Lucky for us, the price was CAPPED at 9 grand. Coulda gone higher.
I just hope none of this was intentional manipulation to try and bust co-ops and Denton (they have their own generator plant.)
Did Denton’s plant trip offline?
If not, they would have made bank during the storm.
Spot prices went way up because so many “gas wells froze up.” Once the price went way up, the wells magically unfroze. Purely coincidental, I’m sure.
No… and it didn’t produce all the power for the city’s demand so they are having to get commercial paper in place to cover the massive costs until Austin can magically make the rates lower.
Once the price went way up, the wells magically unfroze. Purely coincidental, I’m sure.
I’ve got a pretty good friend who works the fields out in the Permian, and everything was frozen solid. He couldn’t even get service guys out to the fields because of snow and ice until Wednesday.
When you bring natural gas up from the ground, a lot of water comes with it that you have to store and then inject somewhere, and that water is what froze up all the wells (and the feeder pipes).
Then, once they’re thawed, you have to inspect the whole pipe leading to the feeder concentration plant for leaks from an ice plug breaking the line.
Given @TBJK’s experience here, I don’t know why it would be hard to imagine that the outdoor fields in the Permian froze over.
Individuals that signed up for wholesale electricity got exactly what they wanted. Electricity at wholesale whether it was $0.01 per KWh or $9.00 per KWh. Nobody was complaining about paying ridiculously low rates on other days. It’s two sides of the same coin. Whether you think this is a flaw or a feature depends on a lot of factors.
ERCOT did exactly what it was asked to do. If that’s not what Texans want then it could change. It’s up to whoever gets elected and their constituents.
5 Likes
The part I have a problem with, is I have a municipal owned power company. And they had enough to power us, but had to turn down based on other communities. It wasn’t equitable, and caused our 57 square miles to be at the whim of other areas. This isn’t a case of NIMBY, but rather, we were still being punished for having a system that works well. We had 0 issues in 2011. The overall ERCOT structure fails to consider too many factors.
It ain’t star trek yet, and I am deeply saddened by the shear losses encumbered by many of our friends, while places like highland park had no outages?!?!? It’s baloney to be polite. I’d rather use a different b word.
1 Like
Highland Park and University Park had plenty of outages… causing frozen houses and frozen pipes and plenty of damage, just like everyone else. I personally know people affected.
Where I was in Dallas there were no outages at all, possibly because a hospital is nearby that put the area in a Safe-zone.
Still shocking to me that our “smart meters” couldn’t be used to target rolling outages and keep the downtime to a minimum for each residence and make it equitable and tolerable for all. That’s the real failure i think. Targeted load shedding is the answer for high demand periods.
My random block of Lewisville didn’t lose power save for a 15-minute outage early on. Explanation from TNMP was extremely limited ability to rotate outages while maintaining grid stability so they shut off other blocks on a ~90% duty cycle. A friend ~1/2 mile away suggested I find out which politician that lived in my block and offer them a gift basket.
Don’t think they have that ability - their main focus is automating billing so as to eliminate meter readers and bill residential customers for suboptimal power factor despite having already installed PFC equipment at residential substations.
Demand dispatch at the major-appliance level seems to be the approach that utilities are experimenting with.
Yes… switches on major appliances would be even better, but even shutting off entire houses would be better than the sledgehammer approach they take now.
I’m pretty sure they can turn your power on and off for nonpayment without someone showing up personally to do it… anyone know for sure?
That’s the most Texas response to the most Texas thing ever. They should just setup their own grid then! 
I’m not aware of this. Was it covered by the press? Data to compare outages? I’m not saying there weren’t any shenanigans, just that if there were I haven’t read about them.
https://www.prestonhollowpeople.com/2021/02/16/yes-highland-park-is-experiencing-outages-too/
I think one of the misleading things here is that some girl drove around with a phone and took video of houses with lights on, and folks in Highland Park had lights on - likely for the same reason that tens of thousands of other did - they had generators.
When you’ve got a $1.5M home, the incremental $7,500 to add a generator is a drop in the bucket. And since there is minimal utility trenching in HP and the surrounding areas, they’re used to losing power because of ice storms and wind storms and the like.
Hell, that’s the reason I have a generator.
3 Likes
I think I was in that block and it was more like a total of 2 hours of power from Monday 2am until Wednesday 9am. Brrrr…
1 Like
Can’t find specifics on the smart meter TNMP installed several years ago, however the Plus version of the same meter claims an optional integrated, factory-installed remote disconnect switch to help utilities efficiently address non-payments and move-in, move-outs, suggesting that the likely older, vanilla, non-plus version may well lack this feature.
This only affects people who are buying their power at wholesale pricing. My utility company (Grayson Collin Electric Co-op) stated on their Twitter feed:
2 Likes
I got a similar email from TXU. ONCOR with its meter charge and taxes are typically half my bill anyway.
I was very fortunate, never lost power for a moment (East Arlington, just off 360 at Park Row). Beginning two streets away to North it was out for quite a ways for at least a mile and a half. Can’t say for how long, because I didn’t go out for three days after that.
Almost. But, not quite. Those of us who signed up for wholesale rates did so with the understanding that the rates were 100% market driven. And, yes, they could vary from less than 0 to $9.00.
What we did not sign up for is sudden minimum price controls mandated by the PUC. Personally, I would have been happy to pay (high) market prices this week due to past cost savings. However, the $9 government price control was in effect for much longer than any market driven spike. This was purposeful and very clearly stated in the PUC’s announcement last Monday. The market rate at the height of the cold was well under $9.
When the price controls were lifted at 9am on Friday morning, the rate suddenly changed from $9 to 4 cents within 5 minutes.
3 Likes
I believe the scenario you are describing is “islanding” your local power grid. Apparently there are issues with doing so though, such as your local island is sure to drift off the 60 HZ AC timing of the entire system and it’s very hard to sync back up. Hence, if you go the Island route it’s impossible to send or receive power from other sources until you have everything realigned. TLDR: You are on your own and it’s really hard to rejoin the pack.
I read somewhere the ERCOT manual goes into this topic, and many others, but is quite a hefty read.
1 Like
I have some personal experience on a very, very small scale with this - a pair of MEP-816A generators.
In theory, you had a signal cable that went between the pair, and you’d plug it in, then start 1, then start 2, then balance them using the voltage and frequency controls independently (and get them as close to one another as possible, then close the interrupter on 1, then put them into sync, then stand back and be sure the sync lights are blinking in unison, then you could close the interrupter on 2 and in theory you were synched and making nice 60 Hz power and you could close the load.
That was the theory.
In practice, that shit never worked right, and if you didn’t give them their proper care and feeding and sacrifice, they’d drift out of sync, and that’d trip the protection circuits, and power would stop flowing to the people who wanted it. Inevitable as I was sleeping somewhere.
Keeping multiple generation sources in sync with one another is a non-trivial challenge. Even to this day, frequency drift is the greatest danger to any given grid, and it’s what they watch more closely than anything else. Look at this from ERCOT’s site:
http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_conditions.html
They track frequency down to 1/1,000 of a Hz, in a system generating 36 gigawatts of power.
All that said, you can connect with other power sources via what’s called a DC Tie, but that means that AC comes in from both sides, is rectified to DC for the exchange, and then inverted back to AC again.
But at a huge current - 375 kVa AC side.
It’s not the most efficient system, but it’s the only way to do it.
3 Likes