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Eastern US power grid orders cuts, issues system wide emergency
- l- 4y agohttps://www.pjm.com/-/media/about-pjm/newsroom/2022-releases/20221223-news-release-w1-statement-call-for-conservation.ashx https://www.pjm.com/-/media/about-pjm/newsroom/2022-releases... Yahoo redistribution: https://www.yahoo.com/now/eastern-us-power-grid-orders-012619072.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/eastern-us-power-grid-orders-01261... Bloomberg URL was submitted per HN Guideline: "Please submit the original source." https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/regional/REG-MIDA https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr... Earlier: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2022/12/23/why-tennessee-valley-authority-ordered-rolling-blackouts-in-nashville/69754538007/ https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2022/12/23/why-t...
- wrycoder 4y agohttps://archive.vn/ZWX1G https://archive.vn/ZWX1G
- michaelteter 4y ago[flagged]
- AlbertCory 4y agoExposing my ignorance here, but: how does archive get past the paywalls? Is it just subscribed to everything? Or maybe it's a volunteer effort by people who are subscribed?
- KMag 4y agoRoughly 20 years ago, setting your user-agent string to match Googlebot was a magic key through most paywalls. These days, paywalls almost certainly also check against lists of known search engine IP addresses.
- snowwrestler 4y agoPretty sure it is the latter.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deadbolt 4y agoYou're on a site titled hacker news and you can't find a way to get past paywalled content, and you feel it's more important to ban the submissions from paywalled content, rather than find a way around it? Why should the submissions be changed because you personally can't view them? Edit: If you want to downvote, at least answer my question.
- dang 4y agoThis question was decided many years ago. The paywalls are annoying and suck, but HN would be far worse off without articles from NYT, WSJ, Economist, and similar publications. (Note: I'm not saying all their articles are good. Just some of them.) https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=paywalls%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 One of these years the publishing industry will get its act together and there will be an actual solution to this problem, but in the meantime, allowing paywalls that have workarounds and excluding paywalls that don't have workarounds is the local optimum.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- retrac 4y agoI was just looking at generation stats here in Ontario. Most of the non-emergency generation is currently fired up with around 20%, some 3600 MW, being exported to America. That's basically the limit of the infrastructure; can't export more.
- 2bluesc 4y agoIs there a site that published this you can share?
- SECProto 4y agohttps://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html https://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html
- UI_at_80x24 4y agoI've stumbled upon a few sites that provide this data; I don't know if this is the best source or not, but here is one that i found: https://www.ieso.ca/en/Power-Data https://www.ieso.ca/en/Power-Data
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fsh 4y agoI find it fascinating that this is considered some kind of doomsday scenario in Europe, but happens regularly in the US. Different priorities, I guess.
- zrail 4y agoI don't know what you mean by "regularly". The article states that the last time this happened was 2014, nine years ago.
- yread 4y agoTexas had some hiccups last year
- KennyBlanken 4y agoBecause it didn't winterize much of its generation despite lots of warnings it needed to do so, and doesn't interconnect with the national grid because they didn't want to have to follow federal regulations.
- WeylandYutani 4y agoYes some would consider every ten years as regular.
- skullone 4y agoEuropean utilities never struggle during extreme hot or cold snaps, right?
- sieabahlpark 4y ago[dead]
- ljoshua 4y agoThis is the grid operating as intended. There are no mandatory or rolling blackouts yet. That is Stage 3; PJM is calling for Stage 2 countermeasures to avoid going to Stage 3. The operators feel comfortable that this will give them the margin required per the quote on the article, and affects businesses without need for constant power (and this is a known prior agreement for those businesses, with remuneration). Electricity is a commodity to be managed like all others, and during times of extreme cold this is good management. I think it’s easy to bash grid operators (I know, I live in Texas!) but this seems like proper operating procedure here.
- Animats 4y agoYes. Here's the actual event, from the PJM dashboard. Note the times. The problem lasted less than 4 hours. Once they got past the early evening peak, things were OK. Times are EST. An Emergency Load Mgmt Reduction Action and a NERC level EEA2 have been issued. Load reductions should continue until released by PJM. Reductions are mandatory based on product requirements. CSPs should review DR Hub for specific registration details. Affected: DR (Demand response hub) AEP (American Electric Power) COMED (Commonwealth Edison) DOM (Dominion Energy) DPL (Dayton Power and Light) FE-ATSI (First Energy, American Transmission Systems) FE-PN (First Energy, Pennsylvania) Posting time: 12.23.2022 17:51 Start time: 12.23.2022 18:00 Cancellation time: 12.23.2022 21:30
- avereveard 4y agoShouldn't have called it emergency is just feeding a thirsty news cycle
- jazzyjackson 4y agoit was an emergency which was then alleviated imagine not dialing 911 because you don't want to give the news free content...
- avereveard 4y ago
- bell-cot 4y agoOh sh*t. In theory, the winter storm should have umpteen thousand wind generators spun up nicely across large parts of the US. In practice...TBD. I just powered down a few more-expensive, more-delicate, and/or more-power-hungry pieces of equipment. Be a good American and all. But also make it easier to get back up, if there's a blackout, with a damaging last-microsecond power glitch when that happens.
- KennyBlanken 4y agoThere are links to grid dashboards elsewhere in the discussion. Wind generation went up to nearly 8GW whereas at times it was as low as 400MW. Hydro also ramped up significantly. As for switching off stuff - conservation is always good, but what they really need are for the guys with two-story-tall electric arc furnaces and the like to dial things back.
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoWind and hydro are more of a western thing, the eastern grid probably relies more on gas and coal as well as nuclear.
- doubleg72 4y agoNever heard of Niagara Falls huh?
- dragontamer 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta... You know, it was only the largest battery in the world for like 30 years...
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoWind, solar, and hydro account for 46% of western grid (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interconnection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interconnection). I can’t find similar numbers for the eastern grid, but hydro production by states, https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/hydropower/where-hydropower-is-generated.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/hydropower/where-hydropo..., shows how hydro is more of a western thing, especially Washington state, but even Oregon and California are comparable to New York.
- pifm_guy 4y agoThis will become more and more of a problem as buildings switch away from gas/oil heating and switch towards green heat pumps. Heat pumps are particularly bad in extreme cold weather. Their efficiency goes down a lot (sometimes 4x), at the exact time everyone needs to use them the most. To be honest, I don't think policymakers have considered this, so I suspect we'll see blackouts on cold winter days quite frequently, with grid operators being reluctant to build double the generation and transmission capacity for just a few hours per year when it's super cold across a wide area.
- pifm_guy 4y agoThere are potential solutions... For example, heat pumps could be required to have a reserve storage tank containing enough heat for a day or so, and then at times when the grid is most stressed, they use the reserve heat reservoir rather than the grid. That could be enforced by building code, or by having a monetary incentive to those who have such a system, or a monetary penalty to those who use power on high demand days (although Texas taught us that people don't understand 'prices rise when goods are scarce', and instead see it as 'company jack's prices when I need it the most').
- jazzyjackson 4y agonever heard of a heat reservoir, what medium are we talking, water? salt?
- Schroedingersat 4y agoWater is the best option for being driven from a heat pump over a few days in most cases. Phase change materials like sodium acetate or thermochemical systems like NaOH + water seem to work well on paper for long term storage, but haven't received much attention for some reason.
- ulrikrasmussen 4y agoAs far as I understand: Water is best for heat pumps because it has a high heat capacity and the operating temperature is below boiling point. Rocks and salt is used for high temperature storage.
- xwowsersx 4y ago> Stage 2 emergencies require businesses enrolled in so-called demand response programs to curtail power use. As part of these programs, companies agree to cut consumption when called upon in exchange for payments. Are the businesses that enroll in this program generally large consumers of electricity such that their curtailment would make a bigger difference than an ordinary consumer or can any business, no matter the size, enroll in this program? Also, what do the payments they receive in exchange look like?
- simfree 4y agoLooks like you usually need to be over 100kW to 500kW to qualify for (or be required to be participate in) demand response programs, and what your paid depends on your utility. Some utilities offer $3.25 per kW of load curtailed. https://www.energy.gov/eere/femp/demand-response-and-time-variable-pricing-programs-western-states https://www.energy.gov/eere/femp/demand-response-and-time-va...
- BenjiWiebe 4y agoIn Kansas our utility has an option for anyone to participate in exchange for slightly better rates. Even a single small household can participate.
- joezydeco 4y agoI got an email from my sports club last night that they were closing at the start of the curtail event. They're not a massive power user but it's a large facility to heat and there's an indoor swimming pool. They probably didn't have to close, but on a night like last night (-20C and 30kt winds) it wasn't worth staying open.
- andirk 4y ago[flagged]
- cbmuser 4y agoIf only New York hadn’t shut down its perfectly working Indian Point nuclear power plant. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- taylodl 4y agoI live in the area managed by PJM. I work for a large utility where PJM is one of the areas we operate. I've been on vacation and I didn't get the memo. Ironically enough I work in customer notifications! We send text messages for when your bill is due or when your power is out, but we don't send any notices that you should be keeping an eye the amount of power you're using. I'm contacting our journey lead now to get this work on the books in 2023!
- jonahbenton 4y agoThis HN post goes into the best of 2022.
- taylodl 4y agoUpdate: contacted my team to get this on the books for 2023 and now we're working to get an ad-hoc message out to our affected customers. We're making our list and checking it twice and working to make Christmas nice - for everybody! Happy Holidays HN!
- hyperdimension 4y agoHappy Holidays from someone working in another utility who only gets noticed when we do our jobs poorly which is, luckily, not often. :) Don't forget to thank your sysadmin today!
- taylodl 4y agoWill do! Thank you and Happy Holidays to you!
- landemva 4y ago'get an ad-hoc message out' Being after the event was resolved, it may be post-hoc.
- joezydeco 4y agoIf you're a real-time customer of ComEd in the Chicago area, prices have been spiking 20 to 30 times above normal for the last 12 hours or so. https://hourlypricing.comed.com/live-prices/?date=20221223 https://hourlypricing.comed.com/live-prices/?date=20221223 The 1600-1700 hour last night saw $3.64/kWh, a 3700% jump over what non-RT users pay.
- rasz 4y agoMeanwhile in Europe unprecedented drop in Electricity price for the last two days https://euenergy.live https://euenergy.live
- ProllyInfamous 4y agoLink to US Energy Information Administration's "Hourly Electric Grid Monitor": https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/US48/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...