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Texas’ Power Grid Crumples Under the Cold
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Texas’ power grid crumples under the cold [arstechnica.com]:
This morning, as the jet stream brought frigid air south to the central United States, Texas residents found themselves facing rolling blackouts as statewide grid struggled to meet demand amidst a large shortfall in generating capacity. As the day wore on, many saw these blackouts extend for ever longer periods of the day, and grid authorities are expecting problems to extend into at least Tuesday. As of noon local time on Monday, the Southwest Power Pool, which serves areas to the north of Texas, also announced that demand was exceeding generating capacity.
The shortfalls appear to be widespread, affecting everything from wind turbines to nuclear plants. One source of trouble may be an increased competition for natural gas, which is commonly used for heating in the United States.
Coming up short
Texas is unusual in that almost the entire state is part of a single grid that lacks extensive integration with those of surrounding states. That grid is run by an organization called ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, a non-profit controlled by the state legislature.
According to a statement [ercot.com] released today by ERCOT, the grid entered a state of emergency shortly after 1am on Monday, meaning it could no longer guarantee enough power generation to meet customer demands. This is because roughly 30 gigawatts of generation capacity has been forced offline.
While some early reports indicated that frozen wind turbines [statesman.com] were causing significant shortfalls, 30GW is roughly equal to the entire state's wind capacity if every turbine is producing all the power it's rated for. Since wind generally tends to produce less during winter, there's no way that the grid operators would have planned for getting 30GW from wind generation; in fact, a chart at ERCOT indicates that wind is producing significantly more than forecast.
So, while having Texas' full wind generating capacity online would help, the problems with meeting demand appear to lie elsewhere. An ERCOT director told Bloomberg [bloomberg.com] that problems were widespread across generating sources, including coal, natural gas, and even nuclear plants. In the past, severe cold has caused US supplies of natural gas to be constrained, as use in residential heating competes with its use in generating electricity. But that doesn't explain the shortfalls in coal and nuclear, and the ERCOT executive wasn't willing to speculate.
With generation failing to meet demand, ERCOT was left with no other option other than to cut off customers' access to power. "About 10,500 MW of customer load was shed at the highest point," as the company put it. In a graph posted on ERCOT's home page, you can watch a sudden plunge in demand occurring at the time the emergency started, indicating that many customers likely saw their electricity cut off at this point. And, at two points in the day since, demand experienced an additional plunge when it threatened to exceed supply, indicating further cuts.
Note that the projected demand for later in the day is far, far higher than the expected supply, indicating that Texas is in for a very difficult evening.
By around noon local time, similar problems had struck the Southwest Power Pool, which serves parts of 14 states to the north of Texas. In a statement [twitter.com] released on Twitter that it had started relying on reserve energy at 10am local time and shortly afterwards ran out of that. (The company's website appears to be down, though whether that's due to power issues or lots of people checking its status isn't clear.) "This is an unprecedented event and marks the first time Southwest Power Pool has ever had to call for controlled interruptions of service," says the company's CEO.
Authorities will probably need several weeks, if not longer, to fully understand how so much generating capacity was taken offline at what turned out to be a period of critical demand. But the event drives home that balancing supply and demand on the grid has always been a challenge and prone to failure at times of extreme heat and cold. While the variability of renewable supplies will undoubtedly increase the challenge, the growing emphasis on pairing it with storage may ultimately help smooth out some of the problems in the coming decades.
← Previous story [arstechnica.com]
Millions without power in Texas as snow storm slams US [phys.org]:
February 15, 2021
Millions without power in Texas as snow storm slams US
A frigid blast of winter weather across the U.S. plunged Texas into an unusually icy emergency Monday that knocked out power to more than 2 million people, closed dangerously snowy and slick highways and put the delivery of new COVID-19 vaccine shipments on hold.
Temperatures nosedived into the single-digits as far south as San Antonio, and homes that had already been without electricity for hours had no certainty about when the lights and heat would come back on, as the state's overwhelmed power grid throttled into rotating blackouts that are typically only seen in 100-degree Fahrenheit (38-degree Celsius) summers.
The storm was part of a massive system that brought snow, sleet and freezing rain to the southern Plains and was spreading across the Ohio Valley and to the Northeast.
"We're living through a really historic event going on right now," said Jason Furtado, a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, pointing to all of Texas under a winter storm warning and the extent of the freezing temperatures.
In Houston, where county leaders had warned that the deteriorating conditions could create problems on the scale of massive hurricanes that slam the Gulf Coast, one electric provider said power may not be restored to some homes until Tuesday.
"This weather event, it's really unprecedented. We all living here know that," said Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. He defended preparations made by grid operators and described the demand on the system as record-setting.
"This event was well beyond the design parameters for a typical, or even an extreme, Texas winter that you would normally plan for. And so that is really the result that we're seeing," Woodfin said.
The largest grocery store chain in Texas, H-E-B, closed locations around Austin and San Antonio, cities that are unaccustomed to snow and have little resources to clear roads.
State health officials said Texas, which expected to receive more than 400,000 additional vaccine doses this week, now does not expecting deliveries to occur until at least Wednesday. "Vaccination will resume as soon as it is safe," said Douglas Loveday, a spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services.
Lauren Schneider, a 24-year-old lab technician, was walking to a Dallas grocery store near her home Monday morning dressed in a coat, hat and face mask. Schneider said she didn't feel comfortable driving with the roads covered in snow and ice. She said she hadn't seen a serious snowfall in Dallas since her childhood and was caught without enough groceries.
"I really didn't think it's would be this serious," said Schneider.
Several cities in the U.S. saw record lows as Artic air remained over the central part of the country. In Minnesota, the Hibbing/Chisholm weather station registered minus 38 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 39 degrees Celsius), while Sioux Falls, South Dakota, dropped to minus 26 Fahrenheit (minus 26 degrees Celsius).
In Kansas, where wind chills dropped to as low as minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 34 degrees Celsius) in some areas, Gov. Laura Kelly declared a state of disaster.
Most government offices and schools were closed for Presidents Day, and authorities pleaded with residents to stay home. Louisiana State Police reported that it had investigated nearly 75 weather-related crashes caused by a mixture of snow, sleet and freezing rain in the past 24 hours.
"We already have some accidents on our roadways," Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said during a morning news conference. "It is slick and it is dangerous."
Air travel was also affected. By midmorning, 3,000 flights had been canceled across the country, about 1,600 of them at Dallas/Fort Worth International and Bush Intercontinental airports in Texas. At DFW, the temperature was 4 degrees Fahrenheit (-15 degrees Celsius)—3 degrees (-16 degrees) colder than Moscow.
The storm arrived over a three-day holiday weekend that has seen the most U.S. air travel since the period around New Year's. More than 1 million people went through airport security checkpoints on Thursday and Friday. However, that was still less than half the traffic of a year ago, before the pandemic hit with full force.
The southern Plains had been gearing up for the winter weather for the better part of the weekend. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration for all of the state's 254 counties. Abbott, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson each activated National Guard units to assist state agencies with tasks including rescuing stranded drivers.
President Joe Biden also declared an emergency in Texas in a statement Sunday night. The declaration is intended to add federal aid to state and local response efforts.
___
Associated Press journalists David Koenig in Dallas, Rebecca Reynolds Yonker in Louisville, Ky., Kate Brumback in Atlanta, Margaret Stafford in Liberty, Mo., and Amy Forliti in Minneapolis contributed to this report.
Explore further
Frigid Arctic air, winter storms grip much of US [phys.org]
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T-Mobile customers in Texas hit by service outage amid massive storm [cnet.com]:
T-Mobile customers in Texas were hit by a service outage on Monday as a powerful winter storm paralyzed much of the state.
Angry customers complained on DownDetector [downdetector.com] of being unable to make calls or text since about 6 a.m. PT on Monday. The outage appears to be affecting customers major cities from north to south, including Dallas, Houston and Austin.
Cut through the chatter Subscribe to CNET's Mobile newsletter for the latest phone news and reviews.
"We're experiencing network issues following severe weather in several areas of the country and especially across Texas," Neville Ray, T-Mobile's president of technology, wrote in tweet [twitter.com]. "Our teams are working hard to restore service."
The operator of Texas electrical grid said early Monday it's instituting rolling blackouts across most of the state amid a massive winter storm that's shut down much of the state. The temperatures for Dallas and Austin were in the single digits Monday morning, and many roads were iced over.
President Joe Biden declared a federal emergency declaration across the state.
