Frequency conversion is a costly and difficult to scale problem. If Texas was part of the Western grid they could be drawing excess hydroelectric power from the pacific northwest right now for example. Texas also could have contributed to help the California power shortages last year.
Edit: Here is a map of the grid interconnects in Texas with capacity. As of the time of this comment the total importation capacity is less than 1% of demand. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/22095643/49019079-...
>If Texas was part of the Western grid they could be drawing excess hydroelectric power from the pacific northwest right now for example. Texas also could have contributed to help the California power shortages last year.
No. That’s not how the grids work. Just because Oklahoma and Washington are part of the same interconnection, that does not mean that people living in Tulsa can pull power as needed from a dam in Washington, which is why Oklahomans are struggling with power outages today as well. Most power still must be generated locally. Long distance transmission is difficult and inefficient, and often requires converting to DC just like a grid-to-grid connection requires, so you have the same issues as you have when you’re on separate grids.
https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/landing_pages/89373/ERCOT-I... https://poweroutage.us/area/state/oklahoma
Per your comment about long distance transmission, that doesn't matter in a situation like this. If you're on a large grid you don't necessarily need to transmit power to Oklahoma all of the way from the PNW.
You need the areas surrounding OK to supply excess power to them, then those surrounding areas can get whatever excess they may need from slightly further areas. This needs less and less excess as you go further since every area is over provisioned.
Eventually at some point, yes, the PNW may be supplying excess power to states around them as a result of Oklahoma having outages, but that power isn't going straight from PNW to OK.
Oklahoma has been dealing with rolling blackouts for the past several days. Tell me why this is, since apparently you think Oklahoma is able to magically get power transferred to them all the way from Washington? If WA has the excess capacity, why are Oklahomans still without power?
> Everyone else in Texas that's on the other, federal, grids, are not experiencing widespread power outages.
Completely wrong. Eastern Texas (eg Orange), which is under MISO, and is dealing with blackouts. And parts of the Texas panhandle like Lubbock, which is also not part of the Texas grid, is also struggling with power outages.
Check out the map. It's pretty clear that what you said is wrong. ERCOT territory is all broken, panhandle, east Texas, and El Paso area are not having problems. https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas
I have family and friends in every place you just said is “not having problems” and I can assure you that you are entirely incorrect.
> I'm sure you can see that a rolling outage affecting 200k people for 4 hours is quite different than an outage affecting four million customers for 3 days.
The 200k customers mentioned is only talking about the numbers from one relatively small provider. If you want to only look at one provider in Texas: Austin Energy, the provider for all of Austin, is currently reporting only 200k customers affected as well. But obviously that’s not the whole picture in Texas, just like 200k isn’t the whole picture in the SPP.
All other providers in the SPP are affected, not just the one in the article. Many more than 200k people were affected, and the blackouts have been happening over the past three days, not four hours.
And as I mentioned in my comment, utility providers do not consider blackouts due to capacity constraints to be “outages”, and thus are not reporting them as outages on their outage maps, which means this website does not have the correct information on blackouts. They are tracking outages only if the outage is due to something like a downed power line. Please attempt to read the full comment and understand it before replying.
This is an area that you clearly do not have any experience in, yet you insist on being an armchair expert. Quite frankly, we don’t need armchair experts, especially ones that are blatantly incorrect and refuse to educate themselves even when information is put right in front of you. Please reflect on this.
As for your “newcomer” comment, lol. I have been on HN for years longer than your account. Apparently you’ve never heard of the ability to create new accounts, though. GTFO of here with that ridiculous gatekeeping bullshit, it’s not welcome on HN.
please don't do that, it's ad hominem and definitely not the way to talk to new posters here.
I feel I am doing right by our community when I say to you: You are not as knowledgeable and important as you think you are.
((3 * 24) / 4) * (4 000 000 / 200 000)
Holy crap, that's literally 360 times worse.
Imagine four cities in a row, all connected with AC. City A generates extra power, which gets sucked up by city B, whose power goes to the next city down the line, to city Z.
Sure, it’s not actually that simple, but when was the last time NY literally had no power? They benefit from being highly connected.
TX is paying for being isolated.
Their handful of DC interconnects do not have the capacity to power their mini grid. They’re short 35GW of generation, and I assume the DC ties are at capacity.
Do you not remember the blackouts of 2003? Multiple entire states went dark for hours, and the “highly connectedness” was a huge part of the problem. The only reason it wasn’t even worse is specifically because grid isolation stopped it from propagating further, just like what’s happening here.
Separate grids are great for other kinds of emergencies, if we get a big solar flare then the splits save each grid.
We need a east to west DC long distance interconnect to haul power across the country.
Not directly, but by way of demand shifting, effectively yes. Northern California is fed by Washington, SoCal by NorCal generation, etc. until you get excess capacity closer to the demand sink.
Imagine a 'bouncy castle' with several input fans. Texas is like an entry ramp that isn't hooked up to either of two big banks of fans and sinks next to it. If it were just ganged in with one of those other two groups even though Texas is having a bad time the other blowers could compensate in aggregate.
One system is DC. The other is AC. They both do primarily the same thing through elaborate systems.
Washington can send electricity south via AC - doesn't really mean CA and WA are functioning on the same grid.
As per ERCOT's status page, both of the high-voltage DC ties between Texas are currently operating at >99% of their rated capacity, and they have been every time I've checked since yesterday. They're not being limited by the availability of power from the other side.
https://www.klfy.com/local/cleco-rolling-blackouts-to-be-use...
https://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article/134700/lr-based-tra...
Again, just because you have excess power in Missouri does not mean that power can magically transfer hundreds of miles away where it is needed. Energy transfer does not work like that.
> As per ERCOT's status page, both of the high-voltage DC ties between Texas are currently operating at >99% of their rated capacity
So as of that comment, either the amount of power available on the other side was equal to >99% of capacity, or it was greater than capacity.
The situation has changed now and neighboring states have had to drop the amount provided to interconnects, but as of the earlier comment, more interconnects would have helped.
Your turn to try again I suppose
Here's one: https://www.iso-ne.com/
Here's another: http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
But there's a limited capacity for Texas to bring in power over just 5 connections, combined with their choice that makes conversion to something compatible with the Texas grid much less efficient.
By isolating & not focusing on compatibility they have made it very difficult to have more robust redundancy in their grid.
https://www.misoenergy.org/markets-and-operations/real-time-...
The problem is that this is a truly regional event and not just isolated to Texas. The entire central US is struggling right now. The SPP (which manages electricity for Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arkansas, and other states) has been struggling with forced blackouts over the last several days as well. They don’t have enough power for their own grid, let alone enough to share with Texas.
If Texas was more interconnected with the SPP, the end result wouldn’t be Texans all having their problems solved. Many Texans would still be without power, but so would many more Oklahomans. The fact that the Texas grid is separate is the only thing keeping OK from having even worse blackouts. Which makes sense, because the entire point of grid isolation is to keep issues localized and not cascade over the entire network. And that’s working to Oklahoma’s benefit right now, but Texas is getting the short end of the stick.