Monday, January 6, 2014

It's cold, a lot of -not necessarily windy- places

It's cold a lot of places, including Texas, where ERCOT issued an energy emergency alert this morning:
Here's how Texas' 1,100MW of wind capacity was performing
AUSTIN, TX, Jan. 6, 2014. – With cold temperatures and high electric use this morning, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has announced an Energy Emergency Alert and has implemented the first two stages of its steps to protect the grid.
"We have brought on all available electric generation and have deployed all demand response programs that have contracted with ERCOT to reduce electric use in emergency situation...Conditions appear to be improving at this time, and we do not expect to implement rotating outages at this time."
Here are some ways to help until operating reserves are restored to target levels...
Texas avoided rotatating outages, with reporting attributing the close call to two lost generators; "If we had lost another unit, it would have put us into a Level 3[emergency]."

Newfoundland has had rotating power outages since Thursday - due to the third one going off.Photo Galleries 'We saw this coming': N.L. hydro official on power rationing | CBC
A Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro official says an unfortunate series of events is to blame for power rationing during this week's province-wide cold snap.

...Gas turbines in Stephenville and Mount Pearl are broken, and a generator at Holyrood is only running at a one-third capacity.

... if those generators had been working, the company would not have had to resort to rolling blackouts.
Newfoundland's problems got much bigger on the weekend - either due to a fire at a transformer station, and incident at the Holyrood plant, or both.

Quebec Hydro also issued a rare plea for conservation last week - even going so far as to turn off the big sign at headquarters.  This article notes Quebec's wind turbines were also performing at about 15% of capacity during the calls for supply restraint.

1 comment:

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