[txlpo78]

This current problems wouldn’t be fixed if Texas wasn’t on its own grid. The Texas grid does have connections to the other grids, and even right now is importing power from both the East and West interconnections.

The problem is that this is a truly regional event and not just isolated to Texas. The entire central US is struggling right now. The SPP (which manages electricity for Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arkansas, and other states) has been struggling with forced blackouts over the last several days as well. They don’t have enough power for their own grid, let alone enough to share with Texas.

If Texas was more interconnected with the SPP, the end result wouldn’t be Texans all having their problems solved. Many Texans would still be without power, but so would many more Oklahomans. The fact that the Texas grid is separate is the only thing keeping OK from having even worse blackouts. Which makes sense, because the entire point of grid isolation is to keep issues localized and not cascade over the entire network. And that’s working to Oklahoma’s benefit right now, but Texas is getting the short end of the stick.

[mike_d]

This is not correct. Because the Texas grid is isolated, the frequency is not synced with the two other major grids and cannot import electricity at any meaningful capacity. (See http://fnetpublic.utk.edu/frequencymap.html)

Frequency conversion is a costly and difficult to scale problem. If Texas was part of the Western grid they could be drawing excess hydroelectric power from the pacific northwest right now for example. Texas also could have contributed to help the California power shortages last year.

Edit: Here is a map of the grid interconnects in Texas with capacity. As of the time of this comment the total importation capacity is less than 1% of demand. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/22095643/49019079-...

[txlpo78]

Nothing I said in my comment is incorrect. Texas has 5 different connections with the other grids and can import/export through them. But they are irrelevant right now because the other grids do not have enough spare capacity to send to Texas.

>If Texas was part of the Western grid they could be drawing excess hydroelectric power from the pacific northwest right now for example. Texas also could have contributed to help the California power shortages last year.

No. That’s not how the grids work. Just because Oklahoma and Washington are part of the same interconnection, that does not mean that people living in Tulsa can pull power as needed from a dam in Washington, which is why Oklahomans are struggling with power outages today as well. Most power still must be generated locally. Long distance transmission is difficult and inefficient, and often requires converting to DC just like a grid-to-grid connection requires, so you have the same issues as you have when you’re on separate grids.

[reportingsjr]

This does not seem to be true at all. If you look at a power outage map of Texas you can actually see exactly where the ERCOT boundaries are. Everyone else in Texas that's on the other, federal, grids, are not experiencing widespread power outages.

https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/landing_pages/89373/ERCOT-I... https://poweroutage.us/area/state/oklahoma

Per your comment about long distance transmission, that doesn't matter in a situation like this. If you're on a large grid you don't necessarily need to transmit power to Oklahoma all of the way from the PNW.

You need the areas surrounding OK to supply excess power to them, then those surrounding areas can get whatever excess they may need from slightly further areas. This needs less and less excess as you go further since every area is over provisioned.

Eventually at some point, yes, the PNW may be supplying excess power to states around them as a result of Oklahoma having outages, but that power isn't going straight from PNW to OK.

[txlpo78]

https://www.kmbc.com/article/southwest-power-pool-again-orde...

Oklahoma has been dealing with rolling blackouts for the past several days. Tell me why this is, since apparently you think Oklahoma is able to magically get power transferred to them all the way from Washington? If WA has the excess capacity, why are Oklahomans still without power?

> Everyone else in Texas that's on the other, federal, grids, are not experiencing widespread power outages.

Completely wrong. Eastern Texas (eg Orange), which is under MISO, and is dealing with blackouts. And parts of the Texas panhandle like Lubbock, which is also not part of the Texas grid, is also struggling with power outages.

[jeffbee]

I'm sure you can see that a rolling outage affecting 200k people for 4 hours is quite different than an outage affecting four million customers for 3 days.

Check out the map. It's pretty clear that what you said is wrong. ERCOT territory is all broken, panhandle, east Texas, and El Paso area are not having problems. https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas

[txlpo78]

The site you are referencing is a crowdsourced site. It takes five seconds of looking at the numbers to see that it has incomplete data. Most major public utilities are saying that they are not tracking these storm-related blackouts as “outages” and therefor do not show up on most utility outage maps.

I have family and friends in every place you just said is “not having problems” and I can assure you that you are entirely incorrect.

> I'm sure you can see that a rolling outage affecting 200k people for 4 hours is quite different than an outage affecting four million customers for 3 days.

The 200k customers mentioned is only talking about the numbers from one relatively small provider. If you want to only look at one provider in Texas: Austin Energy, the provider for all of Austin, is currently reporting only 200k customers affected as well. But obviously that’s not the whole picture in Texas, just like 200k isn’t the whole picture in the SPP.

All other providers in the SPP are affected, not just the one in the article. Many more than 200k people were affected, and the blackouts have been happening over the past three days, not four hours.

[Qwertious]

>I'm sure you can see that a rolling outage affecting 200k people for 4 hours is quite different than an outage affecting four million customers for 3 days.

((3 * 24) / 4) * (4 000 000 / 200 000)

Holy crap, that's literally 360 times worse.

[Element_]

I am not sure it's that simple, I read some where else yesterday that at least one of the non-ERCOT grids had paid to winterize their local power plants after the last ice storm so their plants have been operational throughout this storm and as a result had no outages. I have no idea how accurate that is though, I don't know anything about the electric grid...

[briffle]

There is a 3.6GW DC line that goes from about an hour East of Portland, Oregon, down to LA. Its 2 wires. Texas doesn't have any interconnections with the west. But even if they did, 3GW would not be nearly enough to solve their problem could could replace many natural gas plants that are currently down.

[blake1]

AC transmission absolutely does work over large distances. It’s just not a point-to-point system.

Imagine four cities in a row, all connected with AC. City A generates extra power, which gets sucked up by city B, whose power goes to the next city down the line, to city Z.

Sure, it’s not actually that simple, but when was the last time NY literally had no power? They benefit from being highly connected.

TX is paying for being isolated.

Their handful of DC interconnects do not have the capacity to power their mini grid. They’re short 35GW of generation, and I assume the DC ties are at capacity.

[txlpo78]

> when was the last time NY literally had no power? They benefit from being highly connected.

Do you not remember the blackouts of 2003? Multiple entire states went dark for hours, and the “highly connectedness” was a huge part of the problem. The only reason it wasn’t even worse is specifically because grid isolation stopped it from propagating further, just like what’s happening here.

[blake1]

Just look at the first image on the Wikipedia page, showing the extent of the blackout. This is far smaller than the footprint of the eastern interconnect. The control software at the time made some simplifying approximations which left the grid vulnerable to problems cascading between operators. I do not think they have quite the same problem anymore.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

[pixl97]

There is another problem here. Texas generates as much power as the second and third states on the generation list. The outage Texas had would have sagged most of the US.

Separate grids are great for other kinds of emergencies, if we get a big solar flare then the splits save each grid.

We need a east to west DC long distance interconnect to haul power across the country.

[mike_d]

> that does not mean that people living in Tulsa can pull power as needed from a dam in Washington

Not directly, but by way of demand shifting, effectively yes. Northern California is fed by Washington, SoCal by NorCal generation, etc. until you get excess capacity closer to the demand sink.

[mjevans]

You do still need generation closer to Texas that works, but as a whole the grid can balance the generation and output a bit depending on the gradient between the sources.

Imagine a 'bouncy castle' with several input fans. Texas is like an entry ramp that isn't hooked up to either of two big banks of fans and sinks next to it. If it were just ganged in with one of those other two groups even though Texas is having a bad time the other blowers could compensate in aggregate.

[oasisbob]

A good example of this is the PNW interties which move (primarily) hydro power to California from Washington and Oregon.

One system is DC. The other is AC. They both do primarily the same thing through elaborate systems.

Washington can send electricity south via AC - doesn't really mean CA and WA are functioning on the same grid.

[aardvarkr]

FYI the Texas grid runs on a different frequency than the other two grids and as a result incurs MASSIVE efficiency penalties for that hubris. If I recall correctly it has to be converted from AC to DC then back to Texas’ AC.

[O5vYtytb]

Technically they run on at different phase, but the same frequency (60hz)

[quickthrowman]

You recall correctly, and interestingly, the same method is used for variable-frequency drive motor controllers

[txlpo78]

Yes, that’s correct. Texas has 5 ties to the western/eastern US interconnections as well as with the Mexico grid. But none of that matters right now because those grids don’t have excess capacity to send to Texas anyway.

[teraflop]

It's not really a matter of whether the grids have capacity; the ties themselves can only handle a limited amount of power.

As per ERCOT's status page, both of the high-voltage DC ties between Texas are currently operating at >99% of their rated capacity, and they have been every time I've checked since yesterday. They're not being limited by the availability of power from the other side.

[txlpo78]

You’re missing the point. Even if the ties had more capacity, the supply of power on the other side of the ties is not there. It’s a two-pronged issue, and you won’t solve the problem by only focusing on one of the prongs.

[blake1]

This is incorrect. MISO, the system to the north and east of TX, has capacity. The DC ties cannot handle it. You can see this by checking the price signals on their page. Right now, the TX hub is about $1,000 but the MS hub is about $60.

https://api.misoenergy.org/MISORTWD/lmpcontourmap.html

[txlpo78]

MISO does not have the capacity either. Sections of eastern Texas, such as Orange, are under MISO, and they too have been dealing with blackouts due to lack of capacity. Parts of Louisiana under MISO are also being told that they will see blackouts soon.

https://www.klfy.com/local/cleco-rolling-blackouts-to-be-use...

https://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article/134700/lr-based-tra...

Again, just because you have excess power in Missouri does not mean that power can magically transfer hundreds of miles away where it is needed. Energy transfer does not work like that.

[margalabargala]

It seems highly unlikely that exactly 100% of the capacity of the interconnects is, coincidentally, precisely equal to the amount of excess power available to be fed into the interconnects at the moment. Do you have anything to back up this extraordinary claim?

[txlpo78]

Did anyone make that claim? No. Go re-read my comment and try again.

[ineedasername]

If you browse a few of the ISO pages for other states/regions you'll see a bunch that have excess capacity above their projected peak for the day.

Here's one: https://www.iso-ne.com/

Here's another: http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx

But there's a limited capacity for Texas to bring in power over just 5 connections, combined with their choice that makes conversion to something compatible with the Texas grid much less efficient.

By isolating & not focusing on compatibility they have made it very difficult to have more robust redundancy in their grid.

[s0rce]

Do the other grids publish their generation/demand statistics live? I remember being able to check the CalISO page during the rolling blackouts in California during the summer.

[qqqwerty]

CAISO says it has 10k MW in extra capacity[1].

http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx

[blake1]

I am in MISO, which roughly runs up the Mississippi River, and borders TX. They have some real-time data available publicly.

https://www.misoenergy.org/markets-and-operations/real-time-...

[stefan_]

They have absolutely 0MW capacity that they would be willing to put online to earn millions an hour? Seems unlikely.

[7thaccount]

I tried to say the same above. When the entire south is low on capacity, being fully AC interconnected probably doesn't help much even if the DC ties had more capacity.

[ineedasername]

A few limited connections are not sufficient to fully take advantage of all areas of the country where there may be extra capacity. It wouldn't solve the problem, but would have helped. Oklahoma for example has been able to stop rolling blackouts. Texas is still deep in this.

[austinheap]

This is a two day old account repeating exactly one trope FWIW.

[ineedasername]

Yes, basically Texas is great, this situation was unavoidable, nobody did anything wrong, and people should just suck it up.