Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
by pixl97 on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @01:09AM
(#26163269)
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.
Re:What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
by masklinn on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @03:01AM
(#26163861)
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.
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/