Some pre-politicization perspective on electrical power vulnerability to cold

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pjm-outages-1389285470630.jpg


PJM is a regional transmission organization in the United States. It is part of the Eastern Interconnection grid operating an electric transmission system serving all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia


Jan 2014

As record cold temperatures plowed across much of the United States earlier this week, no piece of infrastructure was left unaffected. Trains were stalled, flights were cancelled, and schools were closed.

Although most people might not have noticed, the electrical grid was not immune to the effects of the cold snap. PJM Interconnection, the largest U.S. grid operator, hit a new record winter peak use of 141 500 megawatts.

The peak energy use came at a time when nearly 20 percent of the generators in PJM's territory were down due to the frigid weather. On Wednesday morning, nearly 40 000 megawatts of PJM’s 190 000-MW installed capacity were offline.

Some of the generation losses were due to natural gas pipeline constraints, which caused gas price spikes across much of the United States. Natural gas is also the most predominant heating fuel in the U.S.; as more utilities build gas generators, they must compete with other natural gas needs during cold spells.

But natural gas availability was only a small part of the picture. Steam-cycle fossil fuel-fired power plants (primarily coal) made up about half of the outages, with diesel generators making up the second largest portion.

PJM does not require power plant operators to specify why generators have gone down, but it seemed as if nearly every cause of failure played a role this week. In some cases, coal stacks were frozen or diesel generators simply couldn’t function in such low temperatures.

“It’s been everything,” Michael Kormos, executive vice president of operations for PJM, said of the failures. “From mechanical problems to just normal fails that happen when we push them as hard as we’re pushing them.” Because so much generation was unavailable during the high-demand, PJM was asking any operators to deliver the greatest possible output from available generators.

To cope with the thin margins, PJM operators cut voltage by 5 percent at times and asked residential and small business customers to reduce their power use. PJM also invoked demand response, where it asks large power users to reduce their load. EnerNOC, one of the largest demand response aggregators in the United States, said this week’s events were the largest winter dispatch in the company’s history.

Some local utilities outside of PJM, particularly in the southeast, did not fare nearly as well because of a greater incidence of generators that were unprepared to operate in frigid conditions. The Tennessee Valley Authority, for example, had to shut down Murray State University to avoid a larger blackout. ERCOT, the grid operator in Texas, narrowly avoided rolling blackouts. After rolling blackouts during winter of 2011, ERCOT demanded that generators invest more in winterization, which helped when the low temperatures spread into Texas this week.

Now that the polar vortex has lifted, it is unclear whether utilities will invest in winterization to arm their facilities against such extreme weather conditions. At least one South Carolina utility, SCE&G, which had rolling blackouts after remote transmitters froze, noted that it’s impossible to winterize every component.


https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/the-smarter-grid/polar-vortex-cripples-power-generation-but-grid-survives
 
Oct 1, 2014

Cold weather operations are challenging for plant designers and operators alike, particularly where severe winter weather is rare.

Plants built in the southern states, from Florida to Arizona, are often of an outdoor design that makes retrofit an expensive proposition.

Regulators in some NERC regions, such as ERCOT, have since become more proactive with plant inspections and third-party design reviews of plants vulnerable to extreme cold and are ordering temperature-related reliability upgrades.

Our survey of several of the lessons-learned reports prepared in the wake of the February 2011 freeze found a number of common failure modes, many of which have since been the subject of reliability upgrades at many affected plants.

Low-temperature operation upgrade is extensive and expensive.

https://www.powermag.com/prepare-your-gas-plant-for-cold-weather-operations/
 
Good, now show up a similarity anywhere when nearly the entire State went without electricity and heat for nearly a week straight, and now nearly a million don’t have fresh drinking water

Texas was told a decade ago after suffering a lesser type calamity that they needed to weatherize their energy infrastructure and didn’t because they didn’t want to spend the bucks, it is their own fault, but, but, but, they have low taxes
 
Good, now show up a similarity anywhere when nearly the entire State went without electricity and heat for nearly a week straight, and now nearly a million don’t have fresh drinking water

Plenty of examples exist, Anchovies.

Weeks Without Power Or Water Lie Ahead

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hurricane-laura-texas-louisiana-no-power-water_n_5f4ab220c5b6cf66b2b8d224

Winter storm Uri was an extreme weather event, Anchovies. It was unprecedented, Anchovies.


Texas is under a winter storm warning for the first time in history

Even though Texas utilities did implement upgrades, they were unequal to the unprecedented storm that hit them, Anchovies, because it was the first of its type to ever strike the state, Anchovies.

http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/ke...Winterization_-_CPS_Energy__reduced_size_.pdf
 
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