Burrito Weather

[kevin_standlee]

By now, most of you will probably have seen this picture that demonstrates the weather in North America about now.



Temperatures are in °F. I'm just to the right of the "38" next to the orange circle on the left side of the map. Yes, it's relatively warm for this time of year in Northern Nevada. Indeed, yesterday it was warm enough yesterday that I didn't realize that the fire had gone out in the fireplace and I had to re-kindle it for only about the third time since October.

I do feel for the folks in the blue zone, especially those farther south, who don't get temperatures like this. It's affecting the other people on the small team on which I work on my Day Jobbe, as one of them down in Texas has lost power due to the cold-imposed blackouts. It's about +10°C here today, while it's closer to -10°C at her home in Texas. Now -10 is pretty cold here in Fernley, too, but it happens fairly regularly in these parts and we can cope with it by putting more wood on the fire. Indeed, having an wood-burning fireplace (the insert type, not open-hearth) and not a pellet stove is one of our adaptations here. A pellet stove needs electricity. If we lose power here at Fernley House, the fireplace will still keep us warm, and also can be used in a pinch for cooking. During the cold months, I typically will heat up a pan of soup on top of the wood stove, for example, rather than putting it in the microwave oven. It takes longer, but it uses the heat I was already generating.

I guess I'm being self-consciously rustic here, but in my heart, I'm still a kid from the backwoods, and my childhood home was heated by wood (and electricity, and propane gas, just like my current home), so I'm accustomed to it. I've adapted further by using the pressed-sawdust fire logs rather than cordwood for convenience and efficiency. Which reminds me that I'd better order another pallet of Pres-to-logs from Big R if I don't want to get really cold next week.

Comments

[garyomaha]

Rolling blackouts were a new experience for us yesterday. We were fortunate -- they happened all around us but did not affect us directly, although a couple of times the local power company blacked somebody out for an hour, we too lost power for less than a minute. I don't quite understand why we cannot get a warning of some type that power is about to go out -- for me, that would help things tremendously. But I should not be complaining; this is much worse for those to the south who typically have a mild winter.

[delosharriman]

One thing which continues to puzzle me : back in the 1990s, I read about efforts to develop a thermoelectric generator for driving the electric blowers of gas & oil forced-air heating systems using the heat from the flame itself. This was specifically in response to the fact that people in prolonged winter blackouts would often have plenty of fuel but no way to use it. Alternatively, one could use an Ericsson hot-air engine (frequently used in the late 19th century to operate ventilation fans & such). The low efficiency of these devices is utterly unimportant, considering the heat sink would be the air you were trying to warm anyway!

Of course, an underlying problem here is decades of underinvestment, wrongly-directed investment, & sheer disinvestment in basic infrastructure such as electric generating capacity. Much of the money for new capacity in ERCOT territory during the past 30 years or so, as in the rest of the nation, has been directed toward wind & solar, which are weather-dependent. They must be assumed to be unavailable during a severe weather event. Severe cold usually comes with either strong enough winds that wind generators have to be stopped to prevent damage, or a dead calm, & it may also be necessary to stop them because of ice. PV panels don't do much in the winter even during the day, still less when they have snow on them. Bloomberg has a story asserting that low wind & solar generation are not the cause of the current problem, but if you read it, the rationale given is that the expected generation from these two sources for this week was already very small. One way or the other, they're not contributing to the supply.

"Cheap natural gas" is supposed to paper over the gaps — but there are two types of gas, cheap, & firm-delivery. Nobody buys gas for a power plant on firm-delivery contract. More, during periods of severe cold, those customers which do have firm-delivery contracts, such as municipal utilities serving homes, are likely to be drawing near maximum, leaving little for other customers. At one time, the solution for this was to have tanks of fuel oil at the power stations, which could be drawn down in case of gas interruption. At the 3-unit gas-burning Handley steam station in east Fort Worth (which started its life as part of the Texas Electric interurban network), the oil tanks were demolished about 10 years ago. And, of course, the gas turbines which have formed a major part of the new thermal generating capacity installed in the past 30 years (because they can be cut in & out rapidly, to deal with rapid fluctuations in wind & solar supply) can't burn heavy fuel oil. It would be technically feasible to provide a spare set of combustors for burning something (expensive) like Jet A, but the impurities in residual oil destroy turbine blades in short order.

Ultimately, Comanche Peak 3&4, which were to have been 1700 MW each, & South Texas 3&4, 1600 MW each, would have been much better investments, in terms of contribution to overall firm capacity & thus to operating margin, than all the PV, wind, & gas turbine capacity which has been built. But the regulatory environment, not only for nuclear but for electricity in general, doesn't support the necessary investment decisions.

[scott_sanford]

You may not have heard - most people won't have, given that Texas is so much larger and more dramatic - but the greater Portland area had over 300,000 people without electricity following our back to back weather events last week. The rest of western Oregon and Washington was probably broadly similar. Most of the power is back on now, including mine, though I was stuck at work for four nights and didn't discover the outage until I got home; I only lived through about 24 hours without electricity.

[kevin_standlee]

I'm glad you're okay!