TVA took 200,000 customers offline when temps were below zero: WHY?
(dailymemphian.com)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (45)
sorted by:
There can be a multitude of reasons why demand cannot be met. During storms facilities can go down too, any number of possible failures affect their ability to run.
If you run gas plants you need gas and water, if water isn't available you can't run. If a switch fails because it's frozen you can't get your power out, if gas supplies are poor you can't run.
If demand exceeds your spinning capacity you need to cut back, rolling blackouts can prevent total collapses so they will do that. Most places have plans in place, heavy industry is supposed to cut back first and then they'll roll blackouts here and there. That way no one is without power very long.
Sometimes it is simple red tape and government foolishness which causes blackouts, sometimes it's poor planning, equipment failures, operator error (that happens a lot), trees on lines, ice on lines, strong winds even.
We had turkey vultures shut us down several times, someone shot a hog with a bow but didn't kill it and it ran off under one of our lines to die, vultures were sitting on our lines as they took turns eating the hog. Their wings shorted us out, tripped off 138000 volt circuits. We couldn't chase the birds away because they are protected...we ended up having to rerun our lines, spaced them out so the damn birds couldn't reach across and short them. Those freaking birds cost millions of dollars...
A lot of legit reasons why power might trip off or not be available, it is usually a tangible reason ho, not just because some manager is a richardhead.
The average person thinks that the execs can just shut down the plant when they want. Don't forget there are numerous regulatory agencies depending on your state and the power you are using. Just off the top of my head there is NERC, FERC, NRC, EPA, and a whole host of PUCs and other state and local agencies/regulations. The plants also have to let the grid operators know how much power they can provide, and if there are any planned outages like "Turnarounds" or "Nuclear Refuels". The plants can also lose $1M+ per day depending on their size. There can also be fines in extreme cases.
Source - me. After I worked at a fossil plant I went on to be an NRC cyber inspector, and then worked at a nuclear plant for about 5 years and contracted at others for another few years.
Merry Christmas.
Yep. Our grid here in Texas is basically isolated from the larger national grid, we connect or used to in only two places. So we can 'kinda' manage our own situation, and the best thing is we can be buffered from national grid emergencies.
But even here we allowed chinese wind and solar farms to operate on the grid, and even be counted as 'X' percent of available power. This is a false thing- wind and solar will never be available in emergency, they should never be counted as available power for the grid.
America needs more nukular, gas turbine, coal and geothermal type plants. We need more spinning reserve, wind and solar cannot pump out the current on a cold wintry night. But if we had 1 turbine sitting idle and were running the others with all the boilers up we could bring another turbine online in less than 20 minutes, add another 120 megawatts.
And because we actually performed all our maintenances our stuff ran, the most efficient plant I worked with was older gas turbine tech, but being older tech we had everything we needed to keep them running smoothly. We were more reliable than most of the newer engines, many of them had teething troubles and couldn't be online with our efficiency.
But you gotta do your maintenances, in States where that isn't a priority power can be kinda sketchy. ERCOT liked to keep one of our turbines in reserve, they knew we could spin right up whereas the newer ones might be balky.
I understand when things happen that power will go off, but nothing happened - they just did it.
I doubt it, and how would you know if something happened? I don't mean weather related, stuff like a relay failure or computer glitch can trip you, a bad instrumentation reading from a RTD on the turbine or some such, happens every day
But ok, they are out to get you.....
Because they put out press releases that it was an ELECTIVE blackout. It wasn't for a reason.
Yeah, scheduled outages are elective, absolutely. You just were not informed of the reason.