9 ms·

Seems to be a combination of many things (a perfect storm...): • Dwellings are not insulated to the same level as their northern counterparts. Over 60% of hous

Seems to be a combination of many things (a perfect storm...): • Dwellings are not insulated to the same level as their northern counterparts. Over 60% of houses in Texas have single pane glass. • Texas seems to rely substantially on heat pumps for residential heating, with fallback to resistive heating. At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - my guess is that many are using 2-3x less efficient resistive heaters at night. • Heating peak demands tend to be correlated with the longest time since the sun was last shining... This bodes poorly for solar supply and also self generators - even those with battery backup. • Texas typically imports from neighboring states... Most of which are in a similar irregular climate. • Heating requirements for a building vs exterior temperature is non-linear, as are heat pump efficiencies. This is especially pronounced with poor insulation factor. To put it into context, Quebec has ~46,000MW of peak electrical production capacity for a population of 8.4M. during cold winter days (-30°f) it uses all of that capacity and becomes a net-importer. In Summer months, it uses 1/3 of this. Texas had peak electrical production capacity of 37,600MW for it's population of 29M.

ubermonkey 6y ago
Greetings from Texas. Yeah, all that is true. You build based on how things usually are, or at least usually WERE when the dwelling was built. I live in Houston -- very close to downtown, so I'm only about 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. This makes it VERY FUCKING WEIRD INDEED that my entire yard is covered in snow, and it is 16F outside. This is NOT Houston weather. It's almost unprecedented -- it's certainly never been anywhere NEARLY this cold in the 26 years I've lived here, and the idea that we really won't be above 32F (0C) for a material amount of time until SATURDAY is really really nuts. In a normal Houston winter, by contrast, we MIGHT see 3-4 nights that freeze. We go years without needing to wrap plants, and I've never bothered to wrap outside pipes before. (Outlying areas to the north and especially northwest of the urban core get as much as 10 degrees F colder, but even so it's not a regular thing.) So yeah, we're all built here for cooling and not heating. Ambient air temp outside is rarely more than 95, so getting your house to 78 is pretty attainable. But when we get cold snaps, WE certainly notice in our house, which is a relatively new (1997) 3-story townhouse (very vertical; it's about 1800 sq. ft. or 167m^2). It's just not set up to heat evenly or well. The first problem is just distribution. Our house has a modern 'open' style floorplan, with soaring ceilings in the middle (living) floor. Heat, of course, rises. The upshot is that if you set the thermostat to warm the lower 2 floors to, say, 65F, the 3rd floor main bedroom will be intolerably warm and dry. As a consequence, a window in our bedroom is open about 2" all winter. The other gotcha in our house is the floor in the first level, where I have my office (I work from home). It's a stained concrete floor, which is great in the summer because it helps keep the room nice and cool. Unfortunately, it does exactly the same thing in the winter. I'm wearing thick wool socks and long underwear in here now, even though I have a plug-in radiator to supplement the central heating. Actually, the radiator -- a Delonghi; it works great -- would probably be enough IF the windows were better sealed. My desk is up against a window. My legs feel cold all day in weather like this (well, in cold weather; there hasn't been any weather LIKE THIS before), to the point that last week when it was much warmer (45F during the day) I was wearing sweatpants over jeans. The house is wonderful and comfortable and attractive. It works GREAT for the vast majority of our weather. It just gets drafty in the winter. And, of course, today I'm concerned that we're going to get rolling outages. Whooo! At least we have a fireplace. (People laugh about it, but in all honesty having a fire is the easiest way to make the living area comfy without overheating the top floor, just based on where the heat goes. If the house was a little bit bigger, I suspect it would've come with 2 climate control units and proper zoning, which would help a LOT, but as is: just one big zone.)
- rini17 6y ago
  For open spaces an IR radiative heater - the kind with glowing elements - is better. It won't save much energy, but for comfort - you can actually point it toward your body and warmup it that way without having to heat everything around you first. The fireplace does this too.
  - ubermonkey 6y ago
    Yeah, hence the fireplace in the very open main room. The radiator in my office -- which is a normal shaped room with maybe an 8 foot ceiling -- does very well.
  - the8472 6y ago
    > the kind with glowing elements There are far-infrared ceramic heaters that don't glow. Less smell and more energy converted into radiation instead of warm air.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  > The first problem is just distribution. Our house has a modern 'open' style floorplan, with soaring ceilings in the middle (living) floor. Heat, of course, rises. This style of house made so that people can feel rich and high status while wasting enormous amounts of energy to heat and cool is an affront to our future generations. And it’s almost inescapable unless you’re interested in custom building or buying an old house.
  - ubermonkey 6y ago
    You seem nice.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      It wasn’t a personal comment. I’ve seen it in all the houses built in the past 3 decades, coast to coast. Makes no sense thermodynamically. Obviously it sells better than a house that wastes less energy.
stdbrouw 6y ago
As others have pointed out, heating requirements (watt/m^2) are in fact linear which is why it's possible to more or less accurately calculate a building's insulation performance in watt/m^2/K, it's just that there's a grace zone where if it's e.g. 65F outside and you want it to be 72F inside, you might not need to heat at all because the shortfall is covered by solar gains through your windows, internal gains (cooking etc.) and energy stored as thermal mass. That is, the nonlinearity is not in heating needs, but in the efficiency of heating production and the amount of heating you get for free.
- tgtweak 6y ago
  Yes that is correct in theory, BTU requirements are linear based on delta temperature with everything else being static. What doesn't follow is electricity consumption per BTU produced, ie. if your heating source efficiency is non-linear, such as a heat-pump + resistive fallback heating. You can easily consume 8x the amount of electricity with a delta T of 60 than you do at 15. In reality, outdoor air temperature alone isn't indicative of the entire building heat loss/requirement - ground temperatures don't respond linearly to air temperatures. Likewise, there are some oddities that come into play with high temperature deltas such as phase-change of materials or outright failure in some cases. Precipitation and wind can also affect thermal efficiencies. A bitter-sweet example for Texans: The snow can actually provide some insulation. It would be worse if you had no snow and similar air temperatures than getting that 12" of fluffy stuff later this week.
lighttower 6y ago
Why does Quebec use more electrical power in winter if most (nearly all) of their heating is natural gas/oil based?
- csharptwdec19 6y ago
  IDK what it's like in quebec specifically, but a lot of my friends in Ontario would have multiple space heaters (depending on how many people were around and where they were) that they would use in the winter months for more 'localized' warmth and the HVAC was more about keeping pipes from freezing.
- lukeschlather 6y ago
  Central heaters may be natural gas/oil based but the blowing fans or water circulation are typically electric. Also people will supplement with electric space heaters for whatever room they are in while keeping the house somewhat colder than they would prefer.
- nikisweeting 6y ago
  Power is super cheap in Quebec ($0.04/kwh USD) and gas is not, so many people heat their homes to 16-19ºC with gas, then have electric space heaters in their rooms to bring it up to 21-23ºC.
- rpeden 6y ago
  I'm not sure where you're getting your information, but every source I've seen indicates that the majority of heat in Quebec is electric. This matches my experience, FWIW. When I lived in Ottawa, I occasionally looked at houses and apartment across the river in Quebec and nearly all of them had electric heat. More data: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-402-x/2007/1741/ceb1741_003-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-402-x/2007/1741/ceb17... https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-quebec.html https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr... (see Electricity heading) https://www.ivey.uwo.ca/energycentre/blog/2019/06/a-closer-look-at-hydro-quebecs-electricity-price-advantage-over-ontario/ https://www.ivey.uwo.ca/energycentre/blog/2019/06/a-closer-l...
- 6y ago
TulliusCicero 6y ago
> At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - my guess is that many are using 2-3x less efficient resistive heaters at night. How is it possible for heating devices to be less efficient? Where does the waste energy go? Normally, waste energy in devices powered by electricity means it's lost to heat, but here it would be lost to...?
- _whiteCaps_ 6y ago
  https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/241-heat-pumps-and-energy-transfer https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/241-heat-pumps-and... Heat pumps use a small amount of energy to move thermal energy, but it's much more efficient than resistive heat. But if they can't move enough heat, they fall back to resistive heat to top it up.
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    Ohhhh, interesting. Right, that makes sense.
- joelwilliamson 6y ago
  There's no waste heat with resistive heating, but heat pumps use electricity to move heat from outside to inside, and they can add more than 1J of heat using 1J of electricity.
- TFortunato 6y ago
  The trick here is that with heat pumps, they aren't generating the heat, just moving it. As such, you can have, e.g. a 1 kW heat pump moving much more than 1 kW of heat. Wheras with a resistive heater, the best you can do is turn 1 kW of electric power into 1 kW of heat output.
jhayward 6y ago
> Texas had peak electrical production capacity of 37,600MW for it's population of 29M Texas delivered a peak of over 60GW last night, before an unprecedented falloff in generating capacity due to weather and grid conditions.
- tgtweak 6y ago
  Majority of the difference between consumption and generation is imported. ERCOT is operating at 52,000MW right now, with 37,600 of it being generated on-grid.
  - jhayward 6y ago
    No. Texas does not have 15 GW of import capacity.
eatmyshorts 6y ago
I was agreeing with your points....until I got to the bit, "Texas typically imports from neighboring states". Not with power. ERCOT is an isolated grid.
- tgtweak 6y ago
  It imports from Mexico and neighboring grids. From ERCOT's own Q&A: ----------- EEA1 When the reserves drop below 2,300 megawatts, Emergency Energy Alert 1 is activated. That’s when ERCOT communicates to the public and to power generators that the situation is deteriorating. At this time, ERCOT will import power from other states and from Mexico. This regularly happens during peak summer months and is not new. But right now, because prices are so cheap, and unrelated to the weather, ERCOT was already importing power from Mexico and other power grids. Rotating outages do not happen during this stage. EEA2 When the electric reserves drop to 1750 megawatts, other steps are taken to bring on additional capacity, but rotating outages are still not yet activated. EEA3 When the reserves get to 1,000 megawatts and they are not expected to recover within 30 minutes, ERCOT will then ask electric suppliers like Oncor and Reliant to begin rotating outages to reduce load on the system. ERCOT said the location of outages would be determined by each provider like Oncor and Reliant. https://www.wfaa.com/article/weather/texas-power-outages-frequently-asked-questions/287-554d28ba-a8a9-4213-a08a-7c436ad8b59a https://www.wfaa.com/article/weather/texas-power-outages-fre...
  - mschaef 6y ago
    The DC ties represent <1.7% of current load. About the size of a single large generating station. ERCOT, by policy (to avoid certain federal regulations), keeps it that way. I guess you're technically right that they can import power, but that is far from the design intent of the system. (Which is stark contrast to the eastern and western interconections, and their internal multistate ISO's.)
    - mschaef 6y ago
      Following up on this, I checked ERCOT status this morning and none of the DC ties are moving energy (at a moment when you might expect they'd really like to): http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_conditions.html http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...
commandlinefan 6y ago
The roads here aren’t designed for snow either. My heat went out on Friday and I can’t even get the heater replaced because the trucks that deliver heaters can’t get through the roads.
- tgtweak 6y ago
  Would be quite inefficient for municipalities to have plows and salt/sand spreaders sitting around for a decade not being used. Similarly for garages and distributors to carry winter tires.
vel0city 6y ago
Texas hit a peak of 69GW of production, not 37. 37 is what we're able to do after a ton of natural gas plants froze over.
- vel0city 6y ago
  Can't edit, but I was wrong on that number being production, that was peak capacity. That was peak capacity. However from my understanding there isn't a ton of interconnect capacity, so I have a hard time believing peak production was only 54% of peak capacity. Do you have a source for your numbers? It seems extremely low.

ubermonkey 6y ago

Greetings from Texas. Yeah, all that is true. You build based on how things usually are, or at least usually WERE when the dwelling was built. I live in Houston -- very close to downtown, so I'm only about 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. This makes it VERY FUCKING WEIRD INDEED that my entire yard is covered in snow, and it is 16F outside. This is NOT Houston weather. It's almost unprecedented -- it's certainly never been anywhere NEARLY this cold in the 26 years I've lived here, and the idea that we really won't be above 32F (0C) for a material amount of time until SATURDAY is really really nuts. In a normal Houston winter, by contrast, we MIGHT see 3-4 nights that freeze. We go years without needing to wrap plants, and I've never bothered to wrap outside pipes before. (Outlying areas to the north and especially northwest of the urban core get as much as 10 degrees F colder, but even so it's not a regular thing.) So yeah, we're all built here for cooling and not heating. Ambient air temp outside is rarely more than 95, so getting your house to 78 is pretty attainable. But when we get cold snaps, WE certainly notice in our house, which is a relatively new (1997) 3-story townhouse (very vertical; it's about 1800 sq. ft. or 167m^2). It's just not set up to heat evenly or well. The first problem is just distribution. Our house has a modern 'open' style floorplan, with soaring ceilings in the middle (living) floor. Heat, of course, rises. The upshot is that if you set the thermostat to warm the lower 2 floors to, say, 65F, the 3rd floor main bedroom will be intolerably warm and dry. As a consequence, a window in our bedroom is open about 2" all winter. The other gotcha in our house is the floor in the first level, where I have my office (I work from home). It's a stained concrete floor, which is great in the summer because it helps keep the room nice and cool. Unfortunately, it does exactly the same thing in the winter. I'm wearing thick wool socks and long underwear in here now, even though I have a plug-in radiator to supplement the central heating. Actually, the radiator -- a Delonghi; it works great -- would probably be enough IF the windows were better sealed. My desk is up against a window. My legs feel cold all day in weather like this (well, in cold weather; there hasn't been any weather LIKE THIS before), to the point that last week when it was much warmer (45F during the day) I was wearing sweatpants over jeans. The house is wonderful and comfortable and attractive. It works GREAT for the vast majority of our weather. It just gets drafty in the winter. And, of course, today I'm concerned that we're going to get rolling outages. Whooo! At least we have a fireplace. (People laugh about it, but in all honesty having a fire is the easiest way to make the living area comfy without overheating the top floor, just based on where the heat goes. If the house was a little bit bigger, I suspect it would've come with 2 climate control units and proper zoning, which would help a LOT, but as is: just one big zone.)

rini17 6y ago
For open spaces an IR radiative heater - the kind with glowing elements - is better. It won't save much energy, but for comfort - you can actually point it toward your body and warmup it that way without having to heat everything around you first. The fireplace does this too.
- ubermonkey 6y ago
  Yeah, hence the fireplace in the very open main room. The radiator in my office -- which is a normal shaped room with maybe an 8 foot ceiling -- does very well.
- the8472 6y ago
  > the kind with glowing elements There are far-infrared ceramic heaters that don't glow. Less smell and more energy converted into radiation instead of warm air.
lotsofpulp 6y ago
> The first problem is just distribution. Our house has a modern 'open' style floorplan, with soaring ceilings in the middle (living) floor. Heat, of course, rises. This style of house made so that people can feel rich and high status while wasting enormous amounts of energy to heat and cool is an affront to our future generations. And it’s almost inescapable unless you’re interested in custom building or buying an old house.
- ubermonkey 6y ago
  You seem nice.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    It wasn’t a personal comment. I’ve seen it in all the houses built in the past 3 decades, coast to coast. Makes no sense thermodynamically. Obviously it sells better than a house that wastes less energy.

stdbrouw 6y ago

As others have pointed out, heating requirements (watt/m^2) are in fact linear which is why it's possible to more or less accurately calculate a building's insulation performance in watt/m^2/K, it's just that there's a grace zone where if it's e.g. 65F outside and you want it to be 72F inside, you might not need to heat at all because the shortfall is covered by solar gains through your windows, internal gains (cooking etc.) and energy stored as thermal mass. That is, the nonlinearity is not in heating needs, but in the efficiency of heating production and the amount of heating you get for free.

tgtweak 6y ago
Yes that is correct in theory, BTU requirements are linear based on delta temperature with everything else being static. What doesn't follow is electricity consumption per BTU produced, ie. if your heating source efficiency is non-linear, such as a heat-pump + resistive fallback heating. You can easily consume 8x the amount of electricity with a delta T of 60 than you do at 15. In reality, outdoor air temperature alone isn't indicative of the entire building heat loss/requirement - ground temperatures don't respond linearly to air temperatures. Likewise, there are some oddities that come into play with high temperature deltas such as phase-change of materials or outright failure in some cases. Precipitation and wind can also affect thermal efficiencies. A bitter-sweet example for Texans: The snow can actually provide some insulation. It would be worse if you had no snow and similar air temperatures than getting that 12" of fluffy stuff later this week.

lighttower 6y ago

Why does Quebec use more electrical power in winter if most (nearly all) of their heating is natural gas/oil based?

csharptwdec19 6y ago
IDK what it's like in quebec specifically, but a lot of my friends in Ontario would have multiple space heaters (depending on how many people were around and where they were) that they would use in the winter months for more 'localized' warmth and the HVAC was more about keeping pipes from freezing.
lukeschlather 6y ago
Central heaters may be natural gas/oil based but the blowing fans or water circulation are typically electric. Also people will supplement with electric space heaters for whatever room they are in while keeping the house somewhat colder than they would prefer.
nikisweeting 6y ago
Power is super cheap in Quebec ($0.04/kwh USD) and gas is not, so many people heat their homes to 16-19ºC with gas, then have electric space heaters in their rooms to bring it up to 21-23ºC.
rpeden 6y ago
I'm not sure where you're getting your information, but every source I've seen indicates that the majority of heat in Quebec is electric. This matches my experience, FWIW. When I lived in Ottawa, I occasionally looked at houses and apartment across the river in Quebec and nearly all of them had electric heat. More data: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-402-x/2007/1741/ceb1741_003-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-402-x/2007/1741/ceb17... https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-quebec.html https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr... (see Electricity heading) https://www.ivey.uwo.ca/energycentre/blog/2019/06/a-closer-look-at-hydro-quebecs-electricity-price-advantage-over-ontario/ https://www.ivey.uwo.ca/energycentre/blog/2019/06/a-closer-l...
6y ago

TulliusCicero 6y ago

> At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - my guess is that many are using 2-3x less efficient resistive heaters at night. How is it possible for heating devices to be less efficient? Where does the waste energy go? Normally, waste energy in devices powered by electricity means it's lost to heat, but here it would be lost to...?

_whiteCaps_ 6y ago
https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/241-heat-pumps-and-energy-transfer https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/241-heat-pumps-and... Heat pumps use a small amount of energy to move thermal energy, but it's much more efficient than resistive heat. But if they can't move enough heat, they fall back to resistive heat to top it up.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  Ohhhh, interesting. Right, that makes sense.
joelwilliamson 6y ago
There's no waste heat with resistive heating, but heat pumps use electricity to move heat from outside to inside, and they can add more than 1J of heat using 1J of electricity.
TFortunato 6y ago
The trick here is that with heat pumps, they aren't generating the heat, just moving it. As such, you can have, e.g. a 1 kW heat pump moving much more than 1 kW of heat. Wheras with a resistive heater, the best you can do is turn 1 kW of electric power into 1 kW of heat output.

jhayward 6y ago

> Texas had peak electrical production capacity of 37,600MW for it's population of 29M Texas delivered a peak of over 60GW last night, before an unprecedented falloff in generating capacity due to weather and grid conditions.

tgtweak 6y ago
Majority of the difference between consumption and generation is imported. ERCOT is operating at 52,000MW right now, with 37,600 of it being generated on-grid.
- jhayward 6y ago
  No. Texas does not have 15 GW of import capacity.

eatmyshorts 6y ago

I was agreeing with your points....until I got to the bit, "Texas typically imports from neighboring states". Not with power. ERCOT is an isolated grid.

tgtweak 6y ago
It imports from Mexico and neighboring grids. From ERCOT's own Q&A: ----------- EEA1 When the reserves drop below 2,300 megawatts, Emergency Energy Alert 1 is activated. That’s when ERCOT communicates to the public and to power generators that the situation is deteriorating. At this time, ERCOT will import power from other states and from Mexico. This regularly happens during peak summer months and is not new. But right now, because prices are so cheap, and unrelated to the weather, ERCOT was already importing power from Mexico and other power grids. Rotating outages do not happen during this stage. EEA2 When the electric reserves drop to 1750 megawatts, other steps are taken to bring on additional capacity, but rotating outages are still not yet activated. EEA3 When the reserves get to 1,000 megawatts and they are not expected to recover within 30 minutes, ERCOT will then ask electric suppliers like Oncor and Reliant to begin rotating outages to reduce load on the system. ERCOT said the location of outages would be determined by each provider like Oncor and Reliant. https://www.wfaa.com/article/weather/texas-power-outages-frequently-asked-questions/287-554d28ba-a8a9-4213-a08a-7c436ad8b59a https://www.wfaa.com/article/weather/texas-power-outages-fre...
- mschaef 6y ago
  The DC ties represent <1.7% of current load. About the size of a single large generating station. ERCOT, by policy (to avoid certain federal regulations), keeps it that way. I guess you're technically right that they can import power, but that is far from the design intent of the system. (Which is stark contrast to the eastern and western interconections, and their internal multistate ISO's.)
  - mschaef 6y ago
    Following up on this, I checked ERCOT status this morning and none of the DC ties are moving energy (at a moment when you might expect they'd really like to): http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_conditions.html http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...

commandlinefan 6y ago

The roads here aren’t designed for snow either. My heat went out on Friday and I can’t even get the heater replaced because the trucks that deliver heaters can’t get through the roads.

tgtweak 6y ago
Would be quite inefficient for municipalities to have plows and salt/sand spreaders sitting around for a decade not being used. Similarly for garages and distributors to carry winter tires.

vel0city 6y ago

Texas hit a peak of 69GW of production, not 37. 37 is what we're able to do after a ton of natural gas plants froze over.

vel0city 6y ago
Can't edit, but I was wrong on that number being production, that was peak capacity. That was peak capacity. However from my understanding there isn't a ton of interconnect capacity, so I have a hard time believing peak production was only 54% of peak capacity. Do you have a source for your numbers? It seems extremely low.