THIS is Texas? 6º F

[4WD]

Some things just won’t ever change I guess. Was in Texas actually at Ingleside TX. Nice folks, area and good times. I’ll pray something “changes” soon. Having no backups kinda pisses me off for sure. OVERKILL has made valid points; WHAT IS STOPPING Texas from adding few nuclear plants? Seriously

Adam: as I mentioned … STP went through all the assessments and got approval to add two more modern day reactors and gens … they already have a large enough cooling pond. But it’s just hard to find the money especially knowing if these these projects run late … the costs pile up … and yes, there is uncertainty in the air …

 

[JimPghPA]

I have not read all 9 pages of this thread, but I think the main problem in Texas is that many many homes and buildings have heat-pumps with resistive heating back-up for when it gets too cold for the heat-pump. When a very high percent of those go to resistive heating mode the power requirement goes up a whole heck of a lot. In fact too much for the grid and stations to handle.

Probably the way to prevent this from happening again would be to mandate some type of hydrocarbon system as the fall-back system for heat-pump heating systems instead of resistive electric heat.

Though it does appear that the generation plants current design can not handle the cold.

It would be interesting to know the increase in power use when a heat-pump system goes to resistive heat. Is it twice as much, three times as much? I do not know the multiple but I do know it is a lot more power being required.

 

[Wolf359]

Yes … lots of the aero derivatives can run on natural gas or diesel … Wonder how clean you could get them on GTL based diesel … but like so many things the upfront cost of GTL is substantial on a large scale … youth stages on the smaller scale projects …
There was a test planned in this area to capture power plant CO2 and inject in wells for enhanced oil recovery …
I doubt anyone has the confidence to go forward with that right now …
Lots of ideas out there …

Oh yeah, forgot that Texas isn't subject to FERC as it's a state only grid. Also the gas plant I think just burned crude oil. No need for expensive diesel.

 

[OVERKILL]

They used to be around. They all got shut down decades ago. They were known as incinerators. Basically the emissions were bad. Think of things like Mercury that's in trace amounts of various things. Now all that gets airborne. If you're going to scrub your emissions, then that costs even more money. Probably the same deal with nuclear plants, no appetite to get them permitted for operation.

Getting a nuke approved is a PITA, I know that Texas was looking at adding two AP1000's to the STP site (STP 3 and 4) but the brakes were put on that when Vogtle went nutty. Perhaps they'll revisit that after this debacle however. Future AP1000's should be cheaper now that Vogtle is almost done.

On the incinerator front, here's the one we have down by Lake Ontario:
https://www.durhamyorkwaste.ca/en/index.aspx

 

[OVERKILL]

When I worked for a company that had a gas plant in the northeast, it was permitted to run for 4 days a year on oil. For several years, they never did it but did run a test once to make sure it worked. There were several oil tanks on site to store all that oil and there were oil tankers there for days afterwards filling up those tanks after the test was run. So the gas plants in texas could have been set up to run on oil. They probably just never figured they'd need it and didn't want to spend the money on it. Gas curtailments mainly happened in the winter and I guess maybe the oil was there in case there were issues in the summer. The plant made a lot more money in the summer than the winter. I think most gas plants out there are combined cycle so they already have heat recovery steam generators. Basically I believe at one point you could get more money for running a combined cycle power plant than a regular gas one if at least 5% of the steam energy was used.

We have a dual fuel plant here in Ontario, it's actually a pretty large facility (2,140MW) that operates almost never, lol. It's owned by the province, is quite old but one of its virtues is that it can run on gas or oil if the need ever arrises.

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

1.5% capacity factor, LMAO!!

 

[OVERKILL]

Yes, My nick name is Lazy Dog but here is the short version of the article. Texas power grid is not part of the country's grid because it did wanted to winterize their grid which had to be done due to federal regulations. They felt they could do a better job when compared to the rest of the country
so pretty much they are on their own.

The Texas grid IS interconnected to the other grids, it is just that the interconnectors aren't very large in order to avoid the federal regulations. So it's not completely islanded, but the points of connection are pretty far from where the demand is and the capacity isn't that high.

 

[OVERKILL]

Texas? No one is adding nuclear plants anymore. Everyone pretty much knows the reason. Too bad, Europe and others do fine with it.

There's a lot of excitement about SMR's, but large gigawatt+ units are almost at a standstill this side of the pond with Vogtle being the only project ongoing and it wildly over budget. We are poised to break-ground on a couple of FOAK SMR builds here in Ontario at Darlington B but they really should have been conventional units IMHO (C6's).

China is building a TON of nukes right now and Russia is partnered with a number of countries with new builds as well. The Russians appear to be able to execute on-time and on-budget far better than the Western and European companies (Westinghouse and EDF). Regulation and excessive red tape have been significant drivers in the increase in cost and time to execute these projects, which in turn makes them unpopular.

 

[spackard]

In a slow time last year I watched, on Virtual Railfan train cams, a train carrying some low-radiation equipment from San Onofre nuclear plant, over the hill, to burial place in Utah, in a Schnabel car. Only time I've seen a train intentionally self speed-limited to 5mph, for hundreds of miles.

Googling it https://www.sandiegouniontribune.co...uclear-power-plant-is-getting-shipped-to-utah
this may be the one I watched.

But, I found an older story -
https://www.ble-t.org/pr/news/headline.asp?id=8530
about a 2003 move. It is worth reading, for the amount of obstacles in the way of moving low-radiation equipment.
You can feel the millions of dollars evaporating.
Point being: there's a huge amount of time and money thrown at nuclear.
One can't ignore those real costs, no matter what your personal feelings are about their necessity.

 

[OVERKILL]

In a slow time last year I watched, on Virtual Railfan train cams, a train carrying some low-radiation equipment from San Onofre nuclear plant, over the hill, to burial place in Utah, in a Schnabel car. Only time I've seen a train intentionally self speed-limited to 5mph, for hundreds of miles.

Googling it https://www.sandiegouniontribune.co...uclear-power-plant-is-getting-shipped-to-utah
this may be the one I watched.

But, I found an older story -
https://www.ble-t.org/pr/news/headline.asp?id=8530
about a 2003 move. It is worth reading, for the amount of obstacles in the way of moving low-radiation equipment.
You can feel the millions of dollars evaporating.
Point being: there's a huge amount of time and money thrown at nuclear.
One can't ignore those real costs, no matter what your personal feelings are about their necessity.

Decom costs are all supposed to be set aside during the life of the units. We have some $30 billion I believe set aside so far for our retirements, all pulled out of the per kWh rate of the plants during their operation, which will continue for another 40+ years.

My understanding is that some of the US decom funds aren't quite as rich, but others are. Holtec is making serious money on decommissioning by tapping into that money and executing the projects under budget.

Remember, a nuke plant is responsible for its entire waste stream, no other industry can claim that.

Nukes produce an obscene amount of electricity, so it doesn't take skimming much off the top during their operating life to set aside a considerable amount of money to deal with all of the end of life costs.

Bruce produces close to 50TWh a year, on a $0.077/kWh rate that's just shy of $4 billion dollars, let's say OPEX is $2 billion, that's $2 billion a year left. If $1 billion goes to EOL funding, over 80 years that's $80 BILLION DOLLARS and Bruce Power can still make $1 billion profit. That's how it is done, but obviously the funding is set aside based on projected costs. Bruce has a $12 billion refurbishment to pay back over the next 40 years, so that'll take a bite of of some of those figures too, but you can see it isn't difficult to fully fund those end of life activities.

 

[Snagglefoot]

I’m posting these color coded temperature maps ( middle two maps) to better explain how on earth it can be warmer in parts of Canada than in Texas. I see that a simple temperature issue is now crossing into the political domain so I’ll stop here. Good luck Texas. Just a couple more days.

 

[Fattylocks]

Texas? No one is adding nuclear plants anymore. Everyone pretty much knows the reason. Too bad, Europe and others do fine with it.

Not Germany. They're ( foolishly ) getting rid of all the nuke plants.

 

[Snagglefoot]

When I worked for a company that had a gas plant in the northeast, it was permitted to run for 4 days a year on oil. For several years, they never did it but did run a test once to make sure it worked. There were several oil tanks on site to store all that oil and there were oil tankers there for days afterwards filling up those tanks after the test was run. So the gas plants in texas could have been set up to run on oil. They probably just never figured they'd need it and didn't want to spend the money on it. Gas curtailments mainly happened in the winter and I guess maybe the oil was there in case there were issues in the summer. The plant made a lot more money in the summer than the winter. I think most gas plants out there are combined cycle so they already have heat recovery steam generators. Basically I believe at one point you could get more money for running a combined cycle power plant than a regular gas one if at least 5% of the steam energy was used.

Although less efficient than combined cycle type, I found Texas in the past had been building simple gas turbine plants in the middle of commercial neighbourhoods. In those, burning oil was not an option. The other thing about those units I recall is that there was not one single bit of insulation. All the pipes were exposed to the weather. However I don’t know if the one I recall was knocked out. It was on I45 north of the Loop.

 

[LazyDog]

I hope that after this debacle Texas takes it very serious and upgrades the grid in a thought-fall manner.

Mother nature just does not do things just once, and she'll come back at some point w/ same or worst conditions.

 

[OVERKILL]

I hope that after this debacle Texas takes it very serious and upgrades the grid in a thought-fall manner.

Mother nature just does not do things just once, and she'll come back at some point w/ same or worst conditions.

They had one of these in 2014 or 2011 too, just not quite as severe, so definitely not the first time.

 

[Snagglefoot]

Here is a screen shot of power generating sources in Texas from 2019. Seems rational to me at a few more nuclear plants would help a lot.

 

[doitmyself]

Going in a different direction for a moment: these calamities always reminds me how vulnerable our country is if an enemy managed to break down our utilities and communication systems that so many take-for-granted.

 

[Snagglefoot]

Harris County alone has 10 power plants built since 1995. The total number of non-renewable power plants built in Texas since 1995 totals 43,400 MW or 43.4 GW. That would power a lot of DeLoreans from “ Back to the Future”.

 

[Jetronic]

Maybe that should become the standard, make every industry responsible for it's entire waste stream.

I hope that after this debacle Texas takes it very serious and upgrades the grid in a thought-fall manner.

Mother nature just does not do things just once, and she'll come back at some point w/ same or worst conditions.

Unless voters died because of this, don't think they will remember to do it after a few weeks...

 

[Snagglefoot]

Maybe that should become the standard, make every industry responsible for it's entire waste stream.


Unless voters died because of this, don't think they will remember to do it after a few weeks...

Yes, with an occurrence once every 9 or 10 years, and going through two full election cycles, in that time frame, it would be tough to stay the course. Buy a good Parka.

 

[wag123]

In terms of what happened in Texas grid failure has nothing to do with wind or solar and everything to do with shutdown gas plants and deregulation .

Yes and no. There have been several contributing factors. The number one factor has been the extreme cold for an extended time period. The natural gas supply was severely compromised by frozen well heads and pipelines. This is what led to the natural gas power generation going down and others not being able to be started-up. The reason that the powers-that-be did this was because they didn't want to disrupt the gas delivery to individual residents, not because the residences could actually use the gas (most can't heat without power), but because when the gas supply is turned-off to residences it can't just be turned back on and everything works. The individual gas meters have safety devices built into them that won't allow the gas flow to resume after an interruption without a technician coming out and pressurising the system at EACH residence, it could take literally months for all of the gas supplies to be restored to each residential customer.
Another MUCH less important factor was the loss of a large percentage of solar and wind generation. About half of the wind generators went down because of icing of the wind turbine blades. In climates where this kind of icing is common the blades have optional heaters in them to keep them from icing-up, but this is an extra-cost option that the utilities didn't feel that they needed to purchase in Texas. Also, under normal circumstances additional natural gas power plants can be fired-up to more than make up for the loss of wind and solar power, but because of the loss of natural gas, they couldn't.