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Pretty interesting to see how this stuff is holding up. The market is evolving rapidly currently with absolutely massive amounts of wind, solar, and battery bei

Pretty interesting to see how this stuff is holding up. The market is evolving rapidly currently with absolutely massive amounts of wind, solar, and battery being deployed everywhere. What's odd in Texas is that they are resisting the notion of connecting to the rest of the US grid. This would allow them to import power cheaply when they need to and export power when they have too much of it. My guess is that they actually curtail a lot of energy at this point because there's simply too much of it most of the time. A quick glance at the main page of gridstatus.io shows that right now California and Texas are burning a lot of gas while there is negative pricing due to wind delivering over capacity in the states in between. They are literally paying people to consume more power there while they are paying for huge amounts of gas to be burnt in California and Texas. It's night time there of course so, solar is out. What's preventing states from doing the obvious thing here? The mid west could be exporting power at a profit right now and instead it has negative power. And California could not be burning many tons of gas right now because there's a surplus of power right next to it.

actionfromafar 2y ago
Connecting Texas to the rest of the grid would make the Texas grid subject to federal grid regulations. Texans don't like that.
- guerby 2y ago
  They could do it with HVDC to "isolate" the two grids.
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    Apparently they have some for "import" of electricity.
    - bob1029 2y ago
      See: https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/dctieflows https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/dctieflows
      - actionfromafar 2y ago
        Access Denied
        infecto 2y ago
        works here.
- oldpersonintx 2y ago
  [dead]
- bradknowles 2y ago
  Correction, the fat cats who own ERCOT don’t like that. Your regular run of the mill Texan may not care one way or the other, most times. But if they get into a crunch where their electric bills are much higher, I assure you that they will care.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >the fat cats who own ERCOT don’t like that. And who are those? Wikipedia says: >ERCOT is a membership-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation,[11][12] and its members include consumers, electric cooperatives, generators, power marketers, retail electric providers, investor-owned electric utilities (transmission and distribution providers), and municipally owned electric utilities.[13] It's not "owned" by anyone.
    - herewego 2y ago
      You are uninformed. ERCOT is heavily influenced (“owned”) by Investor Owned Utilities (IOUs) and market makers that are profit seeking entities. This is true of all ISOs for all intents and purposes. It is the primary reason why the U.S. grid is slow to innovate/change, e.g., implementing distributed generation participation in wholesale markets, etc.
      - bradknowles 2y ago
        Thank you! You said it better than I could have!
infecto 2y ago
I don't believe grid connections are the obvious and easy answer. That would assume those other grids do not have base loads plants themself. There is a massive cost to starting and stopping gas plants that you are also not accounting for. So while yes, there are periods of negative prices, the cost to run that plant 24/7 may be cheaper than turning it on and off and not just cheaper in $ but cheaper in less resources being used. Negative pricing and "burning a lot of gas" are maybe not as bad as you think. As more wind/solar get added to the generation mix, there will be more peak times where prices may become negative. The lens I have is this means there is incentive for more storage to come on the grid to soak up those events and then offload at peak demand times.
- shawabawa3 2y ago
  > There is a massive cost to starting and stopping gas plants that you are also not accounting for It's my understanding that basically the entire point of gas power plants is that they are very cheap to stop and start (as opposed to e.g. coal or nuclear), at least, that's the case in the UK - are these plants different in the US?
  - jillesvangurp 2y ago
    It's still expensive relative to batteries. If you think about it, a steam turbine has a lot of water that needs to be heated before you actually get any steam and a lot of heavy, moving parts that need to start spinning. Once all that is up and running it's fine and you just expend fuel to maintain the steam pressure. But this takes a while. And to heat things up faster, you simply burn a massive amount of fuel; which is costly. And until you generate steam, it's not actually generating any power whatsoever. Any thermal plant has this overhead that makes starting them expensive and stopping them undesirable because the shorter you run them, the more inefficient they get. You amortize the startup cost over the runtime. The longer it runs, the better it gets. A battery provides power within milliseconds and it can switch from charging to discharging on a moment's notice as well. That's why batteries are displacing gas plants as peaker plants in a lot of places.
    - 2y ago
boringg 2y ago
Connecting your grid to other markets for the premise of cheaper energy also puts you in a situation where you no longer control your own destiny. My expectation is that the presumed gains of some cheaper power don't balance the risk on reliability and control. I don't necessarily buy the argument but I am fairly certain that a big chunk of it.
- felbane 2y ago
  As someone who very nearly lost a family member due to the state's complete inability to implement and enforce preparedness regulations, and due to ERCOT's herculean effort to do just barely not enough to keep the grid online... respectfully, fuck that argument. We live in a time where functional electric service is a necessity for life. We also live in a time where extreme weather patterns are getting more frequent and more intense. The very least Texas could do is implement the equipment and procedures necessary to enable importing power from the national grid in an emergency. The cost to implement interconnects at key locations is infinitesimal compared to the costs incurred when there are systemic outages. The "we can do it better ourselves" argument only works when you don't repeatedly catastrophically fail at "doing it better."
  - boringg 2y ago
    You should also remember that actually having a more connected grid makes it susceptible to reliability issues as well. If you look back to 1999 when the entire northeast electrical grid was crippled for a couple weeks as a function of that connectivity. I'm not letting Texas off the hook -- not winterizing your natural gas pipelines and trying to blame renewables for the grid catastrophically failing is definitely a regulators issue and a return a much money as possible to the investor shareholders without concern to the citizens is the key feature of their system.
- Rastonbury 2y ago
  Forgive my ignorance but doesn't connecting to other grid allow them to buy energy when prices are low and still allow them to generate their own when the national grid prices are high? It would also allow them to sell excess no?
wiredfool 2y ago
I recall from reading the blog, there are definitely issues in Texas with grid capacity between the west where the bulk of the solar is and the east where there is load, and people and other grids. So grid interconnects to other grids wouldn’t necessarily be enough, you have to get the power to the interconnect as well.

actionfromafar 2y ago

Connecting Texas to the rest of the grid would make the Texas grid subject to federal grid regulations. Texans don't like that.

guerby 2y ago
They could do it with HVDC to "isolate" the two grids.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Apparently they have some for "import" of electricity.
  - bob1029 2y ago
    See: https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/dctieflows https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/dctieflows
    - actionfromafar 2y ago
      Access Denied
      - infecto 2y ago
        works here.
oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
bradknowles 2y ago
Correction, the fat cats who own ERCOT don’t like that. Your regular run of the mill Texan may not care one way or the other, most times. But if they get into a crunch where their electric bills are much higher, I assure you that they will care.
- gruez 2y ago
  >the fat cats who own ERCOT don’t like that. And who are those? Wikipedia says: >ERCOT is a membership-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation,[11][12] and its members include consumers, electric cooperatives, generators, power marketers, retail electric providers, investor-owned electric utilities (transmission and distribution providers), and municipally owned electric utilities.[13] It's not "owned" by anyone.
  - herewego 2y ago
    You are uninformed. ERCOT is heavily influenced (“owned”) by Investor Owned Utilities (IOUs) and market makers that are profit seeking entities. This is true of all ISOs for all intents and purposes. It is the primary reason why the U.S. grid is slow to innovate/change, e.g., implementing distributed generation participation in wholesale markets, etc.
    - bradknowles 2y ago
      Thank you! You said it better than I could have!

infecto 2y ago

I don't believe grid connections are the obvious and easy answer. That would assume those other grids do not have base loads plants themself. There is a massive cost to starting and stopping gas plants that you are also not accounting for. So while yes, there are periods of negative prices, the cost to run that plant 24/7 may be cheaper than turning it on and off and not just cheaper in $ but cheaper in less resources being used. Negative pricing and "burning a lot of gas" are maybe not as bad as you think. As more wind/solar get added to the generation mix, there will be more peak times where prices may become negative. The lens I have is this means there is incentive for more storage to come on the grid to soak up those events and then offload at peak demand times.

shawabawa3 2y ago
> There is a massive cost to starting and stopping gas plants that you are also not accounting for It's my understanding that basically the entire point of gas power plants is that they are very cheap to stop and start (as opposed to e.g. coal or nuclear), at least, that's the case in the UK - are these plants different in the US?
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  It's still expensive relative to batteries. If you think about it, a steam turbine has a lot of water that needs to be heated before you actually get any steam and a lot of heavy, moving parts that need to start spinning. Once all that is up and running it's fine and you just expend fuel to maintain the steam pressure. But this takes a while. And to heat things up faster, you simply burn a massive amount of fuel; which is costly. And until you generate steam, it's not actually generating any power whatsoever. Any thermal plant has this overhead that makes starting them expensive and stopping them undesirable because the shorter you run them, the more inefficient they get. You amortize the startup cost over the runtime. The longer it runs, the better it gets. A battery provides power within milliseconds and it can switch from charging to discharging on a moment's notice as well. That's why batteries are displacing gas plants as peaker plants in a lot of places.
  - 2y ago

boringg 2y ago

Connecting your grid to other markets for the premise of cheaper energy also puts you in a situation where you no longer control your own destiny. My expectation is that the presumed gains of some cheaper power don't balance the risk on reliability and control. I don't necessarily buy the argument but I am fairly certain that a big chunk of it.

felbane 2y ago
As someone who very nearly lost a family member due to the state's complete inability to implement and enforce preparedness regulations, and due to ERCOT's herculean effort to do just barely not enough to keep the grid online... respectfully, fuck that argument. We live in a time where functional electric service is a necessity for life. We also live in a time where extreme weather patterns are getting more frequent and more intense. The very least Texas could do is implement the equipment and procedures necessary to enable importing power from the national grid in an emergency. The cost to implement interconnects at key locations is infinitesimal compared to the costs incurred when there are systemic outages. The "we can do it better ourselves" argument only works when you don't repeatedly catastrophically fail at "doing it better."
- boringg 2y ago
  You should also remember that actually having a more connected grid makes it susceptible to reliability issues as well. If you look back to 1999 when the entire northeast electrical grid was crippled for a couple weeks as a function of that connectivity. I'm not letting Texas off the hook -- not winterizing your natural gas pipelines and trying to blame renewables for the grid catastrophically failing is definitely a regulators issue and a return a much money as possible to the investor shareholders without concern to the citizens is the key feature of their system.
Rastonbury 2y ago
Forgive my ignorance but doesn't connecting to other grid allow them to buy energy when prices are low and still allow them to generate their own when the national grid prices are high? It would also allow them to sell excess no?

wiredfool 2y ago

I recall from reading the blog, there are definitely issues in Texas with grid capacity between the west where the bulk of the solar is and the east where there is load, and people and other grids. So grid interconnects to other grids wouldn’t necessarily be enough, you have to get the power to the interconnect as well.