How can the Southern power grid handle months of blistering heat with everyone blasting air conditioners, but can’t handle two days below freezing?
In: 1150
Specifically for Texas:
We have plenty of generation capacity. It’s not simply that we get too much load. It’s that our power plants freeze up and go offline. If a large percentage of your power plants fail AND your load is high, then that’s the problem.
Why does cold break power plants? Mostly because there is a lot of water involved. Steam generation, cooling lines, etc. Back in Feb 2021, that storm also combined rain with freezing temperatures. This coated everything with a thick layer of ice, collapsing trees, power lines, etc. This ice coating was also a problem for wind turbines, and Texas has a lot of those.
Why aren’t power plants built to handle this kind of cold? Because it’s so rare. It “never” freezes here… until it does. This kind of problem has significantly disrupted the Texas power grid to the point of shortages and rolling blackouts 3 times since 1970. This killed a lot of people in Texas in 2021, so now there is a lot of pressure to be better able to handle these situations. Rare property damage wasn’t such a huge deal, but rare killing a bunch of people is a problem.
To give you an idea of how things are built different here because freezing isn’t considered a concern… All the houses in my parents’ neighborhood have the water supply entering the house as raw copper lines running outside the house. No insulation, not underground, and nothing to protect them at all. Just copper out in the air mounted outside the exterior wall. Imagine the same thinking at power plants.
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