Will Texas’s Unwise Electrical Policy Cause a Catastrophy?
September 13th, 2008
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You may be aware that right now hurricane Ike is headed toward a direct hit at the state of Texas, with Houston and Galveston directly in the cross hairs. One of the biggest concerns with a major storm like this is always power outages, and there certainly will be plenty of them this time. Power outages are more than an inconvenience, as without electricity the cleanup becomes considerably more difficult. Sewage pump stations rely on electricity as do water purification plants, communications systems and other critical infrastructure.
Although hospitals, fire departments and police stations generally have standby generators, these do not last forever and Katrina showed that a few days worth of deisel is often far too little. Cell phone towers also suffer from limited backup power life and when a storm of this size hits land, it may not be possible to organize maintenance crews to get out to all the backup generators to provide them with more fuel.
I’m a bit concerned that this may prove to be a very bad situation for Texas due to their extremely poor judgment in electrical policy over the past few years. While isolated downed power lines can be repaired, the kind of disruption that this type of storm is likely to cause will likely go beyond local damage. If major power lines are taken down, it will put a tremendously increased strain on the Texas power grid. Due to the insistence on investments in wind energy, Texas has one of the least stable grids in the country and the amount of reserve capacity avaliable has become razor thin.
Texas has only two nuclear power plants and the rest are mostly coal fired. This presents yet another problem because not only can loss of transmission lines take these plants out of commission, but so too can damage to train tracks or ports, as coal fired power plants need constant fuel deliveries and may only be able to operate for as little as two or three days on what is avaliable on hand.
The hurricane is not expected to directly hit the wind farms of Texas, so it won’t damage the turbines directly, although that hardly matters, since they never provide baseload power anyway. However, with Texas already dealing with a highly strained power grid, this storm could be enough to cause a major cascading failure that goes far beyond the area directly damaged. With so little reserve and margin for loss, the Texas power grid will have a very difficult time coping with losing any generating stations at all.
Hopefully, with the reduced demand caused by blackouts in the area, the Texas grid managers will be able to keep the whole system from collapsing, although they have very little to work with. If they do, someone should pin a medal on each them.
(There’s of course also the oil issues this could cause, but that’s a whole other topic onto itself.)
This entry was posted on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 at 1:03 am and is filed under Enviornment, Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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September 13th, 2008 at 1:20 am
I wonder how many windmills this storm will take out.
Or are they away from the hurricane path?
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September 13th, 2008 at 1:27 am
metatron said:
The big wind farms are in Western Texas. There are a couple small ones that might get hit, but generally they won’t be in the path. It’s possible though that they could get grazed by the western edge, depending on the storm track, but probably not enough to do much damage.
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September 13th, 2008 at 1:48 am
Texas does certainly have a lot of power plants in that area, but also a lot of demand so the question is whether the loss of delivery to end users will be as great as the loss of power plants connected to the grid. Of course, in reality it’s more complex than that.
This is why reserve is so important. Even if there is a certain amount of capacity you intend to not generally use, like some simple cycle that is there just for backup, it becomes critical when things don’t all work properly. it gives you breathing room. As is in Texas it is difficult keeping the lights all on under normal times and so if they loose a few major feed lines or power plants then they are in trouble because there’s just no headspace or flexibility.
Nuclear is always more reliable in disasters. The plant works well no matter what. It can go just fine during a hurricane because the containment structure is going to hold up fine. The only issue would be transmission lines coming down or maybe the remote chance of things like transformers or switching things being damaged. In extreme circumstances maybe even cooling towers or something.
A coal plant has much more exposed. If the power lines go down it also goes down, but ditto if the train tracks are flooded out or damaged or if the unloading stations, the train switches, the loaders, the conveyor belts and that stuff is damaged. Or if it’s delivered by barge or ship if the docks are out or the harbor can’t be navigated. It has a large footprint to take damage.
Lets just hope they don’t have too many of the worst power kind to have here: an unstable hydro dam!
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September 13th, 2008 at 1:50 am
Ike is pretty big, but I think Texas is going to see worse damage from storm surges than from wind; it’s only a category 2 at this point. I was in Houston for Hurricane Alicia in 1983 and Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, both of which caused lots of flooding and property damage, but nowhere near as bad as Katrina. (My street flooded, but my house never did.) Alicia was a category 3, and apparently much of the property damage it caused was broken windows from gravel that had been spread atop new buildings; they revised the building code after that.
Houston’s lucky in that although it’s very flat, it’s big and spread out and a few feet above sea level, with no levees holding back water the way it is in New Orleans. The bayous will spill over, but that happens during any heavy enough rain. The drainage systems are pretty good, especially on the freeways, which should make it possible to keep the coal plants going. Most of the refineries have shut down for the duration of the storm; they build for hurricanes the way San Francisco builds for earthquakes, so we may lose some oil platforms, but at the refineries it’ll likely be business as usual once the storm is past. Sorry about your gas prices for the next week, though, guys.
Municipal power seems to be doing okay so far; some friends of mine are blogging the hurricane from their homes, and no one has lost power yet. There have been a few transformer explosions, but that’s about it.
Galveston, OTOH, is going to take a beating. Anyone who hasn’t left Galveston at this point is an idiot.
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September 13th, 2008 at 2:12 am
mlp said:
I’m starting to think that to make oil prices go way up does not actually require that there is going to be any kind of disruption but only that there is a rumor that their might be or that there is some indication like a Hurricane that it could happen.
There is wild speculation in the markets now. A week long minor drop in a commodity so large as oil should not hit end users because it should be buffered by the market. It won’t though because oil speculation and trading and price gouging is out of control.
Oil companies also know they can feed on this and there are so few of them at this point that they end up making more by what is tantamount to price fixing by keeping the supply in flux and not always importing as much as they could or not drilling as much as they could.
I’d like to see them start getting some heat for this and I do not mean just windfall taxes. I want their business methods investigated and executives facing criminal courts. I want them to be treated the way Teddy Roosevelt treated some of the big buisinessed that played unfairly and tried to corner markets.
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September 13th, 2008 at 5:09 am
Engineering Edgar said:
You’re forgetting having to shut down the plant because of lack of demand.
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September 13th, 2008 at 9:36 am
drbuzz0 said:
Too bad, a good thrashing by a hurricane and the sight of a bunch of broken turbines would have helped put the Pickens’ plan into perspective,
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September 13th, 2008 at 11:30 am
There was another comment here. I consider it spam. I’m tired of spam. The issue has been addressed
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September 13th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
“Too bad, a good thrashing by a hurricane and the sight of a bunch of broken turbines would have helped put the Pickens’ plan into perspective,”
Why would you want to set the pickins plan back? Do you like that forin oil is always being imported and that theres polution? Those wind power plants are what is going to save us from that and hopefully its not too late to save the earth. Is it the problem that Pickins is someone you don’t like? If wind is the key to this i cant imagine why you’d be happy to see it broken. Wind is clean too.
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September 13th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Chic Mel8 said:
Why would someone want to set back Pickens’ plan back?
Maybe because wind power is – at least at the moment, but without prospective of amelioration – an expensive and terribly intermittent source of energy, because coal or gas are still needed (even if there is 20 or 30% reduction in their use) to provide back-up power in case the wind just stops blowing?
Maybe because wind power is in its results nothing more than an elaborate ploy of the gas industry, and the coal industry?
Maybe because wind power has been abused by greens and somewhat more indirectly by the fossil fuels industries to prevent the rise of nuclear power?
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September 13th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Chic Mel8 said:
It has nothing to do with whether we “like” Pickens or not. Evaluating the effectiveness of a plan means setting aside matters of personality and taking a look at the cold, hard facts — and the most important facts here are that wind simply cannot provide enough power in a reliable enough fashion to support Texas’ energy needs, and that it is particularly ill-suited for use in a region that gets hit by hurricanes every year.
Coal and oil can’t do it either. The entire Greater Houston area, over three million people, is now without power with the exception of downtown and the Medical Center. Water treatment plants are offline in many areas as well. The power outages are projected to last up to two weeks at this point, which is particularly dangerous at this time of year — the weekend high is expected to be 90 degrees, and high temperatures when people don’t have air conditioning lead to increased death rates among the elderly and children.
Two weeks is a really long time to be without power, but the good news is that it sounds like the coal- and oil- fired plants weathered the storm pretty well — the delay in getting power restored appears to have more to do with downed power lines and debris from the storm surge in the Ship Channel which will make it harder for fuel to arrive. As Edgar mentioned, nuclear power plants would still have to wait for the power lines to go back up, but they wouldn’t be hampered by fuel delivery problems — they don’t need to keep much fuel in reserve. They can shut down safely during the storm, when demand on the grid is low, and when the power lines are repaired they can come back online quickly.
But imagine if Houston relied on huge fields of windmills. How long does it take to put up one of those fields in the first place? There’s no way to protect a tall, thin, free-standing structure that’s designed to catch wind from hurricane-force winds. A wind farm would have been flattened. It would take months to restore wind power in the aftermath of a hurricane. Based on that alone, the idea of using wind to power Texas is foolish.
I’ll let other people who know the numbers better point out how wind requires spinning reserve and just how much fossil fuels end up getting burned in support of a wind farm; this comment is getting long. BTW my family’s fine, they lost their fence but their house is okay, they’re on generator power and they’re in an area that still has clean water.
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September 13th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
There was an article here a while ago where the author showed that even if the Pickens plan allowed us to completely stop using natural gas for electricity this would only mean enough natural gas would be freed up to reduce oil imports by a small amount and that’s assuming we used it all for vehicles. Also, vehicles would need to be converted and what’s the point if you can’t run 100% natural gas. It’s not going to work.
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September 13th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Chic, I would recommend you to have a look at “Sustainable energy – Without the hot air”: http://www.withouthotair.com/ . It doesn’t deal as much with the problems of energy distribution and intermittency as I would have hoped; but it does give you a decent idea of what the scale of the problem is.
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September 13th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Are you sure? Do you want me to check with Linda?
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September 13th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Timmy Superhero said:
I sent an email to Jeff and if I don’t hear back from him in the next couple days I’ll email her directly.
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September 13th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
I often wonder why the US does not build the majority of its transmission lines underground like some countries do. They would be a lot less prone to damage, especially in areas that are prone to hurricanes. However, the disadvantage would be that you would have to somehow protect them from being damaged by flooding in the event of heavy rainfall or tropical storms.
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September 13th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
In Texas, at least, it’s difficult to put transmission lines underground because fire ants, tunneling to look for water, will chew right through them. This was a major obstacle in the building of the Superconducting Supercollider.
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September 14th, 2008 at 3:16 am
mlp said:
Yeah.. and thus it still sits, abandoned like a ghost town, with the tunnel half done and the buildings completely built, sitting there with weeds sprouting in the parking lots tumbleweeds blowing. Some of the massive transformers and compressors and scientific equipment still there, too large to move and the paint begining to chip on the never-used cryo coolers. So much money invested and yet… they just decided it was better to cut losses and…
Lets not talk about the SCSC. It kinda chokes me up a little bit.
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September 14th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
speaking of Pickens does anyone rember in the 80’s when propane was the thing to supplement gasoline? you’d see pickup trucks with lpg tanks here and there… not too effecient at least the one I bought was not, quite a bit cleaner than gasoline, but that was about it. I quickly changed it back to gasoline. Maybe the technology has improved though.
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September 14th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
the00arvin said:
No I don’t. I’m a member of the American voting public. My retention is about four months at most. U also don’t do much research into these things, and if someone tells me it’s different this time I assume that to be the case.
(sarcasm)
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