Yeah, I can't take this guy seriously.
Reportedly, six power plants were offline, accounting for "roughly 2,900 megawatts of electricity — or enough to power nearly 600,000 homes".
Massive demand combined with substantial supply reduction is generally bad news.
Not trying to save money or anything. Genuinely 78 + ceiling fan on low is most comfortable for me. Maybe it's the low humidity?
Some of it is certainly just tolerance or whether or not you're acclimated (heh) to it.
70 degrees F is my most comfortable indoor temp, and I try to let it go down to the 65-68 range in my bedroom for sleeping. This was true even when I lived in Los Angeles.
78 is uncomfortably hot even for lying around naked. 68 is far better for ordinary attire and activity.
My thermostat is set to 77° year round. It stays comfortable inside my house here in NTx near DFW. The temperature varies between 76-78° all day long. I have found that the AC runs about 20-30 minutes to get that 2° drop every other hour or so and it is pretty easy to achieve no matter the outside temperature.
If I still lived near Houston with the higher humidity and all the general suck I would probably do it differently but up here this works great. I can work outside in the heat and humidity, step inside for a break every hour or so and go back outside and it feels like I stepped into a cave while I'm inside.
I can't imagine not running AC, if only for its dehumidifying effects, in a Houston summer.
78 is quite comfortable during the day, especially if you spend even 5 minutes outside for any reason. When you come inside 78 will feel quite cool under your ceiling fan.
Also, when you reach 100F+ outside, you have pretty dehumidified indoor air at 78F because it still takes the AC running a lot.
I wont turn air conditioning on until mid 90s, and then it gets set to 89F or so.
As far as I can see, the rest of the world isn't furry enough to live the way they do. Humans are far too fond of their clothes.
The article is saying that's because tomorrow demand is going to exceed supply again, and just like Feb 2021 in the Texas system that means prices float to match.
The expectation is that businesses will shut down and consumers will turn off their AC to shed load from the system, because everyone is a highly-informed rational actor and the $5k electrical bill will not be a surprise. Which it shouldn't be, you live in Texas, clean water and reliable power are not a reasonable expectation in the same way they are elsewhere. This is a cost you have to bear if you want everything to be so completely and totally market-driven - especially if you signed up for one of those "wholesale" electrical billing plans, this is the whole point. The market raises prices, you react accordingly and turn off your power, the intent is that only “highly informed” consumers who understand the risks will take them - just like playing with options, this can get you in trouble real fast if things go really bad.
(that said, non-wholesale plans will probably just cut your power entirely, because I doubt that is regulated either, it’s Texas! Sue, whoops, I mean, request binding company-sponsored arbitration if you don’t like it. But that could be preferable to getting a $5k bill for a single weekend of AC!)
Orrrrr, we could just regulate the power grid and ensure appropriate generation capacity, with appropriate building codes and grid/power plant building standards so they don't light on fire or freeze solid during peak load, and we can live in a modern society with electrical lighting...
Sure 78 isn't as cold as 72 or 68 that many of y'all like keeping your houses in the summer, but it sure as hell beats the indoor temps of 95+ when you don't have power.
Oftentimes it's enough to open window at night, so that the rooms kinda "accumulate" night cold that would rest for the whole day. Of course it won't be enough at 100+ degrees, but you'd need very little AC then.
I believe winter states like Montana already must build better insulated houses.
The catch? It's more expensive to build.
We do have good insulation for our new houses, but building those kind of houses are at odds with living without A/C. Some older homes, built before A/C, could make the heat much more bearable by having better air flow, more windows, and taller ceilings.
Only the arid/dryer climates cool down at night. It is not uncommon for the temps to still be in the upper 80's to 90's (30-34C) in the overnight hours. I remember one particularly brutal 4th of July, sitting outside at Midnight with temps over 100F (38C).
In my area this week, it's gonna be a scorcher, Temps are gonna be at or over 100F ever afternoon this week.
When I lived with AC I kept it around 27-28°C to be comfortable, that's 81-82°F. Or maybe Texas has high humidity?
It is not uncommon to see people keep their houses 62-72F (17-22C) in the warm months and 80+F (26+C) in the cold months. Often these people don't have ceiling fans and refuse to wear appropriate clothing for the temps in their house.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200930194912.h...
How often it’s actually blowing cool dry air out of all the vents depends on the unit/weather/setting/insulation etc.
Back a few decades ago when Clean Air regulations came into play (Texas was not on the national grid at the time) Texas used their control of the Texas grid to allow grandfathering in of most of the dirty coal generation plants with no requirements that they meet federal standards. Texas mined lignite for many of their plants and bought coal from Wyoming's Powder River Basin for others. New plants under construction had to meet the new standards but old plants could keep on rocking along spewing their ash and pollutants all over the state and everyone downwind. Supposedly it was allowed because utilities argued that it was too expensive to bring them into compliance.
What a joke. This is the same state where a chicken billionaire walked the floor of the legislature passing envelopes of cash to representatives and at the time said that this was just the way to do business here.
And after last year's winter break-down they crafted a handy way to pass all the costs of electricity related to their failures to do simple maintenance and upgrades on to Texas taxpayers while at the same time lobbying and winning property tax reductions which conveniently enough, finances a large part of the state's operations. People keep voting for the same old losers and then griping when it bites them in the ass.
So many parts of Texas are broken and dysfunctional that it is sad but funny to hear someone say they want to move here for any reason. We used to be great but the clowns are driving the short bus here now and everyone wants to ride since it's cheaper than the last place they lived, maybe.
For someone who hates the Fed, Rick Perry is a National Treasure.
Somebody didn't do their homework and gave this idiot the talking point to abolish the dept that's in charge of the fucking nukes.
That's like Defund the Police on steroids.
Ironically, he ended up running it from 2017-2019.
I didn't realize that. I laughed out loud. He couldn't remember the third 'E' department he wanted to abolish.
It is not "political" as the context of your reply clearly indicates as much as it is deeply tied to not only the history of Texas as it relates to joining the USA and also the fundamental manner in which the USA was supposed to function, wich has been and continues to be under constant and direct assault.
It may ruffle your feathers, but not knowing these things clearly indicates that you are not American, however the real questions should be "why is not every other sovereign state of the United States acting more like Texas and why is the system so broken today that essentially only Texas acts the way the system intended states to act?". The only other state that comes close to Texas, may be Florida, which is emerging and moving in that direction, at least among the states of consequence.
May 2022 is on track to be the hottest May on record in Texas. It's already hitting over 100 degrees in most of Texas. It does not typically get this hot until July. Most of the country is facing a huge heat wave this last week, and while some of the country got a reprieve this weekend, Texas did not.
For comparison, this time last year the temperature was in the 70s/low 80s. The average high for May in Austin is 86. The temperature this week in Austin is forecast to be over 100.
It's ridiculous that the Texas grid can't handle this, but to say "it's not even hot yet" is disingenuous. It's fucking hot.
https://news.yahoo.com/texas-shatters-heat-record-temps-1805...
https://weather.com/forecast/regional/news/2022-05-06-heat-w...
https://www.kvue.com/article/weather/may-2022-track-to-be-wa...
Supply is barely outstripping demand and we July and August are going to be hotter. That's not "doing just fine."
They say “they have to maintain the generating and transmission capacity anyway” but there is a mismatch here - they are happy to charge another customer full-price for it, despite the fact that customer will be local and thus they don’t need the transmission capacity during peak when solar is putting out it’s max and everyone is blasting the AC. Also actually they are usually charging the other customer a premium for “green energy”.
Entrenched monopolist uses market and state power to keep competitors out, even if it means reduced quality of service.
Even if, at a federal level, you straight up gave the things away, places like Texas would outright ban them or require contractual terms that made them effectively impossible to install, like different billing rates (large charges for any returned capacity, rather than credit) or just forbidding them in any home that is publicly interconnected (which is usually a requirement for having a mortgage). They straight-up will not allow rooftop solar to succeed under any circumstance, conservatives are politically and emotionally invested in making sure it fails, just like they blamed renewables when the gas power plants froze last year. And they are too entrenched with gerrymandering to ever get out of office, no matter what they do. It is a de-facto one-party state despite democrats consistently returning near 50% in elections.
Samsung moving there is going to be a problem for them, all these disruptions are terrible, not just the outright brownouts but also fabs are extremely sensitive to power quality, small surges or drops will screw up wafers and reduce output quality too. But none of this is a surprise, if you move a business to Texas, and you are some type of commercial or industrial operation that depends on electricity, you really get what you deserve.
I feel bad for the people though.
This came into play a year and a half ago when we had severe cold, one of the exacerbating factors was - those homes weren't well-insulated, so they had to use way more energy for heat than a properly-insulated home would have.
Texas is basically a fractal of aggressive and deliberate fuckups all the way down, because ain't no ivory-tower elitist going to tell ME how to build my house/grid/power plant!
Uhh no. It's because it is cheaper. Especially homes built in the last five years seem to be lacking on insulation.
> Texas is basically a fractal of aggressive and deliberate fuckups all the way down, because ain't no ivory-tower elitist going to tell ME how to build my house/grid/power plant!
Yes. Please don't move here and tell all your friends not to move here.
But we’re an electrical island. We’re not connected to other grids. This independence allows us to do things like build CREZ (transmission lines for wind energy) quickly and without FERC bureaucracy. But it comes with a risk: we always have to supply all of our own energy.
This is a large part of why Texas is having electrical issues making national headlines and I'm not sure it's really getting the emphasis it merits to understand the issue.
Every single adjacent grid to Texas was also suffering from rolling or consistent blackouts during last year's February winter storm. Oklahoma had blackouts, Arkansas had blackouts, Missouri had blackouts, Louisiana had blackouts.
https://kansasreflector.com/2021/07/26/fuel-shortages-drove-...
The blackouts were not as bad as Texas and had they been on the same grid, it may have been able to spread (and lessen) the pain a little bit, but the point stands that Texas' neighbors did not have much electricity to spare.
This month is a little different because other states do have spare electricity AFAIK, but the links Texas has to those grids have relatively low capacity to share it.
At first, you'd think maybe not. If the neighboring states don't even have enough power for their own needs, how could it help?
The thing is, the outage in Texas was severe enough that it went beyond rolling blackouts. My city's utility completely lost the ability to rotate at all, so while some sections of town never lost power (those with essentials like hospitals), others had no power for ~48 hours straight.
Neighboring states did have problems, but they didn't have widespread outages. What could have been done is to have rotating outages in a much greater geographic area in order to prevent Texas from having continuous outages.
Not that the other states would have liked that, but on a technical level, I think it could have done something.
The mention of quick approval of transmission lines is interesting, but I do have to wonder how those that live near these new lines feel about quick approvals.
I worked in the industry for several years so I'm not at all suggesting all regulations are good. And I realize how hard it can be to get approval to run a new transmission line or pipeline is most of the country. But that doesn't mean the answer to every energy shortage is just to loosen regulations and build more of everything.
Huh? That was only mentioned to point out that the classic "renewables are so risky" line hasn't borne out for Texas. Fossil fuel plants have repeatedly been an issue as well. But it was just an aside, more importantly was it saying those generation facilities all being online wouldn't actually make much difference. That power generation will sometimes need maintenance or have failures or under production at awkward times is just the nature of the beast, certain safety regulation might help but everyone on HN should have some sense that chasing 9s gets very expensive very fast. What's really needed is to just have enough overall capacity (both steady and peaker) ready that a reasonable amount of failure is always ok. In a large energy grid a few generators dropping should never register as an immediate possible emergency. Texas needs more generation/storage approved faster.
And other states are tied into vastly more massive grids, they aren't islands, and they haven't had the same obvious increasing demand due to demographic/business shifts that Texas has been very actively encouraging. Their connections lets them help cover each other, which is a perfectly valid strategy, and they will have a more gradual increase. That other states are slightly worse than Texas isn't presented as an OK thing, but rather something they should be working on too. But they have less immediate need. That's just how it is.
I'm not sure how you came to your conclusion there. I don't know if he's right, I'm not from there, but his message is self-consistent.
EDIT: Also, I hate this new “blogging format” of multiple tweets instead of a single page.
It sounds like someone is not telling the truth.
Your personal experience doesn't appear to be universal. There's plenty of news coverage about six power plants going offline because of high usage: https://www.google.com/search?q=ercot+six
> It sounds like someone is not telling the truth.
Are you sure you're not from Missouri? (The "Show Me" state. Ba dum tish.)
This is probably especially true in Texas where one of the defining characteristics of the controlling party of the one-party state (thanks to intense gerrymandering) is anti-intellectualism. They not only won't listen to "liberal academics" or opinion pieces in "liberal newspapers", they'll actively oppose whatever they say on the simple basis of who said it.
No longer need to worry about the clowns in office since clearly they have not learned from the February 2021 debacle.
* 4.80 kW Solar Panels -- +$12,576
* 2 Powerwall Batteries -- +$18,500
* Cash Price -- +$31,076
* Federal Tax Credit -$8,080
* ---------------------
* Net Price: $22,996
I know this sounds like a bizarre setup (4.80 kW?) but my main goal was to be able to have two Powerwall backups that I would have incase the grid fails me. I charge the Powerwalls at night during offpeak hours for free and keep them near 100%.
29% of my energy needs are offset with the 4.80kW panels.
I plan to add more powerful solar panels soon. 9.6kW panels would allow me to offset 58% of my energy needs; it would add on $12k to my costs, but I am safe knowing that I don't need to completely rely on ERCOT and their mafia anymore (to an extent).
TL;DR $23k USD. I was able to get a 0% APR loan as well, so I'm paying around $130 / month. After including the energy generated/offset, it goes to net ~$93 month.
Serious question.
It's like these people either know something we don't, or they're forehead-slapping dumbasses who've accidentally stumbled into billions of dollars, over and over. I don't know which to believe.
Maybe they can even strike deals to go off grid when paid to do so.
https://www.powergrid.news/2020-08-19-blackouts-demonstrate-...
„ Texas, Our Texas! All hail the mighty State! Texas, Our Texas! So wonderful, so great! Boldest and grandest, withstanding ev'ry test O Empire wide and glorious, you stand supremely blest.“
What a Match