Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Texas Wind Turbines Frozen....the Future of America?

I would just once love to hear the truth about all power and energy without a political slant. Just once.
It will never happen.....

I find it funny because our gas line is connected to a 48in pipeline.

It is about a mile from the house and we have never had a problem even when they shut the valve upstream to do some work.

It took about 8 hours and the whole time we had gas.

interesting article

Easy. When demand cranked up downstream faster than supply increased upstream you depressurize the pipe somewhere and you get icing at the point of expansion..
Had the wind and solar power not crashed this would not have been a problem.

I think the NG issue has to do with what my friend showed me one cold morning.

He was outside working in the bitter cold trying to get his well head valve unstuck and gas to his house. He had a back yard well with free gas. The company bought his well and it was going to their use too.
He said it freezes because it has a lot of water/ moisture that cones up from the ground. He showed me a trap.

I don't claim to know anything about gas. I just know that he had a hard time when he needed it most, BUT the company somehow didn't have this problem. A gas man could probably tell you why.
BTW, he didn't use a torch to thaw it out. 😉

I have a wind farm near my up north house that seems to function fine at -40* F to -50* F with no issues. Of course they seem to be shut down most of the time, so I guess if you don't run them much, they'll give you few problems.

Sorry I made mistake. It turns out Texas is off the national grid, so it can't just buy power say from from California. California would only buy power from BC and jack the price up. We have sold power to California.

I'm well aware, I remember moving into a farm house in Bryan, TX around Christmas time in '90(?), and it hit close to zero. Never been so freaking cold in my life and as someone used to more northern climes, couldn't figure out why people wouldn't use insulation where it''s needed.

It just seems that memories of cold are very short in that part of the world. and they should know better.

All three grids have Converter/Inverter ties to buy/sale power amongst the three grids. Spot market MWatt went from $30/ Mwatt to as high as $9000/Mwatt in last week or two. They aren't buying power at that prices and selling for contracted prices of $.12/ Kilowatt or $120/Mwatt.

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/power-outages-linger-millions-another-044450576.html

Not just Texas having issues.....

We have had not unusual cold -40s in northern Minnesota for a couple of weeks. As is the norm when it gets that cold there is not much wind. What good are the dam windmills period frozen or not?

Osky

It's pretty simple in Texas. Mandates forced a large portion of the State to rely on a portion of wind power to supplement natural gas generation. The wells were shut down in reserve. By the time the problems started, it was too late to remedy the problem. Natural gas pipelines didn't "freeze". The ability to open them was frozen. I work around LNG.

What mandates specifically.

The big wind is in the white house.

I was attempting to be apolitical, as requested.

https://www.power-eng.com/coal/idle...ord-peaks-in-2020-and-2021-summers/#gref

Hey, look! ERCOT thinks Texas needs coal this summer.

Wind, solar, and gas all have a few problems. Wind and solar are dependent on the weather for their generation capabilities. Gas is less so, but it is a “just in time” delivery system of the gas to the plants. So, if anything happens to disrupt the supply, there is a problem. This time, apparently the disruption was that the gas well heads were frozen, making it hard to get the gas out of the ground and into the pipelines. Next time it could be something else.

And now, it really matters because there is so little reserve built into the system. Take one power plant out of the equation and you have problems. Increase demand unexpectedly (as this was as usually this is the slow time of year for power demand) and you can have big problems. We need more coal and more nuclear. You can store enough coal to run a plant for weeks onsite. Some plants, like the one that used to be in Mt. Pleasant mine it right there onsite. And of course, we should have lots of nuclear.

But of course, we all know that we’re not going to be allowed to take the obvious steps of building more coal and nuclear plants and this sort of thing is going to become increasingly common in the years to come. Better buy a big assed Generac.

By the way, Obama is the reason Texas is in the predicament it is in.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monticello_Steam_Electric_Station


Selective non-catalytic reduction (SNCR) systems were retrofitted by Fluor to Monticello's units in 2008.[6][7] This retrofit complimented the LO-NOx burners already installed at Monticello to reduce nitrogen oxide (NO
x ) emissions.[6] In November 2011, Luminant announced that, rather than retrofitting, they would permanently idle Units 1 and 2 to comply with the United States Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Cross-State Air Pollution Rule.[8] With two units of the plant being idled, Luminant halted lignite extraction at nearby Sulphur Springs and Mount Pleasant Mines.[9] It later restarted the units in March 2014 due increased demand for power generation from the 2014 North American cold wave.[10] Luminant made the decision in 2014 that Monticello would rely on coal solely from the Powder River Basin beginning in 2016.[3]

So, Obama’s across Air Pollution Rule was the one that killed this plant. If you remember it is the one the State of Texas sued the feds over and lost. Basically it recategorized carbon dioxide as a pollutant. The company decided not to do the expensive retrofits on all of its equipment. That left it running at a reduced rate. Then it decided, in order to comply with federal regulations that it would only burn the cleaner Powder River coal. That of course, massively increased costs. Which, of course, caused it to shut down.

Today’s crisis is directly attributable to Obama’s across Air Pollution Act of 2011.