[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.

[jeffbee]

You've got it basically 180° the wrong way around. "I know people in all these places" is literally crowdsourcing. It is anecdotal. PowerOutage.us is plugged into the API of every utility provider in America. It's the existence of the APIs that is crowdsourced, not the data itself.

[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.