Posted on 02/16/2011 4:35:19 AM PST by thackney
Despite the nice suits and formal setting, Texas state senators are using today’s public hearings into the statewide blackouts earlier this month express their anger over the situation.
While questioning the heads of ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission, Troy Fraser, chairman of the Texas Senate Natural Resources Committee, said the outage of up to 82 power plants “is unacceptable and we should have been prepared.”
Several senators seemed incredulous that so many power plants went down in conditions that are routinely faced by plants in other parts of the country.
“If a pipe busts in my house, I know whose fault it is: It’s mine,” said Senator Glenn Hegar, R-Katy.
During the afternoon session, David Campbell, CEO of power plant operator Luminant, apologized for the company’s four coal-fired units and seven natural gas units, which went offline for a variety of reasons.
Senator Mike Jackson, R-La Porte, was frustrated that even with the level of technology and engineering skills available to Texas power plant builders, “we have a day when we get 20 degrees and everything blows up and goes to hell in a hand basket.”
“I have a problem; if y’all aren’t the ones who did the engineering, I would be ready to file a lawsuit against the one who designed a unit that went down,” said Jackson.
The state’s second largest power plant operator, NRG Energy, had relatively few power plant outages according to John Ragan, President of NRG Texas. One comparatively new coal unit did go down late in the day of Feb. 2, but NRG had most of its power plants online prior to the emergency in anticipation of the cold and had a vigorous plant winterization plan.
“If you’ll just pass your notes to the right we’ll adjourn,” one of the senators told Ragan, referring to the Luminant executive next to him.
Senator Fraser warned that the hearings wouldn’t be the end of the discussion.
“We’re going to be leaning on ERCOT, on the PUC, on the Railroad Commission … because we’ve identified some soft spots,” Fraser said.
It does seem that there must have been something systemtic about all this. But WHAT, besides the moderate cold? All our cars still worked: Why not the power plants?
*Update* Texas grid operator releases partial list of power plants on ice Feb. 2
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2011/02/15/texas-grid-operatpr-releases-partial-list-of-power-plants-on-ice-feb-2/
February 15, 2011 at 3:00 pm
http://www.scribd.com/doc/48908912/2011-Feb-outage-plant-list
Back when NYC had their blackout, ERCOT did a whole lot of bragging about how their grid would be immune from such failures. And while we did not have a catastrophic blackout event, I know a lot of people that were left in the dark and cold a few weeks ago.
. . . . . . .
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2673900/posts
While some natural gas fired power plants had problems with fuel supplies due to the cold, Doggett said the emergency wasn’t caused by gas curtailment issues. He said wind power units and nuclear power plants produced at levels they were expected to.
Many of the plant shutdowns were due to the failure of equipment that monitors different aspects of the power plants, such as temperatures, pressures and water levels, as well as the failure of some control systems.
A number of operators reported pneumatic lines with some water in them froze, disrupting operations.
Another common problem was the failure of a device called a drum level transmitter, which reads the levels of steam and water in power plant boilers. The piping between drum and a switch the device controls typically is wrapped with heated tape and insulated, but the high winds that accompanied the cold may have been too much for even those precautions.
Thanks for the info.....stay safe .
And that NYC blackout took out EVERYTHING. We had a few bad outages but most hospitals, fire stations, police stations stayed on. Our office never went dark because of the Fire Station on the same circuit.
In Dallas, some hospitals went without power but Cowboys Stadium never lost power.
Welcome to the new era of incompetent... over-confident... and definitely over paid jack-a$$ MBA management of
EVERYTHING, including but not limited to, the power industry.
Dontcha love it. Deregulation of the power industry, in Texas, brought you higher prices for worse service and nothing
but arrogant news releases from these ripoff artists.
Yes, Dallas made some bad choices in the circuits selected for power interruptions, unless those tripped off unintentionally.
Most hospitals around Houston either have dual feeds or some generator backup.
There’s a good article in the Houston Chronicle a couple of days ago by Bill White talking about the fiasco and some of the causes going back to deregulation and ERCOTS failure to recognize the same things from CA when they deregulated and had problems. I don’t have time to look it up now but maybe can later today. The article was within the last few days.
It does seem that there must have been something systemtic about all this”
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There was NOTHING “systemic” except tard IQ level management of these power operators. But that’s not really systemic. It’s actually planned. To “plan” for a major event, and be prepared for it, costs money that kills profit level and thus market performance. And by extension it kills bonuses for top management which are almost always tied to market performance.
This was no accident. It was business as usual. The politicians in Austin will put on a little “kabuki dance”
of outrage for public show and NOTHING will be done because your state congress critters are probably drinking wine and
eating little foo foo snacks with these power operators, at parties and mixers ALL the time.
Bill White is an imbecile. His ideas all revolve around Government regulating any industry or service into oblivion. Do not forget that he was B.O.’s Texas Bagman.
I work in a central Texas hospital and we were blindsided. Yes, we have generator back up and it kicked in as planned so nobody on life support or in the OR died, but sheesh. How irresponsible can you get?
There were some weather created outages that happened at the same time that were not intentional. I don't know a way to tell which were which.
Hospital administration says the outages were caused by the rolling blackouts and that our facility wasn’t informed in advance. Electric officials aren’t arguing otherwise. The powers that be are going through appropriate channels to express outrage at the other powers that be and insure it doesn’t happen again. Would love to be a fly on the wall.
They should make official and public complaints.
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