I'm already reading inanities about hotcoldwetdry (is there anything it can't do?) to explain why global warming results in arctic freezes. My favorite from today is the notion that the polar air heated up so much that it became unstable and drifted down into the southern U.S. I think it's also possible it was depressed by seeing so much white supremacy. But as my husband asks, if objective reason is racist, can the science ever really be settled any more?
Anyway, at the risk of reinforcing white supremacy, here are some helpful graphics showing not only the drastic impacts on different power sources in the Texas deep-freeze, but also the contemporaneous mix of power sources in other grids around the nation. In Texas, wind power fell off a cliff, so natural gas took up a lot of the slack. However, even gas took a hit from the freeze (pipelines malfunctioned), and demand took off like a rocket. Presto: blackouts.
I'm trying to figure out why rolling blackouts became fixed patches of power that stayed on for days next to power that stayed off for days. At first I read vague statements about how it was too hard to roll the outages when certain areas had been off too long. Today I found a new statement about how it was too hard to roll the outages when the percentage of outage was too great across the system. No explanations so far, and neither of those statements is obvious. Is there a technical explanation that's too difficult to wheel out for the public?
Also, this morning there are renewed calls to force Texas to stop evading FERC jurisdiction by maintaining its own power grid, ERCOT. I popped over to the FERC site to see what fresh ideas they had to offer, and found this.
22 comments:
I'm just a layman but I'm wondering if the part of the problem with rolling blackouts is that this sort of the opposite situation we're usually in since the failure is primarily a lack of generating capacity versus more demand than can be accommodated by existing infrastructure. The percentage of outage comment seems to point in that direction. The problem might come from not being able to keep parts of the high-voltage grid 'live' due to to lack of generation. Also wondering if the cold is interfering with some of the grid control systems, as well.
I'm already reading inanities about hotcoldwetdry (is there anything it can't do?)...
Yes, the NYT's morning email today was called "Frigid weather and global warming" and begins with this laughing-it-off exchange:
Question: Let’s start with a simple question on some people’s minds — How do you think about record-low temperatures hammering parts of the U.S. at the same time that we’re experiencing global warming?
John Schwartz: It does sound counterintuitive! Those who deny climate science love to declare that there’s no such thing as climate change whenever the weather turns cold. But weather remains variable, and cold weather in winter still happens, even if the overall warming trend means that winters are getting milder.
I had thought, though, that we had abandoned 'global warming' for 'climate change' as a model. In any case, though, the really important thing is that the model is always right. We should steer our lives by these models generated by our experts, even if the warming model ends up enduring colder weather; and even if the Weather Channel couldn't tell you what next month's weather would be, we should act as if we know how the weather shall be in thirty years.
Short answer: We're not experiencing Global Warming.
Extra little pieces of the puzzle, from reading a Fox4 article:
ONCOR, one of the power distribution companies, says that they've been having transformer failures in some areas where power is 'on', because the power demand is unprecedented -- more than 100° summer days.
An ONCOR statement also said that there are areas that they avoid including in rolling blackouts, because they contain essential services or facilities such as hospital and emergency-communications facilities. So if you happen to live near such an essential location, you may -- by chance -- be on a circuit that won't be intentionally disconnected.
I'm suspecting that some of the perception that the blackouts aren't 'rolling' is that there are some neighborhoods where the power can't come back on for technical reasons like transformer failures, and these may be within sight of other neighborhoods that were never blacked out because of critical facilities within them.
Douglas2
My favorite from today is the notion that the polar air heated up so much that it became unstable and drifted down into the southern U.S.
Well, of course. Warm air has more energy in it than cold air, so the warm air is heavier. Since it's heavier, it falls on down the globe from top to bottom; isn't it obvious? And, as any jr high "science" student knows from his [garbled] lessons, as stuff falls, it loses potential energy, and so as the air loses its energy it gets really quite frightfully cold.
QEFD.
Eric Hines
"It does seem counterintuitive, doesn't it?" Why . . . yes. Yes it does.
I can almost hear VP Harris cackling "It was a DEBATE. It was literally a DEBATE!" We may be in the stage where the point is to see how absurd a statement you can get the average citizen to pretend to believe, in order to humiliate him and undermine his instinct to push back on any darn thing.
Douglas--there may be a discernable pattern of people lucky enough to live near a hospital or police station. I'd like to think it was still possible to rotate power through isolated purely residential sectors; some of my neighbors lost power for 105 hours, whereas my street never went off.
Discernible? Spell-check likes discernable but I don't buy it.
Texan99,
Sorry to interrupt, but where did you get those graphs? I've been poking around on the EIA site but couldn't find them or a way to generate them.
Thanks.
Oh, shoot. I'm not sure I can remember now. Probably from Instapundit, I'll poke around.
It was from Powerline's "The Geek in Pictures": https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/02/the-geek-in-pictures-cold-facts-edition.php
This past Nov, we lost power because of a powerful thunderstorm, as well as our TV and internet router. We were out for about 4 days. The storm also hit multiple transformers.
It's pretty disconcerting to see your neighbor a half a mile away who still has power and you don't have any. Thankfully, we have a generator and gas to run it. Not everyone is so lucky.
I've been searching the EIA site referenced in the Powerline graphs, though, and I can't find this information. Lots of lots of stuff there, https://www.eia.gov/
I'm wondering about the water pumps...they are electrical, and I don't know how many of them have generator backup. Lose water, and you also lose fire-fighting capability.
Water towers provide some gravity-fed backup, but IIRC it's typically only about a day's worth at most.
The rhetorical change from "global warming" to "Climate Change" is required for two reasons: (1) we go for years at a time without increases in average global temperatures ('warming') and (2) when in years when it IS warming, temperatures aren't increasing all over. Sometimes the Arctic warms while the Antarctic cools, or vice versa. Sometimes Russia is hotter and Africa colder. Etc.
The problem is that the basic science IS all about WARMING. Carbon Dioxide floats in the troposphere like a blanket, traps heat, and bounces it downwards. Supposedly. If so, the overall climate system is getting more energy. There is nothing in the models about the polar vortex or more (or fewer) clouds or hurricanes or even, really, sea level changes. Warm skies. That's all the science tells us. Everything else is a rhetorical scenario. Most of which scenarios (like seas rising to flood the expressways of New York) have already failed to materialize by the dates specified by our atmospheric physicists.
Saying so makes one a "denier", of course.
Ok, found where the graph came from. Will need to select various options to get what you want but I was able to replicate.
https://www.eia.gov/beta/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/US48/US48
David Foster -
I've been having this conversation (about backup generation for electric pumps and reserve capacity of water towers) with a Texan friend over facebook.
I'm in USDA Zone 3b where days at a time with lows below -20 can't be considered unusual, and discovered for myself in trying to engineer a whole-house backup generation system that I need to have a propane tank that is way oversized for my needs just to get adequate vapor-pressure to operate the generator at such cold temperatures.
Then there is also the problem that if the propane is not 100% moisture-free, when the pressure drop through the regulator causes the temperature of the propane to drop, the water condenses at that point and blocks the gas flow.
My surmise (and it is only that) is that many of the failed water systems in Texas have backup generation powered by natural gas or by propane. In the case of the natural gas ones, they suffer the same low-pressure issue from shortage as the rest of the gas grid, and also suffer from freezing of moisture content at the regulator.
In the case of propane ones, they may not have sized the tank to generate enough vapor-pressure at the current outdoor ambient temperature, and also may have frozen regulator.
Yes, we're pretty casual about all those aspects, and haven't been caught short yet--because for us a hair-on-fire freeze is 18 degrees. We had more trouble with the generator over-heating when we ran it for two weeks straight after our last hurricane. We've just never had to deal with all the special problems of really severe cold.
On the other hand, we have a 20,000-gallon cistern because we looked at 50 years of data about droughts.
I read this week that generators in places like Minnesota are, for all intents and purposes, indoor affairs. We put things outside because it's easier and we can usually get away with it.
This Power Magazine article is unusually good: https://www.powermag.com/ercot-signaling-some-relief-as-power-crisis-stretches-into-fourth-day/
White supremacy - when three inches of cold, white stuff paralyzes a major southern city, because no one knows how to drive in snow on hills. *coughAtlantacough* ;)
LittleRed1
It's the flip side of people dying in droves in Europe in what we'd think of as a very moderate warm spell. People have so little idea of what's dangerous in conditions they don't often see.
How could anyone, for that matter, possibly "freeze to death" in a Galveston home with a functioning roof and walls, in 20- or even 10-degree weather? You're dry and out of the wind; surely you have some extra clothing or blankets to wrap up in, especially since it needn't be high-tech enough to combat rain or wind. Uncomfortable, definitely, but it needn't be deadly. In fact, the one TV report I saw started with hysteria about an ME ordering the dreaded refrigerated vans for "20-50 bodies," which led to even more hysterical reports of "20 frozen to death in Galveston," but the actual interview featured a woman who found her brother dead of apparently unknown causes when she returned to the home they shared. There was contradictory talk of whether he had pre-existing health conditions, but from the picture, he was no spring chicken. No cause of death had yet been determined. Not everyone who succumbs to a stroke was killed, whether in Galveston or the U.S. Capital building.
Thank you for the links. I was without electricity for 3.5 days, and Internet for 5 days, so I came late to the conversation.
I had no problem with the cold. House temperatures were not far from what I experienced growing up in New England. I still had warm wool sweaters- and I finally found an opportunity to use them!
In communication with family outside of TX, I mentioned that wind doesn't work in cold weather, so that's the primary reason TX had energy outage. A "progressive" cousin in NYC- and an engineer to boot- replied that wind energy wasn't the problem.
From your links and working from spreadsheets:
TX: Feb 15-19 daily average of electricity generated compared to Jan 15-Feb daily average of electricity generated.
Gas up 86%
Coal down 11%
Nuclear down 16%
Wind down 59%
Wind production is back up. Gas performed well as backup during the cold spell.
My conclusion is that it was a weather anomaly. I haven't checked, but scuttlebutt is one in 60 years.. Keep going with wind and others. I recall electricity blackouts in New England due to bad weather. Roll with the punches.
https://www.eia.gov/opendata/qb.php?category=3390118
I'm trying to figure out why rolling blackouts became fixed patches of power that stayed on for days next to power that stayed off for days.
Reasons will vary. My power went off Monday afternoon. By Wednesday, power got restored to 100-200' away. My power didn't come on until Friday, early in the morning. The reason is that my power- and a narrow strip along a nearby street- was connected to a
transformer that got destroyed during the storm. Precisely when it went out, I have no idea.
I would have loved a rolling blackout. Even one hour a day of power.
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