Today’s rolling blackouts in Texas has prompted our readers to share their conspiracy theories on what’s really behind the emergency:
“We either lost a lot more than 7,000 megawatts or there’s market manipulation ala Enron style,” Pat wrote in on the FuelFix comments.
“There sould NOT be any electrical shortages here right now, unless we are selling our Texas Power off to other states!!!” writes Trey (somewhat breathlessly).
Others speculate that natural gas for power plants has been curtailed because of demand for the gas elsewhere.
At the heart of the problem, however, is simply that many Texas power plants broke down because they’re not designed to handle lengthy cold spells.
Allan Koenig, director of communications for Dallas-based Luminant, the state’s largest power plant operator, said wet weather followed by more than a day of very cold weather can lead to exposed pipes and other equipment at Texas power plants freezing. Unlike states like Illinois or New York where lengthy cold weather is expected, Texas power plants don’t have all of their equipment insulated or protected in the same way.
Indeed Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst told the Associated Press that water pipes at two plants, Luminant’s Oak Grove coal-fired plant in Robertson County and Austin Energy’s natural gas fired Sand Hill plant, forced the operators to shut down.
This problem isn’t specific to natural gas or coal fired plants, but natural gas plants may be subject to another cold weather peril: during extreme cold the small amounts of water that are in pipeline natural gas may separate and freeze in valves.
It appears most of the power plant outages were in the northern part of the state where the cold weather hit more than day before it arrived in the Houston area.
NRG Energy, the state’s second-largest power plant operator with most of its units near Houston, reported all of its major plants remained online, and at at one point this morning it was handling up to 15.5 percent of the state’s total load.
Koenig said Luminant, which has most of its plants in North Texas, had a larger number of plants offline due to the cold.
if the north texas power plants shutdown because of freezing weather, then they were not designed correctly or the operators don’t know how to operate them properly. what a sorry excuse. you might as well say that lines are down due to ice. now that is more believable.
I call B.S. Last year around this time I had ICE on my house for three or four days! There were no blackouts then, why now?
no, the owners cut back on maintenance to save a buck.
“At the heart of the problem, however, is simply that many Texas power plants broke down because they’re not designed to handle lengthy cold spells.”
——-
Agreed, sorry excuse. We knew of this freeze for how long? Someone at the plant could have said “hey, we are going to have a problem with this…”
-
Naw, my theory is best – cut maintenance to save money.
We saw the same thing with Ike. Power poles broken at the bottom, lines down because branches were not trimmed, Etc. If it’s not true about the tree trimming then why were tree trimmers in the entire Houston area for 3 weeks after the power was restored?
“lengthy cold spell”… umm, didn’t this cold weather just start two days ago? doesn’t seem to “lengthy” for our power stations to start failing. hopefully this highlights some serious need for us to revamp our power infrastructure. maybe someone should tell the engineers that weather has a tendency to be unpredictable…
I agree with rvblueagle. This is a classic example of building something as cheap as you possibly can and not taking in to account the risks if something might happen, like very cold or extended cold weather. But even if they did build these plants the way they should have been built, they would have just passed on the cost to the customer by charging higher rates. It’s a no win for the consumer! Typical example of greed!
Oh brother, here comes the “We should just screw the rest the state” comments.
This is a maintenance failure – it’s that simple. I’ve seen a lot of plants in the course of my career and adequate freeze protection and/or enclosures are part of the design. Now, some companies do a better job at maintaining them than others. Actually, that’s a rather samll part of the problem. The REAL problem is that ERCOT’s market is designed to work like this! I’m serious! In other words, they don’t have a formal, centralized capacity market like others pretty much do – one that differentiates plants with better availability factors that others and one designed to meet the needs of days like today. Look at the weather in the Midwest (MISO and PJM) or the East (NYISO, Nepool, and PJM) where it is MUCH, MUCH worse and they aren’t having similiar problems. Hell, their real-time prices are not as high, either. That’s just better planning and better designed markets, nothing else.
classic example of companies in TX are run by bunch monkeys!
Thanks for this article. The power companies and ERCOT should consider including this sort of detail when they announce rolling blackouts.
Since Texas has been a zonal market there has never been an incentive to replace and improve infrastructure. They recently moved to a nodal market which should allow pricing to better reflect demands which should cause companies to want to build new plants.
BTW… Texas has DC convertors at the state borders and essentially on a grid of its own. We can’t ship power or receive power from other states.
North Texas gets cold snaps like this at least once a year. The plants should have been designed with this in mind. I can understand it happening here, where it hardly ever gets in the 20s for a long period of time, but not in north Texas. Simple example of the CYA principle at work.
If this is the new normal just wait until summer.
Like this is the first time it ever got cold in Texas? Please. If that was the best excuse I could come up with for this giant screw-up, I’d just keep my mouth shut.
“There sould NOT be any electrical shortages here right now, unless we are selling our Texas Power off to other states!!!” writes Trey (somewhat breathlessly).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
After thinking it through, and remembering California and Washington state’s power supply agreement a few years back (2002?), I have come to the conclusion that this is more than likely the reason behind the outages. We had seven days of extreme cold last year, and there were no outages. This scenerio is making more and more sense the longer I think about it.
TXU closed 4 natural gas fired plants in Mclennan County last year with the last one closing Oct 1. Why? If we need electricity then why shut these plants dow. Makes no sense except for a rate increase
Well must everyone has gas heathers, not electric, so why is is blackouts, we did not have them during the summer when everyone uses the air conditioners and those are all electric, or al least must of them, there is no excuse for it, they know we always have some real cold days this is not new or a surprise, they just take advantage of the consumer, expecially when they start so early when everyone is getting ready for work,some schools had to close and there is no excuse at all.
Like others here, my crap detector is on overload. We’ve had cold snaps in past years. We saw this one coming. Either they are to cheap/incompetent to operate their plants properly or they are selling off the power elsewhere. People need to be fired.
That makes sense. Oh wait, didn’t it get cold LAST YEAR????
And to our power companies — .!. Yeah, that’s the right finger.
Since the rolling blackouts have ended, why are 693409 Center Point customers with out power as of 3:15 ???
Nonsense. North Texas and Panhandle power plant design should handle 3-5 days (72-120 hours) of temperatures below freezing. Bad design, cheap construction, and penny-pinching maintenance is the problem.
What a sorry excuse. How’s deregulation working out for you repubs? Gonna have to raise the rates to fix the problem…you know because they don’t have enough money as it is…sheesh. Very Enron-Esque of these crooks.
Major fail. They should have anticipated this if they knew the grid couldn’t handle it and told us it was coming. So much for living in a developed country.
I’m having a hard time buying this explanation too. I can believe that plants in the southern part of the state might be unprepared, but the northern part? I’ve lived in an area that’s close to north Texas, and you know that every couple of decades or so, you’ll have one of those winters where it gets VERY VERY cold. Whoever designed those things is an idiot.
Maybe it’s not a bad thing to expose our antiquated and ill-equipped energy systems. Might we expect to see expeditious federal support for the expansion of the STP nuclear facility? (p.s. – I’m still not buying the failure excuses. I’d get fired for such ineptness.)
Today’s rolling blackouts in Texas has prompted our readers to share their conspiracy theories on what’s really behind the emergency:
====
Come on!
This is a no-brainer,,,,,,
It’s obviously Global Warming (scuse me,,,,,”Climate Change”,,,, and Al Gore……
Scam, enron style. I hate this state can’t wait to get a transfer.
I remember when we had a deep freeze over the Christmas holidays. All the water pumping stations froze and there was only a trickle of tap water.
I work for a company that has several thousand mw’s of generation in Texas. Last night, we had more plant trips than I can ever remember. All these trips were a result of frozen instrumentation lines which froze for a variety of reasons.
My neighbor just explained to me that they have wind mills in reserve, but it takes three days for the wind mills to get fully up and running. Since this was a predicted weather occurance, it sounds to me like someone somewhere sold the excess electricity without letting those that are responsible for getting the reserves up and running. I hope that the state of Texas does a full investigation. Someone somewhere is greedy and making a profit off of the expense the citizens and businesses of Texas. The businesses alone are losing millions of dollars because of this snafu.
If extreme cold is also a sign of global warming as all the “scientists” claim, I’d think that the powers that be, who run the actual power plants, would take measures to protect them from the basic elements. Sounds like we have people with no common sense manning the store.
So, explain the blackouts during the summer. Did the plants break down because they’re not designed to handle Texas’s heat?
Gee, maybe they should watch the nightly news and take the the advice of the weather person during freezing temperatures, protect your pets, plants & pipes(3 P’s)!!!
I call BS on this also. Are the engery companies really trying to tell us that we use more energy for cold weather than we do during the summer heat waves??!! Please people, consumers are not that stupid.
Just another example of why deregulation is a failure. Higher prices and less dependable. My wife is from the Philippines…their electric service is more reliable than ours. Deregulation was sold to us as way to have lower rates and more investment to assure us of plentiful dependable power. It was in fact, just a way for the greed of a few companies and people to be satisfied with extra billions in their pockets. With, no concerns for the needs of the public.
Where is all our wind power?
Good grief, it’s inconvenient enough having rolling power outages without adding all the bile and ignorance on top. A couple facts:
1. Texas doesn’t export electricity to other states. Texas is actually on its own grid and is electrically independent of the rest of the US except for a couple very narrow ties.
2. No, there are no windmills on standby. I’m assuming that was a serious comment. The wind either blows or it doesn’t; in either case it’s only a tiny fraction of our generation needs.
3. Yes, it has been cold before and we still had power. It’s not the cold, it’s the ice. Stuff breaks. Sheesh.
4. This has nothing to do with deregulation. The retail electricity market deregulated, not the Transmission and Distribution (the wires). Centerpoint operates as a regulated company, as does Luminent in north Texas.
5. Get a grip, people.
There have also been power plant closings over the past 12 months. And with some power companies going to “green” energy, there isn’t enough electricity being produced from that switch. Kinda hard for solar panels to absorb the sun’s rays when it’s cloudy. Last summer there was the problem in N. TX with windfarms not producing enough elec. during the middle of summer due to the lack of wind, and Houstonians saw some of their supply going north.
I would be curious how often this type of “pipe freezing problem” occurred when plants were owned by regulated entities, not profit-based. This isn’t a 100-year freeze or anything — it’s not as if temps in the teens and 20′s are completely out of the question during the winter in Texas.
WTF? A plant as huge as those can not handle 1 day below freezing? LMAO! And no, it’s not been a “lengthy cold spell.”. It’s been ONE day! Plants of any kind need to handle temps below freezing. I could understand if we had -20 degrees outside… ok… but mid 20′s for one day? That’s like saying you need to get out of your house because your house won’t make it through a night of 25 degrees…lol It’s a building for pete’s sake. Grids or not… It’s not a grid from 1911. They just want an excuse to raise the rates. Period.
Allen, Regarding your point #5, it is not the transmission lines and wires that were the problem here. It’s the plants themselves. Plants were owned/operated previously by regulated entities for the most part. I think you are proving the point that you wish to disprove.
What about those of who heat our homes and water with natural gas? Our systems don’t use much electricity but we’re penalized along with everyone else.
Come on, can’t all you slackers and whiners do better than these weak conspiracy theories? It was the aliens who landed at Roswell who caused all this. They control the government, and the weather. They did this just to personally inconvenience YOU and you alone! As for deregulation causing all this – can you prove that things would be better if there was no deregulation? Can you prove for a fact that energy costs would be lower now if rates were regulated? Look at how everything else run by the government works? Would you like you power system run by postal workers? Most likely, if we had regulation the blackouts today would have been much worse because we would not have nearly the same capacity of power generation online because no power plants would have been built. Despite what some politicians promise – there is no free ride. Maybe you can hope that the government would pay for your power usage by taxing someone else, but as the saying goes “socialism is great until they run out of someone else’s money to give out”
Yes, because insulating pipes is so difficult and so expensive ::rolls eyes:: Either the construction of the plants was done so on the cheap that they cannot survive a day of cold temperatures, or this IS a pile of BS.
And since ERCOT claims to have targeted certain facilities NOT to lose power (i.e., hospitals, water treatment facilities etc, which is totally understandable) why not tell folks yesterday they were planning these rolling blackouts? The whole story doesn’t make sense. And why are the water treatment plant pipes adequately insulated?
It’s been cold here in South Texas before. In 1994 we had a hellacious ice storm in February. Power was out due to ice causing power lines to snap. But there were no rolling blackouts. Why, 17 years later, is this suddenly a problem? People need some answers that make sense.
I don’t believe the rat bas____s! We have had cold weather before, North Texas has frozen before and they have never cut off our power. Sounds like the people in the energy sector are going backwards instead of forwards.
Water droplets in natural gas freezing?? Puhleeze! Mole sieves in gas plants remove all moisture down to minus 35 degrees dew-point, quite a bit colder than anything Texas will see.
THEY ARE FOLLOWING THAT SAME OLD LEAD STARTED BY THE 1973 GAS CRISIS !!!
SCARE THE MASSES TO RAISE THE PRICES.
What happened to our 20% reserve margin in Texas? Also, what about all those industrial customers who get low volume rates in return for being the first to be cut off in an emergency? Did any of those customers lose power? There needs to be an investigation of this by the Texas PUC, but I’m not holding my breath.
“Lengthy cold spells”? Its been cold all of 2 days! It is all old, rundown poorly maintained power plants. But nothing will be done, cuz they is unregulated!
In DFW, the temp this morning was reported to be around 5F (and had been below freezing for over 24 hours). News reports this morning said that plumbers were reporting “very few” calls for frozen pipes or weather related plumbing problems. Let me tell ya something… homes in the DFW area ARE NOT built for extended or extremely cold weather, yet hardly anyone’s pipes were having problems… but we’re to believe that large scale Power Plants were kicked off line because of the cold causing water issues??? B ESS!!
I’m still waiting for just one example of the “efficiency and low energy costs” that was ‘supposed to be’ delivered when our energy infrastructure was handed over to profit oriented businesses.
Give an “energy company” the choice of profits or what’s best for the consumer, and they’ll choose profits everytime.
PS: Allen – practice what you preach… and stop adding to the “ignorance”
I love it how everyone here is suddenly an expert on the electrical requirements of the state of Texas.
And whats with all the comments about “corporate greed”… I dont know a single endevor in the history of all mankind that didnt go to the lowest bidder. Last I checked, every company (even the one you work for)is in to make a profit.
Why I’m even wasted my time reading these comments, or even going to the touble of posting a reply to these ridiculous, uneducated comments posted by a bunch of arm-chair expert I’ll never know. Maybe become deep at heart I’m a masocist, nope I think it’s becuase I’d like to pass on a little education, a little nugget of knowledge from me to you.
First off folks it’s a low of 23 degrees out, 23! When is the last time any of you arm-chairs out there felt like going outside and doing any work when it was 23 degrees? Prolly never from the piss poor belly aching I’ve read in all the comments. Here’s a secert neither do mechincal things, i.e. power plants, tranmission lines, transformers, you know bulk of these types of things make up our power grid.
Allen up there has it right, it’s not that it hasn’t been this cold before, it’s never gone from 70 freaking degree 3 days ago to 23~! and the whole state is below freezing. The plants were dropping like flys, they lost more than 10% of the generation over night. The reason for the brown outs.
Know lets talk about why your power went off for an hour or two… More ppl using power then they could generate… remember the 7,000 mws of lost gen? Well the way they fix that is to turn a few ppls lights off. They do this because if they don’t they could loss the whole thing. That is a black out! Rather than be out of power for an hour or 3 think days… like 2 or 3 days. Ask the folks in the midwest how bad power outages are due to icing. It’s bad, like imagine being stuck in your house for 3 days with no power, and it’s not a blamey 23 degrees there either, it freaking -10~!
And Allen is alson right 7000 mws did not go to another state, ‘tard there are only like 800 mws of tranmission lines to transfer power out of the state, so unless these ‘enron-ites’ built out 6200 mws transfer line limit out there overnight. Everything is on the up and up, just weather folks.
If you want your power to stay on, you need to move a home on the same circuit as a hospital or a critcal care unit… Other than that, you’re not that damn special, get over yourself and be glad you only missed ‘Kardashains’ and ‘Jersey Shore’ for one hour.
It’s food for thought people… It could be worst, we could all be protesting for regime change like they are in Egypt just so they can afford the luxuries like a few loafs of bread. Get over yourself and please please don’t breed, this world is already full up on stupid people with self entitlement issues.
-smarterthantheaveragebear
I agree will Allen. Most of y’all don’t know what you’re talking about. I understand the frustration, no one (especially ERCOT) enjoys forcing utility companies to implement rolling blackouts. But here are the facts about the events from today, which could very easily be replicated tomorrow.
On the demand-side, the morning ramp-up at 6 a.m. was larger than was forecast, because all parts of the state were in a deep freeze as people woke up to shower and make breakfast. That is an anomaly. Dallas freezes, Midland freezes, but Houston and Victoria don’t. All major load zones froze last night.
On the supply-side, as the article mentions, there were mechanical failures caused by ice that either made the power plants trip off-line or not even start up in the first place during the morning ramp-up. Next, ERCOT calls on the emergency conservation programs (demand response) and they did so at 5:50 a.m. But it was obviously not enough.
The final issue is that with so many natural gas plants scheduled in ERCOT (especially peaker plants which kick on in early morning and late afternoon) any disruption in natural gas supply renders the plants useless. Again, due to freezing temperatures, many nat gas compressor stations were not functioning properly. So pipelines get clogged, pressure plunges, and the power plants can’t turn on.
Within this massive context, there are power lines down in north Texas, which causes grid frequency to fluctuate. And power plants won’t put electricity onto lines that aren’t stable, for the health and safety of the utility workers repairing the downed lines. Deregulation has nothing to do with this. The zonal-to-nodal transition in ERCOT has nothing to do with this. Wind farms have nothing to do with this. It was a freakish weather event. Thank your lucky stars you’re not in Chicago or New York tonight!
EXPLANATION: They needed the power to run the Stargate for some extra off world missions and they simply became advantageous when the temperature dropped, lol. No really, what is concerning to us as the tax and bill payers is that somebody obviously overreacted or make a big mistake. The scary thing is the snow-job of an explanation they are providing the general public. It does not make sense that temperatures drop into the mid to lower 20′s, then all of suddenly rolling blackouts are needed? They knew the front was coming, they had time to prepare. Something does not sound right. I can imagine some individual, who does not know what they are doing, pushing the panic button, then continuing to grandstand on their decision for the sake of their personal ego. Lord help us if we really do get a severe winter blast one day!
“It’s food for thought people… It could be worst, we could all be protesting for regime change like they are in Egypt just so they can afford the luxuries like a few loafs of bread. Get over yourself and please please don’t breed, this world is already full up on stupid people with self entitlement issues.”
–
You have very low expectations. This doesn’t surprise me. There was a time when Americans would be embarrassed and ashamed of this major breakdown in basic infrastructure, but today, it’s okay for us to have to power reliability of a 3rd world country. As long as we can all worship the free market. Meanwhile, communist China is kicking our butts.
I feel so free… so DEREGULATED…. so much more secure now that the Free Market has the situation well in hand.
Now excuse me while I go hand pump my Grandma’s air until the power comes back on.
Did the power lines in the grid become brittle in the cold? Haven’t we had weather this cold before with no issues? Don’t we use our ACs as much during the entire summer as we are using our heaters now? What many of us cannot understand is “why now?” Why is this such a surprise? Why are all the government and utility people not being pro-active about anything. Everyone else in every company has a contingency plan. Why not our government or our utilitie companies. We certainly pay enough for the priviledge. This is not a 3rd world country YET. We’ve worked hard to be entitled and we want to keep it that way. Keep voting in dictator dems and we’ll be competing with egypt in no time. History repeats itself.
smarterthantheaveragebear wrote:
it’s not that it hasn’t been this cold before, it’s never gone from 70 freaking degree 3 days ago to 23~! and the whole state is below freezing. The plants were dropping like flys, they lost more than 10% of the generation over night. The reason for the brown outs.
————————-
You may be smarter than the average bear, but methinks you don’t have much of a memory. The nature of Arctic cold fronts is to drop the temps dramatically within a very short period. I’ve lived in Texas for decades, long enough to see drying laundry come close to freezing on the line (back when people dried their clothes on lines, a “green” technique though we didn’t realize it). I’ve seen these cold fronts come through scores of times, just like this. And the temps the other night did not drop to 23 immediately or everywhere. Or stay there. I imagine there are several reasons for the problem. But it suggests a vulnerable and not very robust method of generation and distribution. Back in the mid-80s, when it dropped into the single digits in south Texas, we did not lose power. Obviously there are many more people here now than then, which is one more reason to completely re-evaluate our energy situation. We are living in the last century in so many respects, including transportation and power. For all his flaws, Obama has tried to prod people into looking toward the future. By and large, we refuse. We are stuck in the mid-20th century, which historians like to call the American Century with good reason, but in too many ways we are losing our edge. Roads are inadequate and falling apart, rail and local public transportation is grotesquely underdeveloped; power plants and water plants and sewer plants and all sorts of basic infrastructure are woefully behind the times or overburdened; conservation is a vague goal that is not given the serious treatment it deserves in so many ways; water demands will rise to outstrip supplies; cities and states don’t have the resources to take care of the basic demand for services. As this power issue shows, so many things need serious attention. So what do we do? Play on our iPads.
The Deregulation Chickens are coming home to roost.
If you’re blacked out, I’m sorry for you. But I hope you’ll remember this the next time you go to the polls and vote for the free marketing deregulators. No one else in the nation is having this problem right now. And their weather is way worse than ours. Connect the dots.
I sure hope everyone has power tonight so you can get back to watching Survivor and American Idol. All the evil conspirators are trying to make your lives miserable. Power should be free and endlessly available. And Internet access too. Nothing ever breaks and this unusually cold weather was caused by Rick Perry. And you should win the lotto every week.
A few points of information for all the Electrical Engineering P.H.Ds who now think they completely know how the power grid works.
1-There are meterologist calling this storm the worst storm that has produced the most snow and ice they have seen in 50 years.
2- Texas is not the only place where there have been power grid problems (example- there are 100k+ homes in Ohio that do not have power right now as you folks do reading online and this article AND will not for a couple of days.)
3- Losing 7000MWS of generation in a matter of hours is like having New York City completely drop off the power grid. That is HUGE problem that there isnt a backup for no mater how many back up reserves anyone has. Most of the generation was lost in the north part of the state. The northern part of physical load is around 19500MWs (thats MEGAWATTS for you E.E PHD types, an average size home uses about 1MW a month). So if my calculation works right that is a little less than 36% of the generation out in an area. To have rolling blackouts with this happening to the grid where folks are without lights for a few hours is not only amazing, but for the grid operators to keep the grid from collasping is a miracle.
Prepared or not,Texas is not used to this kind of whether, Northern states are and they are having issues. If you dont believe me, keep reading other stories about the other parts of the country. If you guys do less complaining and more reading, maybe, just maybe, you people will learn something.
Sounds like the Obama “Infrastructure” government challenge is a reality in Texas. I’m sure no one will heed the warning, because we are so in Love with our pitch-man & resident ventriloquist, Mr. Know-It-All” Governor Perry.
So, are these dumb utilities going to be penalized for f**king up?? Yeah, sure….
Not sure why we had the rolling blackouts today as the Houston metropolitian area and surrounding counties, WE DO NOT receive cole fired electric power from the northern plants. Our service is natrual gas fired electric power therefore thats why we pay twice the electic bills in the summer verses about 1/2 that amount from the coal fired electric plants.
now that customers have been cut off because the power plants have insufficient insulation this winter to avoid freeze ups and tripping offline, how long do you think its going to take the idiots running these quasi-monopolies to install some more insulation? this isn’t rocket science, just short sighted accounting.
how’s that de-regulation thingy working for ya? ;)
JB,
Here are some questions for you:
Is it acceptable to lose 7,000MW of power generation in a matter of hours? Did the power companies in Ohio lose this much power generation during their MUCH worse BLIZZARD that resulted in only 100,000 folks without power? Why were we not warned that Texas power companies were so woefully unprepared for a winter event; why did we have to be surprised by it? Why is the Republican Lieutenant Governor ticked off? Should any changes be made so that Texas is better prepared when the next winter event occurs? Will this require government intervention in power production and/or distribution?
Since you are obviously the smartest guy posting, I will appreciate your answers.
After reading all the comments from all the maintenance, operations and design bench warmers it amazes me that Texas ever has problems delivering electricity. You all are surely underemployed.
In case you nimrods don’t get it, Texas’ electric load is the highest in the summer — not the winter. And the crappy maintenance decisions that you have so astutely identified are, in some part, the result of the decisions that every utility in the world makes to take plants out of service when loads are expected to be less than peak. Some of those decisions take large plants out of service for months — not days.
Of course some of you are clairvoyant and know just how cold it may get coincident with planned maintenance. In 1989 we had rolling outages the day it reached a record 10 degrees (high temp) along the coast. For you engineering experts, maybe you can find the textbook or reference book which suggests that facilities around Houston be designed for that temperature. Those books exist, but they do not suggest 10 degrees as the ambient design temperature for Houston — although they could. But it costs more money to build and operate plants designed for the lower temperature. Heck, maybe one of you geniuses could suggest the appropriate design parameters for the system in Texas — one that takes record coincident temperatures, storms, fuel curtailments and environmental regulators telling you when you cannot operate certain existing plants.
And next spring when your utility companies submit plans for the capital investments and changes in maintenance and operating procedures maybe you will show up and say “Right On. We’d love to pay even more for our electricity.”
Frankly, I’d rather take my chances at missing an episode or two of Oprah every ten years or so.
For all of you power suplier employees defending your employers (probably writing this comments on a company computer)How come Entergy just east of you are not having these problems. Is it because as a regulated company they have to answer to someone(FERC)other than Rick Perry’s PUC if there is a blackout? Thisjust goes to prove what a failure electric utility de-reg has been. For the record I worked 42 years in thepower generation industry. If one of my plants failed like the ones Dewhurst was talking about, someone would be looking for a new job!
“Texas power plants don’t have all of their equipment insulated or protected in the same way.”
SO, TEXAS IS UNPREPARED. SURPRISE SURPRISE!
Saying the power plants were not designed for cold weather is saying that they were designed to provide power “most of the time.” Do we not pay for – and should we not expect – power ALL THE TIME? It DOES snow in Houston! It CAN get pretty darn cold here! It does this EVERY FEW YEARS! It really doesn’t take a genius to realize this.
@mrdon:
According to the ERCOT PR folks, 7,000 megawatts of generating capacity were lost “in a matter of hours.” Please explain how these long term decisions that you describe to take plants out of service is relevant.
Also, it costs more to build plants that function during cold weather. So why is it that folks in Texas pay more for electricity than folks in, say, Massachusetts? And, obviously, the question is: how much more would it cost to build the plants to endure our current weather conditions? I don’t know, but since you are clearly well versed in these things, can you please tell me?
And, regarding the rolling blackouts causing folks to miss Oprah. Here’s another scenario. This morning up on FM 2920 there was a 1/2 mile long traffic jam due to out-of-service traffic lights. (I am told that these jams also occurred on FM1960, Cypresswood, and Louetta up here.) At the back of the traffic jam was an ambulance, siren wailing. The poor victim in the ambulance might have not only missed the Today show, but he might also have died. Tough luck for him, I guess. We all know that the power companies have our best interests at heart, not their bottom lines.
Power generating companies are not regulated under the Texas laws the Republican legislature has passed. The isn’t rocket science – just follow the money. As reported today “Weather-related unit outages caused hourly wholesale power prices in Texas to soar 60-fold to $3,000 per megawatt-hour, up from about $50 where they usually trade.” That means power companies can loose 10% of the generating capacity and still more than make up in high prices what is lost in the amount of electricity sold. Oops just an “accidental” freeze-up that I needed to make some profits out of this storm of opportunity.
You might not like deregulation, and that’s fine, but I have friends who work at one the coal plants that went offline today. And it was due to a transmission problem and not because of poor maintenance or lack of freeze protection. These guys are working all night in the blue black cold to try and get that unit back online for tomorrow morning. There are damn good people who work in this business and they don’t deserve getting some Enron bullsh*t wiped on them.
It’s the Revenge of California for 2000.
[Allan Koenig, director of communications for Dallas-based Luminant, the state’s largest power plant operator, said wet weather followed by more than a day of very cold weather can lead to exposed pipes and other equipment at Texas power plants freezing.]
Excuse me but, would’nt those pipes have to be 1 1/2 inch or smaller to even come close to freezing? If so, somethin’ smells here because there is no way a mega-generation plant can be shut down by such a small line. I’m startin’ to believe that ENRON theory. Bring on more nukes.
Why is no one blaming the EPA, cap and trade? Remember?
JB: “thats MEGAWATTS for you E.E PHD types, an average size home uses about 1MW a month)”
WTF? How does a home use a MegaWatt? Homes use energy; energy is measured in MegaWatt-hours.
How did this happen? I was under the impression that Texas had excess energy for any and all our needs and we could sell excess to and through the grid to those in real need. Surely ERCOT didn’t sell or move energy to other states without taking into consideration the needs of Texans first. Surely this wasn’t a ploy to build new power production plants. Surely the Texas House didn’t act in collusion with those members appointed to ERCOT to mastermind the impression that Texas needed more production plants. With the knowledgeable weather forecasters and computer imaging capabilities available we could not have been warned of this impending action? This action was never a possibility before de-regulation. Something stinks here! I think I’ll forward this to the investigators at Channels 13, 11 and 2 in Houston and a few others around the state to investigate.
Two things…
1) If your answers are right, that’s more disturbing than the conspiracy theories… seems like too many things about our nation are “breaking down” these days. Too much interest in pumping money to rich Wall Street criminals, and not enough revenue being put into maintaining our country’s infrastructure and vital services. These power companies should be less concerned with profits at a time when their plants can’t handle a couple days of what would be warm weather in Chicago.
2) Not convinced what’s said here IS the whole story. You present it like it’s all really simple, but have you gone to see for yourself that what you’re being told is really the problem? Or are you simply relaying what you heard from companies onto the page of your blog? It MAY be the whole story, but maybe you should present it is “this is what’s being said by company X” instead of “here’s what it is” … cause really, you don’t know.
Nonsense.
I like the comment about the Philippines having better power. My wife is from there as well. In areas outside of major cities, brownouts as they call them, are daily occurances. In the US we lose power for an hour and we think it’s the end of the world.
And, aparently, we all think we are power generation experts.
The fact that loads are higher in the summer is irrelevant. Summer peaking generators are shut down for the winter. They are definitely not designed to run during cold weather.
Is it too much to ask people to educate themselves before spouting off? Power generation is very complex. You guys might want to consider the possibility that you don’t know what you are talking about.
ERCOT claims a capacity of 75,000 megawatts in the summer
http://www.ercot.com/news/press_releases/2010/nr-05-12-10
so even with the missing 7000 megawatts the math isn’t adding up. 55000+7000<<750000…. There are a missing ~12000 megawatts of capacity. hmmm…
BS…
The energy companies in Texas own the PUC and government in Austin. Thats why we pay the highest rates in the country and get this kind of service. Follow the money.
From the article–Texas power plants don’t have all of their equipment insulated or protected in the same way . . .
——————-
Then one would have to ask why they didn’t listen to the weather reports or why they didn’t take them seriously. The REST of us–the ordinary citizens–wrapped our pipes, left a faucet slightly dripping, and PREPARED for what we knew was coming. ALL OF THE POWER PLANTS had the opportunity and the time to do the same thing. They chose to “Gomer Pyle” the situation, and citizens in Texas pay the price for their ineptitude.
California will not forget, let alone forgive, no matter how much Texas begs.
lil monte
Actually there were about 12,000 megawatts down for planned maintenance, which has to be scheduled with ERCOT weeks if not months in advance. This time of year its common.
Been in the power plant biz for 30 years. In 83 I was thawing out lines that had freeze protection on them that did not work. In 89 I was there doing the same thing. Today I worked from 6 am until 7:30 pm doing the same thing. Today was a popcorn f@rt compared to 89. It’s the money, it’s always been about the money to prepare for something that may or may not happen. This was entirely preventable. Mark my words, if we have another freeze like 89, as short as it was, we will all be in the dark and the deregulated state of Texas will get to test their black start system. That system was big doings right before Y2K, now it is an after thought.
Me thinks the end of all electric homes,additional electrical appliances is coming to a end.This calls for wood fire places and natural gas.Amen
Hey, the operators just believed Al Gore when he said there would be Warmenating. He didn’t say anything about Coldenating!
After all, he won the Nobel Prize….
If you believe this ERCOT and power plant story then I need to talk to you immediatly about some ocean front property I have in Arizona…….
They don’t make stupid like they used to. Who’d ever think North Texas would have a hard freeze? I’ve only lived in Texas 30 odd years and lived in Dallas for 10, but even I knew that. Psst. It get’s real hot in summer, too.
Shutdown the people who use electricity for heating, not those of us who have minimal electricity usage since we had the foresight to buy a house that also had natural gas. Since I have natural gas for my heating and I can even heat my house with NO electricity, it’s not the lack of heating that irritates me, but rather the potential damage that they do to my electrical equipment by shutting off the power abruptly. Well, that plus having to go reset all the clocks throughout the house multiple times each day because of their playing of games with the electrical supply.
Reality is, they TAKE your money when you pay your OVER PRICED BILL and INSTEAD of putting it BACK into the MAINTENANCE of their systems it goes to their POCKETS! There should be a way to SUE them for OUR loss due to THEIR NEGLECT and GREED!
Come on GOP’s you said you would creat jobs. Didn’t. Now the FREEZE. What are you going to do GOP’s? Nothing. The ‘FILTHY RICH’ are feeling it. Only the middle class and poor. You can count on this being the truth! Nuff Said.
There was a UFO siting the other day. Gub’ment said it wasn’t alien. Just swamp gas.
? Can you prove for a fact that energy costs would be lower now if rates were regulated? Look at how everything else run by the government works? Would you like you power system run by postal workers? Most likely, if we
>> austin is regulated and last I heard had lower rates.
>> I am not asking that postal employees run a power generating plant, the people there are just fine.
I would be interesting to know who much these companies re-invest in the capital equipment and plants. Is is own emergency maint. or do they say, we are bring plant x, down for a phased upgrade to make it a “better” plant?
I call BS too. I have been working as a pipe fitter in the Houston area for 10+ years, and we never leave an exposed pipe. I find it unbelievable that in north Texas, where it does snow and experience prolonged cold, they would be too cheap to do basic insulation and heat traces. If this is accurate, then the state needs to step in, because the irresponsibility of the companies is putting Texans in harms way.
Power plant operators dont know to wrap pipes? This sounds so stupid as to be unbelievable.
I am glad I have gas heat. I may not have lights, but I will be warm!
Parting shot- this feels like global warming to me!
A politically incorrect professor of mine said that one should never design for average conditions. His reason was that the average person has “one tit and one ball.” To not design power plants for the coldest probable condition was wrong.
The main culprit of these rolling blackouts is most likely a lack of re- investment in the equipment and infrastructure, by the power transmission companies and the generation companies. As Texans continue to pay higher and higher power rates, these companies put more to the bottom line to support higher corporate returns and pay the CEOs high pay, yet fail to do what most smart business people would do, improve the equipment which makes it all possible. It is just greed and ignorance by these companies and the consumer pays the price monetarily and in personal inconvenience.
Our state regulatory structure is designed to assist the Texas consumer but yet is continually courted, lavished with benefits and corrupted by the corporations, to negate any punishment by the very government agency who regulates them. If you disagree, try filing a complaint and see what result you get.
“Koenig said Luminant, which has most of its plants in North Texas, had a larger number of plants offline due to the cold.”
——————–
North Texas is no stranger to very cold weather, so why aren’t those plants prepared to withstand a few days of sub-freezing temps?
So… your claim is that the fact that Texas has 7,000MW wind generating is just a coincidence with the 7,000MW shortage when it gets cold? You’re trying to tell us that it isn’t that the wind power has failed like always and everywhere else? Instead you want us to believe that in Texas coal plants somehow stop burning in cold weather even though that isn’t a problem anywhere else on the planet.
Wow good thing they don’t have coal fired power in Wisconsin and Minnesota! Oh wait, Wind power caused rolling blackouts in Minnesota last winter.
If instead of litering the landscape with those windmill eyesores you had built a couple nice sized nuke plants you’d be warm and toasty right now and have a lot more money in your pocket.
Nuke…look at your bill next time. When you see 1000.00+ kW of usage in 1 month that equals 1MW+ of usage in a month. 1000 kw/h = 1MW/h of usage. If you dont know simple basic conversions, maybe you shouldnt post.
More power company BS. Robertson County is not in North Texas is is in fact much closer to Houston than Dallas. All this was was an excuse to test their new “Smart Grid” ability to shut us down any time they please. People need to understand that electricity is not like a radio signal that can be transmitted long distances. It has to be consumed near-by to the powerplants to control line losses, read “resistance turning into heat in the wires themselves”. There are literally hundreds of peaker powerplants scatterered all over Texas to handle power requirements during extreme need conditions, ie, hot, cold, or offline powerplants. So here we are again allowing a corporation, ERCOT, acting as a government agency, deciding who will have power and who won’t. How many dollars in damaged electrical equipment is there going to be? And finally, hundreds have studies have proven that shutting down you air conditioning or heating system does not save power, it actually causes more use of kilowatts due to the amount of “catch up” time…….this is why everyone needs to understand that what they are telling us is plain ole Texas BS!
I’ve worked at a dirt burner and a gas burner in N. Texas and N. Louisiana, and visited many other plants in East and NE Texas. The pipe and air lines are wrapped and heat traced (that’s an insulated and heated line for the engineering professionals that are griping).
Guys, can you also tell me when the last brand new dirt burner went on-line in Texas? It was in the late ’80s. Again for the pro’s – a power plant water or air line that is insulated first has an insulated resistor wrapped around it or laid along it, depending on pipe diameter; then the pipe is wrapped in a few inches of fiberglass insulation; followed by aluminum “lagging” or a shield which keeps the insulation dry.
Now, the breakers to the freeze protection should be turned off in the summer, but usually aren’t because in the grand scheme of powerplant operations it is a rather small vampirical power use.
In a 30 year old plant, there can be spots along, for example, a 30′ line that is for a pressure transducer which is read to control a critical point in the whole power production process. This 30′ line is 30 years old and has never given any problems, but this year, the vibration finally eat’s through the heat trace insulation and the heat grounds out and no longer works. It freezes, the pipe either shows too much pressure and trips the whole unit or the line ruptures and trips on low pressure.
It can be that simple – I’ve seen it happen. A thirty year old afterthought finally gives way.
I worked in a water treatment plant in the Houston area – freeze protection funding was dropped by the GM because Al Gore said it would never be needed again (seriously). It snowed, froze up dang near every air exposed sensor in the plant, froze the water in the air lines so we couldn’t control pneumatic valves (funding for air dryer maintenance was also reduced). We had four hours of fun before the air temps finally came back up above freezing.
These plants were designed and built for the climate. The maintenance crews are first rate men and women. As the plants age, there is less time for checking the voltage on heat trace that has worked for 25 years trouble free than there is fixing major components starting to break due to age.
It’s “putting out fires” that may have caused this.