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Post by gwlee7 on Feb 18, 2021 11:20:47 GMT -6
matt@IAA I appreciate your detailed explanation. It helps bring some clarity. For many people in the US a $300 summer time electric bill is average or even less. So if I pay say $50 or $60 per month more than what I am paying now and can be assured that this doesn't happen again, then it's totally worth it to me. Having a "just in time" inventory is great for buying and selling fresh fish. Having a little back up power on hand even if you have to pay more, just seems prudent.
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Post by Quint on Feb 18, 2021 12:08:17 GMT -6
Not true at all. NG saved the day by taking up the slack of 35% drop in production from the frozen windmills.  I disagree. It is very disingenuous for various Texas state officials, of whom many are anti-renewables, to claim that, were it not for renewable energy sources like wind turbines making up part of our overall energy supply portfolio, none of this would have happened. That's just not true. ERCOT themselves has come out and said that the biggest single source loss was in gas supply and distribution related to that gas supply. I watched them say exactly that at a press conference yesterday and it's been all over the news. So I don't think this is really up for debate. Yes, wind turbines shut down too and contributed to the overall loss of supply, but they were not the biggest contributor to that loss. Loss of non-renewable energy sources were the primary culprit, if for no other reason than that they make up a healthy majority of the state's energy supply. EVERYTHING failed to one degree or another. It just comes down to which energy source(s) had the biggest piece of the pie. I get the argument that people in Texas may not want to pay the extra cost incurred to winterize wind turbines AND gas and power plant infrastructure to the same degree that it's winterized in other parts of the world where this level of cold is normal. It's a cost benefit thing, and events like this have been, relatively speaking, historically rare. But, given that this sort of situation has happened twice in the last decade, I would be inclined to say that I would be willing to pay a little more for a higher degree of reliability. But that's a separate discussion. Lack of winterization, if there is going to be a villain here, is where the blame lies, because it prevented the turbines AND gas/nuclear/coal infrastructure from operating to their full potential. Blame the PUC for not requiring winterizing, as recommended by the feds years ago. Blame the deregulation of the market and the insistence by our state government that we maintain our own grid, rendering us unable to work with other states when we need it, just as so many other states are able to do. But to blame renewables? That's just factually disingenuous. Wind turbines all over the world work just fine in cold environments if they are properly winterized. |
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Post by matt@IAA on Feb 18, 2021 12:13:23 GMT -6
ERCOT can’t make anyone winterize. They only dispatch power and plan capacity. The PUCT is the regulatory body.
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Post by Quint on Feb 18, 2021 12:18:46 GMT -6
ERCOT can’t make anyone winterize. They only dispatch power and plan capacity. The PUCT is the regulatory body. Yes, I meant PUC. Kind of was typing in a frenzy for a moment.  All of this hits close to home for me because I used to work in the regulation of coal mining here in Texas (Railroad Commission). I've been very close to the political side of all of this. The PUC is in the same building I used to work in. I have friends over there. Trust me when I say that the non-renewable (oil, gas, coal) energy industry in Texas is corrupt from top to bottom, and that includes the "regulators"... That's what is driving a lot of this disingenuous "see, I told you so" double speak by people who are owned by big oil/gas and coal. They have a vested interest in trying to stop the competition and maximize profit for their industry pals. |
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Post by teejay on Feb 18, 2021 12:20:48 GMT -6
Matt/svart, you guys are both spot-on, and I appreciate your knowledge and perspective on all of this. Yes, this is a cost/benefit, risk/return scenario as Matt has articulated. Where is the line where the risk has been minimized to the point where increased expenditure for potential capacity, backup, and emergency recovery are no longer justified? Every business goes through this when they develop their Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Plan. Just as Matt mentioned his own increased costs to have the capacity in place for that one, highly unlikely catastrophic event, business owners have the same consideration of sunk costs for an event that could wipe them out, but from a probability perspective will likely never occur. In a past job I was the Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery planner for the enterprise IT facility of a global manufacturer. (If you've seen where I live from some of my posts you can figure it out.) They have one IT facility near their world headquarters where literally all of their mainframes, servers, networks, storage, and 300 critical IT personnel are housed. During my tenure I recommended converting an existing secondary location owned by the organization, and/or purchasing disaster recovery services for backup. Corporate IT did not want to spend the dollars on what they considered to be an unlikely event. Then a factory in Europe had a fire. Shortly after that a local warehouse storing inventory was partially demolished by a tornado. Still no interest by corporate. Then about 10 miles away, where one of the divisions had consolidated seven warehouses into a large multi-tenant former manufacturing plant (just 10 days earlier), there was a major fire. Because of its location, materials inside, and the intensity of the fire, the fire departments had a hard time putting it out. They ran out of water because the large onsite storage tanks had been emptied for the winter and there were minimal local feeds. It was so large that we could stand on the 4th floor of our IT facility and see the huge plumes of black smoke coming toward us from the horizon. The company lost more than $70M in inventory. As bad as that was, my thought at the time was that at least management would now see the need for a DR backup for the single greatest failure point in the company. But here's what happened. Ironically the $70M of inventory was obsolete product. The company had been trying to figure out how to get rid of it while it was being stored. Instead of a catastrophic loss it turned into an insurance claim that helped them recover dollars they would have otherwise had to write off. The business viewed it as a long-term benefit, not as a consideration for catastrophic loss of business. To wrap it up, IT did end up building a backup facility several years later after a management change (and after I'd moved on). Technically it is still too close geographically to the main facility, but at least they did something. And it cost them millions to do it, but someone finally convinced upper management that the risk was greater than the cost. The difference is the company is responsible to the shareholders, who benefit from the continuation of business...they're not being asked to pay more. Whether ERCOT and the authorities make actual changes, and/or customers are willing to ante up additional dollars to ensure it doesn't happen again (and what's the likelihood) will interesting to see. People want a lot of things until they see the bill.  |
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Post by ragan on Feb 18, 2021 12:23:02 GMT -6
Not true at all. NG saved the day by taking up the slack of 35% drop in production from the frozen windmills. This chart is the whole story and it is not good for anyone. Look at Feb 5 or Feb 9. Sometimes wind goes to zero or near zero. It's ok - that's what wind does. The grid didn't collapse. Sometimes, like Feb 8, wind blows a lot - enough to push some coal offline (see the dip in brown)? Again, that's ok, that's what it is designed to do. Feb 9 we had more thermal on the grid than Feb 16. That is a complete breakdown - of the system. The problem is people see documents that ERCOT puts out which are kind of marketing that say "oh 23% of our capacity is wind, aren't we great?" But wind capacity and thermal capacity are fundamentally different. One is dispatchable and the other one isn't. There is a term called capacity factor which is the ratio of the asset's use to its theoretical maximum output. So if you have a power plant that runs every hour of the year at max power, it has a capacity factor of 1. If it runs every hour at half power, or half the time at full power, its 50%. Because wind is variable you expect an average capacity factor of around 35%, but that's just an average. Sometimes it is zero, sometimes it is 50%. Wind in Texas blows more at night and in summer. We planned for roughly a 20% peak average capacity factor for wind over the winter. Maximum capacity factor for a base load (always on) gas turbine is around 92%. Actual capacity factors for combined cycle gas turbine plants are around 50% in the US, and peaking or simple cycle are 10-15%. This isn't bad, this is just what we need from them. Think about the capacity factor for your car engine - it is probably very low, you rarely run it at full power, and don't often drive it for many hours a day. That's fine. How about my little backup / tailgating generator? Capacity factor is probably 1%. That's ok. It is doing exactly what I need. The flip side to capacity, as I said, is dispatchability. That is being able to turn it on and off. If wind doesn't blow at any particular moment, it's fine. We don't expect it to, we don't plan on it, we don't count on it. If I go outside and my Honda generator won't start even once it is worse than useless. I will be cussing and kicking it and wishing hell and damnation upon it. It is supposed to be dispatchable that 1% of the time. The difference between expectation and reality is reliability. Wind is VERY reliable. We forecast wind for seasonal average and detailed forecasts out 48 and 24 hours in advance. Our forecasts are really good, and in fact wind has outperformed installed expectations for capacity factor in Texas consistently. Remember we planned for a seasonal peak average of 6.2GW. Even with the cold and turbines offline in the peak event Sunday night wind was putting 9GW onto the grid. That is reliable, it exceeded our expectation by almost 50%. That's great. Reliability and dispatchability are NOT the same thing. My Honda generator is both dispatchable and reliable. I can turn it on whenever I want, and it literally has never failed me. I love it. My lawnmower is dispatchable but not reliable. And I hate it for that reason. Wind is reliable but not dispatchable. Gas, coal, and nuclear are dispatchable and generally very, very reliable. But we lost 25% of our nuclear output. Less reliable. We lost ??% of our coal plants. Less reliable. We couldn't run due to gas or lost some 30% of our gas capacity. Less reliable. Still dispatchable! There's an on switch! But not doing what we planned...counted...relied on. It's not a failure of the wind technology that it is not dispatchable. It is not a failure of gas technology that it was not reliable - or coal, or nuclear. This is a compound problem in Texas. Gas wells froze, gas liquid separation plants froze or were shut off, pipelines had problems, there may have not been enough gas period due to incredible demand for heating and electricity production, and of course coal plants had problems offloading traincars of coal, sensing lines freeze, its just a huge mess. Up north yankees deal with this all the time and their plants are designed differently for it. ERCOT has the lowest retail electric prices in the world and our system is ingenious. It works really, really well. Part of that is due to the limited amount of backup capacity we carry. That's the definition of a wasted asset - if it doesn't run, it just costs. Well, we got bit. The real question is how much more expensive would everyone have been happy with their bills to ensure we didn't have this problem? Because it's not a question of feasibility, just of cost. We could have a grid with 150GW of power instead of 82GW and this wouldn't have been a blip. And my summertime electric bill would be $300 instead of $150, every single year, forever. LOTS of political propaganda being put out there on both sides. Meanwhile people are suffering. Its sick. It is always gross to see suffering used as a political cudgel. I think the fact that Texas has some high-profile electeds who are very noisy with their demagoguery exacerbates it. Guys like Cruz/Crenshaw crowing and mocking Californians as they lost their homes/business/lives during wildfires has left a portion of the country fighting back the schadenfreude as Texas gets walloped. Or the performative efforts to 'secede', or Abbott spending his time on Fox comically trying to tie this situation to the (nonexistent) "Green New Deal" or the AG suing other states over fantasy 'voter fraud' or whatever. If you're looking at Texas from the outside (which most of the country is), there's just been a lot of high-profile, disingenuous bluster coming out of there. But that stuff doesn't have much to do with the millions of Texans who are really in a bad spot right now. It sure ain't Cruz/Corynyn/Abbott/etc who are the ones hurting. Elite, wealthy, blowhards are doing just fine. Hell, Ted Cruz hopped a plane to Cancun when all this happened (asking Houston police chief to divert cops from the disaster to come make sure his departure was nice and smooth). Tons of other people who have hardly anything to do with all that noise are getting shellacked. I hope you guys get all the assistance you need and can get things rectified ASAP. Obviously you can't re-engineer the whole system overnight and everything is interconnected. And, as you note, being independent from the rest of the country's grid has successfully delivered scant regulation and cheap power. And in that situation, you rely on the voluntary diligence/prudence of an entity like ERCOT. Sometimes that bargain is gonna work out, sometimes it's not. And we all see it through our various ideological lenses (whether we mean to or not). But what matters right now is getting people through the cold and through the lack of water. Hopefully some of that famed 'we take care of our own' ethos is paying dividends right now cause it seems like that's what it's gonna take to minimize the toll from this. Rooting for ya'll from up here in the PNW. |
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Post by Ward on Feb 18, 2021 13:08:43 GMT -6
Family, friends and clients in DFW, Houston and Austin. My heart goes out to any of you suffering in homes not built for the cold.
I don't quite get that though . . .
A home well built for cold is also well built for heat, through interlocking seams and insulation and modern construction methods , , , and mini-splits are fantastic for both air conditioning and heating.
but I understand these things don't work when the electricity goes out. A back-up genny or a Tesla wall might not be luxuries in the future.
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Post by matt@IAA on Feb 18, 2021 13:22:59 GMT -6
A lot of Texas has gas heat which is fine. But takes electricity to run the furnace. Doesn’t do squat when the power is out. Everyone else has electric resistance heaters which are fine most of the time, it doesn’t get very cold here. Also works less well without power. Our homes are not built for cold, we have exterior pipes and fixtures for water. And no basements. Water heaters are often in the unconditioned attic, as is most of the water pipes. Which aren’t well insulated, because it’s normally not a problem.
A lot of older homes are pier and beam, so there’s a crawl space under the house. Basically no insulation at all under that often. Just not built for cold weather.
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Post by Quint on Feb 18, 2021 13:26:29 GMT -6
This chart is the whole story and it is not good for anyone. Look at Feb 5 or Feb 9. Sometimes wind goes to zero or near zero. It's ok - that's what wind does. The grid didn't collapse. Sometimes, like Feb 8, wind blows a lot - enough to push some coal offline (see the dip in brown)? Again, that's ok, that's what it is designed to do. Feb 9 we had more thermal on the grid than Feb 16. That is a complete breakdown - of the system. The problem is people see documents that ERCOT puts out which are kind of marketing that say "oh 23% of our capacity is wind, aren't we great?" But wind capacity and thermal capacity are fundamentally different. One is dispatchable and the other one isn't. There is a term called capacity factor which is the ratio of the asset's use to its theoretical maximum output. So if you have a power plant that runs every hour of the year at max power, it has a capacity factor of 1. If it runs every hour at half power, or half the time at full power, its 50%. Because wind is variable you expect an average capacity factor of around 35%, but that's just an average. Sometimes it is zero, sometimes it is 50%. Wind in Texas blows more at night and in summer. We planned for roughly a 20% peak average capacity factor for wind over the winter. Maximum capacity factor for a base load (always on) gas turbine is around 92%. Actual capacity factors for combined cycle gas turbine plants are around 50% in the US, and peaking or simple cycle are 10-15%. This isn't bad, this is just what we need from them. Think about the capacity factor for your car engine - it is probably very low, you rarely run it at full power, and don't often drive it for many hours a day. That's fine. How about my little backup / tailgating generator? Capacity factor is probably 1%. That's ok. It is doing exactly what I need. The flip side to capacity, as I said, is dispatchability. That is being able to turn it on and off. If wind doesn't blow at any particular moment, it's fine. We don't expect it to, we don't plan on it, we don't count on it. If I go outside and my Honda generator won't start even once it is worse than useless. I will be cussing and kicking it and wishing hell and damnation upon it. It is supposed to be dispatchable that 1% of the time. The difference between expectation and reality is reliability. Wind is VERY reliable. We forecast wind for seasonal average and detailed forecasts out 48 and 24 hours in advance. Our forecasts are really good, and in fact wind has outperformed installed expectations for capacity factor in Texas consistently. Remember we planned for a seasonal peak average of 6.2GW. Even with the cold and turbines offline in the peak event Sunday night wind was putting 9GW onto the grid. That is reliable, it exceeded our expectation by almost 50%. That's great. Reliability and dispatchability are NOT the same thing. My Honda generator is both dispatchable and reliable. I can turn it on whenever I want, and it literally has never failed me. I love it. My lawnmower is dispatchable but not reliable. And I hate it for that reason. Wind is reliable but not dispatchable. Gas, coal, and nuclear are dispatchable and generally very, very reliable. But we lost 25% of our nuclear output. Less reliable. We lost ??% of our coal plants. Less reliable. We couldn't run due to gas or lost some 30% of our gas capacity. Less reliable. Still dispatchable! There's an on switch! But not doing what we planned...counted...relied on. It's not a failure of the wind technology that it is not dispatchable. It is not a failure of gas technology that it was not reliable - or coal, or nuclear. This is a compound problem in Texas. Gas wells froze, gas liquid separation plants froze or were shut off, pipelines had problems, there may have not been enough gas period due to incredible demand for heating and electricity production, and of course coal plants had problems offloading traincars of coal, sensing lines freeze, its just a huge mess. Up north yankees deal with this all the time and their plants are designed differently for it. ERCOT has the lowest retail electric prices in the world and our system is ingenious. It works really, really well. Part of that is due to the limited amount of backup capacity we carry. That's the definition of a wasted asset - if it doesn't run, it just costs. Well, we got bit. The real question is how much more expensive would everyone have been happy with their bills to ensure we didn't have this problem? Because it's not a question of feasibility, just of cost. We could have a grid with 150GW of power instead of 82GW and this wouldn't have been a blip. And my summertime electric bill would be $300 instead of $150, every single year, forever. LOTS of political propaganda being put out there on both sides. Meanwhile people are suffering. Its sick. It is always gross to see suffering used as a political cudgel. I think the fact that Texas has some high-profile electeds who are very noisy with their demagoguery exacerbates it. Guys like Cruz/Crenshaw crowing and mocking Californians as they lost their homes/business/lives during wildfires has left a portion of the country fighting back the schadenfreude as Texas gets walloped. Or the performative efforts to 'secede', or Abbott spending his time on Fox comically trying to tie this situation to the (nonexistent) "Green New Deal" or the AG suing other states over fantasy 'voter fraud' or whatever. If you're looking at Texas from the outside (which most of the country is), there's just been a lot of high-profile, disingenuous bluster coming out of there. But that stuff doesn't have much to do with the millions of Texans who are really in a bad spot right now. It sure ain't Cruz/Corynyn/Abott/etc who are the ones hurting. Elite, wealthy, blowhards are doing just fine. Tons of other people who have hardly anything to do with all that noise are getting shellacked. I hope you guys get all the assistance you need and can get things rectified ASAP. Obviously you can't re-engineer the whole system overnight and everything is interconnected. And, as you note, being independent from the rest of the country's grid has successfully delivered minimal regulation and cheap power. And in that situation, you rely on the voluntary diligence/prudence of a company like ERCOT. Sometimes that bargain is gonna work out, sometimes it's not. And we all see it through our various ideological lenses (whether we mean to or not). But what matters right now is getting people through the cold and through the lack of water. Hopefully some of that famed 'we take care of our own' ethos is paying dividends right now cause it seems like that's what it's gonna take to minimize the toll from this. Rooting for ya'll from up here in the PNW. Sid Miller, the Texas Agricultural Commissioner, is one of the biggest blowhards of them all. He's going around, in the immediate wake of this whole mess, demanding that we never build another windmill again. So disingenuous. This is the same guy who has sent out tweets with a picture of a mushroom cloud in the background and verbage basically saying that we should nuke all of the Muslims in the world. |
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Post by Quint on Feb 18, 2021 13:42:21 GMT -6
A lot of Texas has gas heat which is fine. But takes electricity to run the furnace. Doesn’t do squat when the power is out. Everyone else has electric resistance heaters which are fine most of the time, it doesn’t get very cold here. Also works less well without power. Our homes are not built for cold, we have exterior pipes and fixtures for water. And no basements. Water heaters are often in the unconditioned attic, as is most of the water pipes. Which aren’t well insulated, because it’s normally not a problem. A lot of older homes are pier and beam, so there’s a crawl space under the house. Basically no insulation at all under that often. Just not built for cold weather. Yeah, I've found over the years that a lot of people from other parts of the country assume that we have basements down here. They're actually almost non-existent here in Texas. When I visit friends in other parts of the country, where there are basements, it makes me jealous. I think they are superior to slab on grade houses like the one I own here in Texas. Outdoor faucets bursting in freezing temps? Nope. Just go down in the basement and turn the water off to those outdoor faucets. |
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Post by jeremygillespie on Feb 18, 2021 13:52:13 GMT -6
A lot of Texas has gas heat which is fine. But takes electricity to run the furnace. Doesn’t do squat when the power is out. Everyone else has electric resistance heaters which are fine most of the time, it doesn’t get very cold here. Also works less well without power. Our homes are not built for cold, we have exterior pipes and fixtures for water. And no basements. Water heaters are often in the unconditioned attic, as is most of the water pipes. Which aren’t well insulated, because it’s normally not a problem. A lot of older homes are pier and beam, so there’s a crawl space under the house. Basically no insulation at all under that often. Just not built for cold weather. Yeah, I've found over the years that a lot of people from other parts of the country assume that we have basements down here. They're actually almost non-existent here in Texas. When I visit friends in other parts of the country, where there are basements, it makes me jealous. I think they are superior to slab on grade houses like the one I own here in Texas. Outdoor faucets bursting in freezing temps? Nope. Just go down in the basement and turn the water off to those outdoor faucets. Code around here is now to have hose bibs that extend into the house by about 16 inches or so. When you turn the water off at the hose bib, it’s actually turning it off inside the house, so you ever have to worry about it freezing or draining lines. Pretty cool. It’s interesting to see how different codes are around the country. We have to do all sorts of hurricane proof strapping here for new construction that basically ties all the sills to the frame and sheathing, then up to the roof and the ridge. If done properly nobody is losing a roof, or anything for that matter. I’ve done my fair share of renovations of really old houses back in the day, and I gotta admit when people say “they don’t build em like they used to!” It’s a good thing! Modern building techniques are far superior, the only thing they had better back then was the wood. Today’s lumber is absolute junk. |
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Post by ragan on Feb 18, 2021 13:58:55 GMT -6
Yeah, I've found over the years that a lot of people from other parts of the country assume that we have basements down here. They're actually almost non-existent here in Texas. When I visit friends in other parts of the country, where there are basements, it makes me jealous. I think they are superior to slab on grade houses like the one I own here in Texas. Outdoor faucets bursting in freezing temps? Nope. Just go down in the basement and turn the water off to those outdoor faucets. Code around here is now to have hose bibs that extend into the house by about 16 inches or so. When you turn the water off at the hose bib, it’s actually turning it off inside the house, so you ever have to worry about it freezing or draining lines. Pretty cool. It’s interesting to see how different codes are around the country. We have to do all sorts of hurricane proof strapping here for new construction that basically ties all the sills to the frame and sheathing, then up to the roof and the ridge. If done properly nobody is losing a roof, or anything for that matter. I’ve done my fair share of renovations of really old houses back in the day, and I gotta admit when people say “they don’t build em like they used to!” It’s a good thing! Modern building techniques are far superior, the only thing they had better back then was the wood. Today’s lumber is absolute junk. I flipped houses for awhile, doing almost all the work solo. I know a lot of guys I’m the trades. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard passionate whining (sometimes coming out of my own mouth!) about having to do this or that to comply with code only to, a few years later, be bitten in the ass by the fact that I didn’t do that exact thing on my own house. Case in point: I’m about to tear my basement ceiling open because I stuck a mechanical vent on my shower drain and didn’t leave it accessible (like I’d have had to do if I had pulled a permit) and now it’s failing and I need to replace it. |
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Post by jeremygillespie on Feb 18, 2021 14:14:46 GMT -6
Code around here is now to have hose bibs that extend into the house by about 16 inches or so. When you turn the water off at the hose bib, it’s actually turning it off inside the house, so you ever have to worry about it freezing or draining lines. Pretty cool. It’s interesting to see how different codes are around the country. We have to do all sorts of hurricane proof strapping here for new construction that basically ties all the sills to the frame and sheathing, then up to the roof and the ridge. If done properly nobody is losing a roof, or anything for that matter. I’ve done my fair share of renovations of really old houses back in the day, and I gotta admit when people say “they don’t build em like they used to!” It’s a good thing! Modern building techniques are far superior, the only thing they had better back then was the wood. Today’s lumber is absolute junk. I flipped houses for awhile, doing almost all the work solo. I know a lot of guys I’m the trades. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard passionate whining (sometimes coming out of my own mouth!) about having to do this or that to comply with code only to, a few years later, be bitten in the ass by the fact that I didn’t do that exact thing on my own house. Case in point: I’m about to tear my basement ceiling open because I stuck a mechanical vent on my shower drain and didn’t leave it accessible (like I’d have had to do if I had pulled a permit) and now it’s failing and I need to replace it. Sometimes it just makes sense to throw a studer valve on there instead of tearing out walls to put in a proper vent. But yeah it can bite you in the ass down the road for sure. Reno is pretty frustrating in old houses or when you don’t want to get into tearing out more than is needed. The wife and I purchased a house a few months ago and I’m allowed as a homeowner to file for permits and do all construction, plumbing, electrical etc myself without a license. After drawing up plans and submitting them it took nearly 3 months to get approval. ...and they wonder why home Reno guys just don’t even bother. So many hoops to jump through... |
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Post by ragan on Feb 18, 2021 14:46:21 GMT -6
I flipped houses for awhile, doing almost all the work solo. I know a lot of guys I’m the trades. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard passionate whining (sometimes coming out of my own mouth!) about having to do this or that to comply with code only to, a few years later, be bitten in the ass by the fact that I didn’t do that exact thing on my own house. Case in point: I’m about to tear my basement ceiling open because I stuck a mechanical vent on my shower drain and didn’t leave it accessible (like I’d have had to do if I had pulled a permit) and now it’s failing and I need to replace it. Sometimes it just makes sense to throw a studer valve on there instead of tearing out walls to put in a proper vent. But yeah it can bite you in the ass down the road for sure. Reno is pretty frustrating in old houses or when you don’t want to get into tearing out more than is needed. The wife and I purchased a house a few months ago and I’m allowed as a homeowner to file for permits and do all construction, plumbing, electrical etc myself without a license. After drawing up plans and submitting them it took nearly 3 months to get approval. ...and they wonder why home Reno guys just don’t even bother. So many hoops to jump through... Yeah for sure. And that's a worthwhile distinction to make: the merit of the code itself vs the bureaucratic runaround it takes to get stuff done. |
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Post by Quint on Feb 18, 2021 15:02:09 GMT -6
Sometimes it just makes sense to throw a studer valve on there instead of tearing out walls to put in a proper vent. But yeah it can bite you in the ass down the road for sure. Reno is pretty frustrating in old houses or when you don’t want to get into tearing out more than is needed. The wife and I purchased a house a few months ago and I’m allowed as a homeowner to file for permits and do all construction, plumbing, electrical etc myself without a license. After drawing up plans and submitting them it took nearly 3 months to get approval. ...and they wonder why home Reno guys just don’t even bother. So many hoops to jump through... Yeah for sure. And that's a worthwhile distinction to make: the merit of the code itself vs the bureaucratic runaround it takes to get stuff done. I'm getting ready to do a large scale remodel of my old 1958 house. I'm adding a second story and a whole bunch of other stuff. I hear horror stories about the red tape involved in getting permits from the City of Austin and the general enforcement of code. We'll see how it goes. I've done a fair amount of construction work myself, but this will be the biggest one yet. I'll likely be the prime and just sub out the slab, framing, plumbing, and electrical and then do the rest myelf. I know this. The experience of the last five days has me thinking about incorporating things into the design that I previously was not considering. |
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Post by Quint on Feb 18, 2021 17:25:37 GMT -6
On a positive note, our power is finally back on after 3 1/2 days.
Still no running water though...
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ericn
Temp
Balance Engineer
Posts: 16,107 
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Post by ericn on Feb 20, 2021 18:43:51 GMT -6
You can’t Blame wind when the wind Turbines you put up are not equipped to handle the cold, ice and snow, that’s a human error, oh you want irony, guess where all those Mitsubishi Wind products that are capable and were / are turning in Iowa, KS, MN and WI arrive in the US. The Pelican Island roll on roll off Terminal Galveston TX! Now considering all the wide load permits and escorts needed to get them up north, I’ll bet it would be a bit cheaper to put those weatherized wind farms up in West TX than WI ! Man I hated ending up behind a load of those things going up the cause way. Here in Kansas City we got lucky for the most part we only had rolling blackouts but some had their rolling blackouts last hours in below zero weather because of bad power management when the power was turned back on ! It always amazes me how many transformers and other high current draw equipment because nobody manually turns off breakers and resets them slowly! One time last summer we under a rolling Blackouts and our number came up. Only our freight elevator is under generator power, it and the other 9 elevators date back to 1968. I was asking our head maintenance guy if he had shut down all the breakers to save the bus fuses as well as everything else from the current surge when power came back on. His answer was “ no you have no idea what you are talking about” The guys from the elevator service company happened to be on site and had just walked up as we were having this conversation , “We shut down all the breakers when we lost power for just that reason! No wonder we are here at least twice a week! Shit you want us to keep these ancient beasts running and yet you do all you can to kill them.” |
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Post by Quint on Feb 25, 2021 10:20:20 GMT -6
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Post by matt@IAA on Feb 25, 2021 22:42:35 GMT -6
The calculation that people pay more in deregulated areas because the total spend per capita is more is really dubious. For one, they don’t know (and can’t) what the median spend is. Just the total and the number of people. That means a few less careful people can very much skew the numbers.
Other thoughts about it -
1. Natural gas prices were high before the fracking explosion. A lot of the US has a TON of coal and other places have a ton of hydro. ERCOT relies heavily on NG and has for a long time. I suspect a lot of this difference over time may be generation source based.
2. People are lazy and generally not used to shopping for electricity. Measuring or knowing your own usage to optimize your plan is difficult - I pay a service to do it for me, and it works, but that's not intuitive. Market advantage: retailers
3. People in Texas routinely and on purpose pay more for green energy content in their retail plans. Green energy is premium product and retailers price discriminate on it. I don't get this at all, but whatever - this also drives demand for more wind, and increases average paid retail price in a deregulated market.
4. As a followup to 1 and 3, regulated vs deregulated areas don't always pay the same transmission costs - location is built into spot prices etc. So source and demand and content all affect prices paid.
There’s a *lot* of bs going on. Texas market is basically optimized for a 10.4% overcapacity which works out to a grid shortage event once every three years, but those loss of load events are less than one hour per year. That’s more or less exactly how it has worked. That results in the lowest average cost for consumers AND higher revenue for providers. They make margin in the squeeze events.
Anyone peddling a single answer - regulation, wind, deregulation, the EPA, natural gas, coal, cold weather, pipelines, whatever is trying to pull one over on you. And/or is trying to advance a political aim they already had in the first place.
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Post by gwlee7 on Feb 26, 2021 6:26:56 GMT -6
The $28 billion in extra costs cited in the Newsfeed article comes from this Wall Street Journal report. The WSJ certainly can’t be considered pro regulation. It at least shows how the numbers were concocted. apple.news/AsCSA74RERcOliv8EkU4rQg |
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Post by matt@IAA on Feb 26, 2021 6:34:39 GMT -6
Yeah I read it, but they took the total price paid for electricity. It’s not wrong, but it also isn’t a useful number, you know what I mean?
There’s been a ton of anti-wind propaganda in the WSJ too. This just has too much political value not to turn into a mess.
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Post by matt@IAA on Feb 26, 2021 9:54:33 GMT -6
Sorry for being overly harsh, I just am in this middle of this and it's really frustrating seeing a real problem get hijacked for political ends. Nobody seems to have the best interest of Texans in mind. Here's a link to the raw economics of how an energy-only market optimizes around a certain capacity. Slides 4, 5, and 6. The problem is a capacity market wouldn't have fixed this either, because most capacity markets are set up for 1 load event every 10 years. On Monday they day ahead demand was over 74 GW, near our all time high, and that is 25% more than ERCOT's seasonal plan forecast in December. No one would have carried capacity for that. Sometimes mother nature wins. brattlefiles.blob.core.windows.net/files/16366_capacity_markets_and_wholesale_market_outcomes.pdfForgot the link |
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Post by Ward on Feb 26, 2021 13:24:02 GMT -6
There’s been a ton of anti-wind propaganda in the WSJ too. This just has too much political value not to turn into a mess. i don't see it as anti or political. It's just sober second thought after huge optimism drove folks to optimistically rush ahead before it was ready and people didn't stop to consider the nightmare environmental considerations such as danger to wildlife and crazy amounts of pollution from wind turbines. |
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Post by the other mark williams on Feb 26, 2021 14:16:36 GMT -6
[...] Anyone peddling a single answer - regulation, wind, deregulation, the EPA, natural gas, coal, cold weather, pipelines, whatever is trying to pull one over on you. And/or is trying to advance a political aim they already had in the first place. Or they're just uninformed - I'm glad to have you explaining the nuances, Matt. It's always easier for us as humans to pick out one or two things to blame, rather than see how multivariate the factors actually are. That doesn't necessarily mean folks are doing it maliciously. Education is a good thing. |
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Post by matt@IAA on Feb 26, 2021 14:43:28 GMT -6
There’s been a ton of anti-wind propaganda in the WSJ too. This just has too much political value not to turn into a mess. i don't see it as anti or political. It's just sober second thought after huge optimism drove folks to optimistically rush ahead before it was ready and people didn't stop to consider the nightmare environmental considerations such as danger to wildlife and crazy amounts of pollution from wind turbines. When you have a completely system failure and within 9 hours of the event governors and former governors are publicly blaming wind turbines for the lot of it, that's 100% political. Everything about regulated utilities is political. Editorials assigning blame and offering solutions are 100% political. There's nothing "not ready" about wind. Wind makes around 20% of the electricity for Texas. Every single power plant has environmental considerations. I don't think wind turbines have disproportionate pollution to other plants. And this is coming from a turbomachinery engineer that HATES the subsidizing of wind and the effect it has both on the grid and on my personal wallet. But you gotta have intellectual honesty. |
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