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Texas power prices soared 20,000% Wednesday evening amid another brutal heat wave.
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Spot electricity prices topped $5,000 per megawatt-hour, up more than 200 times from Wednesday morning.
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The state’s grid operator issued its second-highest energy emergency, then later said conditions returned to normal.
Texas actually does better in the renewable energy front than you may expect.
A quarter of the state’s energy is produced through wind and solar. The biggest bottleneck preventing more wind adoption is the capacity of transmission lines up and the lack of energy storage.
The advantage of natural gas is that it can be dry up pretty much anywhere and isn’t dependent on weather.
The biggest problem Texas has right now regarding energy (and housing costs, and inflation, and municipal planning, and traffic, etc) is its extremely rapid population growth.
Yes, the heat wave is historic and ERCOT is awful, but even in perfect weather the grid is being stressed from the sheer number of people and businesses moving here
Don’t forget natural gas lines can freeze. Remember Ted Cruz going to Cancun? Pepperidge farm remembers.
While a lot of shitty things happened regarding ERCOT and that freeze (and ESPECIALLY the lack of response to prevent the next 2 freeze emergencies), Snovid was a perfect storm. And again a lot of the issues were from transmission problems when lines iced over and tress took out transmission lines.
We’re lucky the 2023 freeze was as short as it was, because it’s impact on the grid was almost as severe even though it was shorter and not nearly as cold. It was an ice event instead of snow, and had a much larger impact on trees and therefore transmission lines. Some people were without power for 3-4 times as long as with the 2021 storm despite it being a much milder event.
As an engineer, critical infrastructure should very much be designed with redundancy and failsafes to prevent failure from any reasonable risk. Cold weather impacting natural gas supply is reasonable risk that can have a catastrophic impact on people’s ability to heat their homes and it’s mind blowing how those failures have happened more than once in recent years. Utilities should be held to much higher standards and immediate action taken after failures to prevent the same from happening again.
Completely agree. But Snovid was a case of multiple system failures. It wasn’t just gas lines freezing,. It was increased demand, frozen equipment, inoperable windmills and solar panels, trees on transmission lines, road inaccessibility for repair crews, and informational gaps.
Ummmm they use cardboard for their new construction sheathing, new construction r value code is 30-39 compared to 49-60 for Washington.