Thread by @TeJay_the_Mad

Alrighty. Another explainer

Please bear in mind, I am just a field engineer who troubleshoots broken power plants. I'm not an expert in anything but my particular specialty (which is niche in the power distribution industry)

There is always more behind the curtain.

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The basics: The power industry at the power plant level operates in seasons. You have two peak seasons and two outage seasons per year.

Peak season is also called peak run season, the time where plants want to be online and making money. This is winter/summer.

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Outage season is the fall/spring, where there is less demand, prices fall, and power plants are ready to do their maintenance.

Planned maintenance.

Maintenance at a power plant requires a lot of planning, and planning starts at least a year out.

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You might infer that doing any updates to the power plants to protect against severe weather events like the storm last winter or the record heat coming up cannot be solved quickly. These kinds of updates require parts, planning, people, and most importantly, money.

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You can't just got to the power plant store and buy heat tracing off the shelf. (Heat tracing is what lets a power plant survive cold temps)

These are systems that require engineering oversight to plan, people to implement them, integration with existing systems.

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Can it be done?

Absolutely. As long as we have the people, parts, and cash.

Can it be done in less than a season from planning to implementation?

No. Here's why.

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People: Anyone who knows anything about business knows that you try to employ the amount of people who will get the job done while returning a profit to the company. The business will forecast need, and base hiring decisions on that forecast.

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People like me? We're EXPENSIVE. The training is long, the OJT is long, and while the ROI is good, they only want JUST enough of us to get the job done. Its not a job you can just hire someone off the street to do, it takes investment into a very specialize skillset

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Normally, this works out just fine. Typical outage season for me starts in mid-late January and ends in May, then starts again in August and ends in mid-late November. I do some scheduled jobs, but a lot of my workload is trouble callouts.

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Trouble calls are what happens when a plant breaks down and cant get their turbines back on the grid.

About 80% of what I do are trouble callouts. In the peak of outage season, I normally dont see my own bed for about 6 weeks. Things break, I go fix them.

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The schedule is relentless. January to May, in a normal year, is nonstop.

This year was different.

This year, we are in June, where things should be quiet. I normally stop hearing from my manager by June 5th because sites dont want us around in peak run.

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If I go to a site during peak run, the site is losing hundreds of thousands of dollars PER DAY. I never go to a site that is happy, because if I go to a site, then they are offline.

And they are paying emergency callout prices for my time.

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I am STILL supporting sites. Not just the one I am at, but remotely supporting others by phone, trying to get them back up and running without a physical visit. Troubleshooting from hundreds of miles away.

This is not normal. This outage season has been insane.

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It's showing no signs of stopping. We are looking at booking through the summer, and running full bore straight into the fall outage season.

The reason?

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We're fixing things that broke during that storm, on top of normal wear and tear, on top of the expected outages scheduled a year ago.

Also, Covid is a concern. When our crews get a positive case, we have to quarantine the whole site. So, delays.

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So, no planning, no people. What about parts?

Parts are bespoke. They dont have these things just sitting in a warehouse like it's Power Plant Walmart.

Cash?

Most plants operate on shoestring budgets.

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These sweeping changes that are needed to restore the infrastructure are not going to happen without someone (the government) pouring resources into it. And... well, things just arent maintained well.

Thats what happens when you dont regulate the industry.

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If no one is going to make you meet standards, and its cheaper to let things slide, then why spend all this extra money?

And so we find ourselves here again.

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Myself and my peers working full throttle, more plants down that should not be down because of lack of preparedness, and literally nothing has changed because we are only 5 months out from that storm.

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We don't have a line of sight on the extent of the damage from that storm yet - these are giant machines and the damage isnt always immediate or obvious.

We definitely don't have fixes in place. Some of those sites never came offline to begin with.

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And the Texas legislative session didn't devote any time to addressing the issue. ERCOT was essentially told to do what they thought was necessary... and that mode of thinking is what landed us here in the first place.

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The TL;DR:

No, things are not fixed.

It takes a lot longer than 5 months to do that.

It's expensive.

Its manpower intensive.

Its going to require legislation.

Its going to happen again.

Its still a good idea to conserve power right now or people will die.

FIN.

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