Featured Go Electric Meets the Three Stooges.

Imagine if gasoline stations said not to come get fuel until after 9pm or so...

 

They will if the power goes out.

Starting home charging later isn't really a big deal.

 

I've been seeing plenty of talk about scheduling the great bulk of upcoming EV charging to off-peak hours, for the entire time I've been on this forum, well before any of today's common EV models existed. The complaints now about official advice to not charge during peak times, seem to stem from serious ignorance, or convenient amnesia, or scaremongering FUD.

Certain utilities have had voluntary centrally controlled load shedding programs for major loads (AC, water heaters, etc.), in return for rate reductions, for a long time. More recently, I've seen EV charging added to the program.

Also recently, we've even been seeing 'smartgrid' discussions of using appropriately configured home EVs and Powerwalls to feed energy back into the grid during peak demand.

95° indoor temps very strongly point towards applying some building envelope improvements. These would not only reduce indoor temperatures when the electricity is off, but also substantially reduce energy bills when the electricity is on. When applied across the region, this also reduces the likelihood of electricity going off in the first place.

My home has experienced plenty of record breaking heat here in the past dozen summers, but thanks to various other improvements in both structure and operation, it is quite noticeably cooler inside even without turning on the modern heat pumps.

 

looks like 17 other states have big decisions to make:

41071986

 

That brings back memories of the gas shortage of the 70s. Service stations had limited hours and the supplies were rationed.

There are a couple of states that have emergency backup power requirements for gas stations. Louisiana and Florida are two of them. California had a bill that should have given incentives to service stations, but I can't find anywhere that it passed into law.

It only makes sense that a place with giant gas tanks should have a way to power their pumps when the grid is down.

 

It also makes sense for a state that could experience freezing temperatures to winterize their energy grid.

 

... like they used to do, before anyone was thinking about climate change and the potential abolition of winter, which that state now tends to deny.

And it only makes sense that a major regional petroleum refinery, when installing co-generators, would set up the controls so that they could run the refinery when the regional grid is taken down by major storms. Not wire the generators so that they can operate only in grid-tied mode.

 

Well yes, but ... at around $5/watt ($4 to build the reactor, $1 for natural gas back up) these things are already too expensive. Adding more safety just makes them more economically unviable. We can more cheaply build natural gas, and if its not needed it burns no fuel. Nuclear is only viable if forced to go to 0.

I can only tell you in Texas during the snow blackout. Stations without power could not sell gasoline. There were numerous car chargers that were available. When power finally came on gas tanks were empty at the stations with power, and long lines were at the previously closed stations that still had gasoline. I did ferry groceries in my Tesla to friends that had cars that were out of gas.

The solution in California and Texas are fairly simple to give higher reliability. Unfortunately the PUCs in both states are quite political and seem to be heavily favoring the utilities that would end up closing down old plants when the new ones open, and not working in interest of the consumer.

 

The Gulf states have recent painful memories where gas spigots were shut down for a couple of weeks.
By "recent" I mean in the last 20 years.
When I first moved into the region in the 80's people were asking "What are the chances of ANOTHER Camille?" and lots were still for sale right next to the Gult, complete with pre-installed slabs....from the LAST house that was there.
It hasn't even been 20 years since the last Cat-3 storm and people are already beginning to ask "What are the chances?......" and almost all of the post Camille lots from the 80's have NEW houses on them, meaning that the present occupants are TWICE as dull witted as the original owners.
Humans tend to think in very interesting and very short-term climate patterns which is ironic since it's many of the more religious zealots think that this planet is relatively young.
The "accidental universe" crowd fancies themselves as "knowing better....."

Yep.
Stupid to have that happen.....ONCE.
Some SoCal residents fed up with mounting Flex Alerts. Energy expert weighs in on state's power grid - ABC7 Los Angeles

What's even sillier is the fact that a great many of the houses in the PRC have standby propane (or bootleg gas) generators.
Because....."green."
Can't fix stupid.

I can't speak for the ERCOT refineries because...."Texas."
However (comma!) you really don't want refineries eating their own tail in a post-storm environment, or really any other time because it's nearly as inefficient as people running their houses on gas gensets during a Flex Alert.
People who run refineries for a living may be morally bankrupt (according to the "experts") but they're not all that stupid about dealing with autumnal storms.
Refineries are shut down and rigs are evacuated well before a storm, and they try not to keep product laying around DURING a storm.
Refineries actually DO produce a portion of their own electricity, but the thing that you have to realize about Hurricanes is that they tend to create a localized "everything" shortage.
There's no way that one could expect a refinery to return to ops-normal when roads and docks are torn up, rigs are shut down, workers are displaced, local water, refuse removal, propane and natural gas, schools, and daycare are all out of action, staple stores are shut down.....oh, and telecommunications are disrupted.
You can't get crude INTO the refinery and even if you could, you would not be able to get product OUT of the refinery.

Even if the evil, nasty crooks that meet the nation's energy needs would agree to install sufficient power generation with the requisite scrubbers and burners, my beloved government (who ALREADY have BIG OIL's reproductive bits in a vice) wouldn't allow them to use this generation capacity during ops-normal, and the electricity that might be generated wouldn't have anyplace to go.

 

I was hoping that folks would notice the emoji, and realize that the refinery failure I was referring to was something much much closer to home, within my own region. Pacific Coast. We don't have real hurricanes, so most of the above damage and hazard descriptions don't apply. Our normal fall and winter windstorms that take down powerlines and briefly close roads, aren't associated with similar degrees of devastation.

Now, when the 'Big Ones' (subduction zone shakers) hit, things here will be a little bit worse ...

 

I'm not thinking of many place that make these booboos just once, many seem to be frequent fliers. Texas' 2021 winter blackout had plenty of precedent within recent memory, such as 2011 and 1989. And even colder winter freezes repeatedly within parents' and grandparents' experiences. Investigate the causes, write a report with new recommendations and requirement to prevent recurrence, shove the report on to a dusty shelf, ignore / forget it, lather, rinse, repeat.

After some of my local tin hat brigade was up in arms about 'gummint intrusion' over a Colorado utility's first summer cutback in six years, briefly boosting and locking the air conditioning thermostats of thousands of customers who forgot they had voluntarily signed up for the program (in return of incentives, $250 so far), I learned that the Republic of Texas has long been doing this on about the same scale as the PRC. And apparently, they had to pull the same thing last year even during normal spring weather, triggered by unexpected outages of some of the same suppliers that failed during the winter cold blast.

 

It's like a whole nuther country.....
Betcha if Ann Richards were still running things it'd be a whole LOT different.....if only in the headlines.

 

Yeah, but you can't have it both ways round.
If the EVangelists are right, then the REASON you want people in BEVs is greenery through economy of scale and renewables, offsetting raping the planet for so-called rare earth stuff and other delectables.
At least that's what it says in all of the hymnals.

Also there are fantastical claims about how much energy per barrel is used by refineries, and dot.gov has their reproductive organs clamped in vice grips over pollution, carbon throughput, and profit margins.....and NOW people want them to start cranking out amps TOO?
(but only when the monopoly power companies WANT them to?)

-why, exactly?
Granted, I'm no shill for big oil.
Even when we had adult leadership and gas was $1.50 cheaper than it is now, I never considered it to be "cheap."
I'm thinking that perhaps dot.states.dot.govs needs to do what they are SUPPOSED to be doing, which is to REGULATE the power companies more efficiently.
If corporations are 'people' then their ossifers ought to be doing the perp walk when....saaaay, a power company commits a mass killing (by FBI standards) while they are still on probation from the LAST time they committed the same crime.
Or any of a number of lesser crimes, like allowing Granny to freeze to death after you were warned about power maintenance insufficiencies.
I'm a closet libertarian, and when people like ME start saying that there is a problem that dot.gov needs to correct then it's a problem!

Dot.gov has a hard enough time keeping oil refineries to their assigned task of.......refining crude, without making their OWN mistakes in polluting ground and water, killing people, etc.
I wouldn't be telling evil, nasty, BIG OIL that when they don't have anything else to do, go ahead and crank out some electricity as a side hustle.

 

2011 was the warning. They did the report. They did the recomendations. What happened. ERCOT recommended to the utilities they make the changes, but there was no requirement. Without a requirement or even a fine, utilities did nothing as profits are higher doing nothing and then letting things black out. Between 2011 and 2021, 5 Million more Texans were born or moved to the state than died or moved out. That meant that chance of it being worse was quite high, but we were surprised about how much worse, and many of us thought after the report they would fix it. Unfortunately the PUC which over sees ERCOT didn't do their job, and ERCOT and PUC members were found to be either from the utilities or really working for the utilities. ERCOT's directors all quit in shame, except one that quit after a recording came out and it became impossible for the PUC not to fire him.

Texas needs enough weatherized-capacity to work with all the people including the new ones coming to the state. The utilities fudged how much was weatherized. It is cheaper to build new plants then weatherize the old ones, and new plants are more efficient and can cycle with demand. Building new ccgt plants would fairly quickly retire old natural gas steam plants that failed during the winter, and provide the added capacity for summer. We probably need a new governor to get there as the governor nominates the corrupt PUC. Unfortunately the guy that is failing to solve the problem is likely to win again, because his opponent during his presidential campaign said he wanted to confiscate assault rifles.

I participate in my municipal utilities voluntary smart thermostat plan. It works fairly well. Even without black out conditions electricity gets expensive during some unexpected peaks. My gf keeps our air-conditioning quite cold, and the few times I've been throttled back it really was not a hard ship in favor of the rebate and lower energy costs for others in my city. When it was unseasonable warm this spring and maintenance had not been done we got a turn it down to 78 from erect and the governor. Well F them. I have solar so I'm part of the solution, and if the utility needed it, they could throttle back my thermostat to give some of my generation to others. It is a good system if used corretcly.

 

In this particular case, no one told the big oil company to make electricity as a side hustle. They proactively did it on their own, making use of otherwise waste heat (something they had plenty of). Back when BEVs were not yet a thing and the region was totally dependent on dead dinosaur juice (or fermented dinosaur feed) for transportation fuel.

But when large portions of the electric grid went down during a weather event, taking down the whole refinery too for multiple days, it turned out that they couldn't operate their own electric generators in off-grid, islanded mode to power their own refinery for its core mission of refining fuel for the region's critical needs. This was initially just embarrassing, until restart efforts after several days of cooling off, went haywire in one unit and the erupting fire killed several workers. Had the plant been able to operate off-grid, that unit wouldn't have been in that hazardous of a condition.

My thought was that, with the refinery being such a critical asset for this region, it ought to have set up its generators to run in self-power mode, independent of the grid, allowing the refinery to perform at least some of its regional-mission-critical function during future disruptive events with one less roadblock from cascading interdependencies. Emergency planners here expect to have multiple much larger disruptions of various sorts.

When I asked why it was set up that way, my relative working at that plant replied that the engineer responsible for that choice, was no longer employed there.