It is so cold....

IK04 said:
Older houses built in Texas had their water pipes in the ceiling to keep the pipes warm, but then people began insulating their ceilings, so the pipes froze.

Newer homes like mine have no pipes at all and all water is conducted through copper tubing embedded in the concrete slab. The only water lines more than three feet above the slab are the shower heads. Even the outside water spigots are run up through an insulated interior wall...

Despite all this, I now have no running water because I live on a hill and the supply system can't get the water up to my neighborhood (for all the usual reasons).

I have been melting snow to have water for washing dishes, etc. and have several gallons available.

It's like camping! Fun! :frown2:
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We live in a 12 year old two story townhouse. Most of the water lines are in the foundation or between floors. I have no idea why they ran that one damn line through the attic above the garage!
 
Frostbite and no electricity lack of heat one week, and sweating wanting the air conditioner the next. Gotta love Texas....

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AggieMike88 said:
Frostbite and no electricity lack of heat one week, and sweating wanting the air conditioner the next. Gotta love Texas....

View attachment 94126
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Years ago a buddy and I were planning to enter an SCCA race in College Station. I asked a Dallas friend what to expect for weather. He told me, “Bring a swim suit, a down parka, rain gear, and sun screen. You’ll likely need ‘em all sometime during the weekend.”

He was right. We did.
 
Half Fast said:
Years ago a buddy and I were planning to enter an SCCA race in College Station. I asked a Dallas friend what to expect for weather. He told me, “Bring a swim suit, a down parka, rain gear, and sun screen. You’ll likely need ‘em all sometime during the weekend.”

He was right. We did.
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Here in Michigan we call that July.
 
AggieMike88 said:
We will persevere.... but I think we Texans need to start hiring you frozen northers as experts on how to prepare and deal with such weather.
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Let's trust the science. Hold on - Economics REALLY is a science:

 
EdFred said:
Not even that, mathematically.
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IEEE 754, bit 0 is the sign bit. So if exponent and fraction are both zero, then the sign bit indicates -0 or +0.
But that's for floating point numbers. Integers are even more fun. In a computer, infinity-1 is a finite number.
 
murphey said:
IEEE 754, bit 0 is the sign bit. So if exponent and fraction are both zero, then the sign bit indicates -0 or +0.
But that's for floating point numbers. Integers are even more fun. In a computer, infinity-1 is a finite number.
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But it’s a dry -0.


(A couple days ago)

0C63060C-C434-45D9-8712-01337FECAE9E.png
 
Texas is far away from me, but here's the BBC (outside the U.S. partisan political fray) on what failed in the power system:
Wind turbines froze, as well as vital equipment at gas wells and in the nuclear industry.

But because gas and other non-renewable energies contribute far more to the grid than wind power, particularly in winter, these shortages had a far greater impact on the system.

So when critics pointed to a loss of nearly half of Texas's wind-energy capacity as a result of frozen turbines, they failed to point out double that amount was being lost from gas and other non-renewable supplies such as coal and nuclear.
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So essentially, nothing in Texas was designed to work in the cold and snow. That makes sense somewhere that rarely gets either. I guess there's no political ammo here for either fossil-fuel advocates or green-energy advocates, because it just all broke. Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-56085733
 
I lost power Monday at 2:30am and still don’t have it back on yet. All of the times I watched Survivorman and thought I could do that... I was wrong!
 
David Megginson said:
Texas is far away from me, but here's the BBC (outside the U.S. partisan political fray) on what failed in the power system:

So essentially, nothing in Texas was designed to work in the cold and snow. That makes sense somewhere that rarely gets either. I guess there's no political ammo here for either fossil-fuel advocates or green-energy advocates, because it just all broke. Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-56085733
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I saw some math on that. Half of the wind turbines froze up and stopped. Much less than half the fossil-fuelled plants failed, and those that did failed because winterization was never thought necessary in Texas. And the solar panels were all obscured by snow, as is common in winter, just when they're needed the most.
 
David Megginson said:
Texas is far away from me, but here's the BBC (outside the U.S. partisan political fray) on what failed in the power system:

So essentially, nothing in Texas was designed to work in the cold and snow. That makes sense somewhere that rarely gets either. I guess there's no political ammo here for either fossil-fuel advocates or green-energy advocates, because it just all broke. Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-56085733
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Even more of a fun fact: something like 6K Megawatts of coal-powered plants were retired over the past decade, and replaced with roughly that amount of wind/solar/green energy. Meanwhile, energy demand went up 9K Mw in that same time period due to population increases as well as general power hungry consumers. So, demand went up which put it closer and closer to capacity, and the one type of power plant that is much less susceptible to winter weather (coal) was eliminated in exchange for the "green energy" solutions. That coal power might have kept their heads above water for a few days, instead they traded it for the wind farms that couldn't produce 1/6th of their normal rated capacity during winter and low-wind scenarios. Not to mention some internal failures when the system operators began inadvertently tripping facilities offline when voltages were dropping too fast.
 
AlleyCat67 said:
Free markets would dictate more wind and solar since they are becoming the least expensive source for much of the country.
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Nonsense. They rely on government subsidies and efforts by those in power to increase the cost of fossil fuels so alternatives are more competitive. We are in the process of giving up energy independence and national security to satisfy political agendas, and the country will then be again at the mercy of unstable governments that can dictate the price of oil.
 
aterry1067 said:
Just checking, we are all well aware that there are wind farms in Antarctica, right? I mean, I know Texas is cold right now, but...



https://www.meridianenergy.co.nz/who-we-are/our-power-stations/wind/ross-island
https://www.antarctica.gov.au/antar...s-and-operations/renewable-energy/wind-power/
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wind-turbines-antarctica/
https://www.southpolestation.com/trivia/90s/turbine.html
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There's cold, and then there's cold. Texas wasn't cold enough to get just snow; it got ice, which iced up the blades and probably the hubs, preventing pitch changes. Antarctica will be really cold and really dry most of the time, so icing isn't a hassle. I would think that the cold would make more trouble inside the nacelle, gelling oils and greases and so on. A lot of electronics don't work below -40, either.

There was a famous ice storm in Ontario and Quebec in 1998. Powerlines got loaded up with ice and pulled their towers down, leaving millions without power. In one Quebec city, the mayor got the bright idea of using a railroad locomotive as an emergency generator for some essential-services buildings. The train crews deliberately derailed one and drove it down a city street and connected it to the buildings.
https://steemit.com/history/@kiligi...rt-5-postscript-what-happened-in-my-home-town
 
3393RP said:
Nonsense. They rely on government subsidies and efforts by those in power to increase the cost of fossil fuels so alternatives are more competitive. We are in the process of giving up energy independence and national security to satisfy political agendas, and the country will then be again at the mercy of unstable governments that can dictate the price of oil.
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You think we’re going to have to buy our sunshine from overseas?
 
AlleyCat67 said:
You think we’re going to have to buy our sunshine from overseas?
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The real problem is the lack of understanding of the limitations of wind and solar. It takes huge areas of solar panels to generate useful power, and they'll make max power ONLY on bright, cloudless days when the panels are completely clear of ice or snow or dirt and are directly facing the sun and when the sun is directly overhead, meaning minimum atmospheric absorption of the solar radiation. The rest of the time they're way below 100% capacity, and of course at night they're no good at all.

Turbines have max wind limits and must shut down when the wind is too strong. When the wind is weaker they can't generate max power; in fact, most are only generating 30-35% of nameplate capacity, on average, even in ideal wind territory. And high-pressure weather systems mean little wind, and extremes of temperatures right when we need that power.

Neither of these things come anywhere close to the outputs of fossil-fuelled plants or hydroelectric dams. It would take, for instance, 1700 1.5-MW turbines to replace the 2800 MW Revelstoke dam in my home province of BC. And that's ONLY when the wind is at an ideal speed. Just imagine the amount of forest that would need to be cut down, and the roads and powerline rights-of-way that would need to be bulldozed to accommodate all those things. And they'd all need to be on mountaintops; the valleys kill the winds.

Someone has done the math on the areas required for enough of these "green" sources to replace all US fossil-fuelled generation. It's a huge area, and who wants it next door?

Sadly, the citizens of western nations are going to have to learn all this the hard way. It's anyone who knows anything about electricity that is skeptical. Elon Musk just said that we would need to double power capacity if we all go to electric cars. BC Hydro says that 15 more dams would be needed to power an all-electric vehicle fleet in BC; "which valleys would you lie flooded?" they asked.

Physics is hard. Facts hurt.
 
Dan Thomas said:
The real problem is the lack of understanding of the limitations of wind and solar....
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Yup. Intermittent and/or variable generation is unsuitable for base load. And the more intermittent and/or variable generation is part of the grid, the more thermal is needed for base load as as base demand increases.
 
Dan Thomas said:
There's cold, and then there's cold. Texas wasn't cold enough to get just snow; it got ice, which iced up the blades and probably the hubs, preventing pitch changes. Antarctica will be really cold and really dry most of the time, so icing isn't a hassle. I would think that the cold would make more trouble inside the nacelle, gelling oils and greases and so on. A lot of electronics don't work below -40, either.

There was a famous ice storm in Ontario and Quebec in 1998. Powerlines got loaded up with ice and pulled their towers down, leaving millions without power. In one Quebec city, the mayor got the bright idea of using a railroad locomotive as an emergency generator for some essential-services buildings. The train crews deliberately derailed one and drove it down a city street and connected it to the buildings.
https://steemit.com/history/@kiligi...rt-5-postscript-what-happened-in-my-home-town
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Thanks! That is some interesting reading. I remember reading about generator ships providing emer power to port cities during WWII. After trying to find what I was reading, it appears that off-shore power plants are becoming a thing. Who knew? I also remember support boats being plugged in to the LHD I was on a couple times, providing what I assumed to be power and water treatment.

https://www.navyhistory.org/2014/03...hip-to-shore-power-for-humanitarian-services/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powership
https://www.floatingpowerplant.com/
https://www.foronuclear.org/en/updates/in-depth/what-is-a-floating-nuclear-power-plant/



The ice makes a lot more sense to freezing moving equipment. But, there are wind farms all over the world, in many places with harsher weather such as Norway, Alaska, Sweden, etc. Those places see cold, ice, snow, and rain all the time and they seem to be doing OK. I understand hindsight is 20/20 though, but maybe they could begin to winterize their power grid (or completely rethink their strategy) since these "once in a lifetime" storms are happening on a fairly regular basis. ERCOT has a lot to answer for and should be held responsible.

https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/texas/winter-storms-tx/
 
David Megginson said:
Texas is far away from me, but here's the BBC (outside the U.S. partisan political fray) on what failed in the power system:

So essentially, nothing in Texas was designed to work in the cold and snow. That makes sense somewhere that rarely gets either. I guess there's no political ammo here for either fossil-fuel advocates or green-energy advocates, because it just all broke. Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-56085733
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It's exactly like an aeroplane. Try to operate outside the design envelope (including the thermal range of the specified equipment & installation) and things happen (or don't happen) the way one might expect. Just a different variation of a smoking hole in the ground.

At least its a "home grown" problem with the potential for domestic solutions to be implemented...unlike say medical PPE and prescription drugs, which has been all but entirely outsourced to our "strategic partner" China, as we discovered to our dismay last year.

aterry1067 said:
...ERCOT has a lot to answer for and should be held responsible...
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I suspect it will be difficult to make a case that Texas should spend the money to winterize wind turbines, solar farms and petroleum production facilities for an event that may not happen again for a very long time. Are the rate payers willing to foot the very considerable bill?

One option that might be worth looking at is to install distributed LNG liquifaction and storage capacity with standby gas generation at multiple locations throughout the region. When you're dealing with a cryogenic liquid energy supply at -260 deg F a mere -15 deg day is no problem. ;)
(to be serious, these are common on gas systems in regions where the gas supply comes in from a long distance pipeline, and specifically installed to deal with public emergencies when the piped gas supply might be interrupted. On the west coast one the scenarios is earthquake interruptions to the main line gas system, for an example. It's probably something that would make economic sense and good policy - especially given potential hurricane public emergency issues in those seasons when the Canadians have put away their Polar Vortex weapons of mass destruction).
 
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aterry1067 said:
Thanks! That is some interesting reading. I remember reading about generator ships providing emer power to port cities during WWII. After trying to find what I was reading, it appears that off-shore power plants are becoming a thing. Who knew? I also remember support boats being plugged in to the LHD I was on a couple times, providing what I assumed to be power and water treatment.

https://www.navyhistory.org/2014/03...hip-to-shore-power-for-humanitarian-services/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powership
https://www.floatingpowerplant.com/
https://www.foronuclear.org/en/updates/in-depth/what-is-a-floating-nuclear-power-plant/



The ice makes a lot more sense to freezing moving equipment. But, there are wind farms all over the world, in many places with harsher weather such as Norway, Alaska, Sweden, etc. Those places see cold, ice, snow, and rain all the time and they seem to be doing OK. I understand hindsight is 20/20 though, but maybe they could begin to winterize their power grid (or completely rethink their strategy) since these "once in a lifetime" storms are happening on a fairly regular basis. ERCOT has a lot to answer for and should be held responsible.

https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/texas/winter-storms-tx/
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It's a question of how much you want to overbuild (and overpay) to build wind turbines or coal/oil/gas facilities in a temperate climate like Texas to handle a once in 50 years cold-weather event. You need something to be able to keep running in extreme weather, but it would be expensive to build everything that way. The wind turbines freezing up wouldn't have mattered much if coal and hydrocarbon-based infrastructure (which supplies a much-bigger share of the power in Texas) hadn't also frozen up.

Yes, our wind turbines up here in Eastern Ontario keep spinning just fine at -30c or -40c, and our oil and gas pipelines keep flowing, and the oil pumps keep pumping, and our water pipes are buried deep enough not to freeze up, but we had to pay a lot of extra money to build them that way or we'd have massive system-wide failures several times every winter.

OTOH, we don't earthquake-proof our buildings the same way California does, or have a hurricane response in place (unlike in Florida, almost no one here would have plywood sitting around at home to board up their windows, for example).
 
Dan Thomas said:
I saw some math on that. Half of the wind turbines froze up and stopped. Much less than half the fossil-fuelled plants failed, and those that did failed because winterization was never thought necessary in Texas. And the solar panels were all obscured by snow, as is common in winter, just when they're needed the most.
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Yes, but since Texas relies more on fossil fuels than on wind or solar, the fossil-fuel failures had 2× the impact of the wind turbine failures, even though the percentage was lower.

Note that you can build wind turbines that operate reliably in extreme cold temperatures — they're all over Scandinavia, Canada, etc — but in Texas, why would anyone have paid the extra cost, especially when they're just a supplemental power source, not the primary one?
 
The last time I thought it couldn’t snow in South Texas.
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David Megginson said:
Note that you can build wind turbines that operate reliably in extreme cold temperatures — they're all over Scandinavia, Canada, etc — but in Texas, why would anyone have paid the extra cost, especially when they're just a supplemental power source, not the primary one?
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Except that they weren't supplemental during the cold snap. Energy demand, due to the cold, was so great that every bit of capacity was needed. Record demand, they said.

The Scandinavians and other northern countries use heated blades to prevent icing. https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottc...ze-de-icing-and-carbon-fiber/?sh=60de893c1f59
 
Dan Thomas said:
Except that they weren't supplemental during the cold snap. Energy demand, due to the cold, was so great that every bit of capacity was needed. Record demand, they said.
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Exactly, and they'll have to plan for that in the future. Either (a) pay more to winterise turbines, if they're meant to be the fallback, or (b) pay more to winterise conventional powerplants, if they're meant to be the fallback.

I was talking to a work colleague in the UK. She said that Heathrow can deice only one plane at a time, so on the rare occasions when there's (e.g.) wet snow or freezing drizzle, there are huge lineups, then a desperate race to taxi and take off before it wears off and you have to go back to the end of the line. Airports in the northern U.S. states and Canada that are much less busy than Heathrow have multiple deicing bays and move planes through quickly. Everyone optimises for different things.
 
Sun is out and we should be above freezing by noon. I have a 3pm flight with a student, fingers crossed! Just need the runways back open and the ice to melt off the planes.
 
SoonerAviator said:
Lol, seems like buying a $50K truck is a bit more expensive than $5K for a sizeable backup generator capable of running the basics.
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but the pickup has far more utility than a one-trick pony (a very valuable one-trick pony, but still....)

A reasonable question might be: what does that option add to the purchase price of the truck?
 
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