nanog mailing list archives
Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts
From: Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa>
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2021 18:10:36 +0200
On 2/16/21 18:50, John Von Essen wrote:
I just assumed most people in Texas have heat pumps- AC in the summer and minimal heating in the winter when needed. When the entire state gets a deep freeze, everybody is running those heat pumps non-stop, and the generation capacity simply wasn’t there. i.e. coal or natural gas plants have some turbines offline, etc.,. in the winter because historically power use is much much less. The odd thing is its been days now, those plants should be able to ramp back up to capacity - but clearly they haven’t. Blaming this on wind turbines is BS. In fact, if it weren’t for so many people in Texas with grid-tie solar systems, the situation would be even worse.
I'm not sure that grid-tied solar systems actually provide any massive reprieve on utility generation, because the hours that installations can produce energy is when demand is at its lowest (fair point, working from home this past year has probably skewed that, but...).
Demand tends to ramp up in the evenings, which is when solar cannot work anymore. And considering that there are more grid-tied solar solutions out there with no storage, the grid has to handle that ramp up for the evening loads, likely more quickly than they would have if there was no distributed solar generation.
I'm also not sure about the state restrictions on the % of customers that can connect their solar systems to the grid, but I'd imagine it's somewhere between 10% - 20%, last time I did a spot-check on various U.S. states.
Mark.
Current thread:
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts, (continued)
- Message not available
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Mark Tinka (Feb 17)
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts John Von Essen (Feb 16)
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Brandon Svec (Feb 16)
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Miles Fidelman (Feb 16)
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Mark Tinka (Feb 17)
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Michael Thomas (Feb 16)
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Chris Boyd (Feb 16)
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Seth Mattinen (Feb 16)
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Haudy Kazemi via NANOG (Feb 16)
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Kevin East (Feb 16)
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Mark Tinka (Feb 17)
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Mark Tinka (Feb 15)
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Rod Beck (Feb 16)
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Mark Tinka (Feb 17)
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Ishmael Rufus (Feb 16)
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Rich Kulawiec (Feb 16)
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts William Herrin (Feb 16)
- RE: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Peter Beckman (Feb 16)
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Ben Cannon (Feb 17)
- Re: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Mark Tinka (Feb 18)
- RE: Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts Tim Burke (Feb 19)