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Afaik, the way abnormal situations like these are handled in northern Europe is that the grid suppliers have agreements with the very large industrial consumers
by tpmx 6y ago
Afaik, the way abnormal situations like these are handled in northern Europe is that the grid suppliers have agreements with the very large industrial consumers (think aluminium smelters) who agree to shut down immediately when the grid frequency goes below a certain trigger level.
The way I understand it, this is useful both in time-critical emergencies (like keeping the grid at 50 Hz when a nuclear plant suddenly goes offline for some random safety reason) and when things are moving a lot slower, like during periods of extreme colds and extreme electicity demand from heating houses.
So, this approach is useful in removing the need for rolling blackouts, at least until demand reaches some very extreme level, but it does require ahead of time investments in shutdown agreements.
Perhaps Texas hasn't been in this extreme situation before, and they simply don't have enough industrial shutdown agreements in place?
- cowboysauce 6y agoERCOT does have shutdowns agreements in place, but there’s a limit to what you can do when simultaneously facing record demand and having ~30,000 MW of capacity go offline. For comparison, on Sunday evening demand was roughly 70,000 MW.
- s0rce 6y agoIsn't it immensely difficult to restart an aluminum smelter? Also, my vague memory of these is that in North America most of them are in areas with abundant hydro power.
- tpmx 6y agoProbably. I just picked something at random that I know uses a lot of power - I think in the order of one nuclear reactor for a typical installation. Should have known better than to do that here.
- sjg007 6y agoThey can probably run at lower power? I imagine you slow everything down. After all you just have to melt it again.
- askvictor 6y agoSome designs can be stopped and started easily; others get into big trouble if they're shut down abruptly.
- wavesquid 6y agoThey're immensely difficult to restart once the aluminium solidifies: difficult enough that the answer is throw it out and make a new one. But there's a big enough difference between operational temperatures and solid that you can deprive them of electricity for e.g. 8 hours while you restart your other power generation infrastructure. IIRC for some aluminium smelters you can even run the reaction in reverse briefly if you need to jump start something. (citations needed.... I'm recalling this from a story someone told me ~15 years ago about the Alcoa plant in Victoria, Australia)
- foepys 6y agoI recently watched a documentary about aluminum smelting and this topic came up. An engineer said that they have a 6 hours time frame. If the power doesn't come back on, the aluminum hardened too much and all smelters are lost forever. There is no possibility for on-site generators because the required generator would be the size of a power plant.
- oasisbob 6y agoYou can refresh your vague memories - all of Alcoa's west-coast aluminum industry is long-gone. The waves of Enron took out most of them decades ago when its destruction rolled through the energy markets. IIRC, the last NW aluminum smelter closed a few years ago.
- s0rce 6y agoI was remembering a bunch in Quebec. Not sure where all the hydro power in the pnw goes. Was nice to have cheaper power when I lived up there though!
- landemva 6y agoThe bitcoin mining farms claimed to shut down, so some industrial load shedding seems to be in play in Texas.
- tpmx 6y agoI guess my point is that if there had been sufficient contracts for industrial shutdown, there wouldn't be rolling outages in residential areas.
- nrmitchi 6y ago> claimed to shut down I would guess that there is an ~0% chance any bitcoin mining operation, who's main cost is power, is still operating with power prices as astromonically high as they currently are.