My buddy in Houston reports they've had 36 hours without power, water, or heat. Single digit temps overnight. He's a tough ol' boy, and when he says it's rough, I'm inclined to believe him.
Although I'm not in TX, this event is (further) confirmation I need to buy a generator for grid-down situations.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/mark...cid=entnewsntpOriginally Posted by MK11
"Rich," the Old Man said dreamily, "is a little whiskey to drink and some food to eat and a roof over your head and a fish pole and a boat and a gun and a dollar for a box of shells." Robert Ruark
Probably half of Houston has been without power since Monday morning, people are starting to lose water service at this point as well. I drove around last night and the neighborhoods are pitch black but everyone is sitting in their cars to stay warm an charge up phones. I'm thinking generator sales will increase after this little weather event.
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Seems to be working in France, even with the 'green initiative' their plan is to have 50% of their energy from nuclear power.
It also seems that there is a lot more electricity produced by nuclear energy in the US than I believed.
Nuclear Power in France
(Updated January 2021)
> France derives about 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy, due to a long-standing policy based on energy security. Government policy is to reduce this to 50% by 2035.
> France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity due to its very low cost of generation, and gains over €3 billion per year from this.
> The country has been very active in developing nuclear technology. Reactors and especially fuel products and services have been a significant export.
> About 17% of France's electricity is from recycled nuclear fuel.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/inform...-f/france.aspx
Factbox: A brief history of French nuclear accidents
(Reuters) - - A blast on Monday at an EDF nuclear waste treatment site in southern France, which killed one person but did not cause any leak of radioactive matter, took place amid rising concern over nuclear safety in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster.
France and other European nations are carrying out stress tests to assess the safety of their reactors and Germany has decided to close all its nuclear plants over the next decade, in a dramatic energy policy reversal.
The following is a brief history of recent incidents at French nuclear sites:
June 2011: A minor and fairly common incident that involved internal leakage at EDF’s Paluel 3 nuclear reactor was reported by French investigative website Mediapart, knocking 2 percent off EDF shares briefly.
November 2009: A fuel assembly rod got stuck in the pressure vessel at EDF’s Tricastin plant in southeast France, raising the risk of an accident. A similar incident took place in September 2008 in the same reactor during refueling operations. It took two months for engineers from EDF and French energy group Areva to stabilize the position of the rod and proceed with its unhooking and removal.
July 2008: Thirty cubic meters of a liquid containing natural uranium was accidentally poured on the ground and into a river at Areva’s Socatri site in southeastern France. The spillage happened while the tank was being cleaned at the complex, part of the Tricastin nuclear site, which houses four nuclear reactors. The pure uranium was much less dangerous than enriched uranium, but France’s ASN nuclear watchdog rebuked Areva for mishandling the accident.
December 1999: A massive storm provoked the partial flooding of some reactors at EDF’s Blayais plant in southwestern France. Many nuclear opponents said the flooding nearly caused a major catastrophe because it briefly cut off power at the plant.
March 1980: An accident at EDF’s Saint-Laurent nuclear reactor in central France caused two fuel rods to melt, seriously damaging the reactor and causing the most serious accident in France’s nuclear history, classified as level 4 on the International Nuclear Event Scale which runs from zero to 7.
Nuclear Power in the USA
(Updated January 2021)
The USA is the world's largest producer of nuclear power, accounting for more than 30% of worldwide nuclear generation of electricity.
The country's nuclear reactors produced 809 billion kWh in 2019, about 20% of total electrical output. (for the US)
Following a 30-year period in which few new reactors were built, it is expected that two more new units will come online soon after 2020, these resulting from 16 licence applications made since mid-2007 to build 24 new nuclear reactors.
Some states have liberalized wholesale electricity markets, which makes the financing of capital-intensive power projects difficult, and coupled with lower gas prices since 2009, have put the economic viability of some existing reactors and proposed projects in doubt.
The first zero-emission credit programmes have commenced, in New York, Illinois and New Jersey, with corresponding provision in Connecticut.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/inform...ear-power.aspx
US Nuclear Power Policy
(Updated August 2020)
While the USA has more private sector participation in the production of civilian nuclear power than any other nation, the government is heavily involved through safety and environmental regulations, R&D funding, and setting national energy goals.
Beginning in the late 1990s, US government policy and funding decisions have encouraged the development of greater civilian nuclear capacity.
The commitment to nuclear power as part of the USA's long-term energy strategy continues, but there has been a reduction in some nuclear programs as a result of greater emphasis on alternative sources of energy and the economics of gas-fired power.
The disposal and storage of high-level nuclear waste remains a major unresolved issue.
Over the last 30 years public opinion has steadily grown more positive towards nuclear energy.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/inform...er-policy.aspx
And, from a financial standpoint, that is the right answer. A sunk investment that may get used once every couple of years versus not spending the money; the decision is easy and entirely justifiable. Unfortunately unless there is regulation that requires the investment (and the price increases that go along with that investment), nothing will change.I saw a post on another board from a guy who claimed to be involved in Texas wind power generation, and he said that's exactly it. No one in Texas is going to spend extra money on turbines with all the fancy anti-freeze stuff that's used further north, because it would (almost) never be used. The problem is the "almost."
wind is only a small producer of power in TX, and ERCOT is fully aware that it has less output in winter months. The amount of generation capacity shed since MOnday far exceeds anything wind power produces on its own. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear are all going down
Ironically, the same thing happened back in 2011 during a cold spell. Read the 300+ page analysis if you're interested. Lack of interest in winterizing generating equipment and instrumentation is a major root cause ('cause Texas is hot I tell you what!).
https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/f...-11-report.pdf
Key Findings:
*The lack of any state, regional or Reliability Standards that directly require generators to perform winterization left winter-readiness dependent on plant or corporate choices. While Reliability Standard EOP-001 R.4 and R.5 refer to winterization as a consideration in emergency plans, these requirements apply only to balancing authorities, transmission owners, and transmission operators.
*Generators were generally reactive as opposed to being proactive in their approach to winterization and preparedness. The single largest problem during the cold weather event was the freezing of instrumentation and equipment. Many generators failed to adequately prepare for winter, including the following: failed or inadequate heat traces, missing or inadequate wind breaks, inadequate insulation and lagging (metal covering for insulation), failure to have or to maintain heating elements and heat lamps in instrument cabinets, failure to train operators and maintenance personnel on winter preparations, lack of fuel switching training and drills, and failure to ensure adequate fuel.Recommendations:
*Balancing Authorities, Reliability Coordinators, Transmission Operators and Generation Owner/Operators in ERCOT and in the southwest regions of WECC should consider preparation for the winter season as critical as preparation for the summer peak season. The large number of generating units that failed to start, tripped offline or had to be derated during the February event demonstrates that the generators did not adequately anticipate the full impact of the extended cold weather and high winds. While plant personnel and system operators, in the main, performed admirably during the event, more thorough preparation for cold weather could have prevented many of the weather-related outages...While the probability of a winter event in the predominantly summer peaking Southwest appears to be low, shedding load in the winter places lives and property at risk
Last edited by shootist26; 02-16-2021 at 07:00 PM.
Wrong place
A couple of family members, who shall not be publicly named, had given me some amount of grief, repeatedly, over time, for buying and keeping serious cold-weather sleeping bags, a couple of serious woobies, and my Patagonia parka. “If you don’t wear it or use it in a year, sell it or donate it to a local charity resale shop,” they said. They said I am a hoarder. Well, the They-Saids have now gone amazingly silent.
The nearby ”lifeboat” hotel room lost power, early during this weather/power crisis, but got it back, this morning at 0218, shortly before we lost power at home, this morning at 0402. Then, the hotel lost water pressure, due to a burst pipe. My wife, however, had kept the hotel bath tub filled, so, there is water for flushing the toilet. We have a burst pipe at home, which is dribbling into a non-vital area, and I am about to rig ip a light, and tackle that, with parts already on-hand.
It has not yet gotten bad enough to fire up a Honda gasoline generator. We gave battery packs that have sufficed, thus far. I will plug the fridge into one of the big battery packs, if we do not get power restored by the morning. (It will be an experiment.)
The neighbors have a new house, with a hard-wired generator, that kicks-on automatically. I am getting really tired of the noise.
This was not a Hurricane Ike, or a Hurricane Harvey. Life is easy, in February 2021. Life is good.
Retar’d LE. Kinesthetic dufus.
Don’t tread on volcanos!
This. This is sort of my lane, or, at least, I make money in the energy sector (oil and gas), and this appears to be a rare event that essentially knocked everything off-line. Nuclear reactors shut off, coal went down, oil/gas went down, wind went down. Blaming wind power alone is somewhat ridiculous overall in this case.
*I don't know this*, but I'd assume that the wind turbines in West Texas are not designed for these kind of temps and the operators are likely not using best practices for these weather conditions, which makes sense given how unlikely they are to face these conditions. There are wind turbines that operate in the Arctic Circle at -20ish degree temps, so it can be done
There is a good article on Bloomberg discussing this, but it is paywalled. Small screenshot:
Last edited by Kirk; 02-17-2021 at 12:19 AM.
2 is 1 and 1 is none.
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