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Crosby B. Alfred posted:I think the most ironic thing out of all of this isn't lovely politicians spinning this issue but things like the freaking Wall Street Journal putting this front and center as a failure of renewables. Murdoch's gonna Murdoch. When we had a state-wide blackout a few years ago which did this to the interconnector power lines and they still tried to spin it as a failure of renewables.
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Feb 17, 2021 07:34
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highme posted:Seems perfectly reasonable for the rugged individual executives of Texas to think they don’t need to spend the money for some high falutin’ shed for their turbines. The public always makes me laugh. You can usually get them to give up that line of thinking with the following thought experiment. 1. How well do you like your current electricity rate? 2. What if it was 10x (or more) higher? That usually gets people to quiet down when you can convey the magnitude of the cost increase in buried high voltage transmission cables.
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Feb 17, 2021 10:52
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Orvin posted:The public always makes me laugh. You can usually get them to give up that line of thinking with the following thought experiment. Also, how would you like outages to take weeks or months to fix?
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Feb 17, 2021 15:08
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Minor complaint, but seeing power cables strewn across everywhere in a city especially downtown area is kind of gross. I'd cough up the  to bury them.
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Feb 17, 2021 15:44
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catspleen posted:Also, how would you like outages to take weeks or months to fix? You could spend super duper bucks and put everything in tunnels underneath the sidewalk.
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Feb 17, 2021 15:47
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Bird in a Blender posted:You could spend super duper bucks and put everything in tunnels underneath the sidewalk. While not a bad idea, that doesn’t stop city of Chicago contractors from digging into high voltage transmission cables at least 2-3 times a year. Although I guess those are in underground ducts, not so much tunnels. The electric utility in Chicago does use the old under city freight tunnels to run some transmission cables. But I am sure that was a case of much cheaper to use something that was already there, then to try and dig something else down there.
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Feb 17, 2021 15:57
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catspleen posted:Also, how would you like outages to take weeks or months to fix? I don't think this argument is that convincing because at least on its face it seems that burying the power lines would produce way fewer outages. I understand the argument that burying the power lines in areas outside of densely populated regions of cities is not economical.
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Feb 17, 2021 15:59
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Minor complaint, but seeing power cables strewn across everywhere in a city especially downtown area is kind of gross. Buried cables have their own problems. Heat build up and flooding, for example. If anything goes wrong, it's super expensive and difficult to fix it. It's appropriate for some areas, but not many. Stringing wires on poles may be unsightly, but it's cheap and easy to fix.
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Feb 17, 2021 16:00
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silence_kit posted:I don't think this argument is that convincing because at least on its face it seems that burying the power lines would produce way fewer outages. I am sure there are statistics on overhead lines vs buried cables somewhere, but i have no idea where to even begin to start looking them up. But from personal experience, cables do have failures and faults. Sometimes it’s an issue with the cable, or a dig in. Sometimes it’s where the cable comes up out of the ground into the switch yard. Sometimes it’s the relay protection that fails in fun new ways. It is more rare that it happens, and is going to be less likely to be caused by a major weather related event. So you are going to have longer term spot events across the system, instead of mass events that take large swaths of your system down at once. Depending on the design philosophy of the utility, that may make things a non-issue. If you have multiple sources to a substation, having a single cable out of service for 2-4 weeks for repairs is a non-issue. If you only have the one, then it’s a big problem.
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Feb 17, 2021 16:12
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Minor complaint, but seeing power cables strewn across everywhere in a city especially downtown area is kind of gross. As a British ex-pat - I was shocked when I first came to the US and there were just power lines and cables EVERYWHERE. It's incredibly ugly. I had no idea that burying stuff in cities wasn't the norm outside the UK. I've gotten used to it and I know it's more expensive to bury them but man I wish it wasn't. I also just got a Comcast Internet cable installed on my house and it's just a big black cable swinging across the power poles right into the wall of the 2nd floor on my house lol. Hope a tree branch doesn't fall on it.
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Feb 17, 2021 16:18
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Buried cables are fine for local medium voltage (6-22 kV) distribution, but for long-haul transmission they are often not appropriate.
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Feb 17, 2021 16:23
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Thom12255 posted:As a British ex-pat - I was shocked when I first came to the US and there were just power lines and cables EVERYWHERE. It's incredibly ugly. I had no idea that burying stuff in cities wasn't the norm outside the UK. I've gotten used to it and I know it's more expensive to bury them but man I wish it wasn't. Heh. As an American, I thought the US was bad at this but then I went to Asia. Cables. Everywhere! 
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Feb 17, 2021 16:25
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Thom12255 posted:As a British ex-pat - I was shocked when I first came to the US and there were just power lines and cables EVERYWHERE. It's incredibly ugly. I had no idea that burying stuff in cities wasn't the norm outside the UK. I've gotten used to it and I know it's more expensive to bury them but man I wish it wasn't. Part of it is just population density. Urban areas in the US are pretty likely to have transmission lines buried, and rural areas in the UK are pretty likely to have overhead transmission lines. quote:When costs are calculated over 40 years, overhead cables were found to cost between £2.2m/km and £4.2m/ km to install and maintain, compared with between £10.2m/km and £24m/km for those buried. Costs varied according to the technology used and the voltage of the lines. It does look like your prices are a lot more similar than then 100x as expensive metric being thrown around, and it wouldn't be surprising to hear that the UK (at least in the past) had more willingness to invest in infrastructure than (most parts of) the US. It seems like it should just be an ongoing effort. Budget some amount of money to bury power lines, then systematically go after the ones where an outage would impact more households. Crosby B. Alfred posted:Heh. As an American, I thought the US was bad at this but then I went to Asia. Depends on where in Asia you go. The richer east Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, etc) all typically bury urban lines like the rest of the developed world. But lower income SE Asian countries can be more of the wild west. e: Actually it looks like Japan is behind the curve on that one. That's an interesting one considering their usual (relative) overinvestment in infrastructure. 
AreWeDrunkYet fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Feb 17, 2021 |
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Feb 17, 2021 16:27
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Wibla posted:Buried cables are fine for local medium voltage (6-22 kV) distribution, but for long-haul transmission they are often not appropriate. Yeah my comment up thread was thinking more about high voltage transmission across rural areas. But then also thinking about our companies distribution map attribute data for a central business district (all underground that came from a predecessor company where the install date for everything is like 1/1/1799 (the null value).
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Feb 17, 2021 16:41
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A lot of neighborhoods in the US have buried service lines, but yeah.
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Feb 17, 2021 16:42
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I'd imagine that when you're earthquake prone buried lines would be more of a bitch to fix, yeah?
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Feb 17, 2021 16:48
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Peru was much closer to that SE Asia photo.
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Feb 17, 2021 17:07
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Benagain posted:I'd imagine that when you're earthquake prone buried lines would be more of a bitch to fix, yeah? Narrow streets are also an issue. You can walk along a wide street in Tokyo and the sky is clear, then turn into an alley and it's wires everywhere. As for earthquakes being a problem, they still got buried gas lines and those are way less flexible than power lines. Open air gas lines are just more problematic.
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Feb 17, 2021 17:23
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Benagain posted:I'd imagine that when you're earthquake prone buried lines would be more of a bitch to fix, yeah? If an earthquake is bad enough to ruin underground power lines it's going to do a number on utility poles.
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Feb 17, 2021 17:56
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:If an earthquake is bad enough to ruin underground power lines it's going to do a number on utility poles. Yeah, but utility poles will be back up and supplying power 100x faster than underground lines.
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Feb 17, 2021 17:58
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Deteriorata posted:Yeah, but utility poles will be back up and supplying power 100x faster than underground lines. After the big fires in Australia, they installed solar+batteries with generator backups in some locations to replace long medium voltage runs to outlying farms etc. Seems like the smart thing to do to me tbh. Relevant article
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Feb 17, 2021 18:12
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^^ this makes sense to me. Ohhhhh, Japan chat. I want to go map these things.  Orvin posted:The public always makes me laugh. You can usually get them to give up that line of thinking with the following thought experiment. I mentioned the transmission info just to show the scale of system impacts. I have no idea if this person knows the difference between power lines or comms, much less how the rest of the system is assembled. Portland has a very small bit of underground transmission. One lower voltage line that serves the small subs on Mt Hood and a 115kV (iirc) line that was “buried” on the Tillicum Crossing (newest bridge in Portland) to cross the river. The dip pole for that is one of my favorite in the system. As far as reliability of underground distribution and what it takes to repair, the outage we had this summer is a good story to use for that. Our initial outage was a 100T 3ph fuse blowing after tree limbs caused a fault. It was out overnight and came back around 10am. Around 11:30am we lost power again and I walked to the end of the block where the dip is and saw that fuse was blown. I called it in and went back to sitting in my house without power. A couple of days later it got a temp repair. The first run of UG primary faulted. The crews strung some #2 AL UG cable between a couple of trees, one adjacent to the pole and the other across the street. Then they tied some conduit to the 2nd tree to feed the pad. They’ve since gone back and added a mid span pole in a 444 vault to hold it up. I’ve noticed locates all over the neighborhood so I’m assuming the job to actually repair it is in process. I was pretty sure that temp pole was going to be the downfall of my service during this storm. But look at this thing holding strong.  This is the first tree.  Ironically, the same 100T fuse was the interrupting device for the outage this time and was restored in 24 hours. Only to have the entire feeder go down instead of my 25 meter single phase tapline. Crews began work yesterday, but we had 4 spans of 795, 2 poles and a burnt 900a switch on the ground. It might take a day or two longer to fix this, but it’ll be permanent. I should really go check to see how much of my neighborhood is getting dug up. And as a disclaimer I’m not an engineer, just a GIS toucher, but I’ve worked on both new construction and analytical stuff and am currently working on ADMS implementation. highme fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Feb 17, 2021 |
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Feb 17, 2021 18:24
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Is anyone here well versed with energy or I guess specifically the ERCOT Website or US Energy Information Website? Basically, I'm trying to debunk this stupid misleading graphic. https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1362019477223706626?s=20
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Feb 17, 2021 20:00
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Is anyone here well versed with energy or I guess specifically the ERCOT Website or US Energy Information Website? Basically, I'm trying to debunk this stupid misleading graphic. The graph isn't entirely wrong though, although gently caress these morons blaming it on Wind/Solar, that's the misleading part. It doesn't matter if you have reliable renewables if your grid is trashed
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Feb 17, 2021 20:01
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Ah trees, the natural enemy of the power company. Around me the power company is particularly vicious in cutting back trees from distribution feeders. Makes for some really weird look trees along some roads. But they still get branches into lines during storms.
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Feb 17, 2021 20:08
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Is anyone here well versed with energy or I guess specifically the ERCOT Website or US Energy Information Website? Basically, I'm trying to debunk this stupid misleading graphic. "Alex Epstein is an idiot climate denier who works for the fossil fuel industry, and nothing he says is reliable as a result." -Thoroughly debunked.
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Feb 17, 2021 20:08
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CommieGIR posted:The graph isn't entirely wrong though, although gently caress these morons blaming it on Wind/Solar, that's the misleading part. It doesn't matter if you have reliable renewables if your grid is trashed It's wrong in the context of the argument and extremely misleading. If I could find the data with current demand and current supply it'd look completely different.
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Feb 17, 2021 20:09
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Is anyone here well versed with energy or I guess specifically the ERCOT Website or US Energy Information Website? Basically, I'm trying to debunk this stupid misleading graphic. Most of the drop is due to the red (nuclear), brown (coal), and tan (gas) falling off. Wind didn't have the capacity to replace those even at full strength. Some wind energy went off line, but it was a small fraction of the total.
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Feb 17, 2021 20:27
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Don't get me wrong, I totally get that but I'd like to find the data that show demand and supply. Putting this into Excel with a basic chart would take me no more than fifteen minutes but the ERCOT Website is a bit beyond me.
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Feb 17, 2021 20:35
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Is anyone here well versed with energy or I guess specifically the ERCOT Website or US Energy Information Website? Basically, I'm trying to debunk this stupid misleading graphic. It would totally depend on why the wind portion of that graph is so small. It is probably split between 3 reasons. 1. Turbines offline due to ice/other damage 2. Wind speeds unsuitable for generation. 3. ERCOT could be artificially limiting the wind generation if it might otherwise be erratic while they have a lot of load shed. #3 is the tricky one. I have no idea how constant the winds usually are in Texas. But in an emergency situation, the last thing you want is generation that is going to move around a lot on you. You want nice constant reliable generation. So when things are dire, dispatchers will probably cut wind (and load more) to make sure that if the wind suddenly drops off, they are not putting the whole of Texas at risk. But all that might not be the case if the winds in Texas are generally constant and reliable.
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Feb 17, 2021 20:36
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Don't get me wrong, I totally get that but I'd like to find the data that show demand and supply. Putting this into Excel with a basic chart would take me no more than fifteen minutes but the ERCOT Website is a bit beyond me. Texas certainly could have focused on the resiliency best-practices that enable nuclear, coal, and gas to thrive in cold/snowy weather around the world. That is not exclusive of renewables. He presents it as one or the other. Texas could certainly do both if they wanted to. The use of renewables has no bearing whatever on the unpreparedness of other generating modes for the cold snap.
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Feb 17, 2021 20:40
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Wind will always be small given that Texas is still dominated by Coal and Gas but what I want to figure out is where this data came from and re-run the calculations with demand vs. actual supply because right now this graphic is being used to show that renewables aren't reliable.
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Feb 17, 2021 20:41
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Deteriorata posted:The central issue is a false dichotomy. This. And in the end, the problem is more and more the Fuel accessibility in the case of Natural Gas and the ERCOT Grid not being able to handle the weather.
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Feb 17, 2021 20:43
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Wind will always be small given that Texas is still dominated by Coal and Gas but what I want to figure out is where this data came from and re-run the calculations with demand vs. actual supply because right now this graphic is being used to show that renewables aren't reliable. They aren't. It's not lying about that. That's why you need batteries or other backups for them. The graph is accurate. The interpretation that it proves anything about renewables is bullshit. What you'll find is that people making bad faith arguments are not impressed or swayed by your good faith arguments. No amount of facts or figures will change anyone's mind. I don't understand what you're trying to prove.
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Feb 17, 2021 20:44
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Deteriorata posted:They aren't. It's not lying about that. That's why you need batteries or other backups for them. The graphic isn't accurate. It's specious. What I want to gather - which I think should be doable given it's all public information - is show the same graphic but show the difference between actual demand vs. supply.
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Feb 17, 2021 20:53
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In last decade there were some wide power outages in Finland and the government's solution was to raise the compensation fees for power outages. The power companies did their calculations and this gave them incentive to start burying cables heavily. This of course concerns mainly lines that were running below tree top level.quote:If the service interruption lasts at least 12 hours, the consumer is automatically entitled to standard compensation. Longer the interruption, higher the standard compensation. The amount of compensation also depends on the consumer´s annual network service fee.
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Feb 17, 2021 20:55
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Saukkis posted:In last decade there were some wide power outages in Finland and the government's solution was to raise the compensation fees for power outages. The power companies did their calculations and this gave them incentive to start burying cables heavily. This of course concerns mainly lines that were running below tree top level. Only commies would do something like that!
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Feb 17, 2021 21:05
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highme posted:
I've had to do this for secondary cable that was bad under a road, but fortunately the utility I work for has always loop fed any underground primary in subdivisions, so once the bad section of cable is isolated (sometimes a job in and of itself) we can get everything on and replace it in a non-emergency fashion. Like most things in the utility industry, whether UG primary distribution is a good idea for a given location, depends on a lot of factors. Initial cost isn't the only obstacle. Housing subdivisions are perfect because they're (supposed to be) all planned out, so the power can be engineered with the equipment in exactly the right place, and the developer can pay on a per-lot basis that scales with how much of the housing they intend to build, usually in several phases of construction.
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Feb 17, 2021 21:23
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The easiest debunk to “wind power caused it” is that wind power, even with whatever losses, have been producing more than ERCOT’s day ahead estimates. So if wind could theoretically generate 8GW, only delivers 4GW, but ERCOT was only expecting 2GW it isn’t the wind that’s why the grid is failing. Republicans are focused on the missing theoretical capacity while ignoring that no one was planning on that capacity being delivered. Meanwhile you do see fossil plants failing to meet their expected capacity because of freezes but mostly because of the gas shortage caused by the Railroad Commission’s choices on how to operate the gas system (prioritize distribution to homes over power plants) and the deregulated gas market that caused gas prices to soar so gas power plants were turning off because it was too expensive to run.
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Feb 17, 2021 21:38
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:The graphic isn't accurate. It's specious. What I want to gather - which I think should be doable given it's all public information - is show the same graphic but show the difference between actual demand vs. supply. http://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/load/load_hist Fuel mix report has the generation by fuel type, 15minute increments. http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/181766/IntGenbyFuel2021.xlsx More generation data: http://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/generation The important take away from this event isn’t that wind isn’t reliable. At least when I checked, the forecasted wind and actuals were somewhat close. The biggest issue was not a failure to forecast wind or load (which could mayyybe point to wind being hard and unreliable to use) but a complete failure of the dispatchable generation resources, which were powered by natural gas.
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Feb 17, 2021 21:39
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