I know it’s in vogue to criticize “the Texas grid,” but there was only one incident that involved the actual grid supply and demand, which was the snowstorm in 2021. The only other outages that have happened were localized outages due to mechanical damage to power lines, eg from ice or hurricane-force winds. How long it’s taken Centerpoint Energy to get all those lines back up is certainly something to criticize, but it also has nothing to do with the Texas grid." And there have been no rolling blackouts due to heat, despite the implication in that Vice headline
Comment on California Grid Breezes Through Heat Wave due to Renewables, Batteries
Rentlar@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Compare that to Texas, whose grid works great unless it’s too hot or too cold or too stormy in the case of Beryl.
protist@mander.xyz 4 months ago
Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
I’m a little annoyed that my client apparently didn’t show me this post yesterday.
I’m nominally familiar with utility scale issues and it appears the fault here lie with the lack of regulatory environment in Texas.
There’s a process called “Line Clearing” where utilities send crews to cut down branches or sometimes whole trees if they pose a risk to power lines. Line clearing mostly impacts local circuits. Circuits are neighborhood level, and those power lines are lower than other kinds of power lines. Schedules for line clearing are often set with regulatory bodies, but can be left to utilities to set.Because line clearing means that crews have to traverse every power line on the grid, it’s often not something that utilities want to do. If given a say in the regulatory process or left to their own devices, they’ll opt for as long of a span between line clearings as possible.
What’s that mean, now that I’ve written so much? Well, it means that when big storms come through, the failure point isn’t necessarily the transmission lines or the power stations. It’s the local lines, disconnecting individual houses, streets, or entire neighborhoods. Instead of a few fixes here and there to get the grid back up, it’s a lot of fixes everywhere, which is time consuming and expensive. It means that ‘everyday’ failures are more common as trees can rot out and randomly collapse.
And, sure - those everyday fixes are relatively easy to deal with individually, but in a situation where a lot of those issues accumulate at once, they can cause other, more serious issues on the grid, as well as creating a massive backlog to work through.It’s sort of a foundational regulatory problem that seems to not have been addressed. A lot of midwestern states can bear wind storms with minimal problems - because their grid standards are written with lots of wet snow in mind.
Which is all to say, it’s supply, demand, delivery, and all the trappings therein, too.
I think on those grounds, criticism of Texas’ grid stands.reddig33@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Neighborhood batteries and rooftop solar panels would have prevented most of the Beryl outages. You know, like what California is doing.
PunnyName@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Just know, hurricanes aren’t just stormy, they have what’s known as a storm surge. The lower pressure effectively sucks the water up multiple feet, causing a rise in sea level. So you now how a body of water with a whole new height moving toward and over everything.
Kind of how a tsunami isn’t just a little extra water moving inland, it’s a whole section of the ocean being displaced…and with the path of least resistance being over land, you’re gonna have a bad time.
pennomi@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I was here for it - Beryl took out the whole city, even the parts far, far away from the effects of the storm surge. One would expect chaos on the coast, but not inland. 70-90mph gusts are common enough (multiple times per year) that the grid should be resilient to them, but it simply isn’t. Blatant infrastructure mismanagement.
protist@mander.xyz 4 months ago
My family’s there too, and I grew up there, and I couldn’t disagree more. “70-90mph gusts” cause serious damage to trees, homes, and power lines, but they’re highly localized, and so the damage is easy to repair. Houston just experienced 60-70mph sustained winds with gusts up to 90 and a number of tornadoes across the entire metro for like 2+ hours, which caused destruction several orders of magnitude greater than what you’re comparing it to. All that is to say Centerpoint Energy definitely got caught with their pants down, which had the outage dragging on for a lot of their customers
pennomi@lemmy.world 4 months ago
No doubt it should be considered extreme weather. But since things like this happen with regularity, the infrastructure should be engineered to handle it.
It’s likely cheaper for them to ignore the problem, however.
valek879@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
So you’re saying they’re too stormy.
PunnyName@lemmy.world 4 months ago
And surge-y