Our RV Adventures

The power at the rig stayed on all night, so about 11 Jan and I drove over to get it ready for our return Friday morning. We didn’t move back today, because we had already paid for tonight here at the hotel, and we wanted to turn the heaters on and get the temperature up in the rig.

This was because the temp inside when we got there was 34°. So we wanted to run the heaters overnight to warm things up.

Right now we plan to move back home tomorrow morning.

Then it was on up to Clear Lake to check in at the office. According to my monitoring, the power had come back on there about the same time that it came back on down here. I checked that all the computers had come back up with no problems, as well as the network. And since it all looked OK, I’ll go back to work tomorrow after I get Jan moved back to the rig.

I got several comments yesterday about my blog post about the cold weather problems with Texas’ wind turbines, one essentially accusing the state of ‘cheapening out’ on the turbines because they didn’t have the cold weather kits installed. Which from what I’ve able to ascertain, must be either install during construction, or the turbine must be completely disassembled and the kit installed on the ground.

So why weren’t these kits installed to start with? Well, besides the 30% cost increase per turbine, it’s hard to justify the cost when they’ve never been needed before.

This was a once in a lifetime freeze event, so how do you prepare for that?

It would be like buying a car in Texas, and having to spring for all the extra options to prep you car for life in Fairbanks, Alaska where it can get to –70, just in case it might get that cold down here.

But wait, there’s more. The power to run the cold weather kit comes from the output of the wind turbine itself, reducing the effective output to the grid.

Even worse, if it’s very cold but the wind is not blowing, then power must fed back INTO the turbine to keep it warm. Otherwise, when the wind finally starts blowing, you’ve again got a frozen turbine.

Another reader said that wind doesn’t supply much overall power to the state and that natural gas is our main energy source. Well, I guess it depends on how you define it.

About 56 percent of Texas’ energy comes from natural gas, just under 24 percent comes from wind, 19 percent from coal, and almost 9 percent from nuclear energy.

So almost 25% of our power comes from the wind. And half of that went away with the freeze.

And there were also problems with our natural gas plants, due to the cold too. Once the temps get low enough, there are problems moving the gas around.

Natural gas wells and pipes ill-equipped for cold weather are a big reason why millions of Texans lost power during frigid temperatures this week. As temperatures dropped to record lows across some parts of the state, liquid inside wells, pipes, and valves froze solid.

Ice can block gas flow, clogging pipes. It’s a phenomenon called a “freeze-off” that disrupts gas production across the US every winter. But freeze-offs can have outsized effects in Texas, as we’ve seen this week. The state is a huge natural gas producer — and it doesn’t usually have to deal with such cold weather.

And the photo I posted the other day about defrosting the blades still holds.

This same defrosting is still necessary even in cold climes where the cold weather kits is installed.

Only recently has a way been found to efficiently deice the blades using a carbon fiber coating that can be heated to remove/prevent the ice buildup. It’s almost pretty pricey, uses power from the turbine output, must be powered externally if there’s no wind, and can only be retrofitted with the turbine and blades disassembled and on the ground.

Another expensive option.

But of course, solar power will save us.

Thought For The Day:

When one door closes, sometimes you just need to get a hammer and nails to make sure that SOB stays shut.

Our rolling blackout last night that started at 7:33pm ended almost exactly 3 hours later at 10:29pm. And so far tonight at 8pm, no reoccurrence.

And even better, by about 7pm tonight we finally have hot water again here at the hotel. It, of course, went out last night during our blackout and it took until this evening to catch up.

I suspect that the boiler is not really sized to consistently handle a full hotel load, since most of the time they’re not that full.

Jan and I drove over to the rig about 1pm to see how things were going. We were encouraged by the fact that the CenterPoint Outage Tracker site showed no outages in our area, but they were wrong once again.

Though we saw that the power was back on in locations closer to our park, it wasn’t back on for us. When I checked with our neighbor he said that the power had come back on for a few minutes yesterday, but it had been off ever since.

But on an up note, our water system had thawed out and seemed to be working fine now, with no leaks. We do have a 28° night coming up tomorrow, Thursday, and a 27° one on Friday, but since the system survived 16°, I doubt I’ll have any problems with what’s coming up.

Leaving the rig, we stopped off at Spring Creek BBQ for lunch before heading back to the hotel. When we left the food truck was back out in the hotel parking lot, so when we got back we got a funnel cake for breakfast tomorrow.

Looks delicious, and it was make to order while I waited.

I have this InkBird Smart remote thermostat hooked up to monitor our refrigerator temps while we’re away from home. It lets me check the temps, but also adjust the internal temp from anywhere, even when we were in Europe.

InkBird Smart Thermostat

Normally it connects to house AC and our MiFi, which also usually is powered by house AC. But with the power off, none of that worked.

So I moved the MiFi over to run off of the house batteries, hoping that when the AC came back up I would then be able to see the InkBird come online and I would be able to see it.

And a few minutes after 8pm it showed up, telling me the fridge temp was 35.2°. Since it wasn’t online at about 7, our power came back on somewhere between 7 and 8pm.

This also means that the heat lamp in the water bay should be back on, so I won’t have to worry about Thursday and Friday’s freeze.

But since we’re already set to stay here until Friday, we won’t go back to the rig until then.

Unless the power goes off again.

Thought For The Day:

There’s an old meme that says:

Be polite to everyone you meet, but have a plan to kill them if necessary.

But that’s not a plan.

A plan is to also:

1. Eliminate Any Witnesses.
2. Know Where To Hide The Bodies
3. Have A Rock Solid Alibi

Now you’ve got a PLAN!