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Rolling Blackouts from the cold snap
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JonSCKs
Posted 2/15/2021 08:57 (#8833704)
Subject: Rolling Blackouts from the cold snap


Wow this is starting to be quite the story.

Maybe we shouldn’t have shuttered all those coal generation plants after all?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-15/winter-s-fury-unl...

Millions of households in Texas are suffering rolling power blackouts for the first time in a decade as an unprecedented Arctic freeze wrought chaos in U.S. energy markets.
The largest cities from Houston to San Antonio were without power for spells of up to an hour at a time as supplies in the U.S.’s second largest state fluctuated wildly.

“Every grid operator and every electric company is fighting to restore power right now,” said Bill Magness President and Chief Executive Officer of Ercot, the operator of the state’s power grid.

The extreme cold caught the highly decentralized Texan electricity market by surprise despite a heads up a week ago about the impending frigid temperatures from the U.S. National Weather Service. With the equivalent of 2 million households being cut off at a time, the situation is expected to worsen throughout Monday. Ercot is expecting power demand to hit an all-time high, breaking a record set during a summer heat wave in 2019.


https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-...

U.S. coal consumption is likely to decline sharply again in 2020, though the current roster of planned and completed coal plant retirements suggests the year may not be quite as rough as the past two.

At 13,703 MW, 2019 marks the highest level of annual coal capacity retirements in the U.S. since 2015, a new S&P Global Market Intelligence analysis of federal data shows. The amount of coal capacity planned for retirement in 2020 is expected to exceed the amount retired in each of 2014, 2016 and 2017. Another retirement has already been announced.

Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association Inc. said Jan. 9 that it was closing its 247-MW Escalante power plant in New Mexico by the end of 2020. Since 2014, U.S. power generators retired nearly 62,000 MW of coal-fired generation capacity, with another 26,947 MW of retirements teed up through 2025.

Hmmm... who has the highest wind farm capacity?

https://www.power-technology.com/features/us-wind-energy-by-state/

Texas – installed capacity 24,899MW

“Far and away the state leader of wind energy is Texas with a total installed capacity of 24,899MW, enough to power over six million homes.

The state’s largest wind farm is the Roscoe wind farm in Central Texas, which has 634 wind turbines at a capacity of 781.5MW which produce 2,174 GWh of electricity per year.

Texas’ growth in wind power in the early 2000s was due to former governor and current Secretary of Energy Rick Perry. Under his tenure, wind power surged from 116MW to over 11,000MW and $7bn was invested in a transmission scheme to connect renewable power to Texan cities.”

Golly what happens when the turbines ice up?

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/14/historic-winter-stor...

“Nearly half of Texas' installed wind power generation capacity has been offline because of frozen wind turbines in West Texas, according to Texas grid operators.

Wind farms across the state generate up to a combined 25,100 megawatts of energy. But unusually moist winter conditions in West Texas brought on by the weekend's freezing rain and historically low temperatures have iced many of those wind turbines to a halt.

As of Sunday morning, those iced turbines comprise 12,000 megawatts of Texas' installed wind generation capacity, although those West Texas turbines don't typically spin to their full generation capacity this time of year.”

...

https://www.windpowerengineering.com/the-cold-hard-truth-about-ice-o...

WIPS blade-heating elements consist of carbon-based electrical heaters, which let the blade surface heat quickly — but to a controlled temperature — once ice is detected. The thin (0.5 mm) heater, including a glass fabric protection layer, does not interfere with the unit’s aerodynamics.

However, the biggest challenge was retrofitting an efficient de-icing system on existing, four-year-old wind turbines, according to Sebastien Goupil-Dumont, manager – Generation at EDF Renewable Energy Inc. EDF RE acted as project manager.

“To ensure a high-quality end product, it was decided that the blade work had to be done on the ground, in a remote location, instead of trying to do all of it up tower, using platforms,” explains Goupil-Dumont. So far the retrofit, though costly, is producing positive results.“

Edited by JonSCKs 2/15/2021 09:10




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