Datadog dashboard for the Texas power grid(p.datadoghq.com) |
Datadog dashboard for the Texas power grid(p.datadoghq.com) |
So, what gives? Where's the solar?
[0] https://reneweconomy.com.au/saudi-solar-plant-locks-in-new-r...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/21/heat-ener...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-22/china-is-...
Being installed as fast as the fabs can churn it out? Production capacity isn't infinitely elastic, factories take time to build. Solar is growing very rapidly, for reasons exactly like this, but it's not magic.
Initial cost would be higher, but long term cost of Solar is ridiculously cheap.
Also wonder how much kWh batteries one would need for winter heating (generate at day, use at evening). Kinda feel NZ, especially north island should have enough. Over in Eastern Europe you can get recycled batteries for $150/kWh!
In the end, you'll always need a mix of supply. Or simply better insulation and efficient heat pumps rather than wasting electricity on heating at above freezing.
So much for "sometimes the wind doesnt blow" as well. Looks like they are doing just fine with their wind power in texas.
Yet Texas doesn't have such a policy statewide. Because a simple money saving idea got politicised and lots of people got convinced they were subsidizing liberal elites, rather than paying their neighbours for providing a useful service.
Also, trying to follow to the data source of the Ercot website https://www.ercot.com/ I get blocked with things like this:
Access Denied
Error 16
This request was blocked by the security rules.
If you believe you have a valid business reason for accessing ERCOT resources, please contact the ERCOT ServiceDesk at ServiceDesk@ercot.com.
Two weeks ago I even threw together a simple Twitter bot[0] because I was annoyed with some of their communications there. This datadog dashboard has been around for a while - it shows up on energy Twitter somewhat frequently when the Texas grid is having issues.
The grid being under-frequency for days at a time shows they didn't have enough generation capacity.
Outages can have a lot of causes.
I wish it were easier to see the moments when demand and capacity were at their closest, as those are the "interesting" moments.
It's only odd if you assume that any type of data presentation is always targeted to those living in the area the data is collected for, which of course is not always true. And as others have pointed out, Celsius is in fact used in the US by scientists, physicians etc. -- just not by laymen.
This dashboard gives you an overall of the capabilities and capacity of the grid.
Capacity and Demand - How much capacity the system has available against how much is being used in real-time. As the two lines get closer together, it can indicate that the grid is nearing capacity and the need for conservation or an EEA may be necessary.
Grid Frequency - While related to load, a lot of appliances keep their clocks based off of the grid frequency. Our grid is 60Hz. Deviations from that are expected and usually OK. However, anything greater than ~.5% is considered bad and a 1% variation (e.g. 59.4 Hz) can actually cause equipment damage. In fact, the reason we had load shedding back in Feb '21 was because we got down to 59.4Hz.
Wind & Solar Generation - How much of our capacity is coming from those sources. The days where Wind is down usually is when conservation notices come in.
Energy Flow to/from Other grids - How much power are we getting/sending from/to other grids. We have ties to MX, a "railroad" tie as well as ties to the eastern/western grids. We can and do import/export up to about 800 MW from those grids when needed.
ERCOT Ancillary Real Time is where things (IMO get interesting).
Supply Regulation (freq. adjustment) and ancillary supply are really the big indicators of issues. The more "supply regulation" that goes online the more we are having to adjust the frequency of the grid to compensate. If the grid frequency is too low and all of the regulation freq. up has been deployed—that's a BIG issue and indicates that the system cannot deliver enough.
If the system has deployed all of its online/offline reserve capacity, then there simply is no more generation capacity available. When things "get bad" THOSE two are the ones to watch because those are the ones that are engaged in ensuring the overall stability of the system.
Sometime in the next few years, power grid vendors will start to understand they're in the real-time information business.
All good, it's just a ton of numbers without explanations. Here's a couple very basic insights tho:
Grid frequency below 59.8 is always bad, 60 is perfect
Capacity should be at least 1 GW above demand
Demand equaling capacity is bad
https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/lktl07/comment/gnn0...
I'm not sure what to make of the frequency drift; federally operators are supposed to balance it out for timekeeping, among other reasons.
Taking a week to get on-frequency is...not good.
Honestly it's an interesting trainwreck to observe from far away. Shame that it affects real people locally.
In case you're not familiar with Ercot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_o...
With natural gas and nuclear, there would never be a power shortage in Texas. But for some reason people are obsessed with ugly, bird killing windmills and giant solar farms.
I believe the CA power grid gets similar attention here whenever there's any news. A post for a dashboard would've probably attracted as many upvotes.
Texas has had several power failure related disasters in recent years; which have cost many lives and much value, as well as caused shocks to the rest of the US.
Much of the rest of the US does not have those issues, or has them in only very small predictable circumstances, mostly caused E.G. by huge windstorms (trees), earthquakes, fires, other 'natural disasters'. Climate generally not regarded as a natural disaster since it's something that should theoretically be planned for. Even the windstorm example, for metro areas power should not go out. It's only poorly managed rural areas that tend to go off the grid.
https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/18/...
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/07/24/this_one...
For me it was relevant to answer “oh that interesting, someone posted this ERCOT data I wonder what’s going this week”
Kind of weird my comment was downvoted so heavily - but whatever. The dashboard was posted to Reddit over a year ago during DIFFERENT issues for ERCOT so it seemed relevant to find out what’s going on this time around.
This doesn't surprise me. One of my projects as an intern was to generate reports from public data from ERCOT and a few other North American ISOs (organizations that control a region's power grid). Some of them are happy to reply to a basic cURL request. Others are more particular about things like your user agent or cookies set (even sites that didn't require authentication would set a cookie on first load and would reject requests to certain pages without that cookie). A few were very particular and ran some Javascript code to serve requests that made it so something like Selenium was required.
It was a bit surprising to me how many hoops we had to jump through considering this is public data that tax payers are entitled to.
If I recall correctly PJM was the best to work with because they had a well-designed REST API and provided a developer guide with sample code.
> I don't see anything that would _really_ be drain on those ERCOT resources...
I'm not sure if these controls are in place to safeguard against abuse. Most people don't even know these companies exist and I doubt they get too many requests. I'm assuming this is just a symptom of software sold to the lowest bidder.
All gists are actually GitHub repositories — you can clone them, branch, and commit changes. There isn’t PRs or an issue tracker, though.
(Same with GitHub wikis.)
It's easy to blame them, but if you provide any data on the web, the load you get from scrapers is insane.
There is the AAPowerLink project which proposes exactly this. It's a ~20GW solar farm in Australia with battery storage and a 4500km HVDC undersea cable to export power to Singapore. Seems currently in a planning and Project seems to be in a planning and exploration stage with funding not fully secured though.
Ever since the freeze, people who have even planned outages, refer to them as “rolling blackouts”. ERCOT is a pretty open data organization aside from QSE and generator data, and it’s unlikely that this data would have been fudged. We would have seen EEA3 in addition to $5k settlement prices if there was enough of a shortage to invoke rolling blackouts. These prices directly affect end users, e.g. businesses, datacenters, end users still on RTM rates, and solar buyback users. Generators definitely have offers open up to the $5k price point, and there is no way they’d be able to lock the settlement price without it being obvious to businesses/end users, or to generators/REPs/TDUs that there is market manipulation.
As far as sagging frequency, this is also wrong, because frequency sag calls up additional reserves, and we haven’t run below 1 gigawatt of reserves since the winter freeze. The number to watch for is 59.5 hertz, which is automatic EEA3 (we haven’t hit this since the winter storm, where we reached a whopping 59.3 hertz) This is also directly measurable by TDUs and (maybe) end users.
Or if you don't like fun: https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/17/texas-energy...
> These failing sources largely included nuclear plants, coal plants and thermal energy generators. Frozen wind turbines were a factor, too, but Woodfin said wind shutdowns accounted for less than 13% of the outages.
That's ERCOT Senior Director of System Operations Dan Woodfin. So no, it definitely would've happened with just gas and nuclear.
A more viable though still impractical approach is to store energy in rocks underground. Essentially trading the need for a multi km deep borehole for geothermal with the need to provide your own heat.
One of the issues, not the issue.
FWIW, none of the ISOs I mentioned have the ability to order natural gas to flow either. What they do have, and Texas does not, is a contract with the generators that requires the generators to offer their supply to the market regardless of the price of gas (and associated risks). This doesn’t help if gas isn’t available but generators are not allowed to say ‘buying gas was too expensive or risky or we went home for the evening’. In exchange for signing this contract, the generators receive constant and regular payments during the year for their ‘capacity’, i.e., to be ready and willing to run when called. These payments are significant. This doesn’t always work but it is a notable difference.
This sort of protectionism isn't even buying us a bunch of local solar panel production, unfortunately. I'm not a free-market purist, and am in favor of protectionist tariffs to build a nascent industry, but this is not a way to do to it and we are only harming our installer industry with these terrible forms of tariffs and uncertainty.
Edit: here's an article from a little while ago on this
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-solar-industry-warns-slo...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071998
> As of 30 September [2021] developers had 100.3GW of solar capacity in the queue, 42.4GW of utility-scale battery storage, 22.5GW of wind, 13.5GW of natural gas and minor amounts of other technologies such as biomass.
For comparison, ERCOT has a maximum capacity of 15GW of coal generation, and 65GW of fossil gas generation (per electricitymap.org, which sources zone capacity data in the US from US EIA-860 reporting).
I have to assume there would be a more than 50% loss through the process, hope someone on hn can comment. Maybe it's not worth it when you can tap into unlimited sunlight the next day.
This seems mad - is that built and not connected, or just awaiting permitting?
Instead it effectively says: look at this graph, wind doesn't solve all our issues, so we're going to call it the reason instead. It's a shallow opinion piece not a serious article.
Why do you think someone posted the dashboard link that was already shared over a year ago? Is ERCOT having issues this month? What is the cause of the issues?
I am legitimately asking. I don't know, so that's the only recent link I was able to find.
Assuming it is material, at some distance the cost of land (X) vs the transmission loss (Y), it becomes economical to choose X instead of Y
Isn't saying that there exists a *shortage* of demand the same as saying that there is available supply but no one is willing to buy at the current price? Thus, by definition, there cannot be a shortage of demand if all units are being purchased at the current price?
It does give a good sense of investor sentiment between relative technologies, however.
Agreed. Solar PV module tariffs are suspended for 24 months FYI, so there is some near term policy clarity for utility scale developers. The ITC tax credit is also phasing down over the next 2 years, so the incentive is there to build build build.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/biden-to-pause-solar-tariff...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-10-06/califor...
A program known as convergence bidding, in particular, is meant to help keep electricity prices steady but instead “masked tight supply conditions” during the August heat wave, the analysis concluded.
and
Energy providers collectively under-scheduled the amount of electricity they expected to need.
This was definitely a lack of capacity.
Sure, Europeans pay more for electricity, but maybe that spare capacity and inter-connectivity is worth it.
But also if demand significantly exceeds supply, that is cause for manufacturers to make more investment in increased production. You’d see major solar projects booking out orders six months in advance for example, and with more demand they would book out one year in advance let’s say. So the thing is that demand is a gradient and it’s not a binary thing of “everything is being purchased”. Raising the price of something will usually price someone out of that purchase.
The density is the problem.
If you raise a 25,000kg mass by 100m, that's 24.5MJ, or roughly the energy contained in one kilogram of coal. Or 6.6kWh (standard meter units) of electricity.
(and that's on the input side, not accounting for losses)
It's an actual implementation of energy storage, the water is pumped up there and then gravity distributes it, so there is a buffer if the pumps can't run for some reason.
Flywheels are also pretty good short term, but supercapacitors mostly do their job better these days. That said they are competitive, and technological changes could nudge them into more use. Just making your wind turbine really large gives a flywheel effect, e.g., so again if you already have a spinning thing they are often worth it.
California's largest utility, PG&E, would top this list:
https://www.electricrate.com/data-center/electricity-prices-...
This hurts us in the US, quite a bit. And I wouldn't mind, if it meant that there was going to be a more robust US industry for panel production, as that would be fantastic. But the tariffs don't appear to be designed for that, but instead to benefit a few tiny manufacturers that are not expanding.
I don't think that's correct. Or at least it seems to require evidence. On the whole the US solar market has been extremely robust, with dropping prices and rapid buildout. It's possible that we're somehow lagging the rest of the world somehow, but that seems unlikely.
> The number of shipping containers delivering solar panels to American ports during the first three months of the year was down 17% from the prior quarter and 26% from a year earlier, according to research firm Panjiva. The drop came ahead of a March 28 announcement that the Commerce Department is looking into whether solar manufacturers used factories in Southeast Asia to circumvent American tariffs on imports from China.
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
This is the US messing up its solar industry with no productive gain.