Texas power prices briefly soar to $9,000/MWh as heat wave b

Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing in reserve.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas-heat-pushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels

 

[John Robertson]

On 2019/08/15 11:35 a.m., bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:

Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing in reserve.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas-heat-pushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels

Folks will buy air conditioners. You do realize that the more people
that live somewhere where it gets hot and they like air conditioners
that the power draw will only go up.

http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/texas-population/

4 million more people in 2018 than 2010 - some of them use electricity...

John

 

[Winfield Hill]

John Robertson wrote...

Folks will buy air conditioners. ...

Yes, but if they're smart, they'll cool their house
down in the early AM, when (1) the AC is efficient
due to cooler outside air, and (2) the electricity
is cheaper. Most houses will retain their coolness
throughout the day, rising no more than 10-deg, so
push it down to 68 or 70 in advance. If Texas were
to give individual users demand pricing, they'd soon
start adjusting their demand timing. End of problem.


--
Thanks,
- Win

 

On Thursday, August 15, 2019 at 4:49:41 PM UTC-4, John Robertson wrote:

On 2019/08/15 11:35 a.m., bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:
Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing in reserve.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas-heat-pushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels


Folks will buy air conditioners. You do realize that the more people
that live somewhere where it gets hot and they like air conditioners
that the power draw will only go up.

http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/texas-population/

4 million more people in 2018 than 2010 - some of them use electricity...

John

Ummm-the utilities install the service feeds for these places, so that presumably they know exactly what loading to expect.

 

[Rick C]

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 12:09:39 AM UTC-4, Robert Baer wrote:

bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:
Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing in reserve.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas-heat-pushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels

Damn! Reached the free limit on articles.

Clear your cookies and it will reset. I do that all the time on the PC. Can't figure out how to do it in Google News on my phone though. They feed a lot of Wash Post and NY Times articles and you only get 3 a month.

--

Rick C.

- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Robert Baer]

bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:

Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing in reserve.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas-heat-pushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels

Damn! Reached the free limit on articles.

 

[John Robertson]

On 2019/08/15 3:03 p.m., bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:

On Thursday, August 15, 2019 at 4:49:41 PM UTC-4, John Robertson wrote:
On 2019/08/15 11:35 a.m., bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:
Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing in reserve.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas-heat-pushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels


Folks will buy air conditioners. You do realize that the more people
that live somewhere where it gets hot and they like air conditioners
that the power draw will only go up.

http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/texas-population/

4 million more people in 2018 than 2010 - some of them use electricity...

John

Ummm-the utilities install the service feeds for these places, so that presumably they know exactly what loading to expect.

My point was that more people = higher energy consumption, so the
'record' energy use could have been predicted and as Winfield pointed
out could have been mitigated somewhat by intelligent planning.

I suspect the electrical suppliers have not been building power plants
to match the increased usage. I haven't researched this, it is simply an
assumption on my part. I've seen it so many times before...

John :-#)#

 

[Whoey Louie]

On Thursday, August 15, 2019 at 2:35:30 PM UTC-4, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:

Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing in reserve.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas-heat-pushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels

Isn't the sun shining when it's that hot? So much for the solar miracle.....

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 8:58:20 PM UTC+10, Whoey Louie wrote:

On Thursday, August 15, 2019 at 2:35:30 PM UTC-4, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing in reserve.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas-heat-pushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels

Isn't the sun shining when it's that hot? So much for the solar miracle......

Trader4 hasn't noticed that while solar cells are now cheap Texan power generation firms are even cheaper, and haven't bought any (China is the big supplier), let alone the power storage gear you need when you start getting lots of power from erratic renewable sources.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 3:02:13 AM UTC-4, John Robertson wrote:

On 2019/08/15 3:03 p.m., bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:
On Thursday, August 15, 2019 at 4:49:41 PM UTC-4, John Robertson wrote:
On 2019/08/15 11:35 a.m., bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:
Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing in reserve.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas-heat-pushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels


Folks will buy air conditioners. You do realize that the more people
that live somewhere where it gets hot and they like air conditioners
that the power draw will only go up.

http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/texas-population/

4 million more people in 2018 than 2010 - some of them use electricity...

John

Ummm-the utilities install the service feeds for these places, so that presumably they know exactly what loading to expect.


My point was that more people = higher energy consumption, so the
'record' energy use could have been predicted and as Winfield pointed
out could have been mitigated somewhat by intelligent planning.

I suspect the electrical suppliers have not been building power plants
to match the increased usage. I haven't researched this, it is simply an
assumption on my part. I've seen it so many times before...

John :-#)#

The idea that regulators didn't know the load demands is ridiculous. What happened was their wind power, which normally runs at 20GW, a significant fraction of their total capacity, dropped to nearly zero during the recent weather.

 

Whoey Louie <trader4@optonline.net> wrote in
news:3ace81a9-7a94-41f0-a83b-e569a1ad2b99@googlegroups.com:

Isn't the sun shining when it's that hot? So much for the solar
miracle.....

It works. The hardware simply has to be put into place.

Something way over the head of a twerp like you. Maybe you could go
sit out in the sun for a few days and dessicate yourself to prove to
us all how the sun doesn't work.

You'll have to pay up before hand though for the cleanup of all the
shit flies you would attract.

 

Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in
news:12d1d55e-b4a7-4168-8172-660f2ad2d7b9@googlegroups.com:

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 8:58:20 PM UTC+10, Whoey Louie
wrote:
On Thursday, August 15, 2019 at 2:35:30 PM UTC-4,
bloggs.fre...@gmail.com
wrote:
Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing
in reser
ve.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas
-heat-p
ushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels

Isn't the sun shining when it's that hot? So much for the solar
miracle.
....

Trader4 hasn't noticed that while solar cells are now cheap Texan
power generation firms are even cheaper, and haven't bought any
(China is the big supplier), let alone the power storage gear you
need when you start getting lots of power from erratic renewable
sources.

IIRC, Texas has one or two(or more) of those big solar oven
mirrors-to-tower-collector/heat exchanger types. No semiconductor
solar panels in those.

 

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 7:06:32 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 8:58:20 PM UTC+10, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Thursday, August 15, 2019 at 2:35:30 PM UTC-4, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing in reserve.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas-heat-pushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels

Isn't the sun shining when it's that hot? So much for the solar miracle.....

Trader4 hasn't noticed that while solar cells are now cheap Texan power generation firms are even cheaper, and haven't bought any (China is the big supplier), let alone the power storage gear you need when you start getting lots of power from erratic renewable sources.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Texas has a huge amount of windpower generation capacity, about 20x solar, which was facilitated years ago by Perry subsidizing the transmission system with state money. The winds dropped out during the recent heat wave and they lost about 20GW, causing overload on the non-renewable generation capacity. They probably had the backup capacity to cover it, but it couldn't react fast enough. The really big suff takes hours to spin up, and when the load fluctuates on the order of GW's per hour, they can't track it. They have so-called gas powered peaker plants that can track it, but capacity of those is limited to smaller fluctuations, few hundred MW.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Texas-has-enough-sun-and-wind-to-quit-coal-Rice-13501700.php

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 11:56:53 PM UTC+10, Whoey Louie wrote:

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 7:06:32 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 8:58:20 PM UTC+10, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Thursday, August 15, 2019 at 2:35:30 PM UTC-4, bloggs.fre...@gmail..com wrote:
Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing in reserve.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas-heat-pushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels

Isn't the sun shining when it's that hot? So much for the solar miracle.....

Trader4 hasn't noticed that while solar cells are now cheap Texan power generation firms are even cheaper, and haven't bought any (China is the big supplier), let alone the power storage gear you need when you start getting lots of power from erratic renewable sources.

Wow, you mean free markets still work?

About as well as usual. They don't react to new opportunities all that fast.. For every entrepreneur that will pounce on a new opportunity to make more money, there seem to be about twenty complacent twits who think that business as usual is just fine, and go out of their way to inconvenience unexpected=unfair competition.

And just about no utilities are
buying "storage gear' stupid, for obvious reasons.

You need a fairly high renewable component before you need it, and if the Australian experience in South Australia is anything to go by, the utility companies ramp up the renewable content until they run into trouble, and only then buy the fast battery-based storage gear that can handle the rapid fluctuations in generating capacity.

The obvious reason they wouldn't buy it would be stupidity (or at least inertia) and you'd know all about that.

--

Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 10:36:38 PM UTC+10, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in
news:12d1d55e-b4a7-4168-8172-660f2ad2d7b9@googlegroups.com:
On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 8:58:20 PM UTC+10, Whoey Louie
wrote:
On Thursday, August 15, 2019 at 2:35:30 PM UTC-4,
bloggs.fre...@gmail.com
wrote:
Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing
in reserve.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas
-heat-p
ushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels

Isn't the sun shining when it's that hot? So much for the solar
miracle.
....

Trader4 hasn't noticed that while solar cells are now cheap, Texan
power generation firms are even cheaper, and haven't bought any
(China is the big supplier), let alone the power storage gear you
need when you start getting lots of power from erratic renewable
sources.

IIRC, Texas has one or two(or more) of those big solar oven
mirrors-to-tower-collector/heat exchanger types. No semiconductor
solar panels in those.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_thermal_power_stations

doesn't include any in Texas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility

is in California and doesn't seem to have bothered with thermal storage - they burn gas every morning to melt the molten salt heat transfer medium.

Pretty much everybody else seems to have nice big insulated tanks to keep lots of hot molten salt around to generate power after dark.

The latest generation of solar cells seem to become cheap enough that some of the thermal solar systems have been ripped out and replaced with photovoltaic devices, but big insulated tanks of molten salt seem to be tolerably cheap energy storage systems.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Whoey Louie]

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 7:06:32 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 8:58:20 PM UTC+10, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Thursday, August 15, 2019 at 2:35:30 PM UTC-4, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing in reserve.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas-heat-pushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels

Isn't the sun shining when it's that hot? So much for the solar miracle.....

Trader4 hasn't noticed that while solar cells are now cheap Texan power generation firms are even cheaper, and haven't bought any (China is the big supplier), let alone the power storage gear you need when you start getting lots of power from erratic renewable sources.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Wow, you mean free markets still work? And just about no utilities are
buying "storage gear' stupid, for obvious reasons.

 

[Rick C]

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 7:06:32 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 8:58:20 PM UTC+10, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Thursday, August 15, 2019 at 2:35:30 PM UTC-4, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing in reserve.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas-heat-pushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels

Isn't the sun shining when it's that hot? So much for the solar miracle.....

Trader4 hasn't noticed that while solar cells are now cheap Texan power generation firms are even cheaper, and haven't bought any (China is the big supplier), let alone the power storage gear you need when you start getting lots of power from erratic renewable sources.

Texas is wind country, but there is not a correlation with the sun shining. They are too happy with oil to use solar. I guess Texas is like the UK, doomed.

--

Rick C.

+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 05:37:36 -0700 (PDT),
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 7:06:32 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 8:58:20 PM UTC+10, Whoey Louie wrote:
On Thursday, August 15, 2019 at 2:35:30 PM UTC-4, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:
Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing in reserve.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas-heat-pushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels

Isn't the sun shining when it's that hot? So much for the solar miracle.....

Trader4 hasn't noticed that while solar cells are now cheap Texan power generation firms are even cheaper, and haven't bought any (China is the big supplier), let alone the power storage gear you need when you start getting lots of power from erratic renewable sources.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Texas has a huge amount of windpower generation capacity, about 20x solar, which was facilitated years ago by Perry subsidizing the transmission system with state money. The winds dropped out during the recent heat wave and they lost about 20GW, causing overload on the non-renewable generation capacity. They probably had the backup capacity to cover it, but it couldn't react fast enough. The really big suff takes hours to spin up, and when the load fluctuates on the order of GW's per hour, they can't track it. They have so-called gas powered peaker plants that can track it, but capacity of those is limited to smaller fluctuations, few hundred MW.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Texas-has-enough-sun-and-wind-to-quit-coal-Rice-13501700.php

Texas gets hurricanes too. Fun, mixing windmills and hurricanes.

 

[Rick C]

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 8:25:17 AM UTC-4, bloggs.fre...@gmail.com wrote:

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 3:02:13 AM UTC-4, John Robertson wrote:
On 2019/08/15 3:03 p.m., bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:
On Thursday, August 15, 2019 at 4:49:41 PM UTC-4, John Robertson wrote:
On 2019/08/15 11:35 a.m., bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:
Unbelievable 75GW peak demand due to heat wave, almost nothing in reserve.

And this is just the warm-up, it's going to get much worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-texas-heat-pushes-power-prices-to-near-record-levels


Folks will buy air conditioners. You do realize that the more people
that live somewhere where it gets hot and they like air conditioners
that the power draw will only go up.

http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/texas-population/

4 million more people in 2018 than 2010 - some of them use electricity...

John

Ummm-the utilities install the service feeds for these places, so that presumably they know exactly what loading to expect.


My point was that more people = higher energy consumption, so the
'record' energy use could have been predicted and as Winfield pointed
out could have been mitigated somewhat by intelligent planning.

I suspect the electrical suppliers have not been building power plants
to match the increased usage. I haven't researched this, it is simply an
assumption on my part. I've seen it so many times before...

John :-#)#

The idea that regulators didn't know the load demands is ridiculous. What happened was their wind power, which normally runs at 20GW, a significant fraction of their total capacity, dropped to nearly zero during the recent weather.

Yeah, there is no correlation between wind and the sun shining. In fact, it may be an inverse correlation. I'm sure Bill can tell us about that. My experience with ground level wind is that sunny days tend to be calmer, in particular toward the late afternoon when energy usage is peaking. But that's ground level wind as felt by boomerangs. Don't know what's happening at 100 - 200 feet.

Certainly solar has some advantages and the correlation of power output with insolation is one of them.

--

Rick C.

-- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Rick C]

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 9:56:53 AM UTC-4, Whoey Louie wrote:

Wow, you mean free markets still work? And just about no utilities are
buying "storage gear' stupid, for obvious reasons.

There's the voice of ignorance and the voice of extreme ignorance.

The majority of energy storage is pumped hydro. In the US alone there are 23 GW of capacity. A single 3 GW facility has an energy capacity of 30 GWh.

Yeah, no one is buying "storage gear"...

--

Rick C.

-+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209