Guest “Ice Station Dallas Report” by David Middleton
Dallas Ice Station: February 15, 2021, 0630
Current weather conditions: 6 °F (-14 °C), 34 °F (10 °C) under “normal”. About 4 to 6 inches of snow on the ground. It has been below freezing almost continuously in Dallas since February 10th. It started snowing yesterday afternoon and around 1800 it looked like this:
AC / DC’s Thunderstruck seemed like the perfect music for this video.
Last night our garden became a real winter wonderland …
Winter wonderland, as in how much damage this will do to our landscaping.
Here in Dallas there are not often long routes with freezing temperatures. The last time we had a similar route in icy weather was in 1983 … Five years before Al Gore invented global warming (we could take advantage of some now). Most of the pools here have anti-freeze programs that run the pump when temperatures are below ~ 34 ° C °F. Ours has been running since Wednesday, apart from a break of around 1 hour on Saturday afternoon.
Here’s what it looked like at 6:00 a.m. this morning:
Notice that a layer of ice has formed around much of the perimeter. In addition to our beautiful weather, we can now look forward to:
Hundreds of thousands of Texans without electricity because ERCOT declares the highest level of energy emergency, “rotating failures” begin
The state’s power grid will be overwhelmed when people try to keep their homes heated.
Author: Jennifer Prohov (WFAA), Jason Whitely
Published: 10:21 CST February 14, 2021
Updated: 4:49 am CST February 15, 2021
Updated at 4:45 am with updates from officials about the outages.
The Texas Electric Reliability Council, the agency that oversees the state’s power grid, has declared the state of Texas its highest level of energy emergency and has begun rolling out outages across the state.
The explanation is due to lower power supplies and high demand due to extremely low temperatures during the winter storm that hit the state.
Rotating outages are in progress and will begin at 1:25 am on Monday. Residents should expect to lose power for 15 to 45 minutes, although times can vary. Oncor advises Texans that multiple failure rotations may occur.
[…]
Texas already saw record-breaking electricity demand before temperatures dropped even further on Sunday evening, ERCOT officials said.
At the same time, there are above-average power outages in the grid, caused by frozen wind turbines and a limited supply of natural gas. Individuals use it to heat their own homes.
About half of the state’s wind turbine capacity (25,000 megawatts) is currently not generating electricity because many turbines are frozen. However, the turbines are still producing more electricity than normally expected.
“The wind is more important than we expect for the winter season,” added Woodfin.
The turbines that are running are producing more than normal, he continued. It is uncertain whether there are any plans to de-ice the turbines in parts of west and northwest Texas, ERCOT said.
[…]
WFAA
Good / bad news: The wind turbines that are not frozen are generating more electricity than expected (it was fracky wind!), However, half of our wind turbines are frozen and not working. With record demand for heating and power generation at home also constraining natural gas supplies, if there are no plans to de-ice the frozen turbines, they may want to come up with some plans.
Imagine if Donald Trump hadn’t been president from 2017 to 2020, Texas would have more wind power, less (if any) coal power, and more solar power. Imagine how much more damage the Harris-Biden Dominion’s revived war on fossil fuels could do!
The day after tomorrow – The Dallas Edition is prima facie evidence that coal and nuclear power are essential components of grid stability.
- Natural gas is great, probably the best fuel for generating electricity. But the sudden onset of extremely cold weather can lead to supply disruptions.
- Wind works pretty well in Texas, and the working wind turbines have performed better than expected for the past few days.
- Solar … don’t make me laugh.
While our previous episode of blackouts, Super Bowl week 2011, was due in part to cold weather that hampered the operation of some coal-fired power plants, the problems were eerily similar.
This is what (likely) caused the rolling blackouts
From Kate Galbraith, the Texas Tribune
February 3, 2011
[…]
Initially, some coal-fired power plants appear to have gone out of service due to cold weather issues and taken a large portion of the power off the grid. Luminant, a major power generation company, has confirmed that its two coal units at its Oak Grove plant in Robertson County have failed, as have two units at the Milam County coal-fired power plant. “We are at various stages of commissioning and operating this group,” Allan Koenig, a Luminant spokesperson, said via email. Three of these four units have only been commissioned in recent years. Fraser, chairman of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources, noted that there are new technologies to control emissions and said a question is how those technologies have dealt with the cold.
[…]
Natural gas plants were hastily switched on to make up for the failures in the coal-fired power plants. According to Fraser, a number of blackouts impacted some natural gas compression stations. So without electricity, they couldn’t pump gas, which resulted in some gas-fired power plants going offline. In addition, the rules for “restricting” natural gas – which receives gas for the first time when gas supplies are scarce – were last revised in 1972, according to Fraser. Some power plants run the risk of losing power. A large minority of Texans heat their homes with gas in addition to the needs of the power plants, so there was an extremely high demand for gas in freezing weather.
“We didn’t have enough gasoline available,” said Fraser. An affidavit filed yesterday with the Railroad Commission by Trip Doggett, the head of ERCOT, the Texas network operator, stated: “Certain gas suppliers may restrict natural gas for electricity suppliers or customers of electricity generation.” Koenig of Luminant acknowledged that “one of our gas facilities was restricted due to restrictions on the supply of natural gas ”.
Wind generators also seemed to have problems, Fraser said; He had received reports that some turbines had shut down due to problems with ice on the blades. “The wind was blowing yesterday, but I’m not sure the wind generation was available because they had ice issues,” he said. (At a wind farm in Iberdrola, near Corpus Christi, which the Tribune visited yesterday, most turbines were rotating steadily in response to the operator’s request for maximum production. However, plant operator Daniel Pitts said that some Machines had problems because the cold air had affected the nitrogen in the hydraulic system that supports the operation of the turbines.) Dottie Roark, a spokeswoman for ERCOT, the network operator, said about 3500-4000 megawatts of wind between 5 and 8 a.m. yesterday morning were available (the state has installed around 10,000 megawatts of wind.
[…]
CBS-DFW
When natural gas supplies are scarce, home heating takes precedence … The funny thing is we have a natural gas oven, stove, and water heater, but none of them work when the power is off. Must have been an aggie engineer … 😉
It is now 9:40 am and the sun is actually shining and the temperature is now in the double digits … 11 °FF
Be continued…
4.9
7th
be right
Item rating
Like this:
Loading…
Comments are closed.