Fossil Fuel Power Fell Up To 68% as Blackouts Hit US South (bloomberg.com) 161
Power plants that burn coal and natural gas to produce electricity had significant drops in generation as a winter storm hit the US Southeast, forcing blackouts that left hundreds of thousands in the dark. From a report: Duke Energy and the Tennessee Valley Authority cut power to homes and businesses during the holiday season as an extreme winter storm pummeled the region. Duke instituted rotating outages Dec. 24 that interrupted service to about 500,000 customers, while TVA for the first time in its history had rotating blackouts Dec. 23 and Dec. 24. The disruption was the latest instance of a major failure to generate electricity in the US following a storm or natural disaster, a trend that's brought attention to the state of the nation's energy infrastructure and its dependence on fossil fuels to keep the lights on even as the Biden administration advocates for a transition to renewable energy.
The failure of coal and gas highlights how even the power sources that have long served as the backbone of the US electrical grid can still falter, especially as the South sees its population increase and relies more on electric heat. TVA saw power generation from coal plants drop about 68% from more than 4 gigawatts early Dec. 23 to a low of about 1.5 gigawatts on Dec. 24, according to federal data. While gas generation increased Dec. 23, on Dec. 24 it fell roughly 25% from about 11.5 gigawatts to less than 9 gigawatts as the utility ordered outages for almost six hours. High winds damaged several of the protective structures at the Cumberland Fossil Plant, the biggest TVA coal plant, as well as multiple gas-fired combustion turbines used during peak power periods, a TVA representative said in an email.
The failure of coal and gas highlights how even the power sources that have long served as the backbone of the US electrical grid can still falter, especially as the South sees its population increase and relies more on electric heat. TVA saw power generation from coal plants drop about 68% from more than 4 gigawatts early Dec. 23 to a low of about 1.5 gigawatts on Dec. 24, according to federal data. While gas generation increased Dec. 23, on Dec. 24 it fell roughly 25% from about 11.5 gigawatts to less than 9 gigawatts as the utility ordered outages for almost six hours. High winds damaged several of the protective structures at the Cumberland Fossil Plant, the biggest TVA coal plant, as well as multiple gas-fired combustion turbines used during peak power periods, a TVA representative said in an email.
The obvious (Score:5, Informative)
For reference, I live in Minnesota, and we have ample nuclear, coal, and gas plants and in a half century of adding up outages it comes out to only a few days, none over 6hours. I’m only paying about $0.15/kwh flat fee, no surge prices or hidden fees, and this is a typical experience when the arrangement isn’t predatory.
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It's funny to see all the things that were predicted when I was a kid happening because nobody listens to experts. Seriously when I was a kid people took note that we weren't investing in and maintaining our infrastructure and it was going to start failing. And here we are and it's failing
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they are designed for the weather, we dont live in a hoth like hell hole, and the power grid is designed for that around these parts... Are you suggesting we overbuild for a once in a generation freak event that only lasted 2 days here?
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they are designed for the weather, we dont live in a hoth like hell hole, and the power grid is designed for that around these parts... Are you suggesting we overbuild for a once in a generation freak event that only lasted 2 days here?
How is it they overbuilt fossil fuel and nuclear plants and infrastructure here, yet I pay quite a bit less per kWh and the company is quite profitable with customers enjoying an uptime of over 99.9% yet with far worse weather?
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"Once in a generation" is a 20-year event. That's not good enough by a LONG shot. Cities should be resilient against 500-year events, or better.
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"Once in a generation" is a 20-year event. That's not good enough by a LONG shot. Cities should be resilient against 500-year events, or better.
Sadly, 20 is the new 500 year event based on the historical data - we get hit with those all the time now and the momentum means this will only worsen for the foreseeable future. Without better local models we really should be designing for 10k year events or better.
Re:The obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Your population that is dependent upon electricity for medical needs and/or not freezing to death in their poorly insulated, unheated homes might think so.
Then again, they won't die a second time, so I guess those are "freak events" too.
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Haha. Here in sunny California, with the best renewable power ever in the history of the universe, I pay 35c/kWh. But my power is green green green so I am so happy being a pauper.
so, let me get this straight... (Score:3, Informative)
You're actually asserting, presumably with a straight face, that power generation facilities run on coal, oil, or nat gas are run by rotten greedy bastards, but some other sort of angelic people with no interest in profits at all are running wind mill and solar panel companies...
You also seem to be asserting that some sort of evil grand conspiracy swapped-out all those coal, oil, and gas executives recently, given that all these problems are happening now, whereas these same companies and facilities were pr
Only problem... Timing (Score:3)
Remember it takes years to build these sorts of plants. Biden has only been in office a couple years at this point. So I'd argue that Biden's influence would have much more effect in, say, another year or two. This is a bit too early.
Instead, we'd be looking at Trump more, or maybe even Obama before him. And Trump was supposedly SAVING fossil fuels, not destroying them like Biden.
I'd say this is more a problem of changing weather and a long, long, period of being "lean".
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This has been going on since 2012.
https://www.tva.com/newsroom/p... [tva.com]
Nobody wants to admit it, but the problem is that the TVA is demolishing coal plants and not replacing the generation capacity quickly enough, all while Tennessee is being flooded with refugees from California and New England.
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Yeah, the complaint about "surge pricing" and outages fails to recognize a basic fact: If your plant is shut down because it can't operate in the cold, then you can't sell electricity, and thus get zero money from any "surge pricing". Instead, if you properly winterized, then you can have something of a windfall from selling electricity when others have failed.
If the grid is down, then nobody in the downed section is buying electricity from you. Ergo, no windfall of profits.
Generally, the "surge pricing"
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Any greedy liar can be a corrupt leader. It takes a competent citizenry to give a shit enough to oust those who are blatantly corrupt and are responsible for this design continuing. We'll be here every winter bitching about the problem and killing citizens otherwise
Sadly quite a few people do not have functional minds capable of introspection and thus rational consistent thought. They outsourced that part of thinking to trusted sources who tell them not to worry, here is what to think. They know when it comes to intelligence and the real world they are the prey because they feel (and are) weak and are at great risk of being exploited. Thus it does not matter what or how crazy a thing that source says, they will defend it to death because they fear being eaten alive
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The TVA is owned by the federal government.
Paywalled (Score:5, Informative)
Try this free link [yahoo.com] instead.
"High winds damaged several of the protective structures at the Cumberland Fossil Plant, the biggest TVA coal plant, as well as multiple gas-fired combustion turbines used during peak power periods, a TVA representative said in an email."
In a way, this article is perhaps misleading by suggesting that there is an intrinsic flaw in coal and gas plants that impacted electricity generation. Wind was the problem, but the article isn't clear what the specific problem was and whether that same problem could have affected other types of plants. Damage to "protective structures" suggests that the problem wasn't with the plants themselves but with separate protective structures that affected coal and gas plants in similar ways.
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There are other reports, and I'm too lazy to search them up now, that say pipelines that feed natural gas to the plants froze up. That not enough attention has been paid to the infrastructure that feeds those fossil plants.
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That's certainly what happened in the last Texan cold snap, which was also blamed on renewables by their feckless leaders.
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Texas cold snap... (Score:2)
I think you need to read up some more. Renewables OUTPERFORMED fossil fuels during the cold snap, losing less production, as a percentage of expected/normal, than the fossil fuel plants did. They actually cut out LESS. The percentage of power provided by renewables went up during the snap.
Re:Paywalled (Score:5, Interesting)
There are other reports, and I'm too lazy to search them up now, that say pipelines that feed natural gas to the plants froze up. That not enough attention has been paid to the infrastructure that feeds those fossil plants.
I live in the Winnipeg, which gets pretty damn cold, and virtually everyone here uses natural gas for heat in the winter. It is incredibly reliable, in fact I don't believe I have ever had an unplanned natural gas outage in my lifetime. Weather should not be used as an excuse for incompetence.
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I wonder if it is because of how deep the pipes are buried? At 10ft depth, the temperature stays pretty stable and fluctuations have more to do with the seasonal changes then any given weather event.
I imagine since they expect it to be cold they were prudent and just buried the pipes deeper where as down in the lower half of the lower 48 they decided the added expense to go that deep was not necessary.
It's the same line of thinking with how thin our house walls are. If we designed all our homes with much mo
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I wonder if it is because of how deep the pipes are buried? At 10ft depth, the temperature stays pretty stable and fluctuations have more to do with the seasonal changes then any given weather event.
Gas lines are usually only 2 or 3 feet down here, and I think that is more of a safety cover thing than for freeze protection, whereas water lines are typically more like 8 or 10 feet, and even at that depth sometimes they freeze during particularly cold winters with low snow cover (snow actually insulates the ground below). Anyway, it does not sound like the distribution infrastructure is the problem down south so much as the pumping infrastructure. You would think that keeping such equipment warm enough
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The actual issue is that they've been destroying coal plants so there's no reserve capacity if something goes wrong.
https://www.tva.com/newsroom/p... [tva.com]
The problem is Duke Energy (Score:3, Interesting)
They suck. I live in an area surrounded by them, but serviced by JOEMC (Jones-Onslow Electric something). Any time there is a power outage due to weather or accidents, it takes their customers forever to regain power. Hurricane Florence was months for some people. We had power back on within 4 days. It's always the same for the 11 years I have lived here.
Duke Energy is just awful. I am so grateful not to be at their mercy.
Don't worry (Score:2)
I'm sure someone will twist this into somehow being the fault of renewables.
Why though? (Score:2)
Article requires registration, but I went in search of why gas power plants fail in cold weather. Based on the Texas outage a couple of years ago, this is the best I came up with:
The systems that get gas from the earth aren’t properly built for cold weather. Operators in West Texas’ Permian Basin, one of the most productive oil fields in the world, are particularly struggling to bring natural gas to the surface, analysts said, as cold weather and snow close wells or cause power outages that prevent pumping the fossil fuels from the ground.
“Gathering lines freeze, and the wells get so cold that they can’t produce,” said Parker Fawcett, a natural gas analyst for S&P Global Platts. “And pumps use electricity, so they’re not even able to lift that gas and liquid, because there’s no power to produce.”
I understand the relationship between the gas pumps and the generators is like chicken and the egg. But surely someone would have thought that the pumps need need to be on emergency generators. If they're not, then how would you ever start the generation cycle? Is it that companies are mismanaging the infrastructure by cutting
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I'm not saying they made the right design decision in this case, but there was an interesting piece recently on how the grid is restarted: https://youtu.be/uOSnQM1Zu4w [youtu.be]
It boils down to "dark start" infrastructure being expensive, so only some plants are set up for it. The investment should theoretically be best spent on making sure that power plants don't regularly fail for lack of outside power in the first place.
Battery backups for the win (Score:2)
Increasingly, power utilities are buying grid-scale batteries. These shouldn't be affected by the weather and could provide backup power until they run out. Initially they will run out pretty fast but once enough have been bought they should help.
But those of us who own our own homes do have the option of buying our own home-sized backup batteries. I have solar photovoltiac panels on my house combined with enough backup batteries to run my house for a day. If the power fails during the summer (when it'
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Right now, home batteries are pretty expensive, but the cost will only fall.
Investing in a reliable grid is both economically and environmentally cheaper.
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Investing in a reliable grid is both economically and environmentally cheaper.
And what are the major power companies doing to make the grid more reliable? Buying batteries. Batteries are both cheaper and better for the environment than "peaker" plants.
But I have a great idea for you. Let's remove the heater from your house, and make you rely on a "district heating" system. I'll bet that would be more efficient than letting you have your own heater!
I'd like to point out that where I live, we have power f
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Problem is you have little control over investment in the grid. If they don't do it properly, if they waste money on failed technologies, a home battery might be your best option.
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um last I checked batteries suck in cold weather
Batteries in cold weather (Score:2)
That's why you install them in a building. Preferably a building with climate control - hot batteries degrade faster, and cold batteries don't want to produce power.
If we can install BES, which was briefly the world's largest battery grid storage system, in Fairbanks, AK [wiredpen.com], then we should be fine in cold weather.
You just, you know, heat the building. If you actually start using the system, it'll probably heat itself as well.
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How can you say grid-scale batteries should not be affected by weather
Have you ever installed any kind of insulation in anything? Here's your sign.
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Have you ever been in anything "insulated" that was sitting in sub-zero temperatures for days?
Yep. You keep adding heat, which simply using the system will produce.
For someone who talks about ignorance of things, you don't seem to have any basic experience with how things actually perform in real world conditions.
You are literally the last person here that gets to say that to anyone else.
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Have you ever been in anything "insulated" that was sitting in sub-zero temperatures for days?
Lived in Fairbanks, AK for a while. So I did so for months at a time. It'd be a major power system. It's not that hard if you're building an insulated building to protect the batteries to also, I don't know, install a climate control system. IE it'll keep the batteries cool in the summer, and warm(if the operation of the battery system itself doesn't do that) in the winter. If there's a power outage mandating its use, then the operation of the batteries alone, going by EV experience, will keep the syst
Spherical cow problem (Score:2)
On second thought, this is a "spherical cow problem" - Most of us just go "It'll be in a building, the building will have some sort of climate control". You're the one going odd with not assuming that.
Most of us who consider that the batteries would logically be contained within a building. It then follows that you can insulate said building pretty cheaply - if it's a metal sided warehouse, for example, it's very simple to simply spray foam insulation on the inside to make it insulated.
Then, once you have
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Citation needed.
Okay then. See the bar chart "Cumulative capacity in queues (total MW, as of 2021" in the below, and look for "Storage (Battery)":
https://leylinecapital.com/news/a-recap-of-renewable-energy-news-in-2022 [leylinecapital.com]
Try a Google search for "grid scale battery storage being installed":
https://www.google.com/search?q=grid+scale+battery+storage+being+installed [google.com]
See the top result:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/12/09/us-to-deploy-30-gw-111-gwh-of-grid-scale-energy-storage-by-2025/ [pv-magazine.com]
would not have been so bad if (Score:4, Interesting)
so many power plants were not shut down without replacements over the last 10 years with more coming. Over all, according to wiki, there have been 290 coal power plants shuttered since 2010. There has also been some nuclear plants. Some were replaced and some not. US power grid is cutting its own throat by causing the power shortages and not having backups.
WIND DAMAGE was the problem (see parent article). (Score:2)
Grids will always be vulnerable but the individual winter backup is inexpensive and simple.
My main heat is a heat pump but I've LP gas logs at one end of my home and a gas stove at the other. LP is the most convenient, simple and robust backup heat except for wood stoves which are much more labor-intensive.
Backups should be redundant so I've multiple LP heaters and cylinders (safely stored outdoors). One should be able to survive without head so own a sleeping bag rated for far worse cold than you expect an
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Hell, assuming one is fairly healthy(sadly, the ones most often killed in adverse weather conditions in the USA are the fragile, the elderly, and such), one should be able to survive quite a while just by layering. If you don't own just one set of clothing, put two on. Do you have spare bedding so you can swap between washes? Put it all on the bed. 2-3 sheets, 2-3 blankets, etc... Snuggle up. Have the whole family camp out in one room. It all adds up.
Of course, the pipes potentially freezing is a big
Blackouts hit US South....ugh just Tennessee (Score:2)
Re:Stop Lying (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA:
High winds damaged several of the protective structures at the Cumberland Fossil Plant, the biggest TVA COAL plant, as well as multiple GAS-fired combustion turbines used during peak power periods, a TVA representative said in an email.
Duke also saw its GAS generation drop off just when it was needed most, according to federal data. Generation from its plants fell about 42% from more than 6.6 gigawatts to a low of about 3.8 gigawatts on Dec. 24, the day it instituted outages.
Re:Stop Lying (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh that's easy. It's global warming. Global warming doesn't just make the average temperature warmer, it ramps up the extremes. You get bigger extremes, more often, in all directions: hot and cold, wind and calm, rain and drought, bushfires and flood.
Nothing copes well with extremes, well nothing cheap anyway. This time is was the gas pipes supplying the fossil plants freezing, but if it was wind generation they likely would have turned them off due to ice and a blizzard and solar would have been covered with snow. Next I expect it will be coal and nuclear plants shutting down because the temperature gets too high.
While the world continues to use predominately fossil fuels the extreme weather and the problems it causes is going to get worse. Since TVA is predominately fossil they indirectly are part of the cause of this blackout.
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Oh that's easy. It's global warming. Global warming doesn't just make the average temperature warmer, it ramps up the extremes. You get bigger extremes, more often, in all directions: hot and cold, wind and calm, rain and drought, bushfires and flood.
When in doubt make up some shit about 'global warming'.
Actually, I do think the event mentioned here can be attributed to Global Warming.
The jet stream is basically a big belt that, among other things, keeps the polar vortex in its place [wikipedia.org]. Global Warming means the jet stream moves south and potentially weakens, when this happens it becomes easier for the polar vortex to reach lower latitudes.
So what was the weather story in the news late December? Some of the polar vortex made it down into the US and was causing winter storms and extreme cold [newscientist.com].
So yes, Global Warm
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How do you explain rolling blackouts for the first time in TVA's history then?
That, sir, is a gross misrepresentation of the situation through deceptive use of a fact. The rolling blackouts are better than their response to the last cold snap, in which they didn't have rolling blackouts, just blackouts — for days, when people needed them most. You either haven't been following this issue, in which case GTFOH, or you're being deliberately disingenuous, in which case GTFOH immediately.
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What a tard you are, Martin.
What a coward you are, coward. How long have you worked for B!zX?
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We're not asking you to tow the line...
If you WERE asking, to what location would you have him "tow" it? The word you were looking for is "toe".
BTW, it's "privilege", not "priviledge". And speaking of "damaging to the brand", you might want to familiarize yourself with what that really looks like; so grab a mirror, point your face at it, and open your eyes. First make sure that the front of the mirror is facing you.
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I'll make you a deal.
Who the fuck are you? I don't negotiate with terrorists, or cowards. If you want to have a dialogue with me, do it as a person, not as someone who clicked the "I am a troll" checkbox.
Anchor Participants like you are needed, but it's difficult to keep the lights on.
It's even harder when you refuse to report on Elno's fuckery, boost Nazis (We all remember when Nazi and Reich were in the word filter) and just in general compromise everything that ever made this site great.
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cause if you ever set foot in Tennesee these dumb fuck hicks break out polar gear when it gets to 60F like full gloves and ski masks along with poofy jackets, so it gets -2 outside they have their heaters still set to 78 and it put stress on the system... Is it really that hard dipshit?
TVA’s Generating Assets Today
5 fossil plants (25 active units)
3 nuclear plants (7 units)
29 hydro plants (109 units)
1 pumped storage hydroelectric plant (4 units)
9 natural gas combustion turbine gas plants (87 units)
8 na
Re: Stop Lying (Score:2)
cause if you ever set foot in Tennesee these dumb fuck hicks break
Somebody is an insecure antisocial ahole. Meanwhile refined uranium for the atomic bombs came out of Tennessee.
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cause if you ever set foot in Tennesee these dumb fuck hicks break
Somebody is an insecure antisocial ahole.
All he did was observe the local fauna.
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cause if you ever set foot in Tennesee these dumb fuck hicks break
Somebody is an insecure antisocial ahole.
All he did was observe the local fauna.
And another one who feels the need to put down others to try to make himself feel good about his insecurities. I don't live there, but I've actually been. And wasn't Chattanooga one of the first, if not the first, to offer gigabyte internet and treat internet as a public utility? I guess that's another example of things you must think are done by dumb people.
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TVA has decommissioned about 8.5GW of coal over the last decade while commissioning roughly 3.1GW of new natural gas, ~1GW of wind, and a very small amount of solar (noise) over the same period. For those keeping score at home, that's a net negative of about 4GW and, shockingly, yes, that does mean there is far less buffer if unexpected issues crop up at a plant, and the GP (who you deemed a "fucktard") is making a pretty good point.
By the way, believe it or not, we're not all "dumbfuck hicks" here in Tenn
Re:Stop Lying (Score:5, Informative)
These blackouts have happened because of over-reliance on extremely intermittent 'renewables'
No, the cause of the blackouts has been a combination of high demand and technical failures at coal and gas plants and high demand [source [appvoices.org]].
Ultimately almost all blackouts are caused by something which is extremely technically complicated but which most people take for granted: distribution. This could be as simple as a tree taking out a power line supplying a neighborhood, or it can be, as in this case, the grid operator deliberately shutting down power to areas in order to prevent the entire grid from failing. Again it's not widely known, but keeping the grid stable is so difficult that if the grid actually fails in a catastrophic way, it could take weeks to restore power even if all the distribution equipment is intact.
Renewables do complicate the task of running the grid, but so far they have not been responsible for any major outages that I know of. The 2021 Texas power crisis was blamed by politicians on renewables because that was a convenient scapegoat; renewables are are new thing and can easily be used to scare people afraid of technological change. But, in fact, it was the *old* non-renewable technologies that were responsible: natural gas, nuclear and coal. The idea that it was wind turbines was, in fact, an outright lie, and viral images posted on social media by fossil fuel companies of helicopters de-icing windmills weren't even of Texas [source [usatoday.com]]. The actual cause of that event was a failure to winterize conventional power plants [source]. [youtube.com]
The power grid is going to have to evolve, both to meet increased demand and to accommodate more kinds of energy sources, including more nuclear and renewables. I think one way it's going to change over the next decade is rapid adoption of grid energy storage facilities. These aren't just useful for renewables, they can stabilize the grid, reduce electricity costs, and make nuclear power more economical.
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Right; so not winterizing your coal plants is even worse when you have more renewables. Texas has a largely deregulated power system; the reason there are so many wind plants is that they're an easy way for investors to make a buck. But nobody is in charge of dealing with the risks involved.
But it's not because it's hard to manage those risks. It's just a lack of will to tackle the problem.
I think the answer to this in the relatively near term is grid storage, the cost of which has been declining rapidly
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I think the answer to this in the relatively near term is grid storage, the cost of which has been declining rapidly over the past decade and is expected to continue dropping dramatically for the next thirty years ...
The trouble with storage of electricity is that the best that it can do is provide power for a few hours, these problems here went on for days. Storage is great for helping with peaks (eg when everyone cooks their evening meal) but are not enough when equipment fails for anything other than short periods.
Electricity Storage (Score:2)
Actually, storage systems for electricity can provide power for however much time you're willing to design them to do so. Up to and including days of generation if necessary. Remember, "storage" in this case can be anything from batteries to pumped water to pressurized air.
A tesla powerwall, for example, would be able to power my entire house for 3-7 days. More if I institute energy saving measures such as turning off the AC, or setting the heating to "chilly", etc...
But we're getting enough of these inc
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> Actually, storage systems for electricity can provide power for however much time you're willing to design them to do so.
And have resources to build. This might work locally (for your house), but globally it's physically impossible. (for major cities)
I recommend looking through GTK reports by Simon Michaux.
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Hey everybody!
It's cold|hot outside so plug in your EVs, battery packs, solar arrays, and cell phones to feed power back to the grid.
Sounds like something that California might do.
Re:Stop Lying (Score:4, Insightful)
Right; so not winterizing your coal plants is even worse when you have more renewables.
Citation needed.
During that big Texas outage, wind was producing more power than forecast, i.e. there were outages, but fewer than expected for that week. Natural gas production was the primary culprit, because pumping systems weren't winterized, and natural gas pumping doesn't generally increase just because you're using more renewables.
I mean maybe in a roundabout way, using renewables for base load instead of nuclear might create a situation where you depend on natural gas peaker plants more to make up for lack of solar at night or something, but that's not really a "more renewables" problem so much as a "shutting down base load generating capacity without adequate alternative sources online" problem.
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But you can't criticize the TVA, since it's a federally-owned electric utility corporation, can you? No ERCOT, no private companies to blame, so ignore the current event and just continue to be mad about something that happened two years ago, and which, by the way, wasn't repeated in Texas this time.
Re: Stop Lying (Score:2)
Renewables were not to blame in Texas's case, because no one expected them to produce anything in those conditions (and they didn't). Renewables need huge storage, in ways that don't exist, or full backup from dispatchable power sources.
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Now go outside and roll coal like the idiot you are in protest to a part of the future energy sources in the states.
Luckily these lib-owning coal rollers have owned themselves, the diesel tuner businesses are going away rapidly because those coal rolling dipshits have galvanized government to produce additional emissions regulations.
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You guys need to find a better way to run your country.
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What was crazy is seeing the Republican politicians blame renewables when that was just factually incorrect. I'm okay with politicians lying but I was pretty pissed off to see the media not calling them out on those lies. And they wonder why their circulation numbers keep going down. I'm not going to pay you to lie to me. Politicians will lie to me for free
The blame for this falls squarely on corporate greed. Consolidation of media and cost cutting in news divisions drove most of the best and the brightest out of journalism programs by the late 1990s. Then, a few rich people were able to buy up the consolidated media and manipulate it to act like the PR arm of political parties. (The Republican party was particularly notorious for this.) The net effect is that the news media are collectively no longer able to adequately function as the fourth estate, and
Re:Stop Lying (Score:5, Insightful)
Coal plants are reliable. Truck a train full of coal and dump it near the plant. Simple to shovel it onto the conveyor and into the furnace. Natural gas power, as Europeans are learning, is not reliable. The deliver infrastructure is extremely fragile (pipes) or doesn't scale (pressurized container). Oil power plants were never reliable, and combined with requirements for shutdowns for environmental and safety reasons during hot weather (air quality) or hurricanes (floods of pipeline pump equipment). Where I live, wood is the most reliable for home heat and has been for hundreds of years. It's renewable too, but it doesn't scale to large populations.
It's a tough problem to solve. Doing the same thing we have always done, burning coal, is not practical anymore. It's important that we place people who understand infrastructure and science to make society's transition to new sources of energy as painless as possible. Complaining that they cocked it up is not the same as lying about renewables.
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Coal plants are reliable. Truck a train full of coal and dump it near the plant. Simple to shovel it onto the conveyor and into the furnace. Natural gas power, as Europeans are learning, is not reliable. The deliver infrastructure is extremely fragile (pipes) or doesn't scale (pressurized container).
Well, that's both true and false....
A gas plant is as reliable as a coal plant but both of them are of absolutely no use if you can't deliver fuel. There's not much difference between getting no gas and getting no coal. The infrastructure isn't the problem. There are enough unexploded pipelines left, the problem is that they all end in Russia who a) doesn't want to sell us gas at the moment and b) we don't want to buy gas from at the moment.
The gas infrastructure is ready to use while it would be slightly d
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the problem is that they all end in Russia who a) doesn't want to sell us gas at the moment and b) we don't want to buy gas from at the moment.
This article is about the southern United States. The US produces its own natural gas. [eia.gov]
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I know, but the poster referred to the current problems in Europe as a general point against gas power saying the infrastructure is more fragile (in general). My point was that this generalization can't be made as the infrastructure for gas is still working, but the supply is the problem.
I'm also aware that train routes in the US have more free capacity that could be used for coal compared to the situation in Europe.
That's why his comparison to Europe is not holding up his point.
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In the 70s, in Europe a thing called "Coal vacations" happened.
It rained for a bit, and then came a cold snap. The dumped coal found itself stuck in a layer of ice, and it was literally impossible to shovel it.
Coal delivery infrastructure has the same limitations you mention for gas: fragile, as it is usually shipped by rail, doesn't scale : rail too has capacity limits.
Oh, and since you mentioned recent events regarding Gas: a lot of coal in Eastern Europe used to come from Russia. Now it's a double whamm
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That's incorrect. The only real reliability factor for oil, gas AND coal is where you get the fuel from. In 60 years of using gas as our main source for home heating, the Netherlands has never had a large-scale outage. In a war, all bets are off, for coal as much as for gas.
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Coal plants are reliable. Truck a train full of coal and dump it near the plant. Simple to shovel it onto the conveyor and into the furnace. Natural gas power, as Europeans are learning, is not reliable. The deliver infrastructure is extremely fragile (pipes) or doesn't scale (pressurized container).
LOL. No sorry. Natural gas is just as reliable and transportable as coal. LNG is as easy to move and store as coal. In either case you require *APPROPRIATE INFRASTRUCTURE*.
The issue Europe has is that they don't have gas of their own. Coal is equally unreliable if you don't have coal of your own. All fossil fuels are unreliable if the method of shipping them is suddenly kneecapped by an unwilling third party.
By the way Europe will continue to use gas. The difference will only be who they buy it from and in
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Natural gas delivery is not as flaky as you think it is. Or at least it doesn't have to be.
NG has been the heating source for my whole life (born in '70). Our region routinely gets below -30C in the winter, and sometimes below -40C/F (but not that often). I have personally not ever experienced a gas outage significant enough for me to notice it. If they happened, they were fixed extremely quickly. Our city isn't large by global standards, only about a million people, but it's very large (sparse population),
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Regionally gas delivery is mostly fine, not as logistically straight forward as coal for long haul. Although most people in downstream of area lost gas flow when a pipe line exploded [wikipedia.org].
Please remember that putting natural gas in a pipe at the source is much less costly than cooling and pressurizing it into LNG tanks. Once you try to fill a ship with tanks of LNG it becomes less economical than many other sources of energy for central power generation. You either want pipelines or you want no natural gas power
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TVA is almost all hydro and nukes, the remainder burns shit (coal, gas, garbage whatever)
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You've got one out of three: Someone spends too much time listening to Fox and Friends. Coal and gas and nuclear still supply 75% of US electricity. Many coal plants weren't shut-down, they just sold all their output to one business, such as crytpo-miners. The few that did shut-down, usually did so, because they would run at a loss, or required so much refurbishment, it was not a competitive investment against the increasing demand for green energy.
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Read the freakin summary! Energy production from fossils dropped to 68%! If they didn't cut off 23% of people from power, anything above that was probable made up for from renewables. (or anything else except burning stuff)
Re:Stop Lying (Score:5, Interesting)
The high demand was because most residences in our state rely on heat pumps that become increasingly inefficient as temperatures get farther below freezing - on a day when many people were home for the holiday and wanting to heat their homes continually.
A vast majority of TVA's "renewable" generation capacity is in hydroelectric, which is minimally impacted by temperatures as our lakes don't freeze over. They have a few aging coal and gas plants which they are mostly phasing out because the economics don't work... but you'd never know this based on the many people who drive around with "friends of coal" bumper stickers and license plates, who are quick to claim that everything from our power generation issues to economic woes in rural southern Appalachia would be solved if only we'd get back to digging out that coal and bring back all those wonderful, high paying mining jobs from the old days. Then you have the politicians, who made a big show of blaming the fact that TVA is a government agency, which automatically makes it inept - while completely ignoring the fact that Duke Energy right next door in NC had many of the same issues last week due to the intense cold but is a for profit company.
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That makes a lot of sense when the temp drops enough to have all those systems switch over to the backup resistance heating.
It is also possible to use propane and natural gas or oil as backup with the correct integration, which would be better for supplemental in coldness if your supplier of electrons is flaky. For the do-it-yourselfer, you can buy a system that pipes hot air out of your wood-burning fireplace that can be blown into the central ducts, bring in filtered outside air when the temps are complim
Re: Stop Lying (Score:2)
Havent you learned? They will fight you to the end of the earth about how wrong you are then the instant you are proved right they will act like they always knew and it is just so obvious.
Re:Stop Lying (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, yes and no.
They can certainly build wind turbines with de-icers and heaters that keep the internal equipment from freezing up.
However, they can't do much about very high winds, which was a huge component of this storm. The standard policy everywhere is to feather the props and point them into the wind. If you try to run a big turbine in extreme wind conditions, there's a very good chance you're going to lose the whole thing. And, of course, low or zero winds happen (often during extremely cold weather).
Of course, in this TVA case, it wasn't a problem, since they don't have much wind power as part of their generation package (they do buy a gigawatt or so from out of state). They had some solar plants (which were definitely not generating power those days, due to clouds and snow, which knocked out about 2.5 gigawatts).
The big problem at TVA (along with a lot of other places) is that they haven't been able to build enough baseline generation over the last twenty years or so, due to regulations and financing issues.
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Wind turbines which can handle these conditions exist.
Bitte schnell, Hans - it's windy this morning! Let's smelt some steel!
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Wind turbines? In a winter storm?
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Ask Duke, it's their terminology.
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Infrastructure bill has like $67B for grid improvements, plus Biden did another $2.5B via the DOE so money is coming in and we can do both at once since the Inflation Reduction Act is full of other generation funding including nuclear. Is it enough? Probably not, but it's what could get passed in the current environment.
A lot of the renewable push you are mentioning is private power generation companies and new businesses who want to sell energy for profit, there is less profit model for them to do grid imp
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I think Texas must like it this way, otherwise it would not run in this fashion.
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"On Average" is a problem with electricity (Score:2)
Okay, some issues with your statements.
1. As the title says, "on average" is a problem with electricity. Electricity is effectively used the instant it is generated, 90-99% of the time. With something like an internal combustion energy, you can generally ride through the periods where there isn't a cylinder firing through inertia, this isn't an option for electricity though. So if 100% of average needs are met through solar, that means that you have a 33% or so excess during the day(power demand is ~50%
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Fusion still decades off from commercial use, same for solar to hydrogen honestly, that power is better put into direct generation. Batteries are getting better and there is a lot of battery manufacturing capacity coming online in the next 5 years but a majority of that of that is going to go into vehichle batteries. Things like mechnical batteries or pumped storage shows some promise but really solar and wind are here now doing the work, probably going to continue that way so transmission improvements i
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I'd bet a lot of the power infrastructure investments are like 40-year ROI type investments with all of the above looking more and more likely... they're not sure they'd get a return if they jump with what's available now.
They haven't even reached break-even on a fusion plant, the recent highly misleading press release was about reaching break even only in the reaction itself. It took 100x as much power as was released from the reaction to power the lasers, because the lasers are about 1% efficient. The first practical fusion power plant is almost certainly still more than 40 years away. Choosing not to build more production now on the basis that future technology might make it cheaper would be very stupid.
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Oh, dear, no. Fusion requires reliable large scale tritium fuel sources, which do not currently exist. Drawing the The recent fusion "break-even" result was not harvested as usable energy, not did it approach the scale needed to build all the necessary tools to generate that fusion even. It was an "event", not suitable for ongoing energy production.
Fusion remans decades if not millennia away. The optimists who've consistently cited it as "30 years away", 70 years ago, were very optimistic indeed.
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WTF is VPP?