Link without having to type it in:
DOE Letter To ERCOT

I’ve spent much of my life working with process control automation. It’s believable technically.

Hyperbole. Drama.

Not believable.

Believe it!

Based on sources you cannot quote and reasons you cannot justify. No thank you Sir

Why should they? You post no proof and want people to believe yet on the other hand I post proof contradicting you and you don’t believe it. Oh the hypocrisy.

And your source is?

Would his brother in law suffice?

That is funny as hell FYI.

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but thats Ercots letter to the DOE..... its on Ercot letterhead.

Yup. People that don't work in process control have no idea.

Yes, Director of Ercot. They left off the rest

Ercot, to dept of energy.

My source is common sense. No way we were 277 seconds away from complete blackout.

If so, what made it all good all of the sudden.

You have been defending ERCOT this entire time with no source other that the BIL. You obviously are biased as the BIL has a pretty good job he does not want to lose. I get that but don't feed us crap and expect us to think is a filet.

Taking load off the grid.

That is true. I went dark at 3am Sunday and that killed our water. Water company had them turn us back on a 7p. Damage was already done,

Yep, like a plane pulling out of a dive before it crashes...

Like, I said before. My eyes glaze over when my BIL tries to explain things. HZ, MWH, Freq I dont grasp that chet.

If it is not true, somebody within ERCOT will soon become a whistleblower. There should be a lot of people that know it is either true or BS, too many people to try a cover up..

I have no idea how true the story is, but being able to give an exact amount of time is very believable. Turbines, generators, and most mechanical things can only work at an extended load range for so long, then they blow up. All of these generators have a built in safety that can not be overridden that will shut them down. Let a big enough unit go down and the rest of the grid will fall like dominoes from overload. That part is very believable. The months to restore power, not so much. They would all shut down on safety switches. Meaning they can all be started up back up, that’s the point in the safety. That could in fact take days.

The problem is all we have is just that statement. It would be interesting to see what that’s based on. It’s certainly plausible. Process control data collection in the power industry is pretty good. I’ve been in automation projects where we could look back through data and estimate fairly well that some important piece of machinery was about 4 minutes and 26 seconds [estimated] from rapid, uncontrolled disassembly.

This is not the same but it’s the general idea. I am using a home as an example but we are talking a huge amount of kilovolts in reality. You have circuit breakers in your home right? Well prior to circuit breakers we had fuses. Remember those?

We all have had breakers and fuses pop immediately when overloaded. But other times when it’s somewhat overloaded it might take 5 to 15 minutes for your breaker or fuse to pop. Have you ever had that happen? Well if you had the right electric process control monitoring in your home, it could monitor the load and pretty accurately predict when that breaker or fuse might trip.

Now consider yourself in a world where you have one main fuse to your home. Imagine that fuse has a 4 to 6 week lead time to get a new one. Home power doesn’t work like that anymore but it gives you the idea for the state of Texas.

Now imagine you want to play with electricity in your garage. You hook up all sorts of things directly to incoming power with no breakers or fuses. You use a whole network of power cables and strips just for fun. You’re going to have fireworks. Cables will catch on fire. Cable will melt and burn through until it disconnects itself.

Now transition your thinking from just your garage to the whole power grid.

Your home is a little micro power grid. The same constraints are true before those lines get to your home but the voltages go much higher the further up the chain you get. Your home is micro power grid, your neighborhood is a bigger power grid, your city, your region etc etc. Each of those levels can burn when overloaded.

We have shutdown system timers on most of our big machines; gas turbines, steam turbines, big motors(20khp), etc. They are based on various things such as percent horsepower, amps, vapor inlet temp, vapor outlet temp, etc. A timer may come in on say amps at 300 amps at 900 seconds, 325 amps at 800 seconds, 350 amps at 700 seconds etc. People smarter than me have come up with these values and times but know exactly how long at what constraint a piece of equipment will catastrophically fail. In order to avoid failure, there are safety interlocks to trip equipment or shed users. As you shed users you unload the machine and the timer gets further away from its trip point until it is no longer in the danger zone.

Answering your question based on now instead of what happened.

Outside temperatures increased. Load decreased. More electricity production came back online. A lot of this is just people don’t understand because they never see or deal with it.

When you turn the water faucet on, clean drinkable water flows forth. When you flush the terlet Archie Bunker style it magically flows away and disappears, your thermostat without using sorcery controls the temperature in your home. And finally your Doritos have a pretty consistent distribution of seasonings on the chips in each package. And those chips have Nitrogen in the bags instead of air to reduce oxidation. That is entirely due to witchcraft.