Texas power prices briefly soar to $9,000/MWh as heat wave bakes state

Folks will buy air conditioners. You do realize that the more people that live somewhere where it gets hot and they like air conditioners that the power draw will only go up.

John

Yes, but if they're smart, they'll cool their house down in the early AM, when (1) the AC is efficient due to cooler outside air, and (2) the electricity is cheaper. Most houses will retain their coolness throughout the day, rising no more than 10-deg, so push it down to 68 or 70 in advance. If Texas were to give individual users demand pricing, they'd soon start adjusting their demand timing. End of problem.

Ummm-the utilities install the service feeds for these places, so that presumably they know exactly what loading to expect.

Clear your cookies and it will reset. I do that all the time on the PC. Can't figure out how to do it in Google News on my phone though. They feed a lot of Wash Post and NY Times articles and you only get 3 a month.

Damn! Reached the free limit on articles.

My point was that more people = higher energy consumption, so the 'record' energy use could have been predicted and as Winfield pointed out could have been mitigated somewhat by intelligent planning.

I suspect the electrical suppliers have not been building power plants to match the increased usage. I haven't researched this, it is simply an assumption on my part. I've seen it so many times before...

John :-#)#

Isn't the sun shining when it's that hot? So much for the solar miracle.....

ve.

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Trader4 hasn't noticed that while solar cells are now cheap Texan power gen eration firms are even cheaper, and haven't bought any (China is the big su pplier), let alone the power storage gear you need when you start getting l ots of power from erratic renewable sources.

The idea that regulators didn't know the load demands is ridiculous. What happened was their wind power, which normally runs at 20GW, a significant fraction of their total capacity, dropped to nearly zero during the recent weather.

Whoey Louie wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

It works. The hardware simply has to be put into place.

Something way over the head of a twerp like you. Maybe you could go sit out in the sun for a few days and dessicate yourself to prove to us all how the sun doesn't work.

You'll have to pay up before hand though for the cleanup of all the s*it flies you would attract.

Bill Sloman wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

IIRC, Texas has one or two(or more) of those big solar oven mirrors-to-tower-collector/heat exchanger types. No semiconductor solar panels in those.

erve.

e.....

eneration firms are even cheaper, and haven't bought any (China is the big supplier), let alone the power storage gear you need when you start getting lots of power from erratic renewable sources.

Texas has a huge amount of windpower generation capacity, about 20x solar, which was facilitated years ago by Perry subsidizing the transmission syste m with state money. The winds dropped out during the recent heat wave and t hey lost about 20GW, causing overload on the non-renewable generation capac ity. They probably had the backup capacity to cover it, but it couldn't rea ct fast enough. The really big suff takes hours to spin up, and when the lo ad fluctuates on the order of GW's per hour, they can't track it. They have so-called gas powered peaker plants that can track it, but capacity of tho se is limited to smaller fluctuations, few hundred MW.

erve.

e.....

eneration firms are even cheaper, and haven't bought any (China is the big supplier), let alone the power storage gear you need when you start getting lots of power from erratic renewable sources.

Wow, you mean free markets still work? And just about no utilities are buying "storage gear' stupid, for obvious reasons.

doesn't include any in Texas.

is in California and doesn't seem to have bothered with thermal storage - they burn gas every morning to melt the molten salt heat transfer medium.

Pretty much everybody else seems to have nice big insulated tanks to keep lots of hot molten salt around to generate power after dark.

The latest generation of solar cells seem to become cheap enough that some of the thermal solar systems have been ripped out and replaced with photovoltaic devices, but big insulated tanks of molten salt seem to be tolerably cheap energy storage systems.

eserve.

cle.....

generation firms are even cheaper, and haven't bought any (China is the bi g supplier), let alone the power storage gear you need when you start getti ng lots of power from erratic renewable sources.

About as well as usual. They don't react to new opportunities all that fast . For every entrepreneur that will pounce on a new opportunity to make more money, there seem to be about twenty complacent twits who think that busin ess as usual is just fine, and go out of their way to inconvenience unexpec ted=unfair competition.

You need a fairly high renewable component before you need it, and if the A ustralian experience in South Australia is anything to go by, the utility c ompanies ramp up the renewable content until they run into trouble, and onl y then buy the fast battery-based storage gear that can handle the rapid fl uctuations in generating capacity.

The obvious reason they wouldn't buy it would be stupidity (or at least ine rtia) and you'd know all about that.

Texas gets hurricanes too. Fun, mixing windmills and hurricanes.

erve.

e.....

eneration firms are even cheaper, and haven't bought any (China is the big supplier), let alone the power storage gear you need when you start getting lots of power from erratic renewable sources.

Texas is wind country, but there is not a correlation with the sun shining. They are too happy with oil to use solar. I guess Texas is like the UK, doomed.

e:

eserve.

ty...

t presumably they know exactly what loading to expect.

happened was their wind power, which normally runs at 20GW, a significant fraction of their total capacity, dropped to nearly zero during the recent weather.

Yeah, there is no correlation between wind and the sun shining. In fact, i t may be an inverse correlation. I'm sure Bill can tell us about that. My experience with ground level wind is that sunny days tend to be calmer, in particular toward the late afternoon when energy usage is peaking. But th at's ground level wind as felt by boomerangs. Don't know what's happening at 100 - 200 feet.

Certainly solar has some advantages and the correlation of power output wit h insolation is one of them.

There's the voice of ignorance and the voice of extreme ignorance.

The majority of energy storage is pumped hydro. In the US alone there are 23 GW of capacity. A single 3 GW facility has an energy capacity of 30 GWh.

Yeah, no one is buying "storage gear"...