Texas internet connectivity declining due to blackouts

Wed Feb 17 16:10:36 UTC 2021

On 2/16/21 18:50, John Von Essen wrote:

> I just assumed most people in Texas have heat pumps- AC in the summer 
> and minimal heating in the winter when needed. When the entire state 
> gets a deep freeze, everybody is running those heat pumps non-stop, 
> and the generation capacity simply wasn’t there. i.e. coal or natural 
> gas plants have some turbines offline, etc.,. in the winter because 
> historically power use is much much less. The odd thing is its been 
> days now, those plants should be able to ramp back up to capacity - 
> but clearly they haven’t. Blaming this on wind turbines is BS. In 
> fact, if it weren’t for so many people in Texas with grid-tie solar 
> systems, the situation would be even worse.

I'm not sure that grid-tied solar systems actually provide any massive 
reprieve on utility generation, because the hours that installations can 
produce energy is when demand is at its lowest (fair point, working from 
home this past year has probably skewed that, but...).

Demand tends to ramp up in the evenings, which is when solar cannot work 
anymore. And considering that there are more grid-tied solar solutions 
out there with no storage, the grid has to handle that ramp up for the 
evening loads, likely more quickly than they would have if there was no 
distributed solar generation.

I'm also not sure about the state restrictions on the % of customers 
that can connect their solar systems to the grid, but I'd imagine it's 
somewhere between 10% - 20%, last time I did a spot-check on various 
U.S. states.

Mark.