So, I've answered a few questions about the #poweroutage situation here in #Texas due to the #winterstorm2021

Welcome to my explainer of why some people have power, and others don't.

Power plants in the south are almost exclusively outdoors, like this:

Up north, they are often enclosed in an insulated, hangar-like buildings.

The reason for these design differences are environmental. Up north, it gets colder and they need to keep the cold from getting in. Down south, heat is more intense and it would be a bad idea to insulate like that where summer run season reaches triple digits.

The plants in the south are more susceptible to cold stress because that is the tradeoff for being armored against the heat. This means that when temps drop suddenly, all the ways that cold can damage a machine will happen.

Turbines are now more stressed because of environmental conditions. The demand from the grid is also higher because of the weather. People don't tend to crank their heaters up to 80 in regular winter weather, but they do during a storm like this.

Appliance use increases the strain. Every spare thing you use in your house, even leaving lights on or unused electronics plugged in, this all causes increase in demand on machines that are creaking under the stress of the cold it was not designed for.

When the reserve MW for the grid (the difference in generation capability and demand) falls below a certain point, the grid regulators (ERCOT) will initiate energy saving measures.

First, they will import excess power from other grids. Texas often imports from up there in Oklahoma.

If the reserve drops lower, ERCOT will cut power from industrial users who have agreed to come down in the event of a tight grid.

Even lower, and we will see rolling blackouts in an effort to avoid failure of parts of the grid. This is the step we are at right now.

Sometimes, those rolling blackouts down work and we see genuine blackouts. I am currently in one of those genuine blackouts. Solidarity!

So, genuine blackouts give rise to another problem, and that is what is known as Black Plant.

Black Plant is when a plant's turbines trip and go offline, and they are in a section of the grid that is in blackouts conditions without their contributions. A plant that is in Black Plant condition cannot get back online without power from the grid to help start their turbines.

A small percentage of plants are Black Start plants, which means they are equipped with diesel generators that can provide the necessary power to start a plant back up if they are without grid power.

Its a very small percentage of plants that are Black Start. I have worked at well over 150 plants in the past 4 years as a field engineer and maybe a dozen were Black Start plants.

When plants trip, that means that something happened that need to be fixed. If we are lucky, the damage is fixable by the 2 to 8 technicians that typically man a powerplant, and they roll the unit back up and get back on the grid.

If we are not lucky, it is serious damage that requires an unscheduled maintenance outage, meaning field engineers like me, craft crews, and parts need to get to the site to figure out what is wrong and how to fix it, and then implement the fix.

So, when ERCOT states that they have lost 10,500MW of generation, what they mean is that the plants that generate that power are partially or fully offline and have not yet been able to fix the problem or there are plants that are stranded in blacked out parts of the grid.

Bear in mind, I'm only speaking to the generation side of things. There are other parts of the grid that are vulnerable to damage - power lines, switch yards, transformers, etc. These can also be why you are without power right now.

But please understand that the power generation facilities are all running at full bore right now. People are slapping bandaides on things just to get back up ND running so they can deliver power, and the grid is still failing in places because of this ridiculous storm.

Flooding your power company with conplains will not do anything but tie up their lines. Power companies all draw from the same grid, and right now, demand is outpacing supply.

I know this was a long thread. Any questions? I'll try to answer.