit 1.

and subsequently, an answer to my question of 'how':

> Some people have wondered how “pressure sensing lines” for a feed water pump could have been affected by cold outside air temperatures. There are no turbine halls at STP, both of steam turbines are out in the open air. I’m sure there is a design reason for this choice, but it isn’t apparent.

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

Which water though?

Water related to the main cycle of the plant? Or something non-essential like the toilets, or some valve froze shut because water froze on the outside of it?

I didn't want to admit it in my original comment, but I basically thought something along these lines haha

I don’t think the toilets would knock a nuclear power plant out of service.

This article puts wind at 13% of shut down production:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/frozen-wi...

I imagine the person in the article is griping about the downward pressure wind and solar can put on energy prices (so maybe you lose money operating a traditional plant, but less money than you'd lose by walking away; operating at net that doesn't cover the up front investment).

Where would one build them? Since the USA has no long term nuclear waste storage plan, the current plan is to store at the plants for the most part which is a huge NIMBY issue. IIRC Texas went mostly in on gas/wind because of prevailing prices for the different fuel/plant options. This article gives a bit more data about current generation sources in Texas. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/02/16/tex... Also, the alternative coal plants had pretty big waste/cleanup issues with existing plants in addition to costing more based on projections last time I remember reading about this.

NIMBYs are not an impediment to building nuclear. The first impediment is finding a funding for a project of a class that has a huge chance of being a multi-billion dollar economic disaster. If you can find the money, the problem is actually completing it, and continuing to find new funding as build times go to 2-3x initial estimates, and costs balloon to 2-5x initial estimates.

There are plenty of sites that welcome new nuclear, usually any existing nuclear site would welcome more as its an economic engine for towns. The issue is it's just really poor and overly complicated technology, requiring miles of precision welds, the failure of any of which could cause big problems, and which must last for 50 years. It shouldn't be a surprise that this is hard to do well.

They are to building the waste facility you need for long term storage of spent fuel.

See Harry Reid vs Yucca Mountain

>Where would one build them?

Nuclear energy is insanely efficient from a "materials that need to move around" perspective. That's why not having long term storage and just cobbling together short term on-site storage hasn't caused a crisis. The maintenance department at a plant generates more waste by volume.

Finding the space isn't the issue. Anywhere we could fit a couple container ships is fair game if you're looking for a national level solution. Politics is the problem. People are more scared of "magical glowing toxic waste" than normal toxic waste for whatever reason.

Cutting costs on the cold-proofing of wind turbines in Texas is somewhat understandable. But as far as under-investment due to lack of profit goes, nuclear isn't much better off.

The economics of building a traditional nuclear plant right now don't work out: they are incredibly expensive to build and tear down, take a decade to plan and another decade to build. In the time until a new nuclear plant is built and has paid back the investment you could have built a wind park, made back the investment, made a profit, decommissioned it, built a new one and made back the investment for that one.

Maybe small-scale nuclear will help somewhat, but properly weather proofed wind and gas would work just fine too.

They take a year to build, and can be mobile.

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

With 2 70MW reactors these fall squarely into "small-scale nuclear". A traditional nuclear power plant has reactors with 10-20 times the power output.

I think these kinds of applications have a lot of potential, and are the future of nuclear energy production. But using these kinds of small reactors outside the military (or Russian icebreakers) is an idea that only recently gained traction (at least since it was originally abandoned around the 60s).