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.