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Lots of folks in these comments seem to want to use this event to litigate wind vs. solar vs. gas vs. nuclear vs. coal, but it seems like, across the board, pow
by i_am_proteus 6y ago
Lots of folks in these comments seem to want to use this event to litigate wind vs. solar vs. gas vs. nuclear vs. coal, but it seems like, across the board, power generation facilities in Texas were simply unprepared to operate in such low temperatures.
All of these technologies can and do work well in very cold climates.
- jdkee 6y agoSolar panels don't work well under a foot of snow.
- ckemere 6y agoThe people down the street from me in Houston are currently powering their house with their solar panels, actually. They were able to loan their generator to their neighbor. We had to abandon our house.
- tmotwu 6y agoLast year, I went on vacation to Alaska. Me and my friends airbnb'd an off-grid home/cabin in Talkeetna, about several hundred miles north of Anchorage. It was powered entirely on solar panels on the roof and right by the house. Water from the rivers. Granted, it had a wood stove, like most cabin/homes are in the north. Just want to chime in and say that renewables are absolutely very prevalent in colder, remote climates.
- snowwindwaves 6y agoit isn't that big a deal to run a fridge and some led lights on solar pAnels. As you identified heating and cooling are the big energy users.
- 8note 6y agoMiles north of anchorage? How many hours of sun were you getting? 3? 1?
- kingaillas 6y agoI was curious so I used sunrisesunset.com to see. Looks like at June 21 (picking a day around the summer solstice) sunrise is at 4:04 am and sunset is midnight. That's a nice 20 hours of sunshine. On the flip and dark side, Dec 21 it is sunrise at ~10:30 am and sunset at ~3:30 pm. A sadly short 5 hours of sun. Ouch.
- favorited 6y agoSolar panels provide less than 1.5% of Texas electricity generation, so the fact that they can't be used under snow isn't the cause of the deficiency today.
- jeffbee 6y agoTexas is pretty large and their solar resources are way the hell out in Pecos County where it hasn't been snowing. This is actual ideal to have your solar power plant far to the west of your population centers, to handle the evening load peak. If Texas had California-scale solar power installations, they would be warm and happy right now.
- HALtheWise 6y agoIn cold climates, solar panels will have builtin heaters that makes the snow slide off, but it seems likely that they didn't bother to install that for a solar plant in Texas.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ashtonkem 6y agoTurns out you can actually design around that. Heck, my solar panels cleared themselves of the foot of snow we received (Idaho) without any intervention on my part. If necessary I could’ve gotten up there with a broom and ladder.
- windexh8er 6y agoLive in MN. We have a lot of solar and wind here. In fact solar gets a boost from ground cover snow based on the reflective property. Do panels lose out on snowy days or some accumulation? Yes, but there's a solar farm a mile from my house that covers probably 40 acres with solar - and I've never seen the panels covered. As for the wind turbines - they work fine in cold weather. It's just that with ice build up on the blades the operator will force the unit to lock down so it doesn't become unbalanced and destroy itself. Edit: To add some additional color I know Texas is not the only state dealing with some rough weather over the last few days / week - but for context, where I live, today was the first day we broke 0F since February 10th. Yesterday morning it was -27.6F in my backyard (Ambient weather station - air temp). I'm curious to see what the actual root cause of the outages really was in Texas. Curious if it was all naturally related or if we see any inklings of strategically timed cyber related events.
- azernik 6y agoHuh. Hadn't thought of the snow-reflection boost. But yeah, cleaning off solar panels is a totally doable bit of maintenance in snowy conditions, or even just tilting and coating them so snow falls off. A human with a broom could make rover solar panels work for decades on Mars, we can do it in Minnesota.
- windexh8er 6y agoI've never seen anyone cleaning them anywhere. Pretty sure the solar farms either have slightly warmed panels that will reduce the friction of any coverage enough to leverage the panel tilt - or since a lot of the installs will follow the sun anyway they probably have a mode of operation to "dump" the panels clean. I have someone coming out to go over a solar quote I had done, so have some new questions to ask!
- ashtonkem 6y agoThe solar panels in my roof shed snow way faster than the shingles do. I suspect it's a combo of the angle plus them being slick glass rather than rough asphalt paper. Maybe they're warmed too, I've never actually touched them.
- redisman 6y agoNatural gas plants also had to shut down. This was a systematic failure to plan for cold weather,
- gameswithgo 6y agoi have solar panels in texas, snow slid right off.
- soulofmischief 6y agoAlso: I live in Texas and have 100% renewable energy, so I feel sidelined by such comments.
- gruez 6y ago>Also: I live in Texas and have 100% renewable energy Are you living off the grid, or living on the grid but paying for a "100% renewable" provider? If it's the latter it's likely that you're only being 100% renewable on a net annual basis, and still using non-renewable sources during peak hours. https://energy.stanford.edu/news/100-renewables-doesn-t-equal-zero-carbon-energy-and-difference-growing https://energy.stanford.edu/news/100-renewables-doesn-t-equa...
- fastball 6y agoSeems like an unnecessary quibble. If everyone was using a "100% renewable" provider, would non-renewables be consumed?
- saghm 6y agoIt sounds like GP is saying that at current capacity, there isn't enough renewable energy to supply all of the demand 100% of the time.
- gruez 6y agoBut at this moment people aren't so whether it's actually helping the environment is debatable. It's like selling a vegan burger that's made with beef but claiming it's totally fine because that's offset by some other guy eating a plant burger.
- aardvarkr 6y agoJust an FYI, unless you’re off the grid you aren’t actually 100% renewable. I live in Texas and found this to be super confusing when I signed up for power for the first time. If you think about it for a second it makes sense that you’re getting the same energy as the rest of your neighbors and the grid is made up of many many different types of power plants. The “100% renewable” bit means that when the power broker gives a cut to the state that money is used to fund only renewable projects. Hope you learned something new today!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- danans 6y ago> All of these technologies can and do work well in very cold climates. The technologies can work, but only if measures are taken to make them work that way, and those measures are expensive. Texas' grid, like most of the nation's grid, is optimized to keep prices low for consumers and profits steady for generators and distributors, and it's worked amazingly well at that. But "running lean" is great and everyone wins until you get hit with a highly consequential long-tail event (Taleb's Black Swan), and then you sometimes get caught without any backups.
- oivey 6y agoThey aren’t that expensive, seeing as probably most states can operate their power grid at reasonable cost at these temperatures. They definitely aren’t expensive compared to the economic damage of an event like this every 15 years.
- danans 6y ago"Expensive" is all relative. If it costs say ... 2% of the utility shareholder dividend, would shareholders be ok with that? Before this happened, what exactly were the incentives that led them not to prepare? Was it really an unforeseeable event? Was the risk understood but downplayed (like the oil industry with climate change)? The answers to these will hopefully come out in time.
- da_big_ghey 6y agoI've had power out for over a day and am fine. I would not pay any more money to avoid this once every thirty years, or even once a decade, for a few days. Mostly because paying the cost to prepare for one of these is reasonable, but preparing for all of them would be very expensive and I will trade cheap power for the occasional inconvenience.
- HenryKissinger 6y ago> every thirty years Climate change says hi.
- heurist 6y agoThey didn't invest in the weatherproofing needed for these extreme events. It wasn't worth the expense for them to ensure that people would have heat if we had a record-breaking cold snap (only have to go back 30 years to match the one we are in now). I wonder if that equation will change once the state is back up and running again.
- ip26 6y agoI wonder if that equation will change... It seems like there is no shortage of scapegoats, so my money says "no".
- killjoywashere 6y agoSeriously, there are already disinformation agents hard at work across the internet, at least one in this thread. By November this cold snap will be tied to Benghazi and a pedo ring run out of a pizza joint.
- reddog 6y agoIt will. You can bet on it. The Texas Legislature is currently in session (it only meets every other year). Maybe a quarter of them will have personally experienced this power outage and all of them will have a parent, sister, son, neighbor, friend who suffered through it. And while these people may not know much about same sex bathrooms, a lot of them know a lot about energy. When this session is out weatherpfoofing will not be "suggested" or "recommended", it will be law.
- bluedino 6y agoWind farms have been freezing up in texas
- jwolfe 6y agoYes. That's their point. So have solar farms. And gas plants. And a nuclear reactor.
- bdcravens 6y agoThe issue is that the plants weren't built to handle these temperatures, and the deregulation and political climate in Texas makes it difficult to incentive those plants to make those changes. (Pre-pandemic) you'll see some random electric company setup outside of a grocery store asking everyone who walks in what their rate is, and offering to beat it.
- pixl97 6y agoMany of those places are calling their customers and telling them to cancel their service as fast as possible. https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/texas-power-retailers-to-customers-in-face-of-freeze-please-leave-us https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/texas-power...
- masklinn 6y ago> Lots of folks in these comments seem to want to use this event to litigate wind vs. solar vs. gas vs. nuclear vs. coal That’s simply not true. The only people “litigating” do so in response to dishonest indictments of wind power.
- tryptophan 6y agoIIRC solar panels are actually more efficient at low temperatures.