100%. Our system has been on stage 2 aux heat (electric) ever since we dropped below 24 or so. Usually we might see it for a few hours on the coldest nights. I'd say most people are probably pulling full summer load +20%. On Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 5:10 PM Seth Mattinen <sethm@rollernet.us> wrote:
On 2/16/21 09:49, Michael Thomas wrote:
On 2/16/21 8:50 AM, John Von Essen wrote:
I just assumed most people in Texas have heat pumps- AC in the summer and minimal heating in the winter when needed. When the entire state gets a deep freeze, everybody is running those heat pumps non-stop, and the generation capacity simply wasn’t there. i.e. coal or natural gas plants have some turbines offline, etc.,. in the winter because historically power use is much much less. The odd thing is its been days now, those plants should be able to ramp back up to capacity - but clearly they haven’t. Blaming this on wind turbines is BS. In fact, if it weren’t for so many people in Texas with grid-tie solar systems, the situation would be even worse.
You'd think that mid-summer Texas chews a lot more peak capacity than the middle of winter. Plus I would think a lot of Texas uses natural gas for heat rather than electricity further mitigating its effect on the
grid.
The difference is that in extreme cold heat pump systems are likely switching on emergency heat (i.e. plain old resistance heaters) when the compressor alone can no longer keep up with call for heat demand, which requires significantly more power. That's never happening in the summer, which is only ever running the compressor.