From what I gathered there were 3 categories of failures:
Solar and wind were offline due to the weather (and, to my knowledge, one hydro plant suffered a major failure).
However.....
~30 gas fired generation plants went offline due to the ice disrupting plant instrumentation and safety systems + other temperature related failures
An unknown number of generation plants were fuel starved. Due to unprecedented consumer demand for gas? Ice/cold related gas distribution failures? Don't know yet.
Possibly fuel starved because the compressors used in gas pipelines were converted to electric rather than gas because of emissions. Some of those compressors may have lost power and that caused cascading failures.
More information seems to be coming out pretty often now.
If only there was some sort of hydrocarbon available to power a backup system. For some reason thoughts keep drifting back the the USSR circa early 1990s
Gas compressors at my utility are electric; we have black-start capable (diesel) generators which in the event of a loss of station power are "supposed" to start but, good luck with that. And performing an actual black start is very tricky indeed for a variety of reasons. Adding in all of the weather issues that probably rendered their (likely non-winterized) backup equipment even less reliable than ours in my balmy area and, well... yeah, they were fucked.
Don't forget nuclear. Unstable grid makes them trip. Those turbines suck up a lot of energy. If the generator hall is offline for very long, the plant can't deal with the heat, so they have to bring the reactors offline. And if a reactor is stopped on short notice, you generally can't restart it for a few days minimum, until the xenon (etc) has decayed.
In other words, several days of outage were pretty much baked into the cake when the failure cascade reached a certain size.
From what I gathered there were 3 categories of failures:
Solar and wind were offline due to the weather (and, to my knowledge, one hydro plant suffered a major failure).
However.....
~30 gas fired generation plants went offline due to the ice disrupting plant instrumentation and safety systems + other temperature related failures
An unknown number of generation plants were fuel starved. Due to unprecedented consumer demand for gas? Ice/cold related gas distribution failures? Don't know yet.
Possibly fuel starved because the compressors used in gas pipelines were converted to electric rather than gas because of emissions. Some of those compressors may have lost power and that caused cascading failures.
More information seems to be coming out pretty often now.
If only there was some sort of hydrocarbon available to power a backup system. For some reason thoughts keep drifting back the the USSR circa early 1990s
Gas compressors at my utility are electric; we have black-start capable (diesel) generators which in the event of a loss of station power are "supposed" to start but, good luck with that. And performing an actual black start is very tricky indeed for a variety of reasons. Adding in all of the weather issues that probably rendered their (likely non-winterized) backup equipment even less reliable than ours in my balmy area and, well... yeah, they were fucked.
u/residue69
Don't forget nuclear. Unstable grid makes them trip. Those turbines suck up a lot of energy. If the generator hall is offline for very long, the plant can't deal with the heat, so they have to bring the reactors offline. And if a reactor is stopped on short notice, you generally can't restart it for a few days minimum, until the xenon (etc) has decayed.
In other words, several days of outage were pretty much baked into the cake when the failure cascade reached a certain size.