ERCOT Warns of Intensified Summer Supply Crunch For Texas Electricity Supplies.

[NNadir]

I'm on the mailing list of Power, a trade magazine for the electric grid companies.

It's often an interesting read. I have a rather long post in process - which I may or may not finish - on the issue of process intensification, with a side bar on spinning reserve, the reserve power that grids keep running to deal with fluctuations in demand.

It appears that ERCOT, the grid that serves Texas is expected to operate at historical reserve lows this summer.

The news article is here: ERCOT Warns of Intensified Summer Supply Crunch

Some excerpts from the article:

Grappling with a historically low planning reserve margin of 7.4%, owing to a mass of coal plant closures, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is forecasting record electric use this summer and warns it could issue energy alerts at “various times.”

ERCOT said its March 5–released final Seasonal Assessment of Resource Adequacy (SARA) for the upcoming spring season (March to May) and its preliminary assessment for the summer season (June to September) suggest the independent system operator (ISO), which manages about 90% of Texas’s electric load, faces markedly tighter supply scenarios this summer.

“Prior to each season, we consider a range of potential risks to determine whether there will be sufficient capacity to meet the expected peak load forecast,” said ERCOT President and CEO Bill Magness in a statement on March 5. “In all of the scenarios studied, we identified a potential need to call an energy alert at various times this summer.”

When ERCOT declares an alert, it “can then take advantage of additional resources that are only available during scarcity conditions,” the grid operator noted. “These resources include demand response products, resources that are normally set aside to provide operating reserves (including contracted load reduction from some industrial facilities), additional generation or imports from neighboring regions and voluntary calls for conservation by consumers...”

... The SARA also considers about 381 MW of typical maintenance outages, as well as forced outages of 3,845 MW, both based on data from June through September over the past three years. Other risks include low wind output, which would require securing about 3,959 MW in an extreme scenario.

As ERCOT explained, the SARA focuses on the availability of sufficient operating reserves to avoid emergency actions such as deployment of voluntary load reduction resources. “It uses an operating reserve threshold of 2,300 MW to indicate the risk that an Energy Emergency Alert Level 1 (EEA1) may be triggered during the time of the forecasted seasonal peak load,” it said. “This threshold level is intended to be roughly analogous to the 2,300 MW Physical Responsive Capability (PRC) threshold for EEA1..."

I've added the bold in this excerpt.

In the post I've been writing, which began with commentary on a scientific paper on electrochemical carbon capture and went somewhere else, I have an explanation of the real costs of spinning reserve, which explains why Germany and Denmark have the highest electricity prices in the OECD, despite all this mindless bullshit about how low the prices are for wind and solar energy.

Here's another article from the current issue of Power:

Nuclear Power Plants Set Performance Records in Spite of Pandemic

...and another...

Nuclear Reactor with 3D-Printed Core Slated for Operation in 2023

It's always a good thing when you know something about which you're talking. I'm not in the power industry, but I read this trade publication from it anyway.

[hunter]

1. Your second link is bad.

It should be:

https://www.powermag.com/nuclear-reactor-with-3d-printed-core-slated-for-operation-in-2023/


These 3D printed nuclear reactor cores seem closely related to 3D printed rocket designs.

For example: https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/3d-printed-rocket-injector.html


As for the rest of your post, wind and solar power enthusiasts ALWAYS end up dismissing the environmental and political impacts of the natural gas power plants that support their energy fantasies.

A society powered entirely by wind, solar, and other "renewable" energy would look nothing like the society many affluent people now enjoy. It likely not even possible as the human population approaches ten billion by 2050.

[NNadir]

2. They also always miss the environmental impact of wind energy itself.

The requisite redundancy is bad enough, and it drives costs through the roof for reasons I'll probably explain in a future post, but to make this trivial source of energy less trivial will place an enormous strain on the world's metal supply.

Wind power is decidedly not sustainable, but it's become a kind of dogma that is now hard to displace even among people who mean well and who think they're open minded, although experience shows them to be less so.

Twenty or thirty years ago, it seemed like a reasonable thing to consider, but the experiment was performed at a trillion dollar scale, and the results are in. We had days this spring where carbon dioxide concentrations hit 418 ppm, and where weekly averages were almost 417 ppm.

Thanks for the correction.

I have been thinking quite a bit about printed reactors, but my ideas are very different than what is being proposed by ORNL/INL. I'm trying to interest my son in these ideas, in case I die, since he is about to graduate with a degree in Materials Science Engineering.

I toured ORNL last summer because my son had an internship there. The local ORNL museum had a Jeep that was 3D printed.

It was pretty cool. This is no longer a laboratory curiosity. We are now in the pilot stage.