What went wrong is that the Texas legislature which owns Texas-specific grid process to avoid interference from the Feds didn't figure out how to also ensure Texas generator companies got compensated for weatherizing (and ensuring it was done).
How many of the 24+6 recommendations from the NERC/FERC review of last time this happened in Texas (hint:2011) were taken up by the legislature or those at ERCOT they delegated responsibility to or the power generation providers?
The eye opener to me from skimming the 2011 recommendations is that there was no explicit rating/SLA for a power plant's acceptable temperature operating that could be used by planners for assessing the risks of an upcoming weather event by policy planners. It'd seem pretty basic to be able to ask "How many plants do we lose when temperature drops below X"?
Dunno whether they fixed trying to create such a basic measurement for Texas plants, but it doesn't seem like it.
If you want to know some of the specifics about what "winterization" means in practice for a power plant including natural gas ones, you can read some of the details in that report. It's kinda interesting.
It is annoying when this sort of event happens and everyone starts deciding what they believe to be truth within 48 hours of the outage. It makes more sense to be talking about the 2011 outages in terms of what went wrong than the 2021 ones - because we have actual information on 2011 instead of "things went wrong!" now.
I want to thank you personally for injecting a PDF into the discussion, but also positively assert that it is not obvious what just happened this week. We don't yet know how many of the recommendations were ignored, what happened in the last decade regulator-wise or whether this round of failures are for the same or different reasons.
Speculation is much less useful than waiting a few months for the actual investigations. Emergencies are urgent, engineering (and political) decisions and assessments are never emergencies.
From an engineering standpoint, I agree that you want a true RCA and this event's RCA will be a bit different than 2011's. And this RCA (and its political consequences) will take time, doesn't need to be done right this minute, etc etc.
However, this problem is not at its root an engineering one; it is political. While the public attention is on this, we should point attention as close as possible to the most likely cause given the information we have at the time. It's bayesian truth and bayesian politics.
You'll note I didn't draw conclusions about which recommendations were ignored but having read through them all, there is no way they were all actually followed and we ended up where we are. I think some basics are fairly obvious. While some winterization perhaps was done, there is some degree of winterization that was never done; power plants in other states far north of us and colder than us are not having the same types of problems. Various professors in various cities in Texas who follow this stuff confirm this in various news outlets I haven't cited here. I also wouldn't be surprised if there was were issues with gas transport from wells through pipelines to plants that were noted in 2011 but much more severe this time due to even colder temps and unexpected by all. But still...
At the end of the day, Texas has optimized for cheap power and has not funded the work of reliable power. This is a political decision at the end of the day due to companies not paying for their externalities of poor service. I'm open to saying we shouldn't blame follower-type politicians who were scared of "raising electrical rates" and we should blame ourselves, but let's all acknowledge that some costs that weren't borne should have been borne and some oversight that should have occurred didn't occur. Is that so hard to concede at this early juncture?
Is this power outage truly such a bad thing? It seems like a decision that the elected representatives of Texas have chosen to make. They basically said we would rather have much lower utility costs on a regular basis and have a risk that we lose our power every 9 or 10 years in a big storm. Everything is cost vs benefit trade off, and this just seems to be a different decision than most make.
This outage is undoubtably causing 10's of billions of dollars of property damage as we speak (the internet is being flooded with pictures of burst pipes, not to mention rather stark conditions for everyday people that will almost certain result in many deaths in outlier populations).
If the utility company had a disclaimer on their bills, or a billing option to pay more or less depending on if you wanted to run this type of risk - maybe it would be a tradeoff people could make?
Instead this seems to be a complete failure of the regulated utility and it's governing political apparatus resulting in an entirely preventable 'major hurricane' level crisis.
The deaths and impacts on the poor make it, to me an unacceptable tradeoff.
I don't see why others states can do it and Texas couldn't or shouldn't. This is hindsight, but out past strategy, if it was intentional, was not optimal.
Even just numerically, I would bet money that the lost productivity and sales will be much more than the "ounce of prevention" costs, even ignoring the humanitatian aspects.
My friends have been unable to drive, without water or electricity for a few days now. Their house is slowly losing all residual heat, making its way down to ~18 degrees.
They're young and prepared, so they'll be fine. I expect there to be a lot of deaths. And then a wave of burst pipes and property damage. Many people may be going without running water for weeks or months to come.
Is this lowering cost or just shifting cost, given the huge amount of property damage being caused due to lack of power? The “stitch in time” would apply here. Not to mention how to calculate the cost of human suffering caused by trying to survive in freezing temps with no power for multiple days.
This is meta/tangent, but I've had similar conversations a few times recently. Seems to be in the zeitgeist.
Re: everyone starts deciding what they believe to be truth within 48 hours of the outage.
Maybe, hopefully... the epidemic is humbling us. It's been significant and long lasting enough to rub our noses in whatever opinions we so brashly got behind too early. Professors and peasants alike. We're more likely to stop and say "I don't know."
The classic example of this is governments taking credit/blame for economic stuff. Low unemployment, high gdp, etc. Current government decisions are really unlikely to be affecting these, because stuff takes time. Meanwhile, short term data about the economy is both uncertain and fairly useless even if it wasn't. The whole thing is so disingenuous, yet I doubt there has ever been an democratic election where this wasn't a major factor.
Nah, it’s very easy to selectively forget what you ended up being wrong about and remember what you got right (or close enough to pretend it was right).
I was wearing an n95 mask in the grocery store starting March 1st last year, there was no reason at that point to think it wouldn’t help and I still can’t comprehend why someone like Fauci who said in no uncertain terms not to wear a mask, it won’t help never faced any repercussions. I probably got a lot of things wrong that I don’t really remember. I still am a bit ocd about hand washing and hand sanitizer even though covid seems not to spread via surfaces very much, except for when it does, and I’ll probably keep doing that until the pandemic is over just because I have been.
My takeaway from this past year is certainly not that humans are rational or good at accountability.
> I still can’t comprehend why someone like Fauci who said in no uncertain terms not to wear a mask
I thought the general assumption was they were afraid of dramatically affecting supply for the people who were risking their lives taking care of sick patients.
The hard part for me, was in the same breath of saying that, they said 'All health care workers need to wear a N95 or better rated mask.'. It was a clear lie to mislead the public, and so transparent it could not possibly accomplish the task of avoiding hoarding, while also torpedoing any trust anyone paying attention might have had in the CDC.
That set of statements probably cost almost as many (or more) lives as the (very misleading) 'no such thing as asymptomatic spread' comments from WHO.
The opposite of saying "yes, everyone should wear a mask" is not "no, nobody should wear a mask, it doesn't help". It's extremely common in public statements for authorities, especially in crisis management, to avoid saying something simple because they know it to be false but at the same time they can't acknowledge that it's false (because that would endanger their efforts). All Fauci and his commission should have done is avoid giving a statement on the matter while they're working on ensuring health care providers do receive their masks.
If you're in a position of authority and you DO come out and say something you know to be false then don't be surprised at having to deal with long running consequences for making such a statement.
And in the process lost a significant portion of trust in public health measures. Saying the don't work is very different than saying they are short in supply and blocking sales temporarily or something. Second one is much easier to reverse without teaching public to second guess every public health directive from there on.
> On February 19, Fauci told USA Today, “In the United States, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask.” On March 8, as scientists estimated tens of thousands of undetected Covid cases in the US, Fauci told 60 Minutes, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.”
You can decide for yourself, but to me he was pretty clearly trying to make people think masks don't work masks don't work while leaving a small sliver of plausible deniability.
This whole article makes a compelling case that he's really just as much of a calculating politician as anyone in Washington https://www.thedriftmag.com/the-case-against-fauci/. And he's done a great job branding himself because most people seem to think the opposite, until you look at him closer.
The problem is the premise that government officials can ethically lie to the public to do things such as protecting a supply chain. So what else are they lying about that they haven’t yet revealed? The trust relationship between people and government is broken.
Okay, well let's start with firing, and let's assume since his bad advice was in march 2020 then any repercussions would happen within the next few months when it became obvious that masks should definitely be worn.
The two people with the power to fire Dr Fauci are the NIH director, and the president (via his power over the NIH director). In fact by summer 2020 Dr Fauci had earned the ire of the White House, but for essentially the opposite reason (this was when the White House was still trying to underplay the pandemic as not-that-bad, going-away-soon, it'll be an Easter miracle, etc). As such the NIH director aligned with Dr Fauci against the White house, and Fauci was seen as the "defender of wearing masks" or somesuch. For example, consider the following article:
I don't think it's impossible to have seen Fauci fired if that's how Trump played it politically. But it's not.
Consider the following:
> Trump, in particular, has openly disagreed with Fauci’s guidance on whether fans should attend professional football games in the fall [...]
> In recent weeks, as the U.S. outbreak has spiraled out of control, Fauci has urged Americans to wear masks and to practice social distancing. The White House, however, has refused to amplify his advice, and instead has escalated its attacks on him.
The white house was trying to stimulate the economy by reassuring people it's okay to go out and spend money. Attacking Dr. Fauci for not being serious enough about masks sends the opposite signal. Hence, Fauci became the "wear a mask" guy (as viewed in opposition to the White House). Thus, everyone forgot / didn't care that early on he was wrong about masks.
He wasn't exactly wrong, as not wearing masks was still the general scientific consensus at the time, right? It was a WHO guideline, if I'm not mistaken.
I would say it is Americans that are not rational or good at accountability from a cultural perspective.
If you ever have the opportunity to visit Japan and see people wearing masks when they have a cold or flu on normal days. We don't do that. Heck, we are in a work culture where it is a bad thing to take days off when you are ill.
If you look at other countries where the government and the populace take pandemics seriously and lock down.
You see governors here being proud about not adhering to COVID-19 Protocols. You see Police in major cities of the country REFUSING to wear masks or intentionally wearing them wrong. You hear of them refusing to get the vaccine, when they are prioritized to do so.
You see a Pandemic become politicized because an incompetent man was President and it was part of his brand to not deal with it or set an example.
You have certain epidemiologists telling school teachers to get back to work and teach his daughters because, well only a small number of them will die from COVID, so get the fuck back to work.
> I still can’t comprehend why someone like Fauci who said in no uncertain terms not to wear a mask, it won’t help never faced any repercussions.
This is actually a perfect example of the difficulty of scientific communication to a large audience. You need to communicate concise easy to understand guidance about complex topics. Asking “are masks effective” isn’t a simple question and the answer is, it depends. The first part is “effective at what task”, the second is “to what extent”, third is “in what situation”, fourth is “with what risks and tradeoffs”. I’ll be talking about the non-N95 masks unless specifically stated, to avoid any confusion.
Masks are not very effective at preventing an uninfected person from contracting Covid when in proximity to someone infected with Covid. The masks do not form a seal around the mouth and nose, allowing significant amounts of air around the mask when breathing in, as well as not being able to prevent being infected through the eyes. They do provide some protection, including possibly reducing the severity of the infection if contracted while wearing the mask, but that is not their primary benefit.
Mask are effective at preventing the spread from an infected person (either asymptomatic or symptomatic) to others. Breathing out directly into a mask allows the material to catch and trap the majority of the virus carrying condensation, and what gets out around or through the mask is slowed down significantly, allowing the droplets to be pulled down by gravity before traveling as significant distance (or fog up your glasses). Especially when combined with social distancing, this is very effective at prevent the spread of the virus. This is the masks primary benefit and is effective when there is large scale adoption, so that people that have the virus but are not aware, don’t unknowingly pass it. Its effectiveness comes as an aggregate effect similar to herd immunity, rather than an individual effect, since the vast majority of transmission comes from people unaware they are carriers.
Mask come with risks. People tend to touch their face more while wearing masks, and contracting the virus by touching your face is a primary infection mode. People tend to relax other more effective protection methods when wearing a mask, both unconsciously and due to a false belief in the protective capabilities of a mask.
So, in March we had a situation where we were running a shortage of masks. We had people wearing masks (either homemade or surgical) because they believed the mask provided good protection from contracting the virus, which is not true, and may cause people to engage in risky behavior that would put them and others at more risk. We also didn’t have enough masks to be used for their actual benefit of “herd immunity”. The assessment was that non sick people wearing masks was likely to put the individual at greater risk, and deplete the resource from places it was needed, without providing a medical benefit to the individual greater than the risks. In March, the average non sick person should not be wearing a mask.
Now, we have a situation where we do not have a shortage of masks. We have a situation where the public has been educated through awareness campaigns on how masks work, like the “My mask protects you. Your mask protects me” campaign, so people are less likely to use the masks incorrectly and put themselves and others at greater risk. The assessment is that high compliance of mask wearing will have a greater positive effect through “herd immunity” to outweigh the risks and tradeoffs. But make no mistake, the risks are still there. Now the average non sick person should be wearing a mask.
If you don’t understand the underlying medical complexities of the situation, it seems like they can’t both be true. And when an expert organization is trying to provide a clear, short, easy to understand list of recommendations from analyzing and evaluating all those data, they can’t go into to a 45 min presentation every time. Dr. Fauci even tried to add context in March. He talked about how the masks don’t provide protection in the way people think they do, how it can cause people to put themselves at greater risk, both through a false sense of protection and other behaviors like face touching, and how masks primarily protect you from infecting others, not the other way around. If you go back and look at his quotes at the time, he consistently tries to bring that additional context into it, but since it is a complex issue of competing risks and benefits, it’s hard to convey how masks can be good in some cases and bad in others.
> Dr. Fauci in March. “When we get in a situation where we have enough masks, I believe there will be some very serious consideration about more broadening this recommendation of using masks. We're not there yet, but I think we're close to coming to some determination. Because if, in fact, a person who may or may not be infected wants to prevent infecting someone else, one of the best ways to do that is with a mask, so perhaps that's the way to go.” [1]
> And of course his 60 Minutes interview. “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”
I have yet to see any of my friends and definitely not politicians (of any stripe) humbled about anything pandemic. If anything there’s a doubling down and mental gymnastics to explain away inconsistencies or hide lack of knowledge. I’d love to share your optimism- seriously- do you have an example in mind?
Test the waters again maybe. I've been feeling this change pretty recently.
I'm not predicting any kind of revolution, and this is all at the margin. I don't expect TV takestars or politicians to be the vanguard. That said, I have noticed people pondering the unknowability of it all. More interest in margin or error equivalents. Stuff like that.
Example: Covid conversations (the one I have in mind was with my aunt) 6 months ago were along the lines of "the government did X, Y happened." Now, it's wondering whether X impacted Y... counterfactual thinking.
I have yet to encounter this in my work/corporate life though, and honestly, that's where it's most needed.
Well, looking at the breakdown of electricity generation by energy source [0], it looks like energy generation fell by about 30% around the start of 2/15, with most of the losses being from coal and natural gas. And as Texas's grid is isolated from the the other eastern and western grids, they can't make up the difference. And reports indicate that it's because instrumentation in coal and natural gas plants has frozen, shutting them down.
It kind of feels like the problems are evident, and waiting for time to lull people back into complacency on the issue seems like it will just set up the next such disaster.
People aren't leaping to conclusions here, this isn't speculation. This has happened at least twice, and there were a bunch of clear recommendations from 2011 that weren't followed. The state government and other sources are already providing information on the current crisis and its causes.
I agree and have been feeling this more lately. You know this is already being politicized. Armchair investigators are suddenly becoming power grid experts. The complex reality of balancing a huge diverse power grid is becoming an “easy” problem - if only the evil other side had done what my media source and politician said they should!
It’s tricky - I also have a problem waiting months for a slow inefficient government agency to figure out how to cover their collective asses (or find the right scapegoat). I don’t think it’s unreasonable to make systems we can monitor, analyze and draw conclusions from much quicker.
There needs to be a happy medium- find the problems and “trust the experts” for sure, but do so without being so damn _loud_.
This country politicizes everything, rather than dealing with it, because you have some people who have financial interests that make money off the existing situation. For many, it is part of a belief system, rather than dealing with it from policy and engineering perspectives.
We don't deal with school shooting massacres here right after they occur. We don't deal with them after they happen.
What stopped school shootings? Not having children in schools.
You just had a group of militias, white supremacists et al, invade a branch of government, terrorize they staff, representatives and security--and nothing comes of it in terms of accountability and responsibility by Trump.
You have those on the political right saying nothing big happened. You have people whining why is the national guard still there?
As a nation, we don't prioritize efficiency, competence and reaction time.
We don't want to measure and improve our infrastructure and policies.
The right to protest should be important to you, regardless of your political persuasion. 2020 saw a very great many more violent protests, including the construction of autonomous zones that rejected the authority of all elected United States government. To say that a person’s voice should not be heard because they are dangerous to your beliefs is itself the most dangerous thing.
What happened at the Capitol was way past the point of simple protesting. It's unfortunately people who have been sucked into a cult. They reject reality and got violent because of it.
Since the Texas Legislature is in its once every two year session right now, and four million Texans are pissed off, it will be fun to see if new laws result this cycle.
Continuing my theme from above; if legislators took a 6 month recess after every major crisis before starting to debate it the quality of law would probably be a lot better. Democracies naturally tend to deadlock anyway, stuff everyone agrees on got waved through years ago. Most of the time in session is grandstanding and making a fuss without achieving much.
Legislators have a terrible habit of using a crisis to:
1) Make something that was already illegal super-dooper illegal (see: terrorism).
2) Mucking up traditional safeguards against bad government - like evidence requirements, reasonable process, human rights in some cases, debating the legislation, reading the bill before voting on it, etc.
In emergencies, legislators are just going to rubber-stamp things technical experts wave under their nose/hand power to some executive. They aren't needed.
That just leaves plenty of time for all the sundry industry lobbyists, gladhanders and sleeve-tuggers to capture all the legislators and their advisors, ensuring the status quo is maintained and nothing ever gets fixed.
Anecdote: All 7 developers in my Houston team (semi-geographically scattered in the city) lost power; half for >24 hrs (it's 10-25 degrees F here for the last 2-3 days).
Most lost water for some stretch of time and some still don't have it.
I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well.
(I haven't found clear findings on what determines whether your fireplace net-warms or net-cools your house in super-cold weather (by sucking heat out of adjacent rooms and pulling cool air from the outside and sending hot air up your chimney). Pointers welcome.)
> I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well.
American fireplaces in general are a joke. You are just spending way too much energy and not really storing it anywhere except the air around it. They are built to look good, not to actually heat anything properly.
Check any Nordic country, we don't have gas fireplaces nor do we have the silly tiny iron things you have. What we do have is stone fireplaces. [1]
How it works is this: You heat the multi-hundred kg stone mass using any material you want, for us it's usually wood in some form. After the stone is hot enough, you stop wasting wood and close the chimney when the fire has burned out to prevent heat from escaping.
The stone mass will store heat and distribute it slowly and evenly over many hours, keeping everyone warm without electricity. If you want to distribute it, there are fans that operate on the radiant heat coming from the fireplace. A properly installed fireplace (central to the house) will keep a normal home toasty warm for a day or two with one proper heating cycle depending on how cold it's outside.
Why would most places bother with the expense of a fireplace really designed to heat a room?
I can assure you that most new construction in Oslo (pretty much only apartments these days) don't include fireplaces. And why would they? With steam pipes running through much of the city, there's no need for the expense and pollution involved with a fireplace except for show anyway.
The fact is that cities in the US, like in Europe, generally have very reliable power and gas supplies, so they don't need to build fireplaces designed to actually heat the place, and we don't want to encourage people in cities to burn wood to heat their place anyway. So showplace fireplaces, especially the gas ones, are a better solution for allowing people to have the cozy feeling when they want it.
Cities in the US and Europe have very reliable power and gas supplies, until suddenly they don't. The trouble is that people have started to take the reliability of the power grid for granted and stopped thinking about what happens when it inevitably fails.
We take metric shit tons for granted in our everyday lives. The risk that we will be out of power for more than a few hours where I live is very small, so I chose to save the about $10000 that it cost to install a fireplace and a chimney, so I’m instead prepared if I get long time sick, unemployed, or the car breaks down. All of those risks are order of magnitude higher than that we would be without electricity for any extended period of time.
For that matter, as someone who lives in New England, if I wanted to install backup for extended power outages (which do happen where I am now and then), the sensible thing to do would be to get a propane-fueled generator installed because that would work if I were traveling (to keep pipes from freezing) and would also keep refrigerators running in a summer outage. (Added: Maybe a Powerwall-type thing would make sense today.)
I do have a fireplace and a wood stove which provide something of a backup but won't heat the whole house and only work if I'm there.
We've started taking it for granted because it works. It's ~35 years or so since last time I experienced an outage longer than a few minutes, and enough years since I experienced any outage that I can't remember when it was.
Of course apartments in city centres shouldn't have wood burning fireplaces in them. This discussion wasn't about multi-story apartments, but about the uselessness of American-style fireplaces in detached homes.
Except they're not useless. They simply have a different use than heating the home. You may not agree with the use case, but that doesn't change the fact that they work fine for what they were designed to do.
Jøtul [1], one of the the largest manufacturers of fireplaces in Norway has been around since 1853, manufacturing mostly cast iron fireplaces.
The considerations are different, though. Cast iron is great if you want to radiate as much heat as possible as fast as possible or need to heat a small area (e.g. single room per heater). There's a reason small cast-iron Jøtul fireplaces used to be the stereotypical heater for cabins etc. in Norway.
Sterotypical for the United States also! While brands like Vermont Castings have become quite common (founded 1975 after Middle East oil embargo), we often see old Jøtul in New York cabins, hunting lodges, etc.
Jøtuls are fairly readily available in the US as well. When I wanted to put a small woodstove in a new sunroom a few years back, the local woodstove dealer recommended the small Jøtul over the equivalent Vermont Castings because they said it drew better.
Or you know, instead of having a whole fireplace, just get a kerosene heater? Enough to heat a whole room in case of power&gas outages, last long enough through the night on one fill, and kerosene can be had at a gas station.
I am not sure why you got downvoted, this is a good backup strategy.
I have natural gas heating and a combi smart boiler which runs on electricity. Even if I still have the gas link operational, if my power goes down then my heating is dead.
This news of Texas actually reminded, that I should have some sort of emergency winter heating backup, and a boat or camping kerosene heater is a actually a pretty solid idea for emergencies.
The whole prepper community isn't completely crazy. Everyone really should have a Bug Out Bag or a Bug In Bag ready or at least under construction.
You don't need to go overboard with tons of dried food and a nuclear fallout shelter. Just a cheap multi-fuel camping stove and some canned food will last you a few days easily.
Bug out/in bag seems like a weird term, kinda adds to the “crazy” of preppies. here it’s just called your emergency/ earthquake kit - 1-2 weeks of food and some amount of water.
Pretty much anything actually built to heat stuff is better than the all-looks-no-function "fireplaces" the Americans seem to be in love with. The ones they like to mount their TVs over, despite the neck pain.
I don't think you can generalize American fireplaces. Every fireplace I've personally encountered has been traditional wood burning and absolutely heats up the room well past the time the fire is actually lit (American Northeast). I haven't actually been in a home with a gas-burning fireplace.
But more importantly - the gas fireplaces are intended to look nice with minimal effort. They are explicitly not intended to change the indoor climate much if at all. They're usually built in very new homes that have dedicated, reliable climate control systems or in cities that don't require much heating.
I can agree with that last statement. Every house I've seen has had a gas fireplace, but I live in the metro area of a city that (in)famously only owned a single snowplow.
You have a slightly condescending tone here that I'm not sure is necessary. Perhaps they're "all-looks-no-function" because they're mostly meant to be decorative rather than functional?
Here, in Central Texas, my home has three fireplaces. Each designed to accommodate wood, but all have gas feeds that make it possible to run them without the smoke of wood fires. We don't run them for heat nor decorative effect. The are just architectural features of the house that some people might choose to utilize for the mood that a fire can convey.
They are a bit like windows: not energy efficient but nice to look at/through.
During the historic cold weather going on this week, I have no confidence that they would help if the power went off.
You are stereotyping a country of hundreds of millions that spans climate zones ranging from Hawaiian tropics to the arctic circle.
Yeah. There are decorative fireplaces. The Norwegian company Rais sells some great decorative ones.
There are also incredibly efficient cast iron stoves that some people use for heat. You made fun of them in another comment, but they are much more efficient than a fireplace, and can use a variety of fuels like pellets or gas in addition to wood.
Of course, there are also people that have a standard wood fireplace that you imply is in every Norwegian home. Most people don’t use them here since they are so inefficient, dangerous and illegal in cities due to the pollution.
You can do a hybrid approach with the hot metal burn chamber for wood gas and earthen materials to slowly radiate the heat. This is called a rocket mass heater. The exhaust temperature is usually below 100C and often smokeless (a complete burn). Using a fan to extract heat from the final vertical stack (pipe around the exhaust with air running by) can give you an exhaust temperature of around 40C. Here's a quick 3 minute video that explains the concept; there's other YouTube videos that go into greater details if you wish to research this topic more. https://youtu.be/fwCz8Ris79g
In 1996 (or thereabouts), I lived in Maryland, and my family lost power for 6 days due to a snow/ice storm that took out a ton of power lines (water froze on them and the added weight pulled them down). We had no natural gas service, and our running water was provided by a well in the backyard that had an electric pump. So no electricity, heat, or running water for 6 days in ~20-30°F weather. (Fortunately we'd prepared by buying many gallons of drinking water, and filling up bathtubs and buckets with water earlier in the week.)
We had two fireplaces in the house, one each in the living room and master bedroom, so we kept all doors closed and all slept in the master bedroom. They did a decent enough job keeping us somewhat comfortable while wearing several layers and winter coats at all times, and sleeping in sleeping bags and with extra blankets. (An oddity of our house was that the chimney ran through the middle of it, not outside an exterior wall, so even some of the heat going up it would warm the house a bit.)
After 4 days my dad felt the roads were clear enough for us to go to a motel where we could shower and experience some heat. Going back to the house after that (before power was restored) was in some ways worse than enduring the first 4 days.
Granted, the reason for that outage was very different from what happened in Texas, but I just wanted to highlight that our power grid everywhere is still very susceptible to bad weather. (Well, ok, this story is 25 years old, but I suspect things haven't changed all that much.)
>Granted, the reason for that outage was very different from what happened in Texas
There are actually a lot of ice/ freezing-rain downed powerlines happening simultaneously with the rolling blackouts, and that's a huge part of the problem.
The grid/supply is being blamed for both. Of course if the lines weren't down, it would increase demand and there wouldn't magically be any more supply to feed them... but it does explain why a lot of people's blackouts aren't "rolling."
We've had a ridiculous cold snap in northern U.S. the last couple of weeks, where every day is at least -15f and every night -30f, not including wind-chill. So much so that 8f out feels warm now.
Have not had even a blip of outage for anything. Last year I believe something damaged a large power pole and we were out for 3 hours.
If warmer states took notes on how north states do it we wouldn't be in this pickle I assume. Also warm states need to bury their water lines deeper.
Interior or central chimneys make more sense to me than ones against an exterior wall, and they seem common enough in houses of a certain vintage at least. If your chimney is on an outer wall, doesn't it radiate heat to the outdoors?
Chimneys on outer walls are worse on every measure compared to internal ones.
They loose heat to the outdoors as you say and since they cool down a lot faster than the internal chimneys it is also generally harder to get the fire going when re-lighting. The chimney on my house is on an outer wall and when it's below 0C I have to light a fire every day or it becomes too much of a hassle to get it going.
Old houses in New England were built with internal chimneys for the same reason (less heat loss).
Houses in southern states were built with external chimneys which made sense for a couple reasons. Back in the day people would keep a fire 24/7 for cooking and that fire + southern heat is uncomfortable. Because of the shorter cold season the chimney was on the outside of the house. Also, in the case of chimney fires you could tie a chain around an external chimney and rip it down with a horse, hopefully saving your home.
The ones on the outside can use outside air to go up the chimney, avoiding the problem listed above. Harder to do with inside chimneys.
Last place I rented with a fireplace, there was a metal door in brickwork below it in the basement. It wasn’t until after I moved out that I realized what it was for.
Wood ashes also collect in the small chamber in the basement under the chimney. As a child in Michigan, one of my hamsters escaped his confinement. Poor little Pinky couldn't be found in the house, but a couple of days after disappearing my Mom found him in the chamber covered in ashes that had cushioned his fall. (He made a full recovery from his adventure.)
I think if you're having to worry about makeup air cooling the house down than your fireplace heats it, that's less to do with chimney placement and more with how the fireplace is designed. I.e a gas flame in a fireplace with no appreciable thermal mass and a chimney that pipes the heat straight out is where I'd look to first as a problem.
A massive stone fireplace that's heated with a single load of fuel, then has its chimney flaps closed to keep the heat from escaping, is going to be much more efficient. I wonder if maybe the fireplaces in many parts of the USA are actually designed to not heat the house too much, given the usual weather in e.g. Texas.
No, due to ventilation. Even an indoor fireplace for example is -always- vented, so the gasses can escape via the chimney. If you close the damper with a fire blazing, you'll not have a good time.
Outdoor fires well, are outdoors, so there's plenty of oxygen.
People die nearly every year in the brutal cold from getting desperate and bringing grills and such indoors to light, which is a big no no.
Not all indoor fireplaces are ventilated in the US, actually. (Source: have one unventilated fireplace that is probably mostly for aesthetics and not to be used for extended perios of time)
AFAIK it's not illegal to run your grill indoors, either. Being legal isn't the same as being a good idea. Ventless fireplaces are also not legal in a lot of places in the US, for good reason.
Legality is a signal for safety for most people. The natural gas industry, and the manufacturers of indoor gas ovens, stoves, fireplaces, etc all claim that what they sell is safe for indoor use. People have an expectation that the federal government will regulate things which are bad for us. In my opinion, they're failing miserably in this particular area.
Technically, I believe the problem is the CO concentration and exposure time, not displacement of oxygen. CO binds to hemoglobin more effectively than oxygen, preventing enough oxygen from getting to the body's tissues. CO poisoning is common: 20,000 hospital visits per year in the United States, and in many countries is the most common form of poisoning. [1]
We had an incident early this AM and of the eight people we paged, only one had power. I’ve been without power, heat, internet, water, or septic more than 90 minutes at a time for two days. My house was 44 degrees this morning when I woke up. Sunday night we were without power or heat for seven and a half hours. Our DR plan didn’t really account for all of our staff being on the same power grid!
I’m in Austin, without power for almost 48 hours now. There’s ice in my roommate’s bedroom. It’s my birthday tomorrow, and I’m hearing that we won’t have power until Thursday at the earliest. I’ve gone beyond furious to just horribly depressed.
Good luck, and here's some advice from a midwesterner that has dealt with cold, ice, and snow forever. If it's cold enough to start freezing things inside then make sure you have some water flowing in your pipes. Keep your kitchen sink running on a low (very tiny) dribble. Maybe even keep a shower/bathrub running at a very low rate too. You do NOT want to be dealing with frozen, broken flooding pipes on top of no power. Can find more tips here: https://www.redcross.org/get-help/how-to-prepare-for-emergen... Good luck (and happy birthday)!
Also, leaving water trickling when you’re on a septic system can ruin your grinder pump because it stirs up the solids in the first separating tank. And, as I learned the hard way this week, even if all the faucets are dripping, there’s no way to trickle a toilet. The supply lines for both of our toilets froze while the sink next to them kept right in dripping. And then there’s the question of how to keep your water heater from bursting when the power goes out and it can’t heat anything.
If you have a tank toilet you might be able to adjust the floater (bend the rod upwards) so it never quite turns off the supply valve. Failing that, you can just manually prop the flap open with something.
If you have a flushometer, remove the nut over the valve and adjust the screw underneath until the valve never quite shuts off.
Warning: Take careful note of exactly how things were before. A toilet that never stops running can be just as hard on the spirit as a toilet that doesn't work at all.
I guess that’s true. But the alarm on our septic starts screaming after about six hours of a trickling toilet. The alarm is pretty much there for that specific condition and the installer really hammered on the need to fix a leaking toilet
Immediately. I guess in the grand scheme of things a new grinder pump and a visit from the honey wagon are cheaper than a condemned house, though...
For a couple of cents, couldn't the grinder circuit include a basic 555 timer de-bounce circuit to suppress multiple triggers within, say, 30 minutes? That seems a lot cheaper than an alarm.
Alternatively, why doesn't the grinder have a higher minimum triggering flow rate? It seems it's falsely detecting potential solids arrival.
It’s not that it “stirs up solids,” it’s that a continuous leak causes the pump to cycle on more frequently. Your pump might cycle a few times a day normally; a running toilet could cause that to be every 30 min, and at that rate you could need a new pump in a year or two instead of 10.
Trickling your faucets (just a drip-drip-drip) for a few days is a small amount of extra wear on your pump in exchange for not rupturing pipes.
Why don't pipes in areas prone to this sort of thing have some of cheaply replaceable burst disc relief valve, given how catastrophic an uncontrolled failure of the pipework is?
I don't think relief valve will help with freezing pipes. Freezing pipes burst because ice is less dense than water, so water expands as it turns into ice. Pipes freeze on the outside first, resulting in remaining water being entrapped in ice. As remaining water freezes, it can't move into relief valve.
I'm not thinking of a mechanical valve - a burst disc essentially is an engineered weak point, designed to fail first. It would have enough clearance for the ice to be forced out through it, and be in a location with sufficient drainage that water damage would be minimised when the ice melts.
It sounds like the answer is that to be effective, you'd have to put too many of them along the length of the pipework.
Water expands about 9% when it freezes. It's not a question of pressure relief, it's a question of the pipe bursting in multiple locations as it freezes end to end if you have lost heat in the house. The pipes don't leak until the ice melts.
Consult your local regulations of course. But frozen pipes are no joke and can turn a brand new, perfect home into a condemned tear-down, rebuild in a matter of hours.
For those in that situation, turn off the water to your home and drain the pipes. Bursting pipes can do massive damage to your home and make it uninhabitable during the rehab.
Two units in my apartment building already flooded because they didn't trickle their water. Trickle means a tiny trickle of drops, not leaving the tap running. Use common sense, not FUD.
You would think so but there were rolling blackouts during the bay area/socal fire season last year and nobody seemed to change course. I wonder if it’s because a lot of companies in the Bay Area already had remote workers?
Some septic systems require power for a lift, essentially a pumping station. When the ground is too flat, you need to pump the waste higher than the drain field.
If you've ever seen a septic system with an audible alarm, this is probably why.
If you don't have sewer service, you'll usually have a septic tank instead. It's basically a mini waste treatment plant in your backyard, eventually the water will flow into the ground. Modern systems have pumps and such that depend on electricity to function.
I’ve never heard of a below ground septic system that required pumps. The only pumps for drainage are for sub level bathrooms such as in basements.
There is a significant overlap of septic installations and wells and most modern wells run on electric. But if you’re toilet’s basin is full, it doesn’t need any power to flush and drain. It just won’t fill again.
They're common used in multi stage septic systems that have a perc field above the tank level. If this pump is without power for a significant time, it will cause quite a problem. However usually your tank will have enough free capacity for some hours. You don't see pumps in single tanks very often due to solids blocking the intake.
When one of the pumps on my aerobic system died a few years back it was less than 24 hours before the drains were backed up. If your soil won't pass a perc test I guess you can just go with aerobic which allows you to build pretty much anywhere. The final stage sprays effluent on your yard.
If you have a pressure fed (septic) sewer system, you need electricity for it to work. Usually if you avoid excessive water use, your holding tank has a bit of reserve.
I've been out of power since Sunday night. Water out since yesterday. I'm on the seventh floor too. Most of my friends are in even worse situation. I'm a paranoid near doomsday prepped and my batteries are still low.
Walking out of my apartment is indistinguishable from an apocalypse. The emergency system batteries died days ago. Police don't come. The roads are pure ice. Nothing is open. All essential supplies are sold out. Fire systems are all disabled because pipes have burst. Elevators have been gone for a long time. Without a flashlight you might as well be in a cave.
Gas furnaces need power for the circuitry & blower.
My experience with fireplaces is that the house winds up net-colder, but you can warm yourself with radiant heat while it burns. Freestanding wood stoves on the other hand are very capable of warming a large space.
A tight wood stove in the hands of an experienced user is a remarkable thing. The amount of heat that can be extracted from a large oak log is nothing short of remarkable.
Sadly, most wood stoves are not tight, nor are most users experienced.
Best fireplace in terms of efficiency is a rocket mass heater. It burns the wood gas in a secondary burn chamber and then routes the exhaust through a lot of thermal mass. One 2 hour fire a day will usually heat 2000 sq feet of house. 3m video explains the concept; longer videos will better explain it https://youtu.be/fwCz8Ris79g
This is 50% of the reason why pellet stoves were created, with the other 50% being you can burn scraps instead of large oak logs that could be used for furniture etc.
Pellet stoves sound nice in concept but my experience with them (n=2) has not been good. The hoppers break and jam, the fans die, and they’re generally just a pain in the rear. Usually happens right when you need them most, too.
I only have n=1 experience here, but I've been using a pellet stove for years, burning a ton (50 bags) of pellets each year. I buy quality pellets which avoids having clinkers and keep them dry in the garage.
It does require yearly maintenance to grease the motor and I had to undergo some repairs when we bought it (used, it came with the house) because the previous owners did some really dodgy stuff like using a completely wrong sized fuse and taping it in with duct tape, mangling the fuse holder, but it has been reliable for over a decade now.
Cold climate here (Quebec) and we heat with electricity usually. Many people have an electric furnace (forced air) or even baseboard (what I have for example). We also have a heat pump (heats the upstairs very well until about -15C and provides awesome AC for the entire house in summer).
For Power outages and also coz its just awesomely warm: propane fireplace. All the benefits of a wood fireplace with none of the downsides.
What this means is that we don't worry about "oh how about we all go ice skating" just turn the fireplace off without worrying about a fire. No indoor air quality issues. Electricity is out? Sure no fan but who cares. Still warm (and some have battery backup fans). Have to start it up without electricity? No problem, pilot lights w/ piezo starter. Propane delivery isn't that different from having to stockpile the firewood.
LPG or Propane is awesome down until -42 celsius. Then it’s basically useless as it won’t vaporize. Live in Quebec too and my backup is a dual fuel generator. Propane and then regular fuel if it’s too cold or I’m out of propane. Never too careful!
You do have us on the regular fuel backup :) don't have that but we also don't have a backup generator in general. I wanted to last time we had a >12 hour outage but couldn't get the expense approved by the "finance minister" (i.e. the SO). When the electricity goes out for more than an hour or so the neighborhood is suddenly very loud though coz several next door neighbors go and bring out their generators so I'm not too worried about our survival and there's always the firewood pile in the backyard.
I haven't downvoted you, but it's perhaps because the LPG tank is usually outside with a rather large surface area, so if -40 degree days are rare, insulating the tanks and providing a heater might not be very cost-effective vs. having multiple fuel jets in your burner for multiple viscosity fuels.
Also, either the "way to keep the tank warm" would probably be an electric heater (which would fail in these corner cases) or else a small burner... next to your tank of highly flammable gas with lots of no-smoking signs around.
Though, I would guess in colder climates, if you really wanted to use LPG, you could put an electric fuel pump in your tank (so it doesn't rely on vapour pressure to feed) and have a burner that pre-warms the fuel and includes a small electric heater for starting.
> it's perhaps because the LPG tank is usually outside with a rather large surface area, so if -40 degree days are rare, insulating the tanks and providing a heater might not be very cost-effective vs. having multiple fuel jets in your burner for multiple viscosity fuels.
It's more or less a one-time cost and you might want the simplicity. Tradeoffs rather than it being inevitable.
And multiple fuel jets aren't enough. If you can't depend on the propane, then you need a lot of backup fuel.
> small burner... next to your tank of highly flammable gas with lots of no-smoking signs around.
You have fire that's not very far anyway. It's not hard for an expert to design something that's safe, since you don't need all that much heat.
> Though, I would guess in colder climates, if you really wanted to use LPG, you could put an electric fuel pump in your tank (so it doesn't rely on vapour pressure to feed) and have a burner that pre-warms the fuel and includes a small electric heater for starting.
If you prefer keeping the tank design the same, that sounds fine. A tiny pump would take barely any power, so a cheap solid-state generator attached to the burner could run it and charge your phone too. You don't even need a battery to get things going; a 1 pound tank could be warmed by hand if everything else goes wrong.
They also change the composition of at least Diesel at the pump. Not sure on fuel oil which is essentially the same as Diesel at the pump, save for possibly things like that (definitely the color)
Yes, most of my relatives on my mom's side are farmers in the upper Midwest. They have separate (gravity fed) tanks on their farms for #1 and #2 diesel, and the tank they use for filling the tractors depends on the season.
(Farmers buy diesel in bulk and don't pay road tax on it. It's illegal to put the untaxed diesel into a pickup that ever leaves the farm.)
What's a good place to learn the art, do you know? I'm not in Texas, but I have two woodstoves now, and my one experiment with them thus far has taught me only that I have a lot to learn.
Other poster covered it well, but one thing to add. There are the kinds of wood burning stove. Old simple, pre EPA mandated high efficiency stove, efficient stoves with a catalyst to provide the clean burn, and efficient stoves that use secondary air injection to provide a clean burn. The new efficient stoves are a bit more forgiving for throttling them down for long burns without producing too much creosote they can cause chimney fires.
I just replaced the old stove in my house with a new catalyst model and I burn 30% less wood while providing more steady even heat. I am heating 4000 sqft 2 story with only wood heat, one load every 12 hours, house between 80 and 64 degrees depending on location.
Are you aware of any high-efficiency wood burners that don't require electrical power for the secondary air injection? If they do all require electrical power for secondary air injection, if power is lost, do they quickly foul the burners with soot, or do they just gracefully degrade to running at a lower efficiency?
The secondary air combustion for wood burning stoves usually doesn't require electricity. At least, we shopped for an EPA 2020 compliant replacement wood stove a couple years ago, and I don't think I came across that needed electricity for combustion. Pellet burning stoves often do, and there are often add-on kits for wood stoves to provide greater air circulation for the room, but the primary and secondary combustion use the natural "draft" from the chimney. I guess it's possible that even higher efficiency would be possible for bulk wood with a forced air design, but I don't think they are common. We ended up with a Progress Hybrid Soapstone, and have been happy with it.
Other reply covered it nicely. I am not aware of any conventional high efficiency wood stove that requires electricity to run. I do have blowers on mine to circulate air over the convection deck, which also reduces clearance requirements to the rear of the stove.
I opted for a blaze king catalyst stove. It’s probably the nicest stove utilitarian stove you can buy if you want to heat a large space and want to control temp outputs. Downside is cat replacements every 5 or so years, but that’s not a big deal and worth the benefits.
Wood stoves are charcoal breeder reactors powered by their own vaporized wood gas. The re-radiated heat from the ironwork is what gives them their extreme warmth. They are like many other fuel burners — stage one vaporizes the fuel and stage two burns the vapor — it’s just that both stages are in the same iron firebox.
When you start a fire you want to quickly get the stove up to temperature. Use small split logs and kindling sticks along with some kind of “candle” that burns long enough to get the flames going. Commercial fire lighters (kerosine wax bricks) or even just a bit of kitchen towel with a tablespoon of vegetable oil will do.
The kindling and your first log will burn hot and bright with an attractive yellow flame — like a campfire. At the end of this first burn you will build up a layer of red hot wood embers in the base of the firebox and the ironwork will be about half way to temperature.
The next stage and each stage after that is to put on a much smaller load — often I will just use a single large log — and leave the air intake or door ajar, temporarily. The hot embers will rapidly get the new log hot and the whole thing will instantly go from glowing red to an inferno in under a minute.
At that point you have achieved a self sustaining reactor. You can leave it running full throttle if you want the pretty yellow flames. It will only last 20 minutes though and all the energy will blast up the chimney.
Much better, and indeed the whole reason for having a wood stove over an open grate, is to now shut off almost all of the airflow to the firebox. Low airflow means the combustion goes right down — you may not even see any flames if you go super low — but it also means the stove isn’t being constantly cooled by a high volume of airflow.
If you balance it just right then the flame front of burning wood gas will sit above the logs and permeate the whole chamber. It looks like a cross between Aurora borealis and a Backdraft (1991) slo-mo sequence — a deep red wraith that flaps around slowly, completely unlike the sooty yellow flames you began with. You get a real feeling for how it’s the gas not the wood that’s burning. (Having a stove with a glass viewing window really opened my eyes to their operation.)
A single 10” log — quarter split from a 20” diameter ash tree and air dried for 18 months to <20% moisture content — will now produce 10kW for an hour or more and stay burning for eight. The fire will “keep” overnight and in the morning you can put on a new log, fire it up with the door ajar, and be back at full capacity in minutes.
What’s interesting is that if you run the stove in pretty mode — like a cartoon open fireplace with crackling and burning and yellow flames with the vents or even the whole front door open — you’ll notice that parts of the stove might not even get hot. The iron air intake grill on mine will remain at room temperature because although the flames are vigorous, the airflow is so fast it keeps the stove body cool.
Conversely, once the stove has been running for an hour in slow burn mode, the entire body is practically glowing and requires thick gloves to handle. It is wonderful.
Exactly this. Wood stoves operated in this manner are extremely efficient, and generate particulate emissions comparable to an oil-fired furnace, maybe 100x less than an open-hearth fireplace.
> It looks like a cross between Aurora borealis and a Backdraft (1991) slo-mo sequence — a deep red wraith that flaps around slowly, completely unlike the sooty yellow flames you began with. You get a real feeling for how it’s the gas not the wood that’s burning. (Having a stove with a glass viewing window really opened my eyes to their operation.)
Would love a video if you can find one to see exactly what you're talking about.
After a quick search on YouTube I was somewhat unsatisfied; the few videos I looked at showed the effect only partially. People do sometimes like to bias the burn towards the yellow flame, either for entertainment or to keep the temperature of the stove down. Also it's hard to capture. My own attempts to photograph the effect haven't been successful due to the movement of the flame and the gentle low red glow that it gives off.
I've never seen it before (so I'm not 100% this is the same thing), but did find a picture that I think is similar to what they're describing - the red glow in the top window of the picture here: https://commonsensehome.com/masonry-heaters/
The trick is to start it up hot and then reduce down the airflow to near zero. The knowledge was passed down in the tribe, so I don't know where one learns the art.
Right, if you think about it almost all of the heat from the fire goes right up the chimney. The brick of the firebox & chimney are generally built outside the building envelope for safety reasons, so any heat in the brick doesn't warm the house. The only heat that actually makes its way into the house is the radiant heat cast from the fire itself, which is small.
The smoke is poison, and unlike a furnace, gas fireplace, firebox, or wood stove, there is no heat exchanger, so you can't capture any of the heat out of the flue gasses.
It's counter-intuitive, I know. But this is why everybody congregated around the hearth in the days of fireplaces.
This is why russian-style stoves have a whole labyrinth for the air to blow through, warming up the large brick structure. It can hold heat for a while even after it's done burning.
Even worse, all that exhaust gas that goes up the chimney has to be replaced. And it's replaced by cold air from the outside coming through all the little books and crannies of your house.
There are many different designs that have tried to solve the issue. Both from capturing the heat lost up the chimney and supplying combustion air from outside. They all come with downsides and ultimately forced air heating won out.
The 180 year old house I grew up in has a central brick chimney for this reason. When you put the fire out before going to bed you have a column of brick radiating throughout the night. It’s still pretty chilly in the morning but it works quite well.
Right, but it turns out the mortar fails more often than you would like and you'd get smoke & carbon monoxide leaking into houses from that central chimney, which is why that went away (or so I've heard)
Almost without comment. All I will say is that we have some friends in Germany living in the 'countryside' (as much as that's still a thing in densely populated Germany) that heat their main living area with one of these (way less elaborate design lol). My grandma had one of these sitting in the wall between kitchen (right next to the eating area) and the living room.
My parents have one of these in their holiday house by the sea (essentially an old farmhands dwelling). I can confirm that it heats the house up to blistering temperature even in the coldest winter if one wants. Other friends use a more modern design in their house which essentially heats up the whole house (I don't think they have any other heating except water heating)
The house I grew up in in Scotland did exactly this.
We had fireplace powered central heating -— radiators throughout the house linked to pipes behind the firebox. In the morning I’d wake up to ice on the inside of the windows, and by my teenage years it was my job to head downstairs and light the coal fire first thing in the morning. It worked well once the fire was up and running.
This is a very old problem and there are solutions, like the Franklin stove [1]. However, we don’t really use fireplaces as a primary source of heat anymore. Their use is really more decorative. If they were really intended for heat generation, so one of the other posts mentioned, we would use a completely different design.
Wood boilers are common enough. Pipes and radiators won't do all that much good if you aren't moving the water, and at that point it makes sense to optimize the whole thing for heating water with the minimum required fuel.
My father did that a long time ago in a house that had baseboard heat. Made a fire grate out of plumbing pipe, ran the baseboard water through that. It worked, when it did. It would also somehow get air in the lines and start banging from time-to-time. I was a kid, so I don't know if the monetary savings offset the pain in the arse, or not.
In parts of Europe (definitely Germany) heating with water based radiators throughout the house is normal. And that goes from individual houses to big apartment complexes (I lived in a 52 unit one with a central furnace). It's totally normal to let the air out of your radiator from time to time. And they (or you in the individual house case) fill up the water in the 'closed' system from time to time.
Different places, different 'customs' i.e. systems we are used to. All have their pros and cons and sometimes it's just that we don't know that different systems exist.
Radiative heat actually makes you feel significantly warmer, so you can set your heating to a lower temperature and still feel the same warmth compared to airflow heating. This is the reason why floor heating is very efficient, because you have a large heat mass with radiative heat that sits at your feet (which typically get cold first). So it provides the same comfortlevel at significantly lower temperature.
Which is why it is better to make a quick but strong draft in your home than keep window constantly slightly open. With a quick exchange of air, your walls remain warm and continue to radiate heat. Having a window constantly slightly open means air exchange is slow but constant and the area of the wall around the window cools down significantly.
It takes very, very specific conditions (you'd have to go out of your way to minimize radiant heat transfer) for a fireplace to put less heat into a room than it removes with airflow.
Back in the day (i.e. 1700s) everyone heated with fireplaces. And many of them (e.g. 2nd floor ones) weren't that big.
The problem, in my experience (grew up spending significant time in a 3 story country house made of stone with only one fireplace for heating), is that it gets warm close to the fire and whatever is touching the chimney, but the rest of the house gets colder because of the cold air drawn in by the fire. So very likely a net gain, but depending on where you sleep, it could get interesting at night.
Fireplaces typically draw air from the house to sustain the fire, then up the chimney or out a vent. That creates negative pressure, which draws cold, unconditioned air from outside into the house from wherever air can leak in.
How this works out in terms of net heat gained/lost will depend on the fireplace design, but, from what I hear, it's not uncommon for this to be a net-loss type of situation.
Not if they are in the attic. Also, my house has a subfloor. When the furnace and water heater were inside the part of the house you live in, they both had vents on the floor, so air used for combustion came from outside.
No, the issue is that the draw of the heated air up through the flue creates a negative pressure inside the home, which gets made up through all the little nooks and crannies around the house.
As a result, the room where the fireplace is will be warmer but the rest the house is typically colder.
Probably to a small extent but the more pronounced effect is the heat gradient. The rest of the house becoming quite a bit colder just sends you back to the fireplace, which is generally not a bad place to be, so overall it's not a major issue.
It does, and it creates a floor on the outside temperature where the heat from the stove is overcome by the losses of sucking in the cold air. This depends on the design of the stove. Some wood stoves pull down the firebox air from the outside to avoid this problem, but it is fairly unusual. There is a second heat exchanger with its own fan that circulates the inside air. The problem with this is that you still lose a lot of heat up the chimney.
> Some wood stoves pull down the firebox air from the outside to avoid this problem, but it is fairly unusual.
AFAIK in europe having outside air intake in stove is mandated by law. You can not use it, but all newly built houses have outside intake if someone was planning on adding wood stove. You also need to have proper vent near your stove, so even if it uses inside air, it will typically get it through that. I have automatic pellet burning furnace in basement for normal heating needs (it starts automatically when needed, uses 3 temperature sensors on floors and in basement) and wood stove for "romantic" purposes, but when it's fired, it heats up almost whole house and pellet stove sees that no more heating is needed. I have lots of leftover wood from construction phase, so wood stove will pay itself back from reduced use of pellet.
As for losing heat through chimney - properly mounted and operated wood stove doesn't lose that much heat through chimney. Most of them have long enough steel pipe from stove to chimney, which reuses some heat from exhaust and ventilation channels in chimney, which are heating incoming air.
Many fireplaces that HSE outside air sometimes put hot smoke out the intake. The intake probably wasn't designed for this so it is a fire hazzard. This can be avoided, but if you don't know how you probably didn't.
Then again Ben Franklin figured out how to make a fireplace that worked yet most don't.
I doubt this net-loss is the case for most new gas fireplaces with direct-vent exhaust systems, in which case the combustion air comes from the outside. This is what I have. Not sure how common these would be in Texas. It can also be used in the event of a power outage. (Minus the fan) [1]
Yes. You’ve got a big hole in the wall/ceiling with a pressure differential blowing most of the heat up & out while sucking cold air in. Balanced improperly, you get a radiant heat area with rest subject to cold air.
Seems like they should divert a small part of their output to keeping a small battery backup just in case of emergencies. Then in an emergency the battery could reignite the system and run the blowers with the furnace again diverting some output to keeping things charged.
You would need the generator to provide about 100 watts to run the electronics and blower. Something passive like a thermoelectric generator would require a large amount of surface area to get this much power. Something more active like a traditional generator would require significant maintenance. If you’re really concerned your best bet is to get a couple Powerwalls and limit what you run off them. You could go a week running just the furnace and charging cellphones.
Power walls are pretty expensive. Much cheaper-- if you're primary concern is keep heat going and maybe a few other basics-- would be a low-maintenance dual fuel generator. Unlike the powerwall it's run-time isn't limited. Prolonged blackouts will run the powerwall dry, but with a dual fuel generator as long as you can get gasoline or propane you're good to go.
I suppose if you can afford it, go for both and have multiple reduncancy.
I have seen some fireplaces in US (I am from Poland) and outside of northern states they are all decorative pieces not designed to heat the home.
A good fireplace is completely closed (yes! no fire visible!) and is built to recover and store as much heat as possible.
* the fireplace must be enclosed completely so that it is possible to regulate amount of air going inside and especially to close it completely and SAFELY when you go to sleep. You need to close it so that it does not suck air out of your house. The fireplace stores heat but it does not make any sense if, once it burns out, the air takes all that stored heat out.
* the hot gasses go through a complicated tunnel (not directly into chimney) to heat up a large amount of bricks made from material that has high energy capacity. That's why here in Europe we don't tell silly stories about Santa coming through the chimney, because that would be totally ridiculous. He could just as well be coming through water pipes, it is just as accessible.
* the fireplace is built on a steel bed so that you can easily take out the ash WHILE it is burning. Also, it supplies the fire from beneath which makes for much better heating.
* traditionally, if you made effort to keep fire on throughout the day, you want to make as much use of it as possible. That's why you will see these frequently performing multiple functions: separate space for oven, large top to be able to heat multitude of things, maybe even place to sleep (that especially in really cold climate in Russia, in Poland much less popular).
Here are pictures of traditional fireplaces you could expect to heat well:
The first one is something you would expect heating the kitchen and the main/dining room and provide most of the heating for the house throughout the day.
The second one is something to put in individual rooms that are too far from the kitchen. It is easy to light it up and it heats extremely quickly but also stores absolutely no heat.
There is a difference between a fireplace and a wood-fueled heater. You have described the latter. No one would ever call what you have shown in those images a 'fireplace' in English. There are wood-fueled heaters but they have mostly been replaced by ones that use composite wood pellets, these are popular for off-grid heating in the US.
That's exactly the point. Here this is the fireplace.
You will find western style "fireplaces" in some new homes which are nothing more than show pieces to have cosy atmosphere but are utterly impractical for the task of heating the home.
Now, what what we would call "heater" is usually placed in the basement for practical purposes. The ones I showed above are placed directly in living area and are way more efficient.
Traditionally, you did not heat entire home, only the area where you live which contracts during winter. There might be other rooms which you only heat in the evening before you go to bed and then it gets extremely cold (but that's fine, you just put good enough featherbed to keep warm). This is practical aspect because heating entire home requires huge amount of resources.
There are plenty of manufacturers making glass fireplace inserts that are designed to be combined with a heat accumulating flue systems. Romotop or Hoxter are examples of fancier ones. The finished stoves typically are specced to retain 50% peak heat output after 12h, 25% after 24h. Combined with automated dampers you just load the firewood, light it and can then basically forget about it as the automation takes care of regulating primary and secondary air and shutting air supply off once the fire is done burning.
Anyway, just as you mentioned, this requires enclosing the fireplace (even if with glass) and it requires that the heat is routed somewhere else rather than directly to chimney.
This is 101 of building a functional fireplace designed to heat the house.
No one in the US builds or uses functional fireplaces to heat the house. We have not done so for over 100 years. Any fireplace you see in the US is a decorative feature designed to look nice and set a 'mood' for a room. There are some off-grid wood-heated homes, and some places will have fireplaces designed to efficiently heat a room or two, but statistically these are so close to 0% as to not exist and in many locations it has become illegal to install wood-burning fireplaces due to the air pollution they cause.
This isn't really true. My parents build a house with a large fireplace in the living room. True enough it actually sucked warm air out of the house (tall chimney) and made the whole house colder.
My folks simply bought a really nice fireplace insert. It works extremely well. These are not uncommon, even in the south, and my parent's place is far from 'off grid'. They absolutely do use it to 'heat the house', and we only supplement with radiant heaters in the far bedrooms.
I think you should visit small town/rural New England. A good part of the population around here heats exclusively with wood but usually with a free standing stove or insert.
I think I went back and forth about adding a footnote to 'no one' to quantify before deciding against it. There are still some left who heat with wood, but only a percent or two. It seems pellet-based units are slowly taking over the biomass-heating niche, but I am sure old guys in flannel with a couple of cords of wood up against the side of the house will never disappear from the northeast.
I think you misunderstood. I don't have anything against fireplace as a completely decorative element. Just don't expect it to perform the function of heating the house.
Where I previously lived (in Switzerland), we had a fireplace/stove very similar to the first picture. A bit similar to this: https://artoffire.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Kachelofen-s... On the other side of the wall was the kitchen, and this was where you actually set up the fire, inside an ancient iron cooking stove. Using some kind of a "flap" you could allow the heat from the stove (for cooking) to go to the tiled stove in the living room (for heating).
In my current appartment (also in Switzerland), this is the stove we have: https://imgur.com/a/SVKahw5 We also have an oil based central heating system, so it's not really needed anymore, but on very cold days it allows to get the living room warm and cozy.
>Most lost water for some stretch of time and some still don't have it.
This is extremely problematic. Power going out for periods of time less than 48 hours is one thing, losing water from the utility is a problem 3rd world countries have. You sure these people's pipes didn't simply freeze.
Having worked at a water treatment plant in the past: if the power is out for a sufficiently long time, then your water is going to go dry. The time it takes is dependent on the distribution system (and time of year, you consume about twice as much water in summer as in winter), but where I worked, it was about 12 hours.
Also, we had no generators. Why? Because a) power outages of that length are extremely uncommon (2 in 70 years, IIRC) and b) the power draw of a large water treatment plant is insanely high. The water company was literally the largest consumer of power in the entire state, and turning on some of the pumps require the power company's permission because it draws that much power. It's not very feasible to keep a backup power system for such a large facility when the need for it is so very low.
Even if your pipes didn't freeze, the upstream pipes could have frozen, or enough of your neighbors' pipes could have frozen, burst, and gotten thawed again, allowing water to flow freely out of the system.
>I don't think any lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well.
I'm curious how they didn't lose heat. Any furnace built in the last 30 years, even gas, has an electronic control board in order to ensure it doesn't accidentally turn on the gas without a functioning pilot light and/or heating element (which would blow up your house).
No electricity = no heat, regardless of natural gas supply.
I've got about a dozen coworkers in Texas, they've all been without power (which means no heat) for two days now. The power comes on long enough to at least warm their houses up to 50ish degrees before dropping back out so they're not completely screwed but I know they're scared.
The big issue isn't just the control board-- most forced-air furnaces (at least, of the type used in the southern US) use an electric blower to actually distribute hot air to the rest of the house.
End result's the same, though-- no electricity = no heat, regardless of natural gas supply. (But, at least in this case, a relatively small generator can provide enough power to get the furnace up and running and heat the house; the electric furnaces and heat pumps that are most common in places like Texas would need something quite a bit beefier to run without grid power).
My gas fireplace has a valve mounted flush with the floor. You use a special key-like wrench to turn it on.
Even with the valve barely open you have maybe 3 to 5 seconds to get it lit in a normal fashion. Heh mess around too long and you’re in for a big woosh and plenty of singed arm hair.
My gas fireplace still requires electricity to run. I know I can start it with a match if needed (and it has a pilot of course) but I'm not 100% sure if I can manually override the gas valve to open. It opens when I flip an electric switch.
Does it? Mine opens when I flip an electric switch, but it's self-powered via a thermopile on the pilot-- no AC connection whatsoever.
Some other models (from the same manufacturer as mine) don't have a standing pilot, but either use a battery as the primary ignition source, or use AC power but take batteries as a backup.
I've seen both styles. If it is a regular switch in the wall it uses mains to open the valve. If it has a switch on it, or a thermostat on the wall it probably is thermocouple powered. Though there are exceptions both ways.
Even with the switch on the wall nothing is certain. See my sibling post to parent. We had a wall thermostat but all it did was send a trigger current. If the thermo pile wasn't generating enough current nothing would happen :)
Sooo many different systems and many are just not well thought out. Especially in climates where it usually doesn't matter.
Here in Quebec it does matter so the one we have works in all conditions with various levels of manual intervention. We don't even have the one with a battery operated fan but even that exists.
Being close to the gulf a lot of people have generators that are likely big enough to power at least their fridge and one or more window/portable AC units. (For hurricanes.)
That size is usually big enough to run a blower and control board (and maybe a few other circuits), but it wouldn't come close to powering an electric heating element. But having a gas heater makes it all doable.
Though with a generator that big and some ingenuity you can plumb the radiator into the house and get heat from the engine. The more load on the genererator the more heat.
Very much true. I didn't touch on safety which is a real issue.
That doesn't make the idea bad though. There have been attempts to do this in commercial furnaces before, but the details are hard, and ultimately of questionable value in general. In this particular situation it might be useful, but that is a lot of complexity for something that only makes sense for a week every 10 years.
It's more an explanation of how you can have gas heat without power. Also, even heat pumps use a heating element at some point below 28~30 degrees. If you rely on the pump only below that, it'll start to freeze up into an ice block itself at some point.
Plus having a continuous plug-in (natural gas) fuel source is a big advantage over refilling a gasoline generator, which most portable generators are.
> No electricity = no heat, regardless of natural gas supply.
You're confusing furnaces and fireplaces.
A fireplace is soemthing that sits in a living space usually with a visible flame behind glass and is designed more for aesthetics than function. They typically run using a millivolt valve for the gas supply, with the voltage generated from a thermopile sitting in the pilot flame. They're often controlled by a regular light switch or a simple two-wire mechanical thermostat.
There's natural gas and propane models, and they'll run so long as you have gas flowing.
I upgraded mine to use an older wifi thermostat, but kept a light switch on a small cable underneath so I could always use it in case of a power outage, and it's come in handy a couple times. [1]
Mine also has a mains-powered blower fan built in (that's the plug on the left), but electrically it's completely separate and controlled by its own thermostat. It turns on when a certain temperature is hit -- usually about 5-10 minutes after the fireplace is on -- and stays on for some time after the flames are off. Obviously the blower doesn't work when there's a power outage but the fireplace still generates a usable amount of heat for the room.
On the other hand, my gas forced-air furnace -- which distributes heated air via ducts around the house -- is, as you describe, entirely useless without electricity. Even if it was running without the main blower fan, it would just be heating up the air sitting in the duct coming out of it. At best it might get some heat into the house via convection but I suspect it would cut out on thermal overload before actually doing anything useful.
They used go make furnances that didn't have a blower, hot air raises which gives circulation. You need bigger pipes and can never get high efficiency (went out of style before about 1960 is my guess ). If the furnace looks like it belongs in a horror film it might be this style.
I have a gas-only fireplace less than 20 years old that does not require power to function. There's a mechanical spark generator for lighting the pilot, but in colder months I keep the pilot on all the time. I believe the opening/closing of the valve for the gas to the main flame area is powered by a thermopile once the pilot is on.
Maybe it's changed lately, but most of the medium sized gas heaters (thinking fireplace inserts, fake wood stoves, etc.) have a feedback loop where the pilot light heats a thermocouple that opens the pilot light valve, plus a thermopile for opening the main valve when the thermostat switch closes. The fan won't run, but you'll still get radiant heat without main electricity.
Good question. I am unclear about heaters but I do think some of them are out for some team members and you may be right on that. Ovens also are commonly gas but ones since 1990 require an electric light. But... stovetops which are gas do not require electronic ignition. The risk is of course carbon monoxide poisoning; hopefully you have such detectors as part of your in-home fire detectors.
The problem is not so much the deliberate rotating blackouts who can get restored after a time, but large groups of people for whom power is out due to some other weather-related outage issue; there are large swaths of them in Houston at least according to the Centerpoint Energy outage map which distinguishes between the two (but does seem to be not the most timely updated data per various people I have talked to whose status has changed during today: http://gis.centerpointenergy.com/outagetracker/ )
This seems to be a problem specifically with whole house furnaces. I don't quite get why but I'm guessing cheap companies. Our gas fireplace has no such problems. Piezo electric knob to start the pilot (like your Coleman camping stove but it actually works - ask me how I know) and the pilot generates the electricity needed to actually let the gas flow. If the pilot isn't able to generate the electricity to open the gas valve then no gas ever enters the burn chamber. Again ask me how I know - yes those things gunk up and then can't supply the current you need to open the valve. Easy fix tho. Zero electricity needed and the upstairs stays warm. Also no cold air sucked into the house. The whole system is closed off towards the house. Love this thing!
I haven't seen a gas oven that can work without electricity. A gas stove, yes, you can simply turn on the gas and quickly use a kitchen lighter to ignite the gas manually and hope not too much poisonous gas escaped the stove. But ovens? How?
Older gas ovens used a standing pilot light. They would work without electrical power. Really old ones you light with a match.
My kitchen has a gas range, the oven uses electical resistance/incandescent ignitors so it won't work without electrical power. The top burners have spark ignitors but of course I can light them with a match.
Gas heaters still require electricity for basic management.
I'd imagine heaters have batteries for specifically this case. If they don't, it's frankly a miracle if we don't lose anyone, and someone needs to get prosecuted.
It is not feasible to run a gas furnace off a battery (short of a "whole house" battery like a Powerball). It's more than just basic management. You need to run either a blower or a pump to distribute the heat throughout the house. You'd need a substantial battery to run a 1/3 HP motor for any length of time.
A gas boiler furnace with steam radiators typically only requires power for the thermostat and solenoid valve, which can indeed be powered by a small battery. This is assuming you have a pilot light, which many older furnaces do.
Residential steam boilers are pretty rare these days. Generally hot water heat uses circulation pumps (which draw less than a forced air blower, but still have a non-trivial continuous current draw)
Furnaces don’t come with batteries because a 12v 100Ah battery that costs $180 will run a 1/3rd HP (700w) fan for 2 hours. To sustain the fan for 3 days, you’d need 36 batteries. Lead-acid batteries have a limited lifespan. You would also need a transfer switch and enclosures and at that point you may as well buy a UPS or a natural gas generator to provide backup power.
One thing the NEC 2020 update allowed is bi-directional power between an EV and its charger, you can set up an EV to provide backup power your house, with a transfer switch and everything.
Radiant heating systems with boilers require electricity for the pump, even if they’re gas fired. Electric resistive heating needs electricity. Forced air heating needs electricity to run the fan. All heating systems require electric power, even if the heat is generated by burning natural gas.
We're talking about forced air furnaces here, I think. Something has to force the air. A big blower motor that takes hundreds of watts.
Forced air heat is not great in terms of comfort, but in Texas you already have all the ductwork and the blower motor and so on for AC, so it's simplest just to add a gas burner to that.
at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well.
I have a gas fireplace, it's vented to the outside through a chimney.
If you sit right in front of it, you can feel a little radiant heat, but the true warmth comes from the electric fan that circulates air through the firebox that's heated from the gas flames. I'd always figured that if there was an extended power failure, I'd set up a 5V fan from my computer to blow air through the the fireplace.
Some gas fireplaces are "direct vent", which means that they vent the exhaust right into the room. I'd never trust one of those not to fill the room with Carbon Monoxide.
> I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work that well.
I believe fireplaces in Texas are for decoration. I live in a relatively new house in North Dallas, read open floor plan, and turning on the fireplace make absolutely no difference.
We managed to turn it on by replacing the igniter batteries and turned it back off after an hour because you don't get any heat unless you sit within 1 feet of it.
A "decorative" residential fireplace typically won't do much to provide real heat. If you want something that will make a difference it is usually going to be a sealed unit or something a little more purpose-built. Still, when you compare the burner in the average small fireplace to what you have in a typical furnace, it becomes clear pretty quickly that a fireplace is not likely to be a heat source of much merit, and even if it did have a decent BTU output, it's unlikely to be evenly distributed around the house.
tl;dr - a typical residential fireplace isn't an alternative to a furnace.
Re fireplace - check out a ventless system. They can change existing burner and logs with ventless which gives you lots of heat that a vented system won't. Can get a decent one for 600-1200 bucks.
My brother's house is currently 38°. Inside. Also, gas is not useful for a central, forced air system because it depends on the electric motor driving the blower.
For natural gas you want a sealed one so effluent goes up the chimney but the heat radiates through the glass. But heat rises so you create convection. I think a fireplace is an 80% loss so for $10 spent you get $2 heat.
Parts 15 and 16 of that PDF are, in polished up polite speak, particularly scathing in terms of what's being recommended.
The summary is: Regularly inspect and maintain your equipment, here are the obvious things that must be done. (Unstated: We feel a need to say this, because obviously it didn't happen in at least one place...)
Probably got cut by the bean counters and a cut-throat market that didn't require safety and availability as considerations.
If the penalty for ignoring scathing words is hurt feelings, then there's no reason to be scathing or not. (Well, except it might look good in an investigation someday.)
What's needed is real incentives, carrots and/or sticks, with real enforcement and follow-through. Speak softly, and all.
Yes I agree state's legislatures did not prepare. But maybe that shows why a body of politicians is not prepped for engineering nuances. Maybe they should have adequately applied leverage to the power companies to "push" them to better practices rather than trying to fine and inspect and regulate which is an inherently "pulling" option which the companies will always try to weasel out of.
This argument to incentivize rather than punish applies to many issues with legislative bodies across all complex industries like Big Tech and other Engineering fields. You pass a law that drinking water cannot have over 10ppm of XXX carcinogen? There is most likely going to be 9.99ppm because that's the bare minimum.
> Yes I agree state's legislatures did not prepare. But maybe that shows why a body of politicians is not prepped for engineering nuances.
The problem is that Texas is an outlier. Other governments, broadly, get this right. Those FERC recommendations mentioned upthread? They're the work of the government (hell, NERC is even a multinational globalist thing). That argues less that "governments are bad" than it does for "THIS government was bad".
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different outcome. When another option works and the current implementation fails, then it's time to change to the workable option.
> Under 10 ppm you get a carrot. Then drinking water will still be 9.99.
But also the company decides that they're okay with only getting that carrot 95% of the time because filtering costs money. So 5% of the time it's much worse.
The real power of a stick over a carrot is the incentives can be much bigger. If you're selling widgets, and 1% catching on fire just means you're paid 1% less, you don't care very much. If you're fined 50 times the purchase price for each widget that catches fire, you care a lot.
Can you clarify what the distinction is that you see here? Ultimately, whether it's fines/regulations ("stick") or bonuses/incentives ("carrot"), you're still going to have a bunch of budget-focused politicians pulling the levers.
Their incentive structure rewards short term budget savings at the expense of long term preparedness. The real fix is to have a non-partisan body staffed by actual engineers setting this kind of policy, isn't it?
The legislature could have done something, but the private utility companies could have also decided to provide a quality, reliable product. In the old days they may have considered it their civic duty. This is just another example of why private utility monopolies don’t work.
They did that in the old days because the public utility commission wielded a big stick. Companies only understand punishment when delivering a commodity service. Power companies care about the dividend.
In my experience running capital projects, you get performance by paying modest performance bonuses and assessing tough penalties for non-performance.
Est. 1970 just in case of unreliability (for utility shareholders), not much of a factor until recently. Given more leeway to disappoint consumers after 2002.
Up until 1995, under the HL&P monopoly the first 675 kWh remained extremely low cost for residential consumers as had been agreed with PUC to allow jacking up further residential kWh, and business accounts, into rates beyond the reach of low-income households. Check your old bills.
Of course 675 kWh is not enough for air conditioning but otherwise a small household could remain within that tier if they could conserve effectively, and had gas heat for the normally mild winters. As soon as deregulation started, HL&P then began the agressive promotion of new plans to all their established customers, similar to the limited number of newly allowed competitors where giving a break for the first bunch of kWh was no longer required. For a while there it was still required for HL&P consumers who had not opted out of their 1980's plan, but they made whatever straight-rate deals were necessary to get this info off of people's bills ASAP.
Headed us in the current direction starting in 2002.
New company Centerpoint took over the energy delivery infrastructure. Transmission assets from HL&P and others, delivery pipelines from gas suppliers, all of it.
As the name implies, pay no attention to a central point of failure. Nothing to see here.
By 1983 in the other most air-conditioned state, FPL the Florida state monopoly in a number of power plants was consuming the same grade of fuel oil as the Houston monopoly. A fuel oil vessel could be loaded from a Houston refinery, and with freight to FL the consumers there were paying half the price as in Houston using the same fuel without the added cost of sea freight.
7. As we have seen, Gov. Abbot has never been good enough for Texas, Lt. Gov. Patrick experienced his high point as a failed sports announcer, and Atty. Gen Paxton has only enough integrity for an uninhabited island.
Don't get me started on the equally compromised Ex. Rep. DeLay who in 2002 became US House Majority "Leader". Left in disgrace over lack of ethics himself.
Forgot to mention the 27-story Houston Public Works building downtown which was built in the 1960's by HL&P still has the nicely air-conditioned parking garage.
No garage doors to keep the cold air in since it didn't really matter to the power company.
No mayor has ever wanted citizens to be very aware of that since the city took over the building in 1999.
Also HL&P changed to numerous versions of "Reliant" as it was heading toward "spinning off" Centerpoint:
>Reliant Energy Inc.--formerly Houston Industries Inc.--operates among the top five power and natural gas marketers in the United States. With over $32 billion in assets, the company serves nearly four million customers in the southern United States and Minnesota. After the Texas Electric Choice Act was passed in 1999, Reliant Energy rolled its non-regulated operations into Reliant Resources, a majority owned subsidiary with power plants it the United States as well as the Netherlands. Reliant Resources also markets and trades energy in Germany, the United Kingdom, and in the United States. Reliant Energy Communications, an Internet-related division, provides Texans with Internet, data, voice, and other telecommunications services.
Dumping a political talking point like '20% more' without anything analytic to support it is just trash posting.
Interconnect with neighbour grids does not cost 20% more, AC or DC. In fact the huge peaking capability of a state with ~50% gas generation would generate revenue supplying peak demand and variations in renewable supply.
Pricing systems (i.e. market rules) that encourage reliability doesn't automatically lead to gold plating.
The customers unfortunate enough to have signed up for spot pricing are paying 200x more than before. One week of that is enough to erase two decades of 20% savings.
It would be interesting to see a plot of price vs. uptime in the face of unlikely events for electric grids, and which spot on the curve has been chosen here.
There are definitely points on such curves, of course, where you've exhausted the sweet spot and just have the option of paying e.g. 3x as much for a very modest marginal decrease in risk. But that doesn't sound like the case here.
I haven’t found a detailed comparison, but I learned today that El Paso, TX requires utility operators to winterize. Comparing El Paso to similar cities in Texas should provide a more definitive answer.
20% is about what energy deregulation supposedly saved customers. Utilities regulated under rate-of-return regulation tended to overbuild and maintain large safety margins, because they could pass those costs along to the customer.
We always get told that <important thing> will result in massive price increases for the customer, even though in practice it's not always true. For example, we're told raising the minimum wage above where it's been for decades will make everything cost absurd amounts, even though there are many cities in the US with a $15/hr minimum wage and prices there aren't much higher than the ones with minimum wages in the $8/hr range.
It certainly could raise your electrical costs by 20% for weatherization, but there's nothing stopping the utility from raising your costs for any other reason. If weatherization doesn't completely eat into their profit margins, they don't HAVE to raise prices at all. The government could also fund it as a one-time expense.
After experiencing that event? I think so. A lot of people on both sides of the political spectrum are very pissed right now. The state of Texas and its Republican rulers have been embarrassed in a big way, as the sham that is “free market” has been revealed for all to see.
Exactly the same thing happened in South Australia in 2016
1) Renewables % of generation mix grows (wind + solar)
2) Base generation sources get pushed out by economics and regulation (coal)
3) Peak generation sources get squeezed by the economics of wind + solar over summer (lots of wind, lots of sun) and begin to be relegated to backup roles
4) Something bad happens (in SA it was software misconfiguration across multiple wind generation sources)
5) The backup generation gets used for the first time, suprise suprise it doesnt work
Sorry, but no. A 2011 FERC report cited problems in Texas gas/coal/nuke plants for failing to weatherize. They didn't fix the problems, and gas and sensing lines froze, taking gas/coal plants offline too.
2/3rds of the power that went offline from the storm was fossil.
Moreover, Texas's independent grid (not connected to the rest of the US) makes it difficult for them to import power from neighboring states.
Stop trying to push political tribalist stories that blame renewables for bog standard failures in traditional systems that could have been avoided.
No, it's because natural gas got cheaper, and they switched to the cheaper source.
"The report also addresses the interdependency of the electric and natural gas industries. “Utilities are becoming increasingly reliant on gas-fired generation, in large part because shale production has dramatically reduced the cost of gas,”
In 2011 when this happened before, Texas had even less renewables. I realize you're trying to hard to sell an ideology to blame renewables for what is really, gross mismanagement of the Texas grid, including fossil and nuclear power, but the reality is much more complex than your simple narrative.
Which fossil source is cheaper also largely depends on individual markets. The way carbon offset and carbon pricing is implemented in Germany for example, means coal got cheaper than natural gas for electricity. Despite being bad at ramping up quick and being really worse for the climate and environment. Gas would also be a good companion to renewables, simply because a gas turbine is very reactive, something a coal plant is not.
Natural gas got cheaper if you don't include the cost of the power grid going down in the case of weather like this. I do wonder if it would still be cheaper if you do... it's not just the power plants that failed, apparently the pipelines and the natural gas production infrastructure couldn't cope either, and that sounds potentially really expensive to fix.
That doesn't explain why coal and nuclear plants failed. Or why gas power plants in other states are still running. All of which is in line with the 2011 report about TX not winterizing their power plants properly.
Frankly, it seems like you've decided that the issue is renewables and you're searching around for an argument to justify a conclusion you've already come to. Because what you're saying is simply not actually supported by the evidence or consistent with the current situation.
Yeah, but none of that appears to actually be what happened.
Renewables are down from their peak capacity in Texas, but they're actually performing above what the grid thought they'd do. So it's not like ERCOT got caught with their pants down when it comes to renewable generation.
Instead the issue appears to be that thermal (gas, coal, and nuclear) plants all over Texas are failing in the face of cold weather, and because Texas has its own grid it can't shift enough power from nearby states in order to cover the demand.
And it's not like these plants were off and everyone is surprised that they didn't turn on; Texas gets most of its power from natural gas most of the time. More to the point cold weather specific recommendations from back in 2011 weren't followed with sadly predictable consequences.
backup generation (gas) is not working. As mentioned. When your only on-demand source of generation is only profitable in peak periods its a recipe for disaster.
Again, this is not what is actually happening. Texas has heaps of on demand natural gas generators. They froze up with the storm and failed to turn on. Has nothing to do with renewable.
Strangely the rules under which some of them operate involve them paying for gas at spot prices (or at least during peak demand), and with spot gas prices being so high (due to pipeline failures limiting supply, and gas for heating having precedence) they had the option to stop generating...
How many of the 24+6 recommendations from the NERC/FERC review of last time this happened in Texas (hint:2011) were taken up by the legislature or those at ERCOT they delegated responsibility to or the power generation providers?
https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/ColdWeatherTrainingMaterials/...
The eye opener to me from skimming the 2011 recommendations is that there was no explicit rating/SLA for a power plant's acceptable temperature operating that could be used by planners for assessing the risks of an upcoming weather event by policy planners. It'd seem pretty basic to be able to ask "How many plants do we lose when temperature drops below X"? Dunno whether they fixed trying to create such a basic measurement for Texas plants, but it doesn't seem like it.
If you want to know some of the specifics about what "winterization" means in practice for a power plant including natural gas ones, you can read some of the details in that report. It's kinda interesting.