ERCOT: Texas power grid was ‘seconds, minutes’ away from catastrophic blackout event

[rangerrebew]

ERCOT: Texas power grid was ‘seconds, minutes’ away from catastrophic blackout event
Texas

by: Billy Gates, Wes Wilson
Posted: Feb 18, 2021 / 09:56 AM GMT-0600   / Updated: Feb 18, 2021 / 11:46 AM GMT-0600   

AUSTIN (KXAN) — As ERCOT announced Thursday all controlled outages have ended in Texas, it also shed light on how close the state came to “catastrophic” blackouts.

With the end of controlled outages, utility companies, including Austin Energy, Oncor, and others, can bring back all power online as each utility sees fit.

ERCOT President and CEO Bill Magness said during a news conference Thursday the company authorized transmission operators at utilities to get power back to those affected by Monday’s mandated load shed outages. Those outages ended up being prolonged, not rotating like originally

https://www.borderreport.com/regions/texas/ercot-controlled-outages-over-power-can-be-restored-across-texas-live-update-at-10-a-m/

[thackney]

...When asked how close the grid was from having a “catastrophic blackout,” Magness said if transmission operators hadn’t reacted “very rapidly to change the situation,” things could have escalated quickly.

“We were at a level of frequency that needed to be addressed immediately,” Magness said, “and that’s what the operators did. It was seconds and minutes, given the amount of generation coming off the system at the same time the demand was still going up significantly.”

Woodfin explained there’s a “safety net” that automatically takes effect if transmission operators aren’t able to reduce load fast enough. He said the system, called under-frequency load shed, will automatically shed a percentage of load if the frequency drops really far, really fast due to severe power supply imbalance....

Yep, that is the way electricity works.  Very difficult to have a "surge tank" like a liquid system to handle sudden drops in input.  The utility sized battery systems are actually helping a lot for these systems.

[Bigun]

Yep, that is the way electricity works.  Very difficult to have a "surge tank" like a liquid system to handle sudden drops in input.  The utility sized battery systems are actually helping a lot for these systems.

I once saw the Eastern province of Saudi Arabia (where all the industry was at the time) so dead for electricity that welding machines had to be used in generating facilities to provide sync voltage so generators could be brought back on.  Why, the lack of automatic load shedding devices on the grid.  The ultimate cause was later determined to be one 480 volt motor that had gone to ground in one of the facilities on the grid.

[thackney]

I once saw the Eastern province of Saudi Arabia (where all the industry was at the time) so dead for electricity that welding machines had to be used in generating facilities to provide sync voltage so generators could be brought back on.  Why, the lack of automatic load shedding devices on the grid.  The ultimate cause was later determined to be one 480 volt motor that had gone to ground in one of the facilities on the grid.

Yep, electric reactions happen FAST.  Protective Device Coordination even today is somewhat still an Art, but very much based in science.