3 million without power in Texas

i'm not sure that is correct, but agree we need infrastructure. let's hope congress comes through, but i'm skeptical.

 

There's a school of thought that millions of BEVs that are connected to the grid could actually help alleviate some of these problems, or at least serve as an emergency power source for the home when the lights go dark.
A million BEVs connected to a really smart grid that have amps in their cans can act as a VERY VERY large battery, and most power grid problems occur during very brief surge periods.
This would require regulations and standards as yet unwritten, and BEVs are in the "VHS or Betamax" stage of development - and remember what happened to BOTH of those standards.

Sounds like some states need to require utilities to stop playing in "The Street" and give their customers (and regulators) a REAL WORLD power budget (both kinds.) Wind has advantages....and there are hundreds of thousands of jobs that COULD BE created HERE instead of sending ratepayer's checks overseas.

 

Do the Tesla superchargers also go down when there is an outage like the one in TX?

All those BEV's stuck going nowhere could also be an issue, I'd think. Plus the dropping temps don't make matters any more appealing.
@ETC a few more standards to add to the mix are wax, vinyl and discrete quad, reel2reel (about 5 versions), 8 track, cassette, CD, DVD, BlueRay and I few others lesser knowns.
But there are probably members here that still use one or more of those obsolete technologies. I still have one of two of them on that list, and a VHS box and a stereo receiver, now both unlooked for lack of use.
Trash or Treasure ......

 

Don't know.
I suspect that if you don't see a bunch of solar cells near-by then they are probably affected as well - or they all might have PowerWalls installed.

I'm sure that some EVangelist will weigh in.....

BEV drivers are range sensitive.
I suspect that some will get caught short but people run out of gas in power outages too.

Darwin is a fair grader. There's no curve.
You don't get extra credit for being PC, but it IS a pass-fail test.

 

Those would have to be some mighty large powerwalls to keep a rack of 10 superchargers up for very long.

 

Last day to save $200 @ PlugOutPower.com on a PlugOut kit to turn your prius into a generator for your home.

Use code: pres2021

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

We need the updates without EVs. Needing them before many EVs is a question of time of use. Even with a BEV, a household's main use of electricity will be air conditioning. With the BEV likely being charged at night, that household's demand amount won't increase, just last longer. Which does help in running some power plants more efficiently.

Chargers don't work without electricity, but many gas stations won't with the power out too. Emergency generators are the solution for both, and they can be set up beforehand with predicted major storms. Tesla has sent owners warnings with such predictions to keep the car fully charged in case of power outage, and have even unlocked capacity of cars locked for shorter range during those times.

Media formats aren't exactly comparable to charging standards. How many VHS deck makers included a Betamax slot just in case the buyer had those tapes? The cost of including both CHAdeMO and CCS plugs on a DC charger is a small fraction of the charger's total price. So many have both. Superchargers can do the same if the licensing and ego issues are ever resolved. Though Tesla owners have adapter options for CHAdeMO and CCS.

The j1772 standard for AC charging is very likely as set as the plug to your TV or can opener.

 

My son is in Texas. They announced a rolling blackout and the power in their town was cut on schedule. Then, the story goes, they could not get it switched back on. That's not too surprising since there was 9 inches of snow in an area that almost never snows.

Personally, I would not want to use MY BEV as a grid storage unit. Not that I have one, but my PHEV is part of my emergency contingency plan. I know that I can travel 500 or so miles in my car even after the battery is drained. The last thing I would want is to find myself in the middle of a natural disaster with my battery badly depleted.

I agree with the idea that the infrastructure should be updated with or without BEVs in the mix. Along with EVs the grid also has to handle the widespread use of heatpumps and A/C.

I got a chuckle out of the mention that gas stations can continue to supply gas in a storm if they have a generator (quite true) and that superchargers could do that too. (huh????) I had visions of the 20 station supercharger on I-5 at Harris Ranch in California with a dedicated 10MW peaker plant to keep the superchargers running during a power outage. It's quite doable, but power plants require maintenance and are not cheap to design, build and install.

Dan

 

A power outage tracker right now shows 4.15 Million customers in Texas out of electric power, out of 12.48 Million total customers. When I first glanced this morning, more than 4.4 Million were out, over 1/3rd of all customers.

A separate news article indicated that spot natural gas prices had spiked 100X in TX and OK, as many wells freeze. I haven't checked any others sources of energy prices.

 

Lot of folks lost water as well. Turns out that the power was unplugged from the water utilities as well...

Hope that they did not do that to the hospitals.

 

Now I see an article saying the same for wholesale electric prices:
Texas wholesale electric prices spike more than 10,000% amid outages | Reuters

Spot prices exceeded $9,000/MWh on Sunday, vs $30/MWh on Wednesday.

"ERCOT can be more susceptible to wholesale price spikes because it does not have a capacity market, which pays power plants to be on standby during peak demand and weather emergencies, for example. ERCOT’s model means consumers are not paying for generation that may never be called into action.

But early on Monday, ERCOT said extreme weather conditions caused many generating units – across all fuel types – to trip offline and become unavailable. That forced more than 30,000 megawatts of power generation off the grid, ERCOT said in a news release."

The earlier natural gas item:
Natural gas prices increase 100 fold due to frozen wells in Oklahoma, Texas | KOMO

 

Over the last several years, there's been an increase in mutual and pension fund managers filing shareholder resolutions with the companies they invest in to say "in your annual reports, please include information on what you are doing to anticipate and mitigate risks to our investment that are foreseeable in changing climate expectations." Maybe such reporting could have led to reconsidering whether a "worst case weather scenario" looking backward still makes sense as a "worst case weather scenario" looking forward. (Or, perhaps, it could have led only to some clown standing at a podium saying he doesn't get how "warming" could lead to Arctic air arriving in Texas.)

Naturally, the SEC's answer during the last administration was to make it harder for shareholders to file resolutions.

 

I imagine that the extreme demand payed a much bigger part in systems tripping than a 12% loss of supply. Most people's HVAC systems were probably running 24 hours a day and still not keeping up since they and the homes aren't designed for that much of a heat demand. Plus, the heat pumps aren't going to do much, so the resistance heaters come on. That much colder than normal probably more than double electricity demand. They'd have had blackouts even without the wind turbines freezing. We had a cold snap a couple weeks ago that was nothing like what Texas has and our heating ran for over 12 hours one day. I bumped the setting down a degree but couldn't do much more because of my wife's 90-year-old mother staying with us. Guess where she's going on Friday. Yup. Houston. Bad timing, mom!!

 

Not to mention they also have natural gas generating plants in the mix, but gas got prioritized to homes using it for heat.

I splurged at last on a heated mattress pad. Oh my goodness it is nice. I've since bumped the night setback on the thermostat down another degree Celsius (or a couple degrees Fahrenheit, if you will), and can probably go further and still sleep perfectly comfortably. In a way, this is just finally getting around to taking the same ideas from the Prius hunkering threads and applying them indoors.

I think lowering the setback temperature has also noticeably extended the life of fruit, bread, etc., between my very infrequent COVID grocery trips. That won't continue into the warm months, of course, but it's nice while it lasts.

 

I'm seeing elsewhere that ERCOT planned for a winter demand peak of 67 GW, but starting tripping out when they hit 69 GW:

“No one’s model of the power system envisioned that all 254 Texas counties would come under a winter storm warning at the same time."

The freeze knocked out 30 GW of generating capacity, of which only 5 GW was wind power. All kinds of thermal plants had to shut down when some of their equipment froze: natural gas, coal, even nuclear. But natural gas had the largest chunk of the shutdowns, also suffering from a supply shortage as other gas users also increased their demand.

Texas has also cheaped-out on certain resiliency measures that are common elsewhere:

"Wind turbines, for instance, can be equipped with heaters and other devices so that they can operate in icy conditions — as is often done in the upper Midwest, where cold weather is more frequent. Gas plants can be built to store oil on-site and burn the fuel if needed, as is often done in the Northeast, where natural gas shortages are more common. Grid regulators can design markets that pay extra to keep a fleet of backup power plants in reserve in case of emergencies, as is often done in the Mid-Atlantic.

But all of these solutions cost money, and grid operators are often wary of forcing consumers to pay extra for safeguards if they don’t think they will be needed.

“Building in resilience often comes at a cost, and there’s a risk of both underpaying but also of overpaying,” said Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University. “It’s a difficult balancing act.”"



A glimpse of the future in Texas: Climate change means trouble for power grids | The Seattle Times
Texas produces more power than any other state. Here's why it went dark anyway - CNN

Note also that North America has three primary independent electric grids: Eastern, Western, and Texas. (Smaller grids include each Hawaiian Island and many self-contained Alaskan and northern Canadian regions and towns.) Within an inter-tied grid, everything is phase-locked, so energy can be fairly easily shuttled around and shared, within the capacities of the big transmission lines. But shipping energy between grids requires very specialized equipment, so is limited.

Eastern U.S. and Eastern Canada are tied together. Similarly, Western U.S. and Western Canada are tied together. But Texas is Texas.

 

Do you get a chuckle over the Prius Prime having a charge mode.

Tesla has deployed generator powered chargers to Supercharger locations during busy holiday weekends in the past. No reason why it couldn't be done for emergencies. There'll be less chargers available, and charge times will likely be longer. Still better than no charging until the grid is back up.

 

Weren't we talking about exactly this just three days ago? Power failures, water storage towers, and backup power for the pumps?

I think we're going solar | Page 3 | PriusChat

Or maybe I shouldn't expect more from places that don't prepare for repeats of previous ice storms(*), or issue building permits for major housing developments inside the storage pool area of flood control reservoirs.

(*) I know they've had serious ice storms there previously. I had a job interview in Dallas nearly 40 years ago, and faced very severe winter road conditions getting to my nearest PNW airport to fly there. And compared winter experiences with one of my interviewers, a Minnesota or Michigan transplant. During his first Dallas winter, he merrily drove to work one morning after an overnight ice storm, wondering why there were almost no other cars on the road but numerous in the ditches. Only after getting to work and finding the doors locked, did he finally turn on the radio to discover that everything was closed. Being from a far northern state, it had never occurred to him to not go into work in such conditions.

 

Yes, I chuckled when I found out that the Prime had that function on my first long trip. And then I used it that day so that I could showcase the electric mode for family at the end of the day.

The picture of the 10Mw backup generator just for superchargers was funny because the Cat 10MW model natural gas generator is 10 foot wide, 15 foot tall and 45 foot long. Add an enclosure and you have quite an eyesore. Well, some would say that. I'd say it was cool.