Cheapest source of power for each county in USA

[electricron]

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science ... y/?ref=yfp

Study released by UNiversity of Texas.
It's also interactive, change the tax or subsidy, see a different answer.
FYI: The cheapest source of power for Dallas County today is Wind.

[electricron]

And with the first big freeze to hit Texas, and Dallas in particular, half the windmill or windfarms in Texas dropped off line as the blades froze solid under ice.
Brownouts are more than an inconvenience, lack of power to air conditioners, electric space heaters, or gas heaters controlled with electrical thermostat, can kill people.
We need reliable power, not unreliable power. Too many "green" sources of power are not reliable.

[northsouth]

Except that by far the main loss of power has been from natural gas plants, partially from more gas being used for home heating than usual, but also because wells are getting blocked by ice. Can't deny that some turbines have frozen, but wind is still producing about as expected for these conditions, and solar is actually overperforming.

Some numbers: https://twitter.com/cohan_ds/status/1361346284230234112

[electricron]

Except that by far the main loss of power has been from natural gas plants, partially from more gas being used for home heating than usual, but also because wells are getting blocked by ice. Can't deny that some turbines have frozen, but wind is still producing about as expected for these conditions, and solar is actually overperforming.

Some numbers: https://twitter.com/cohan_ds/status/1361346284230234112

in this freeze wave, whether natural gas or electricity is used to heat homes does not matter, as much as the natural gas is being used to heat homes.
Many natural gas steam generating plants can switch their burners to burn fuel oil instead of natural gas. Those that could probably have. But not every natural gas generating plant is designed to do so. And even if they are designed to do so, there is not much fuel oil stored at the plants, the fuel oil has to trucked in after a few days. With ice on the highways, trucking fuel oil around is not easy or quick.

Many recent natural gas plants today are not running on steam, they are jet engines being fueled by natural gas instead of jet fuel. They will never run on fuel oil. Turn the gas off to them, and they will coast down.

Steam generating plants in Texas are not as winterized as those up north, because of the heat during the summer months inside the turbine buildings. Much of the steam piping and moisture drains are outside, exposed to the sky. While the pipes are heat traced, these wires require constant maintenance to keep them operable. With over 100s of exposed pipes on each turbine generator, it could only take one pipe on a moisture drain to freeze up to cause the turbine to trip off line. I have personally spent months of my life during the summer heat working on heat tracing wires, so I speak from years of experience.

The lack of sufficient natural gas is not the fault of electric power utilities, nor a lack of gas in the fields. It is the lack of infrastructure to move all the gas around, lack of pipelines.

And I was not amongst those protesting every new pipeline project in the last few decades. Amongst the first things the new President did was to stop all new pipelines which the last President tried hard to get built. Having adequate infrastructure of "ALL" kinds is important, or brownouts will be the result.

[tamtagon]

Maybe the fancy new batteries they're coming up with will give ERCOT enough of a buffer to ride out the next deep freeze.... I don't think, though, that those batteries are being made to get the grid through a three day defrost, just a 12 hour swing.

The rolling brown outs clearly show the weakness, and ERCOT must find a way to sequester enough potential energy to create a weeklong buffer.

[Hannibal Lecter]

The question is whether it's worthwhile to spend $50-100 billion to be ready for a once per 40-100 year event.

It's like the concept of the 100-year flood plain. Society picks the balance between cost and safety that it's willing to live with.

[electricron]

The question is whether it's worthwhile to spend $50-100 billion to be ready for a once per 40-100 year event.

It's like the concept of the 100-year flood plain. Society picks the balance between cost and safety that it's willing to live with.

True. But nobody notices or cares as long as the electricity is available. It must be available, 24 hours a day every day of the year, forever. Brownouts from a heat wave or deep freeze is a symptom of recent political developments discouraging one source of energy from all others.
Unacceptable sources from the greens: nuclear, coal, natural gas, fuel oil, ethanol, wind farms, just about everything but solar. Even solar has distractors because how un-environmental friendly storage batteries are.

You can not have something if you do not like how that something is made. And I will repeat, the reason natural gas fueled generators dropped off line had nothing to do with the availability of natural gas in the ground, but in the ability to move it from fields to the power plants. Additional pipelines are needed.

[quixomniac]

The question is whether it's worthwhile to spend $50-100 billion to be ready for a once per 40-100 year event.

It's like the concept of the 100-year flood plain. Society picks the balance between cost and safety that it's willing to live with.

True. But nobody notices or cares as long as the electricity is available. It must be available, 24 hours a day every day of the year, forever. Brownouts from a heat wave or deep freeze is a symptom of recent political developments discouraging one source of energy from all others.
Unacceptable sources from the greens: nuclear, coal, natural gas, fuel oil, ethanol, wind farms, just about everything but solar. Even solar has distractors because how un-environmental friendly storage batteries are.

You can not have something if you do not like how that something is made. And I will repeat, the reason natural gas fueled generators dropped off line had nothing to do with the availability of natural gas in the ground, but in the ability to move it from fields to the power plants. Additional pipelines are needed.

The ability to move around natural gas is the reason why there was blackouts. But not because there isn’t enough pipelines. Texas already has a high concentration of pipelines. As shown below. But rather its frozen compressor stations that distribute the gas. Exposed pipes without insulation froze in place. ERCOT already expected wind and solar to drop off during winter, but they didnt expect natural gas and coal to drop off. The problem is lack of proper insulation, some refer to as « winterizing » the equipment.
No amount of extra pipelines is gonna change frozen compressor stations not working.

AE7A78D0-0522-489D-B9AA-394663EFC92E.png

[tamtagon]

The next step for ERCOT is a big one, that's finding a way to become an exporter to all neighboring power grids. Federal and International regulation will be a bigger challenge than building natural gas plants with next to zero emissions. Sell electricity, not gasoline.

Winterizing is the easy part.

[Casa Linda]

I'll just leave this here. Report on what went wrong in 2011. There's a real original link but I can't find it now. This type of cold weather has happened multiple times before, and will happen again. Anyone remember 1989? I think in 1983 we went 12 days below freezing. ??

https://www.kxan.com/wp-content/uploads ... -event.pdf