There was no single reason for the failures and no particular location, plant operator or type of power plant behind the problem, he said.
I'm glad that you posted that. Being in the industry, I am familiar with these kinds of situations. Equipment fails all the time, but the level of redundancy in the industry makes most events go unnoticed. I remember a couple of years ago losing 2400 MW of generation at the same time - the eastern interconnection absorbed the hit, and the entity that lost the generation was able to bring on fast-start gas turbines and pumped-hydro generation to replace the enormous loss within 10 minutes.
The problem in this case is the quantity of failures, and the inability to get adequate recovery resources on line. From what I recall reading in other threads, a few coal-fired plants had problems and were taken off line or tripped off line. Then, many of the gas turbines that are used to recover from these events failed to start due to cold weather issues.
By the way, a few of the rolling blackouts were in areas of Texas that were not part of ERCOT - El Paso had issues, and they are actually in the Western Interconnection. But they are remote, with apparently inadequate tie connections to the rest of the interconnection so they were not able to garner sufficient resources to supply their customer demand.
The lessons in this event will undoubtedly surround winterizing equipment to a greater extent, not relying too much on uncontrollable resources like wind power (and I have no idea how effective wind generation was during these last few days). In addition, a couple of high-capacity DC ties to the eastern or western interconnection might be a result of this event.
Thanks for your response and insight into how the systems work. I suspect there will added emphasis on winterizing the equipment to a higher level once the outage causes have been evaluated.
El Paso Electric had rolling blackouts impacting customers in both west Texas and southern New Mexico.
Info on the coal units are mentioned in this article:
http://www.awea.org/rn_release_02-04-11.cfm
Over the last few days we’ve learned more about the events that led to the rolling blackouts that occurred Wednesday morning in Texas. Wind energy played a critical role in limiting the severity of the blackouts, providing enough electricity to keep the power on for about three million typical households. ERCOT, the Texas grid operator, has confirmed that wind energy was providing between 3,500 and 4,000 MW of electricity (about 7% of ERCOT demand at that time), roughly what it was forecast and scheduled to provide, during the critical 5-7 AM window on Wednesday when the grid needed power the most. In an interview with the Texas Tribune, ERCOT CEO Trip Doggett put it this way: “I’m not aware of any nuclear plant problems, and I’m not aware of any specific issues with wind turbines having to shut down due to icing. I would highlight that we put out a special word of thanks to the wind community because they did contribute significantly through this timeframe. Wind was blowing, and we had often 3,500 megawatts of wind generation during that morning peak, which certainly helped us in this situation.”
We’ve also learned what did cause the rolling blackouts: a large number of fossil-fired power plants broke down and failed to provide the amount of electricity they were scheduled to provide. The grid operator and others have confirmed that 50 power plants totaling 7,000 MW of power capacity experienced outages and went offline due to the cold weather. At least two of these were large coal power plants that went offline due to pipes freezing or breaking at the plants. Some gas-fired plants also experienced outages due to the cold, and some gas-fired plants were unable to produce as scheduled due to inadequate pressure in natural gas pipelines due to high demand. In addition, an estimated 12,000 MW of coal and gas-fired power plants were offline and undergoing maintenance during this time period, making them unavailable to provide electricity. While there are scattered reports that a few of Texas’s roughly 7,000 wind turbines experienced reduced output due to the weather, the vast majority of the fleet was unaffected and continued producing electricity on schedule.
end snip