Mailing List Archive

On 4/14/21 18:07, Niels Bakker wrote:

>
> The relevant virtue that's signaled with green energy is that its MWh
> prices are WAY lower than traditional fossil fuel-based generators.

Particularly when you factor in close to no maintenance costs for things
like PV, and a nominal 1% drop in efficiency per year on 20-year-old
design plans.

Mark.

On 4/14/21 18:31, Brian Johnson wrote:

> Not going to get into this, but this is simply not true on multiple
> fronts.

On a large scale, I agree that numbers can look odd. But on a smaller,
community scale, it does look good.

Mark.

It appears that Stan Barber <sob@academ.com> said:
>-=-=-=-=-=-
>
>I would suggest that the regulation paradigm in Texas does not allow
>coordinated maintenance scheduling to adapt to supply and load issues
>(especially in the face of a disaster like the Winter event earlier this
>year). That would mean a stronger regulatory framework and that smacks of
>government interference in the eyes of some.

Exactly. It's all about risk shifting. Ercot is run by free market
fundamentalists who believe, in spite of considerable evidence to the
contrary, that the market alone will always provide all the power
people need. This has the effect of shifting the risk of failure onto
users who often don't realize that until it's too late. They've known
since 2011 that much of the Texas grid fails when it's below freezing
but they don't have any inclination, or even the authority, to tell
power generators to spend money on weatherproofing and other risk
management.

They allow the wholesale price of power which is usually about 4c/kwh
to spike as high as $9, in the absurd belief that super high prices
will magically cause power to appear. This had the effect of dumping
giant power bills on users who couldn't pay them, and the costs and
defaults are now making lawyers rich.

Meanwhile, the politicans are involved in an extensive effort to pin
the blame on anyone but themselves, which is where the nonsense about
green power comes from. Texas' windmills aren't weatherproofed any
better than rest of the system but nontheless were providing slightly
more power than Ercot expected while the grid collapsed.

So, yeah, if you're in Texas, better make your own arrangments because
the state is paralyzed.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

---

one would not
be entirely off-base if they approached the problem from a "How do we
stay up, regardless of the grid's condition" vs. "How do we go green",
---

Not those whose jobs are to ensure the operation of the facility, but others in management\corporate making this big picture decisions are more concerned with the optics than they are of the uptime.



-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions

Midwest Internet Exchange

The Brothers WISP

----- Original Message -----

From: "Mark Tinka" <mark@tinka.africa>
To: nanog@nanog.org
Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 2021 10:32:25 AM
Subject: Re: Texas ERCOT power shortages (again) April 13



On 4/14/21 17:12, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:

> Bringing it back to the topic on hand: How do we keep the grid up? Or
> plan for it not being up?

I think "planning for the grid not being up" is more within our control
than the former :-).

Data centres serving base power load from solar PV, for example, can be
one place to start if they have the land (or rooftop space), in
economies where they are not only allowed to do grid feed-in, but are
also able to draw those credits from the grid in the evenings and/or on
cloud days. Of course, if the grid allows this but is unreliable, then
this doesn't work very well. But if it does, low-hanging fruit.

I think data centres are already good at performing demand side
management with how they use energy, given that they are now classified
by how much electrical energy that they can deliver vs. how much space
they have to sell. So while these activities help alleviate pressure on
the national grid, they probably have a more meaningful impact that
gives the data centre the opportunity to operate its own mini grid that
would survive a national grid outage, while minimizing its carbon
footprint. But this requires even more deliberate, multi-faceted
initiatives from the data centre operator, which costs money.

National grid prices are only going in one direction, the world over.
Couple that with an expected reduction in generation capacity (reliable
or otherwise) due to the rising levels of electrification, one would not
be entirely off-base if they approached the problem from a "How do we
stay up, regardless of the grid's condition" vs. "How do we go green",
because I believe the answer to both those questions innately calls for
renewable generation, operated at a very small scale to the rest of the
nation.

Think about this: there are more mobile phones in Africa than there are
people with electricity. At its most basic, those phones need to be
charged. The same can be said for most of the developing world. Care to
imagine what shambles the power companies will be in when those people
finally get on to the grid? It's not like they don't need their
Facebook, Google or Instagram :-)...

Mark.

I would say that under normal circumstances, 45 days might work
(Personally, I would prefer 90 days).

However, I suggest we are not dealing with a normal circumstance because of
the fall out from the winter incident.

On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 11:35 AM Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa> wrote:

>
>
> On 4/14/21 18:03, Stan Barber wrote:
>
> > I would suggest that the regulation paradigm in Texas does not allow
> > coordinated maintenance scheduling to adapt to supply and load issues
> > (especially in the face of a disaster like the Winter event earlier
> > this year). That would mean a stronger regulatory framework and that
> > smacks of government interference in the eyes of some.
>
> 45 days of planned notice, is what I read. And can be rejected if that
> notification window is shorter than that.
>
> Is that sufficient?
>
> Mark.
>

On 4/14/21 20:25, Stan Barber wrote:
> I would say that under normal circumstances, 45 days might work
> (Personally, I would prefer 90 days).
>
> However, I suggest we are not dealing with a normal circumstance
> because of the fall out from the winter incident.

Agreed.

Mark.

On 4/14/21 7:00 AM, Brian Johnson wrote:
> There is no profit motive for a non-profit company. It’s completely
> relevant to your response.


This is patently absurd. It's an industry group/organization. It's
raison d'etre is to serve its industry which definitely has a profit
motive. That and even non-profits have a profit motive to stay afloat.
See the NRA for one that has gone terribly wrong.

Mike