ERCOT: Texas Was 4 Minutes and 37 Seconds Away From a Blackout That Could Have Lasted Months

[captain queeg]

25. Thanks for digging into it. That makes some sense.

Frequency is the primary controller on the grid. I’m a little surprised that they operated 0.5 off of 60 for that long. In WECC the deviation limits are something like 0.05, but that’s what they are supposed to maintain. I don’t know what actions are prescribed when you get that far out of whack and didn’t know that about steam turbine blades. Certainly have even hydro units start vibrating violently and have seen blades fall off. For a hydro unit a broken blade would tend to get washed downstream and not be bouncing around hitting other blades. That would be bad news. Nowadays there’s a big emphasis on “predictive maintenance” and vibrations are closely monitored. I could see units tripping offline on their own with human actions taking place. It all just seems like they were operating a system lacking sufficient reserve capacity.