12 ms·

Datadog dashboard for the Texas power grid

303 points by finiteseries 4y ago

a-user-you-like 4y ago
Wonder if there’s one for blackout central — CA.
- dv_dt 4y ago
  CA has had blackouts, not for lack of power, but recently, rather for liability reduction vs wildfires sparked by woefully behind the times maintenance of the grid.
  - a-user-you-like 4y ago
    Ah so such a dashboard would need to display expected vs actual.
  - zbrozek 4y ago
    We had capacity blackouts in 2020. https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/18/california-has-first-rolling-blackouts-in-19-years-and-everyone-faces-blame-1309757 https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/18/...
    - a-user-you-like 4y ago
      Yeah, I was part of those. Sometimes living in CA feels third-world, and due to completely preventable maintenance items.
      - dx034 4y ago
        As a European, it always baffled me that power outages are such a common phenomenon in the US. I've heard stories about rolling blackouts due to heat/cold from people in all areas in the US. Whereas in Europe, I cannot remember a single instance rolling blackouts were used because of a gap in supply. Sure, Europeans pay more for electricity, but maybe that spare capacity and inter-connectivity is worth it.
        mrep 4y ago
        The only power outages I have had in Chicagoland have been due to trees and those get resolved in a few hours. I'm pretty sure TX and CA are the outliers.
        cozzyd 4y ago
        In 8 years of living in Chicago... I've had the power go out for approximately 2 seconds.
        baq 4y ago
        don't worry, the grid in EU isn't issue-free by any standard and solar and electric cars will do it no good at all.
        dx034 4y ago
        I know it's not issue free. But Europeans tend to pay a premium to avoid its shortcomings rather than have blackouts. And I prefer that over having cheaper electricity but with a threat of blackouts.
        zbrozek 4y ago
        I don't think most Europeans pay more for electricity than most Californians. California's largest utility, PG&E, would top this list: https://www.electricrate.com/data-center/electricity-prices-by-country/ https://www.electricrate.com/data-center/electricity-prices-...
        mrguyorama 4y ago
        The 48 states that aren't Texas and California just don't have these problems
        seoaeu 4y ago
        In most of the US they aren’t common. Outside of that debacle in Texas, I can’t recall any rolling blackouts in the US from lack of supply. The rarity is quite likely why that event made international news and got so many people around the country talking about it
      - zbrozek 4y ago
        On any given day this month I've had an 87% chance of having uninterrupted power. 27 hours of total downtime, despite paying some of the highest rates.
    - dv_dt 4y ago
      Small nitpick, they weren’t from lack of capacity it was reported as a planning problem. https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-10-06/california-rolling-blackouts-climate-change-poor-planning https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-10-06/califor...
      - zbrozek 4y ago
        From the linked article, A program known as convergence bidding, in particular, is meant to help keep electricity prices steady but instead “masked tight supply conditions” during the August heat wave, the analysis concluded. and Energy providers collectively under-scheduled the amount of electricity they expected to need. This was definitely a lack of capacity.
  - artandlol 4y ago
TameAntelope 4y ago
Odd to present temperature in Celsius for a US state, but otherwise very cool! I wish it were easier to see the moments when demand and capacity were at their closest, as those are the "interesting" moments.
- finiteseries 4y ago
  Made in Germany! (I’m not the creator) https://github.com/danopia https://github.com/danopia https://twitter.com/danopia https://twitter.com/danopia
- dx034 4y ago
  Apart from the already mentioned fact that it was made in Europe, using Celsius makes sense for scientific dashboards. And here, data is pulled from airport weather reports, which always report in Celsius.
- hnarn 4y ago
  > Odd to present temperature in Celsius for a US state It's only odd if you assume that any type of data presentation is always targeted to those living in the area the data is collected for, which of course is not always true. And as others have pointed out, Celsius is in fact used in the US by scientists, physicians etc. -- just not by laymen.
  - TameAntelope 4y ago
    This is a site for American laypeople primarily, so yeah I do think it an odd choice.
grepfru_it 4y ago
I got hit with a rolling blackout on Thursday. Coincidentally, settlement prices skyrocketed to over $1.2k. I should connect this data to my power transfer/backup power system to preempt potential blackouts
- jeffbee 4y ago
  ERCOT didn't declare any capacity emergencies on that day, or any recent day. Is it possible you just suffered from a stochastic outage, and not a capacity-related intentional disconnection? https://www.ercot.com/services/comm/mkt_notices/opsmessages https://www.ercot.com/services/comm/mkt_notices/opsmessages
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    Oooooor maybe they're not publishing notices when they should be. The grid being under-frequency for days at a time shows they didn't have enough generation capacity.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      The hypothesis that there was a rolling outage invisible to everyone except one guy on a forum doesn't strike me as being very likely. Just an ordinary power outage seems a lot more likely.
    - maxerickson 4y ago
      Are you misreading a label? The largest deviation is to 59.97 Hz.
    - dibarra 4y ago
      Pretty unlikely. Outages are common, especially in this above average summer, due to higher transformer load and temps. Ever since the freeze, people who have even planned outages, refer to them as “rolling blackouts”. ERCOT is a pretty open data organization aside from QSE and generator data, and it’s unlikely that this data would have been fudged. We would have seen EEA3 in addition to $5k settlement prices if there was enough of a shortage to invoke rolling blackouts. These prices directly affect end users, e.g. businesses, datacenters, end users still on RTM rates, and solar buyback users. Generators definitely have offers open up to the $5k price point, and there is no way they’d be able to lock the settlement price without it being obvious to businesses/end users, or to generators/REPs/TDUs that there is market manipulation. As far as sagging frequency, this is also wrong, because frequency sag calls up additional reserves, and we haven’t run below 1 gigawatt of reserves since the winter freeze. The number to watch for is 59.5 hertz, which is automatic EEA3 (we haven’t hit this since the winter storm, where we reached a whopping 59.3 hertz) This is also directly measurable by TDUs and (maybe) end users.
rexreed 4y ago
What are we supposed to glean from this as energy laymen? How do you provide data in a way that provides real meaning? All this data but no real insight.
- bloudermilk 4y ago
  Perhaps energy laymen are not the intended audience
  - vogt 4y ago
    That doesn't make the GP question any less relevant or meaningful.
    - hnarn 4y ago
      Nobody said the question was irrelevant or not interesting, but it does answer the question "what am I supposed to take away from this", if the answer is "you're not".
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  For one, the peak price of electricity was ten times the usual low point (~$36) I'm not sure what to make of the frequency drift; federally operators are supposed to balance it out for timekeeping, among other reasons. Taking a week to get on-frequency is...not good.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    TX is not a federal operator, correct? And what is the problem with drifting a bit? I know back in the day lots of peoples' clocks used it as a time reference, but that can't be very true today.
    - selectodude 4y ago
      It means the power plants are over capacity is all.
imrehg 4y ago
I was looking at the source code linked from dashboard, and surprised a bit that it's a gist, rather than a repository. Is it just to facilitate discussions on the code? Otherwise it feels a bit ad hoc that way, wouldn't consider a gist with this many files more ergonomic compared to a repository. Also, trying to follow to the data source of the Ercot website https://www.ercot.com/ https://www.ercot.com/ I get blocked with things like this: Access Denied Error 16 This request was blocked by the security rules. If you believe you have a valid business reason for accessing ERCOT resources, please contact the ERCOT ServiceDesk at ServiceDesk@ercot.com. This seems ... pretty old school as well. Is it geofencing, or more general IP whitelisting? Feels very strange, guessing the former, as Google's cache returns a page that can be viewed. I don't see anything that would _really_ be drain on those ERCOT resources...
- hk1337 4y ago
  I think they block anything outside the US.
  - banana_giraffe 4y ago
    They also seem to allow Canada .. and Sydney, at least out of all of the AWS regions.
- Shank 4y ago
  > Otherwise it feels a bit ad hoc that way, wouldn't consider a gist with this many files more ergonomic compared to a repository. All gists are actually GitHub repositories — you can clone them, branch, and commit changes. There isn’t PRs or an issue tracker, though. (Same with GitHub wikis.)
- gurchik 4y ago
  > This seems ... pretty old school as well. This doesn't surprise me. One of my projects as an intern was to generate reports from public data from ERCOT and a few other North American ISOs (organizations that control a region's power grid). Some of them are happy to reply to a basic cURL request. Others are more particular about things like your user agent or cookies set (even sites that didn't require authentication would set a cookie on first load and would reject requests to certain pages without that cookie). A few were very particular and ran some Javascript code to serve requests that made it so something like Selenium was required. It was a bit surprising to me how many hoops we had to jump through considering this is public data that tax payers are entitled to. If I recall correctly PJM was the best to work with because they had a well-designed REST API and provided a developer guide with sample code. > I don't see anything that would _really_ be drain on those ERCOT resources... I'm not sure if these controls are in place to safeguard against abuse. Most people don't even know these companies exist and I doubt they get too many requests. I'm assuming this is just a symptom of software sold to the lowest bidder.
newaccount2021 4y ago
HN is obsessed with the TX power grid....why?
- mjevans 4y ago
  A large number of fabs and other manufacturing facilities exist there. Texas has had several power failure related disasters in recent years; which have cost many lives and much value, as well as caused shocks to the rest of the US. Much of the rest of the US does not have those issues, or has them in only very small predictable circumstances, mostly caused E.G. by huge windstorms (trees), earthquakes, fires, other 'natural disasters'. Climate generally not regarded as a natural disaster since it's something that should theoretically be planned for. Even the windstorm example, for metro areas power should not go out. It's only poorly managed rural areas that tend to go off the grid.
- viraptor 4y ago
  It's an interesting case of one area trying to stay independent and deregulated, then failing in basic areas like low costs, and maintenance, leading to serious issues in recent winters. With certain media trying to turn the management failures into an anti-wind campaign thus not making things better. Honestly it's an interesting trainwreck to observe from far away. Shame that it affects real people locally. In case you're not familiar with Ercot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_of_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_o...
  - philshem 4y ago
    Direct link to the 2021 Texas power crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
  - briandear 4y ago
    Those failures didn’t happen until they started shifting to so called “green” energy. And compared to California’s power woes, Texas is a model of efficiency. With natural gas and nuclear, there would never be a power shortage in Texas. But for some reason people are obsessed with ugly, bird killing windmills and giant solar farms.
dvasdekis 4y ago
The surprising inference from me, as an energy layman, is that solar output coincides with periods of peak demand. Obviously this is seasonally adjusted, but in an era when the Saudis have solar contracts being supplied for $10USD/MWh [0], the potential profits for a solar provider at periods of peak demand seem more than sufficient to encourage investment, especially with interest rates still at a historic low for big capital projects. So, what gives? Where's the solar? [0] https://reneweconomy.com.au/saudi-solar-plant-locks-in-new-record-low-price-for-power-1-04c-kwh/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/saudi-solar-plant-locks-in-new-r...
- maxerickson 4y ago
  Solar capacity in Texas tripled since last summer. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/21/heat-energy-crisis-would-be-worse-without-solar/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/21/heat-ener...
  - dvasdekis 4y ago
    Thanks! Makes sense if it's being built as fast as possible given the number of workers available for installation.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      Solar is actually super super hard to install right now, because tariffs are in an uncertain space, so nobody knows if, should they import, if they are are going to get a bill in the next 12 months for past sales that's 1x-2x the cost of the import (I forget the exact factor). This sort of protectionism isn't even buying us a bunch of local solar panel production, unfortunately. I'm not a free-market purist, and am in favor of protectionist tariffs to build a nascent industry, but this is not a way to do to it and we are only harming our installer industry with these terrible forms of tariffs and uncertainty. Edit: here's an article from a little while ago on this https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-solar-industry-warns-slowdown-due-supply-chain-disruptions-tariff-uncertainty-2022-04-28/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-solar-industry-warns-slo...
totetsu 4y ago
Is purple capacity and blue demand?
- rossdavidh 4y ago
  Yes, you can also see it here: https://www.ercot.com/ https://www.ercot.com/
repler 4y ago
Some context: wind power is falling short during peak demand recently. https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/07/24/this_one_ercot_chart_explains_why_texas_is_having_electricity_shortages_843990.amp.html https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/07/24/this_one...
- ravedave5 4y ago
  That is the most slanted site I have read in quite some time. Should not be trusted.
  - repler 4y ago
    I noted that as well, but it did give context for why it’s worth looking at this data right now. For me it was relevant to answer “oh that interesting, someone posted this ERCOT data I wonder what’s going this week” Kind of weird my comment was downvoted so heavily - but whatever. The dashboard was posted to Reddit over a year ago during DIFFERENT issues for ERCOT so it seemed relevant to find out what’s going on this time around.
    - viraptor 4y ago
      Well, it could have something to do with right wing weirdos slamming wind farms as the reason for all failures of Ercot. And the article bringing up the winter issues when mostly the gas/thermal plants failed. And not mentioning the fact Ercot decided out to be a part of a bigger market that could help the situation by trading the energy with other states. And the capacity planning issues. Instead it effectively says: look at this graph, wind doesn't solve all our issues, so we're going to call it the reason instead. It's a shallow opinion piece not a serious article.
      - repler 4y ago
        Okay, sorry, not an expert on this. Why do you think someone posted the dashboard link that was already shared over a year ago? Is ERCOT having issues this month? What is the cause of the issues? I am legitimately asking. I don't know, so that's the only recent link I was able to find.
RedShift1 4y ago
Can you add legends to the charts that have multiple items in it?
OliverJones 4y ago
I wish this were available for my power grid vendor. They send me emails in hot weather begging me to turn off my oven and ac. I know they send similar emails to much bigger power users too. It would be very nice if they had this data available, so big power users could plan. Sometime in the next few years, power grid vendors will start to understand they're in the real-time information business.
- rjmunro 4y ago
  Which vendor is that?
- TrueSlacker0 4y ago
  I'm on the Texas grid and we have been getting the same emails from our electric provider the last few weeks.
arminsergiony 4y ago
What kind of information are we, as energy layman, supposed to glean from this? How can one present data in a way that conveys actual significance to the audience? All of this information, yet I still don't feel any wiser.
- nvahalik 4y ago
  There are some bits missing from this dashboard but as a layman who lives in TX, let me give you the rundown I gave a friend: This dashboard gives you an overall of the capabilities and capacity of the grid. Capacity and Demand - How much capacity the system has available against how much is being used in real-time. As the two lines get closer together, it can indicate that the grid is nearing capacity and the need for conservation or an EEA may be necessary. Grid Frequency - While related to load, a lot of appliances keep their clocks based off of the grid frequency. Our grid is 60Hz. Deviations from that are expected and usually OK. However, anything greater than ~.5% is considered bad and a 1% variation (e.g. 59.4 Hz) can actually cause equipment damage. In fact, the reason we had load shedding back in Feb '21 was because we got down to 59.4Hz. Wind & Solar Generation - How much of our capacity is coming from those sources. The days where Wind is down usually is when conservation notices come in. Energy Flow to/from Other grids - How much power are we getting/sending from/to other grids. We have ties to MX, a "railroad" tie as well as ties to the eastern/western grids. We can and do import/export up to about 800 MW from those grids when needed. ERCOT Ancillary Real Time is where things (IMO get interesting). Supply Regulation (freq. adjustment) and ancillary supply are really the big indicators of issues. The more "supply regulation" that goes online the more we are having to adjust the frequency of the grid to compensate. If the grid frequency is too low and all of the regulation freq. up has been deployed—that's a BIG issue and indicates that the system cannot deliver enough. If the system has deployed all of its online/offline reserve capacity, then there simply is no more generation capacity available. When things "get bad" THOSE two are the ones to watch because those are the ones that are engaged in ensuring the overall stability of the system.
cwal37 4y ago
A lot of ERCOT heat these days. I work in energy and it’s both intriguing (because some things move faster there than other markets so there are more opportunities to advocate on the regulatory side of things) and just a mess (over RUC-ing costing consumers an extra ~$2B by the end of the year probably, extreme political spin on grid ops). Two weeks ago I even threw together a simple Twitter bot[0] because I was annoyed with some of their communications there. This datadog dashboard has been around for a while - it shows up on energy Twitter somewhat frequently when the Texas grid is having issues. [0] https://mobile.twitter.com/ERCOT_Status https://mobile.twitter.com/ERCOT_Status
TradingPlaces 4y ago
Normally, this EIA dashboard has all regions but it has been down for a month now. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/US48/US48 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...
NelsonMinar 4y ago
Neat! The California ISO grid has a really nice web and mobile app showing similar data. The site is complicated and has a lot of different views, it's not as nicely organized a dashboard, but the data is great. Example view: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx#section-ra-capacity-trend https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx#secti...
jjt-yn_t 4y ago

303 points by finiteseries 4y ago

a-user-you-like 4y ago

Wonder if there’s one for blackout central — CA.

dv_dt 4y ago
CA has had blackouts, not for lack of power, but recently, rather for liability reduction vs wildfires sparked by woefully behind the times maintenance of the grid.
- a-user-you-like 4y ago
  Ah so such a dashboard would need to display expected vs actual.
- zbrozek 4y ago
  We had capacity blackouts in 2020. https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/18/california-has-first-rolling-blackouts-in-19-years-and-everyone-faces-blame-1309757 https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/18/...
  - a-user-you-like 4y ago
    Yeah, I was part of those. Sometimes living in CA feels third-world, and due to completely preventable maintenance items.
    - dx034 4y ago
      As a European, it always baffled me that power outages are such a common phenomenon in the US. I've heard stories about rolling blackouts due to heat/cold from people in all areas in the US. Whereas in Europe, I cannot remember a single instance rolling blackouts were used because of a gap in supply. Sure, Europeans pay more for electricity, but maybe that spare capacity and inter-connectivity is worth it.
      - mrep 4y ago
        The only power outages I have had in Chicagoland have been due to trees and those get resolved in a few hours. I'm pretty sure TX and CA are the outliers.
        cozzyd 4y ago
        In 8 years of living in Chicago... I've had the power go out for approximately 2 seconds.
      - baq 4y ago
        don't worry, the grid in EU isn't issue-free by any standard and solar and electric cars will do it no good at all.
        dx034 4y ago
        I know it's not issue free. But Europeans tend to pay a premium to avoid its shortcomings rather than have blackouts. And I prefer that over having cheaper electricity but with a threat of blackouts.
        zbrozek 4y ago
        I don't think most Europeans pay more for electricity than most Californians. California's largest utility, PG&E, would top this list: https://www.electricrate.com/data-center/electricity-prices-by-country/ https://www.electricrate.com/data-center/electricity-prices-...
        mrguyorama 4y ago
        The 48 states that aren't Texas and California just don't have these problems
      - seoaeu 4y ago
        In most of the US they aren’t common. Outside of that debacle in Texas, I can’t recall any rolling blackouts in the US from lack of supply. The rarity is quite likely why that event made international news and got so many people around the country talking about it
    - zbrozek 4y ago
      On any given day this month I've had an 87% chance of having uninterrupted power. 27 hours of total downtime, despite paying some of the highest rates.
  - dv_dt 4y ago
    Small nitpick, they weren’t from lack of capacity it was reported as a planning problem. https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-10-06/california-rolling-blackouts-climate-change-poor-planning https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-10-06/califor...
    - zbrozek 4y ago
      From the linked article, A program known as convergence bidding, in particular, is meant to help keep electricity prices steady but instead “masked tight supply conditions” during the August heat wave, the analysis concluded. and Energy providers collectively under-scheduled the amount of electricity they expected to need. This was definitely a lack of capacity.
- artandlol 4y ago

TameAntelope 4y ago

Odd to present temperature in Celsius for a US state, but otherwise very cool! I wish it were easier to see the moments when demand and capacity were at their closest, as those are the "interesting" moments.

finiteseries 4y ago
Made in Germany! (I’m not the creator) https://github.com/danopia https://github.com/danopia https://twitter.com/danopia https://twitter.com/danopia
dx034 4y ago
Apart from the already mentioned fact that it was made in Europe, using Celsius makes sense for scientific dashboards. And here, data is pulled from airport weather reports, which always report in Celsius.
hnarn 4y ago
> Odd to present temperature in Celsius for a US state It's only odd if you assume that any type of data presentation is always targeted to those living in the area the data is collected for, which of course is not always true. And as others have pointed out, Celsius is in fact used in the US by scientists, physicians etc. -- just not by laymen.
- TameAntelope 4y ago
  This is a site for American laypeople primarily, so yeah I do think it an odd choice.

grepfru_it 4y ago

I got hit with a rolling blackout on Thursday. Coincidentally, settlement prices skyrocketed to over $1.2k. I should connect this data to my power transfer/backup power system to preempt potential blackouts

jeffbee 4y ago
ERCOT didn't declare any capacity emergencies on that day, or any recent day. Is it possible you just suffered from a stochastic outage, and not a capacity-related intentional disconnection? https://www.ercot.com/services/comm/mkt_notices/opsmessages https://www.ercot.com/services/comm/mkt_notices/opsmessages
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  Oooooor maybe they're not publishing notices when they should be. The grid being under-frequency for days at a time shows they didn't have enough generation capacity.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    The hypothesis that there was a rolling outage invisible to everyone except one guy on a forum doesn't strike me as being very likely. Just an ordinary power outage seems a lot more likely.
  - maxerickson 4y ago
    Are you misreading a label? The largest deviation is to 59.97 Hz.
  - dibarra 4y ago
    Pretty unlikely. Outages are common, especially in this above average summer, due to higher transformer load and temps. Ever since the freeze, people who have even planned outages, refer to them as “rolling blackouts”. ERCOT is a pretty open data organization aside from QSE and generator data, and it’s unlikely that this data would have been fudged. We would have seen EEA3 in addition to $5k settlement prices if there was enough of a shortage to invoke rolling blackouts. These prices directly affect end users, e.g. businesses, datacenters, end users still on RTM rates, and solar buyback users. Generators definitely have offers open up to the $5k price point, and there is no way they’d be able to lock the settlement price without it being obvious to businesses/end users, or to generators/REPs/TDUs that there is market manipulation. As far as sagging frequency, this is also wrong, because frequency sag calls up additional reserves, and we haven’t run below 1 gigawatt of reserves since the winter freeze. The number to watch for is 59.5 hertz, which is automatic EEA3 (we haven’t hit this since the winter storm, where we reached a whopping 59.3 hertz) This is also directly measurable by TDUs and (maybe) end users.

rexreed 4y ago

What are we supposed to glean from this as energy laymen? How do you provide data in a way that provides real meaning? All this data but no real insight.

bloudermilk 4y ago
Perhaps energy laymen are not the intended audience
- vogt 4y ago
  That doesn't make the GP question any less relevant or meaningful.
  - hnarn 4y ago
    Nobody said the question was irrelevant or not interesting, but it does answer the question "what am I supposed to take away from this", if the answer is "you're not".
KennyBlanken 4y ago
For one, the peak price of electricity was ten times the usual low point (~$36) I'm not sure what to make of the frequency drift; federally operators are supposed to balance it out for timekeeping, among other reasons. Taking a week to get on-frequency is...not good.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  TX is not a federal operator, correct? And what is the problem with drifting a bit? I know back in the day lots of peoples' clocks used it as a time reference, but that can't be very true today.
  - selectodude 4y ago
    It means the power plants are over capacity is all.

imrehg 4y ago

I was looking at the source code linked from dashboard, and surprised a bit that it's a gist, rather than a repository. Is it just to facilitate discussions on the code? Otherwise it feels a bit ad hoc that way, wouldn't consider a gist with this many files more ergonomic compared to a repository. Also, trying to follow to the data source of the Ercot website https://www.ercot.com/ https://www.ercot.com/ I get blocked with things like this: Access Denied Error 16 This request was blocked by the security rules. If you believe you have a valid business reason for accessing ERCOT resources, please contact the ERCOT ServiceDesk at ServiceDesk@ercot.com. This seems ... pretty old school as well. Is it geofencing, or more general IP whitelisting? Feels very strange, guessing the former, as Google's cache returns a page that can be viewed. I don't see anything that would _really_ be drain on those ERCOT resources...

hk1337 4y ago
I think they block anything outside the US.
- banana_giraffe 4y ago
  They also seem to allow Canada .. and Sydney, at least out of all of the AWS regions.
Shank 4y ago
> Otherwise it feels a bit ad hoc that way, wouldn't consider a gist with this many files more ergonomic compared to a repository. All gists are actually GitHub repositories — you can clone them, branch, and commit changes. There isn’t PRs or an issue tracker, though. (Same with GitHub wikis.)
gurchik 4y ago
> This seems ... pretty old school as well. This doesn't surprise me. One of my projects as an intern was to generate reports from public data from ERCOT and a few other North American ISOs (organizations that control a region's power grid). Some of them are happy to reply to a basic cURL request. Others are more particular about things like your user agent or cookies set (even sites that didn't require authentication would set a cookie on first load and would reject requests to certain pages without that cookie). A few were very particular and ran some Javascript code to serve requests that made it so something like Selenium was required. It was a bit surprising to me how many hoops we had to jump through considering this is public data that tax payers are entitled to. If I recall correctly PJM was the best to work with because they had a well-designed REST API and provided a developer guide with sample code. > I don't see anything that would _really_ be drain on those ERCOT resources... I'm not sure if these controls are in place to safeguard against abuse. Most people don't even know these companies exist and I doubt they get too many requests. I'm assuming this is just a symptom of software sold to the lowest bidder.

newaccount2021 4y ago

HN is obsessed with the TX power grid....why?

mjevans 4y ago
A large number of fabs and other manufacturing facilities exist there. Texas has had several power failure related disasters in recent years; which have cost many lives and much value, as well as caused shocks to the rest of the US. Much of the rest of the US does not have those issues, or has them in only very small predictable circumstances, mostly caused E.G. by huge windstorms (trees), earthquakes, fires, other 'natural disasters'. Climate generally not regarded as a natural disaster since it's something that should theoretically be planned for. Even the windstorm example, for metro areas power should not go out. It's only poorly managed rural areas that tend to go off the grid.
viraptor 4y ago
It's an interesting case of one area trying to stay independent and deregulated, then failing in basic areas like low costs, and maintenance, leading to serious issues in recent winters. With certain media trying to turn the management failures into an anti-wind campaign thus not making things better. Honestly it's an interesting trainwreck to observe from far away. Shame that it affects real people locally. In case you're not familiar with Ercot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_of_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_o...
- philshem 4y ago
  Direct link to the 2021 Texas power crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
- briandear 4y ago
  Those failures didn’t happen until they started shifting to so called “green” energy. And compared to California’s power woes, Texas is a model of efficiency. With natural gas and nuclear, there would never be a power shortage in Texas. But for some reason people are obsessed with ugly, bird killing windmills and giant solar farms.

dvasdekis 4y ago

The surprising inference from me, as an energy layman, is that solar output coincides with periods of peak demand. Obviously this is seasonally adjusted, but in an era when the Saudis have solar contracts being supplied for $10USD/MWh [0], the potential profits for a solar provider at periods of peak demand seem more than sufficient to encourage investment, especially with interest rates still at a historic low for big capital projects. So, what gives? Where's the solar? [0] https://reneweconomy.com.au/saudi-solar-plant-locks-in-new-record-low-price-for-power-1-04c-kwh/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/saudi-solar-plant-locks-in-new-r...

maxerickson 4y ago
Solar capacity in Texas tripled since last summer. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/21/heat-energy-crisis-would-be-worse-without-solar/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/21/heat-ener...
- dvasdekis 4y ago
  Thanks! Makes sense if it's being built as fast as possible given the number of workers available for installation.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Solar is actually super super hard to install right now, because tariffs are in an uncertain space, so nobody knows if, should they import, if they are are going to get a bill in the next 12 months for past sales that's 1x-2x the cost of the import (I forget the exact factor). This sort of protectionism isn't even buying us a bunch of local solar panel production, unfortunately. I'm not a free-market purist, and am in favor of protectionist tariffs to build a nascent industry, but this is not a way to do to it and we are only harming our installer industry with these terrible forms of tariffs and uncertainty. Edit: here's an article from a little while ago on this https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-solar-industry-warns-slowdown-due-supply-chain-disruptions-tariff-uncertainty-2022-04-28/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-solar-industry-warns-slo...

totetsu 4y ago

Is purple capacity and blue demand?

rossdavidh 4y ago
Yes, you can also see it here: https://www.ercot.com/ https://www.ercot.com/

repler 4y ago

Some context: wind power is falling short during peak demand recently. https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/07/24/this_one_ercot_chart_explains_why_texas_is_having_electricity_shortages_843990.amp.html https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/07/24/this_one...

ravedave5 4y ago
That is the most slanted site I have read in quite some time. Should not be trusted.
- repler 4y ago
  I noted that as well, but it did give context for why it’s worth looking at this data right now. For me it was relevant to answer “oh that interesting, someone posted this ERCOT data I wonder what’s going this week” Kind of weird my comment was downvoted so heavily - but whatever. The dashboard was posted to Reddit over a year ago during DIFFERENT issues for ERCOT so it seemed relevant to find out what’s going on this time around.
  - viraptor 4y ago
    Well, it could have something to do with right wing weirdos slamming wind farms as the reason for all failures of Ercot. And the article bringing up the winter issues when mostly the gas/thermal plants failed. And not mentioning the fact Ercot decided out to be a part of a bigger market that could help the situation by trading the energy with other states. And the capacity planning issues. Instead it effectively says: look at this graph, wind doesn't solve all our issues, so we're going to call it the reason instead. It's a shallow opinion piece not a serious article.
    - repler 4y ago
      Okay, sorry, not an expert on this. Why do you think someone posted the dashboard link that was already shared over a year ago? Is ERCOT having issues this month? What is the cause of the issues? I am legitimately asking. I don't know, so that's the only recent link I was able to find.

RedShift1 4y ago

Can you add legends to the charts that have multiple items in it?

OliverJones 4y ago

I wish this were available for my power grid vendor. They send me emails in hot weather begging me to turn off my oven and ac. I know they send similar emails to much bigger power users too. It would be very nice if they had this data available, so big power users could plan. Sometime in the next few years, power grid vendors will start to understand they're in the real-time information business.

rjmunro 4y ago
Which vendor is that?
TrueSlacker0 4y ago
I'm on the Texas grid and we have been getting the same emails from our electric provider the last few weeks.

arminsergiony 4y ago

What kind of information are we, as energy layman, supposed to glean from this? How can one present data in a way that conveys actual significance to the audience? All of this information, yet I still don't feel any wiser.

nvahalik 4y ago
There are some bits missing from this dashboard but as a layman who lives in TX, let me give you the rundown I gave a friend: This dashboard gives you an overall of the capabilities and capacity of the grid. Capacity and Demand - How much capacity the system has available against how much is being used in real-time. As the two lines get closer together, it can indicate that the grid is nearing capacity and the need for conservation or an EEA may be necessary. Grid Frequency - While related to load, a lot of appliances keep their clocks based off of the grid frequency. Our grid is 60Hz. Deviations from that are expected and usually OK. However, anything greater than ~.5% is considered bad and a 1% variation (e.g. 59.4 Hz) can actually cause equipment damage. In fact, the reason we had load shedding back in Feb '21 was because we got down to 59.4Hz. Wind & Solar Generation - How much of our capacity is coming from those sources. The days where Wind is down usually is when conservation notices come in. Energy Flow to/from Other grids - How much power are we getting/sending from/to other grids. We have ties to MX, a "railroad" tie as well as ties to the eastern/western grids. We can and do import/export up to about 800 MW from those grids when needed. ERCOT Ancillary Real Time is where things (IMO get interesting). Supply Regulation (freq. adjustment) and ancillary supply are really the big indicators of issues. The more "supply regulation" that goes online the more we are having to adjust the frequency of the grid to compensate. If the grid frequency is too low and all of the regulation freq. up has been deployed—that's a BIG issue and indicates that the system cannot deliver enough. If the system has deployed all of its online/offline reserve capacity, then there simply is no more generation capacity available. When things "get bad" THOSE two are the ones to watch because those are the ones that are engaged in ensuring the overall stability of the system.

cwal37 4y ago

A lot of ERCOT heat these days. I work in energy and it’s both intriguing (because some things move faster there than other markets so there are more opportunities to advocate on the regulatory side of things) and just a mess (over RUC-ing costing consumers an extra ~$2B by the end of the year probably, extreme political spin on grid ops). Two weeks ago I even threw together a simple Twitter bot[0] because I was annoyed with some of their communications there. This datadog dashboard has been around for a while - it shows up on energy Twitter somewhat frequently when the Texas grid is having issues. [0] https://mobile.twitter.com/ERCOT_Status https://mobile.twitter.com/ERCOT_Status

TradingPlaces 4y ago

Normally, this EIA dashboard has all regions but it has been down for a month now. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/US48/US48 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...

NelsonMinar 4y ago

Neat! The California ISO grid has a really nice web and mobile app showing similar data. The site is complicated and has a lot of different views, it's not as nicely organized a dashboard, but the data is great. Example view: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx#section-ra-capacity-trend https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx#secti...

jjt-yn_t 4y ago