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New report suggests Texas' grid was 5 minutes from catastrophic failure:
The preliminary report has been put together by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in combination with the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit set up by utilities to help set standards and practices that keep the grid stable. The draft itself isn't being released at this point, but the two have posted a detailed presentation that describes the report's contents. A final version will be released in November.
The outline of February's grid problems is well understood: a severe cold snap raised demand at the same time as it caused failure of many of the generating sources in the area affected. The problems struck a number of states, but only Texas' ERCOT grid suffered severe failures. The neighboring Southwest Power Pool suffered five hours when its demand exceeded its generating capacity, But, because of its tight integration into neighboring grids, it was able to call upon 13 gigawatts of generation capacity in states farther east.
[...] The largest single cause of failures during the event was frozen equipment, which ranged from individual gauges and instruments on large plants to the icing up of wind turbine blades. This accounted for 44 percent of the failures of generating equipment. Mechanical failures accounted for another 20 percent. Between the two was a failure of fuel supplies, accounting for nearly a third of the failures. And "fuel supplies" here primarily means natural gas.
[...] But a major problem was loss of power to the gas distribution and supply system. Apparently, Texas grid operators had taken no steps to identify natural gas facilities and prioritize power delivery to them when starting the rolling blackouts. "Most natural gas production and processing facilities surveyed were not identified as critical load or otherwise protected from load shedding," the report indicates.
Previously:
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/02/15/2347241
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday September 27 2021, @05:28PM (1 child)
I've been meaning to take a trip to Florida when/if they stop being a Covid hot spot, on the grounds that I'd like to see what it's like while it still exists.
And yes, I fully expect that the same people that refused to take any responsibility for any of the world's problems before it started affecting them too directly will continue to refuse to take any responsibility once the problems do start affecting them directly.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday October 01 2021, @09:41PM
After all, why should they? It will obviously be the fault of liberals/gays/taxes/immigrants/critical race theory/facemasks/the gay agenda/etc. [insert scapegoat of the day].