The Two Hours That Nearly Destroyed Texas's Electric Grid

[Klaralven]

...

The control room of the Texas electric grid is dominated by a Cineplex-sized screen along one wall. As outdoor temperatures plunged to arctic levels around the low-slung building 30 miles from Austin last Sunday night, all eyes were on it. The news wasn’t good.

Electric demand for heat across the state was soaring, as expected, but green dots on the corner state map started flipping to red. Each was a regional power generator, and they were spontaneously shutting down — three coal plants followed quickly by a gas plant in Corpus Christi.

Then another metric began to flash: frequency, a measure of electricity flow on the grid. The 60 hertz needed for stability fell to 59.93.

Bill Magness, chief executive officer of the grid operator, was watching intently and understood instantly what was at stake. Below 59 and the state’s electrical system would face cascading blackouts that would take weeks or months to restore. In India in 2012, 700 million people were plunged into darkness in such a moment.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-02-20/texas-blackout-how-the-electrical-grid-failed

The logical implication of this is that a cyber attack that forced enough generators suddenly off line would destroy the grid for weeks to months.

PS -

By Friday, when Ercot declared that the emergency had ended, 14.4 million people still lacked reliable access to public water supplies, and the crisis had already cost the state $50 billion in damages, according to Accuweather. Meanwhile, some generators made a windfall as energy prices soared to $9,000 a megawatt-hour during the crisis. In all, generators have earned more than $44.6 billion in electricity sales alone this year — more than 2018-2020 combined, according to Wood Mackenzie. Those earnings don’t take into account any hedges that may have been in place.

[SWBTATTReg]

1. Makes you wonder if some hedge fund operators caused beyond peak usage events to occur, so

they could make tons of money?...

[Klaralven]

2. There should certainly be a detailed investigation of which generators shut down, when, & why

It's easier to create a gap in generation than a peak in usage.

[SWBTATTReg]

4. Perhaps there were a lot of factors, but the biggest one in my mind is that they ...

promised tons of electric when needed at the unregulated price, and of course, they didn't deliver. The infrastructure collapsed, and not enough electric was being generated either. A dismal failure that both TX and republican officials all should pay for.

[Hortensis]

3. Makes me glad for the competence of the grid operators. They

knew all the theoretical vulnerabilities, but how quickly power supplies were falling offline was a shock, the inability of other states to make up some of the difference not a shock but a problem. All of it was a rapidly hugely extreme emergency situation that they understood completely as it arose so that they were able to do what they had to.

[roamer65]

5. Thank the cloud beings ERCOT was isolated.

This could have cascaded like the 2003 power outage in the Great Lakes region.

[LeftInTX]

6. This whole thing is "fascinating"...not in a good way, but also because I don't know anything about

energy/energy markets etc.
In 1989, we had the same type of weather as last week and no blackouts.

In 2011, we had some cold weather, but it wasn't exceptional. The low was 20 and high was 28. We had blackouts. That was the first time I heard of ERCOT. It was the first time, I had been in a "rolling blackout". But the blackouts lasted about 45 minutes. There was several hours between the next blackout. I believe there were three altogether. It was during the day. No blackouts after 4 pm. I saw it more as an inconvenience. I thought maybe they were doing maintenance on a power plant somewhere....

I shrugged the event off. However, I shouldn't have. In 1989, it got down to 5 degrees and we never lost power. In 1989, we were outside putting up Christmas lights in the cold. We put up our tree. I had a 3 year and was expecting another child.

But why did a freeze in 2011 cause black outs and the much worse freeze in 1989 not cause blackouts?

I should have thought more critically in 2011, but shrugged it off. Most of us did. It sucked not to have to TV or internet for 45 minutes, (altogether, it about 2 hours). But I forgot about it. I caught up with the 2011 Wisconsin teacher protests later and life was back to normal.

Food for thought...something changed and it wasn't the weather......

[Klaralven]

7. In 2018 and 2020 there wre 6453 MW of old coal-fired generation plants closed.

They were presumably replace by gas-fired plants and by wind farms. But the gas-fired plants shut down when the gas pressure dropped. The wind farms don't produce their rated output except under ideal conditions.

Plus demand had gone up substantially in the last decades as the Texas population has grown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Texas