Dear Senator Daines
I just read an Associated Press article (2/17/2021) that quoted you as saying that the ERCOT power grid failures demonstrated “…The need for reliable energy sources like natural gas and coal”. I want to help you understand first how the power grid works, and second how wind and solar electric generation is a part of the solution, not a part of the problem.
Visualize if you will a boxcar on a railway track. It is out job to get this boxcar from where it is now to somewhere else. Generally, the way we do this is by using a railway engine to move the boxcar. The advantage to this method is that it is simple. We start up the engine, hook it up to the boxcar and away we go. The disadvantage of this method is that if the engine fails for some reason, we cannot move the boxcar. I am confident you see the metaphor – the boxcar is the utility load, and the engine is the power generator. If the generator goes offline, everyone loses power.
No power grid has just one generator. The diversity of power generators is one of the facets of the truly miraculous way we provide power to electric customers. These diverse generators all work together just like we might have multiple railway engines pulling a train. If one engine fails, the train still gets to the destination. We use coal fired generators, natural gas fired generators, nuclear generators, wind powered generators, solar powered generators, etc. all different kinds of generators working together to make sure that power stays on. You might think of the power grid like instead of one engine pulling the boxcar, we have a team of one hundred people pushing the boxcar. Some people are big and strong and some people are smaller and weaker, but they all contribute some to pushing the boxcar.
What happened in Texas (and what happens when power fails in a broad area of a power grid) is that some of the people stop pushing the boxcar. It isn’t necessarily the small and weak people pushing that makes the boxcar fail to reach its destination, because when a small weak person quits working, the big strong people push a bit harder. For example, this happens when a solar electric generator stops producing when the sun goes down – Other generators, wind, natural gas, coal, ramp up their output and the lights stay on. Now, when the big strong people stop pushing, everyone else pushes harder until they tucker out and give up. So, if you have a big natural gas fired power plant that runs out of gas, all of the other generators try to keep the grid alive, but if the load is too great, the other generators shut down in order to protect themselves. According to the ERCOT, this is what happened in Texas – the natural gas ran out. The agency said that wellhead freeze-offs and other natural gas supply issues were primarily to blame for the widespread outages.
Utilities are in fact able to incorporate large percentages of intermittent resources like wind and solar into their supply portfolios – they have lots of people pushing the boxcar, and these people come on and push sometimes, and sometimes they don’t push. To make the problem more interesting, the boxcar is not always the same weight, and sometimes the boxcar goes uphill and sometimes downhill, and these changes happen more or less instantaneously. The load changes all of the time, and the resources change all of the time. I think we need to have more small generators working in a distributed generation model rather than a few large generators in a central model.
Consider another very similar situation where a distributed service model has proven to be widely accepted, that is in information resources. The question arose a couple of decades ago whether large mainframe computers were a better architecture or small distributed computers would be better. I think you know the answer. While cloud computing has encouraged the construction of large server farms, in fact the interconnection of many small computers into the Internet has shown that the distributed model is preferred by pretty much everyone.
The fact is that we need all of the generation options we can get. The renewable generation industry, wind, solar, small biomass fueled, has the benefit of granularity we need to keep the utility grid working under more situations than a few large fossil fueled generators – which were the cause of the Texas outages of last month. Please support more diversity in electric generation.
First Energy Conservation Blog Ever
The first thing ever is to use less water. Do you take a bucket down to the creek to get your water for making breakfast, cleaning up after breakfast, making supper, cleaning up after supper? Let’s get our bucket and take this trip. Luckily, our camp site is pretty close to the creek, maybe 150 feet. We can see the creek and hear the creek from the campsite. the the creek dominates the soundscape of the campsite.
It is best to have a filter for the water. We have a nice integrated pump and filter made for backpacking. we have the bucket and the filter, and take our time filling the bucket from the rushing stream.
So it happens that the stream is not there. We head down to the bottom of the gully, the water is not there. Now what? dig, or move downstream. Dig, no water no water, time to move downstream.
Balance Engineering 