Tesla is working on a Home battery device that makes your home a profit center.
Electricity you don’t need is sold back to the Grid for others to have.
Sci-Fi ? Maybe. But it is Elon in action.
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The concept has been around for a long time, 20 plus years or so. But when you say electricity you don’t need, I assume you mean electricity that you may be generating that you can sell into the grid for use such as off your home set of solar panels or if you had your own generator. Is that correct?
Selling back power is something we were talking about in engineering school in the 80s.
Some states have laws that require the utility to buy back that power. Others charge premiums if you have this sort of set up.
I don’t know, but I’m guessing Texas law doesn’t treat people who try to sell back to a utility very favorably. I could be wrong.
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Oh well forget about climate change and politics and just stay safe lol
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Texas is the grand home of energy marketing industry nation wide. Selling back energy into the system is being an energy marketer. You just ineed an interconnect agreement with your utility (e.g. CenterPoint). Since the Texas Gulf Coast is also one of the worlds largest petrochem infrastructures iin the world, the plants have been selling their excess energy production into the grid for over two decades.
I remember in the mid 80’s the entire state of Texas under frigid temps, freezing rains, ice all over, cars in ditches, buses going sideways. I do not remember millions of people out of power. More people have moved into Texas since then. There are frigid storms every eight to ten years. That is an historical given. It has nothing to do with global warming or global cooling. The ones that are suffering are a reminder to the “ones in charge” to have the common sense to anticipate such a storms) It might not happen for another 10 or even 15 years but it is a harsh reminder that authorities have to be prepared.
Prayers to the unfortunate ones.
Very different times. First, the Texas population was 56% in 1985 of what it is today. All pre-Energy deregulation and the delivery model is far more complex versus the heavily regulated utility owns it all using all fossil fuel energy sources that were far more efficient and more reliable.
I didn’t blame it on wind power alone, I stated the following in my above post, “Oh yeah, there are also several plants down for maintenance that won’t be able to come back on line in time to contribute power this week.” I also mentioned in a subsequent post that the regulators should have power plants schedule maintenance shutdowns to limit how many plants or how much power could be down at any one time. BTW, the peak usage this week did not come near the peak in summer months according to Channel 13 this afternoon.
As for deicing with helicopters; how long does it take a helicopter to de-ice a turbine and how much deicer can one hold? That doesn’t seem like a very efficient, or expedient, thing to do. Say, they could do a blade in 10 minutes, which I think is unlikely, it would take 30 minutes to do one windmill. There are over 10,700 wind turbines in Texas generating electricity. Take 30 minutes each and that is 222 helicopters working 24 hours a day to deice them in 24 hours, not taking time to refuel, reload, or give pilots a break for any reason. How much time and how many helicopters it would take would actually be much more since that would be an impossible schedule.
Regardless, I think too much blame is given to emissions from power plants for the greenhouse effect. Agriculture is a major factor because of how the huge farms have been overworking their land and boosting with fertilizer. There was a very revealing documentary about this and the below referenced article explains this concept which I had never heard about until very recently.
There are other articles about using agriculture techniques to reduce the greenhouse effect.
My family and I live in this world just as you do and I want us to have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink, just like you. I just think that before we rush into new ways, we need to do more to examine unintended consequences that happen all to often. Not enough research is given to these outcomes and the impact of them. For instance, what do we do with all of the discarded lithium batteries.
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You can winterize windmills, you don’t need helicopters every time it freezes. But that would be a funny picture if that happened. If Texas energy was under federal regulation most of the windmills and power plants that went off line would have been required to be winterized already. Also I heard that Texas only keeps half as much excess energy as the federal guidelines. Then throw in that we can’t borrow energy from other states and that is a big disaster that was waiting to happen. I have no problem with us having our own grid since we have way more than enough energy in the state, but it has to be for the reason of being a better provider for residents, not to save money for the state. We are an embarrassment right now and one side of the main stream media trying to spin it as green energy’s fault wont help and if people listen to that it will not change any of the real issues we have with our grid.
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Arizona has a Nuclear Power Plant west of Phoenix.
The plant currently sells almost 100% of its output to California.
If Arizona needs this electricity in the future it can cut off Cali and keep the juice.
Thus an entire Nuclear Plant is in reserve.
The growth of Texas requires power reserves. It requires far better thinking and planning.
There is no doubt that there is going to be a major post mortem and action plan out of this energy planning and operational cluster. A guarantee is going to require far more hot reserve generation capacity and that reserve capacity will be highly reliable and hydrocarbon based. It is and will be the most efficient and reliable source of energy for a very long time.
Texas has done a good job of growing its green but far less reliable wind and solar power capacity. Winterizing both will be mandated. Texas now has as much wind capacity as the next four wind producing states combined from Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, and including California. Texas is the leader by far in wind and also is quickly growing in solar and after 2020 is in 2nd place with solar capacity with many south eastern Atlantic states with California having a large solar lead. You just need to have the hot reserves capacity to back up these less reliable but cleaner energies.
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I have doubts there will be any real changes. We can circle back in a few months (although they are in session now so changes should/could come immediately). The whole point of us having our own grid is to not have to follow federal guidelines and regulations. If we actually make the changes to put us more in line with them, what is the reason for staying separate?
Also seems like winterizing the natural gas plants should actually be the priority. If we increased our reserve energy up near federal levels and didn’t lose any power plants, then the wind power lost would not have mattered at all. Would be interested in seeing the breakdown of what was saved going cheap on the windmills and where that money went, I read it can be up to 5% more expensive for the weather proof ones. A place like Iowa gets both extremes with colder/harsher winters and still very hot summers but doesn’t have issues. What are their costs vs ours? You would think common sense would have been used for at least the wind turbines in west Texas since that is one of the coldest parts of the state.
Texas regulators told ERCOT 3/4 of a decade ago that they needed to winterize wind assets but it wasn’t mandatory. I bet it will be now.
Unlike history when the focus has been on summer demand capacity the winter bad weather scenarios will be added to the hot list.
I can understand how this scenario happened, but it is unexcuseable to me is ERCOT not beung able at all on forecasting when generation will be back online. In the age of IoT and digital, not knowing the status of all gen assets on the grid is not acceptable. They haven’t communicated squat to date which comes across that they don’t know. For a reliability council that is a real bad look.
Saw this posted by a county judge:
"The problems stem from two main sources: A lack of winterization packages on generator plants and units and a lack of gas line modernization being required by state leadership.
Gas lines are regulated by the Railroad Commission of Texas. This is a three member commission elected statewide. Generators are regulated by Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC), which is a board appointed by Office of the Governor Greg Abbott. They, not the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), made the policy decision to not require the needed winterization and modernization standards required in the other 49 states."
“ERCOT’s job is to manage the load. The railroad commission’s job is to require a safe, efficient and effective gas delivery system that doesn’t freeze on its way to the gas plants. Most offline gas plants during this crisis have been off because the gas lines going to their plants are frozen.”
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But the same thing happened in 2011 with gas and coal plants going offline because of the ice storm. Maybe this one will have a bigger impact because the cold has stayed for longer and power out for longer, but that was a clear sign and Texas was given a list of things to do to make sure it didn’t happen again.
I don’t even remember the 2011 crisis and thats unusual. We must not have been impacted. But it appears they were given a list. Not sure how much was mandatory and how much wasn’t. From what I read many of the action items were not mandatory.
The more I read about it, it appears we lost up to and maybe over 30% of our gernatiion capacity and it went across the portfolio of generating types. It appears that the list will be long and ERCOT probably will be in for some major changes.
The PUC oversees ERCOT. I read another article that blamed ERCOT for not implementing what the regulators (PUC) requested implying some were manadatory and others were not, but it put the emphasis on ERCOT ensuring winterizing occured to the generation assets. It will all come out in the wash I guess.
If this is a real tweet and not a hack, boy…are they tone deaf.
https://twitter.com/ercot_iso/status/1361094672001732616?s=21
That is a dumb statement; it doesn’t matter if an appliance is plugged in if it is not turned on. Who comes up with this crap?
Been without power since Monday 3am. 