northsouth wrote: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.