Can anybody tell me why the coal plants had trouble producing power during the cold spell in Texas just recently
You would think if anybody had a chance to produce power if would be a coal burning power plant, but records show the amount of power produced by coal plants was less during the cold spell
Can anybody think of a reason why coal burning power plants could not increase power, especially given the price of electricity at the peak price. Those plants should have made a fortune, selling power, but no, they produced less.
That seems to me like saying I can't feed the fire place with more wood because it is cold out side
I know many did not have a supply of fire wood, but surely a coal plant would have a huge pile of coal ready to use
I don't know why but living in the land of ice and snow I would think I could figure out some way to fire up the coal burning plants and at least produce the maximum possible, not less
Does anybody know why coal fired generation of electric power was less during the cold spell
That makes no sense to me
No wonder Texas had a problem, if coal failed
Like how far is it from the coal pile to the fire box???
https://www.texaselectricityratings.com/blog/texas-coal-plant-shut-2020/
With a trend of coal power closures, some may worry about whether or not the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) will be able to keep up with energy demands. These five coal plants made up 22 percent of the state’s coal capacity, after all.
Thanks Wayne,
Texas just flat out blew it by not being prepared for something that had high odds of happening again, like it had in the past.
There is absolutely no excuse for this. They are calling the story below "climate adaptation"..............no, it's called being prepared for weather that has always happened and will always continue to happen every couple of decades.
Adaptation suggests changing to prepare for something new.
This was nothing new.
Climate Adaptation
Federal regulators warned Texas that its power plants couldn’t be counted on to reliably churn out electricity in bitterly cold conditions a decade ago, when the last deep freeze plunged 4 million people into the dark.
They recommended that utilities use more insulation, heat pipes and take other steps to winterize plants -- strategies commonly observed in cooler climates but not in normally balmy Texas.
“Where did those recommendations go, and how were they implemented?” said Jeff Dennis, managing director of Advanced Energy Economy, an association of clean energy businesses. “Those are going to be some pretty key questions.”
The February 2011 incident occurred when an Arctic cold front descended on the Southwest, sending temperatures below freezing for four days in a row. The result was disastrous. Equipment and instruments froze, forcing the shutdown of power plants and rolling blackouts, according to the report.
Moreover, some of the same equipment, the report noted, had failed during previous cold snaps. One in December 1989 prompted the state’s grid operator to resort to system-wide rolling blackouts for the first time.
“Many generators failed to adequately apply and institutionalize knowledge and recommendations from previous severe winter weather events, especially as to winterization of generation and plant auxiliary equipment,” the 2011 report said.
In the 1989 storm, wind chills reached 14 degrees below zero in Texas, forcing power plants to operate below capacity or fail to start altogether. And after that storm, as with the 2011 episode, regulators issued a slate of recommendations aimed at improving winterization.
Not Mandatory, and over the course of time implementation lapsed,” FERC and NERC said in their 357-page report in 2011. “Many of the generators that experienced outages in 1989 failed again in 2011.”
The report recommended dozens of changes for lawmakers, regulators and power plants in the southern U.S. Among them: wider adoption of reliability standards to harden power plants and related equipment against the cold. Wind barriers, better insulation and heating systems could be installed, for example.