It reached upper 30s here and probably 70% or more of all snow is melting away - will be a mudhole here soon. Tonight is supposed to fall into the upper 20s, but after that a lot of warmth on the way. I shiit you not, by the looks of it, I'll be pumping air conditioning by next Wednesday. :D

We all know it takes electricity to move water. I'm hearing more from Austin folks who have power, but no water. I actually loaded up Austinites with water in coolers, buckets, etc.. at work today. Who runs the show there? Yep. You guessed it. Google the powerplant that has produced nothing since Austin bought in years ago.

Good for you! Neighbors helping neighbors...how it usually works out during times when all the politicians do is flap their gums.

Can you run new lines on the inside, either back of cabinets or through the cabinet toe-kick?

News says some of the people up there may have 10 days w/o power. Nothing happened here.

It only affected a small area, tho the most populous area of the state.

Outages are from downed lines.

No turbines or dams were affected.

This article is probably too liberal for many here but it covers many of the problems with Texas’ electric market deregulation:

https://www.salon.com/2021/02/19/what-caused-the-texas-disaster-decades-of-republican-deregulation-laissez-faire-run-amok/

Lots of wind, mostly hot, in Texasss that's for sure !

20% wind power is pretty darn good. Didn't know that prior.


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The good news, I had a hole in the brick from capping a broken hose bib. I felt around in there and there was the broken line. The elbow broke. I cut it out and there was enough give in the pipes to put in a new one.

While I was "in there", under the sink was poorly setup. I changed the location of the hot water valves away from the under sink electrical outlet.

With the cold temps, I let the CPVC cure for 18 hours. No leaks. We have hot water today.

We moved my parents back to their house today.

Good to hear, Red

our property is in the realm of one of those coops, and I can confirm that except for one two hour outage, that the rest of the outages at the property were one off, two on, repeat. I'm hoping that protected our plumbing from major failure.

Texas has crappy coal. Bituminous, sub-Bituminous and lignite. Bad for shipping around, but great for mine to mouth electric projects. And cheap.

Lignite is $19/ton. @17 MMBTU per short ton, it is cheaper than Natural Gas, at about double.

NG can be used in CC plant in the 48-54% Thermal efficiency region. Coal in a good thermal plant will be around 42%.

So it produces 80% less electricity, but at 50% cheaper, it works out...

I've been wondering about spray foam. I suspect a closed cell foam is likely far, far better than most other insulation, fiberglass, batt, rock wool, etc.... But, while it's tops at insulating, I suspect it could be a HUGE pain under certain circumstances. If it encases wiring or plumbing or even adheres to dry wall, it could end up being an enormous pain in the arse if any of that stuff or anything else in it's path has to be accessed, repaired, replaced, etc...

So, if you have access to things like plumbing or wiring, is there an advantage to wrapping them in some sort of thin plastic sheeting so that they aren't directly stuck to the foam?

What about shiplap/TnG wood siding? I would think that you may also not want the foam to be applied directly to that sort of thing. Sure, having a direct seal probably increases the insulating properties, but being very close, but not actually adhered to things should be very, very close to the same insulation value, right?

Outstanding!

Interesting, real time data per MISO

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http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1613794552.jpg

We now have to spray foam behind electric boxes on outside walls to seal them up. Most freezes (in my experience) have not been caused by lack of insulation, but wind and a draft.

The foam is great for sealing drafts. As to pipes, you always want to insulate between the pipe and the outside wall, not between the pipe and the conditioned area.

That makes sense. Keep the cold out of the walls, but let the heat from the house into the wall (somewhat) to keep the pipes in the wall warm.

Interesting how volatile wind power is.

Here's the chart showing just how quickly this occured.

From Feb 7 at a balmy 60-70s to the low Feb 15 20s (!), natural gas generation ramped up 5x or more.

I suppose it didn't help when solar/wind contribution dipped to 0 Tuesday and Wednesday and gas couldn't make up for that loss as it did during the week prior.

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https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46836

What you are seeing is the alert from ERCOT to suppliers on 2/08 about the impending weather and telling them to get their **** together.

The suppliers know they don't winterize their equipment and switched sources away from unprepared infrastructure.

They ramped up on gas but that did not quite work because the priority for gas is residential supply over other demand.

Then the gas facilities failed and where unable to deliver half of normal capacity much less the increased demand.

The dominos fell.

And what that chart leaves out is capacity which is normally around 75 MW.

All sources should have been able to supply up to that. The numbers you see after 2/14 represents the capacity they could actually supply after everything failed which is why generation dropped so precipitously.

Too soon?

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James,

Glad to hear pipes all fixed. We were fortunate not to have any bursts and my next door neighbor is fortunate I over buy when I get plumbing supplies so I had plenty of copper fittings for him.

As far as coal:

We've quit burning lignite in our lignite plant and switched to powder river basin coal.

42% seems really high efficiency for a coal plant. I would think more like 33-34%.

The big drawback of wind power is when wind turbines makes peak power at off peak demand, fossil fuel plants have to back down including coal and then whatever their max efficiency is goes out the window. Maybe down to 12% efficiency. I expect this will be a big reason large steam plants, especially coal, get mothballed in favor of smaller combined cycle and high efficiency simple cycle gas turbines that don't lose as much efficiency at partial load.