Texas Record Cold & Building Zone Issues
Austin, Texas is located in Building Zone 2A and Dallas, Texas is in Zone 3A. Both areas are experiencing major issues with the recent Polar Vortex cold. Thousands of homes are having their water pipes freeze & burst inside the homes due to not having power for a day or so.
My question is this. Does the code need to be updated so in the future, if your power goes out for 24 hours, your pipes shouldn’t freeze in just 24 hours? In a properly insulated home, it should take a few days before the temps would go from 70F inside to 32F inside, if the power/heat was to go out.
Phoenix, AZ is also Zone 2. Their water line pipes actually run outside the home, exposed. If below freezing temps ever hit there. It would be a disaster.
A builder once said, that in colder climates, it’s always best to run the water pipes on the interior walls and never on the exterior walls. This protects the pipes from freezing.
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Replies
Peter, it's an unfortunate situation and revised building codes would help. In the meantime, advertising "disaster-resistant housing" should be a free-market solution. (And hopefully more than just a marketing gimmick.)
There are at least two issues here--one is building in resilience to power outages and cold snaps. The other is climate change leaking to more frequent and more extreme swings in temperature. The standard 99% design conditions might need an update for the middle of the US.
I looked at a couple of new builds in Houston when I was there in 2011. Slab on grade, ductwork in the attic, thermo ply wall sheathing. I would like to know what the summer electric bills are for those homes. A better insulation and air sealing package would have a benefit in all seasons.
Texas adheres to IECC 2015 so I think homes would be better built but who knows what portions of the code they did not adopt. Armando Cabo would know.
https://www.energycodes.gov/status-state-energy-code-adoption
Ya I don't know. This cold snap last occurred over 30 yrs ago. I'm not sure it's worth designing for but it may occur organically if exterior insulation is adopted as code. In any case I suspect the vast majority of broken pipes occured in much older homes/apartments.
Sh!t happens.
Reports are that tens of thousands of homes & businesses have frozen & broken water mains in Texas. The cost of this damage will be in the Billions. Building better structures would make financial sense and lives could be saved. As people have already died from exposure and even electrocution.
The problems in TX homes are not a lack of Codes, the problem is lack of enforcement. Building Officials, in general, are over-worked, under-educated, and often, some just don't give a boot about. Municipalities do not allocate money for more education of their officials or hire more officials.
Many municipalities are passing the buck to third party verifiers, and many are really good, but many are awful, with a two week education, and many that pass the client-builders to maintain the account. As a couple of Raters/Verifiers told me, "we have to feed our families too".
The quality of building in TX is some of the worst in the country. Most Builders do not have a clue about Codes; most don't care about education either. There is no minimum Licensing requirements, and much less minimum education or continue education requirements; and the industry leaders are no help, in fact, they promote lower building quality...yes, I'm talking the local and state Builder's Associations.
Homeowners got used to accepting crappy houses, and few educate themselves... Did I miss someone?
Oh, yes... most house plans are four walls, four elevations, and that's it. Must Homeowners and Builder clients don't want to pay for a full set of drawings and specifications, and they wonder why their house is built like CRAP!
(I hate it when I think out loud) 😝😁😱
Thanks for chiming in Armando. I figured as such. At a certain price point customers want the home buying process to be like buying a car and production builders provide that experience.
I've been thinking this week about the thousands of outdoors-mounted tankless water heaters in Texas, nearly all of which will be toast (unless the owners drained them before they froze up). But I suppose that's really the frosting on the broken pipes/flooded house cake.
A lot of infrastructure other than water mains is likely to have been damaged too, not the least of which would be natural gas pipelines & compressors, etc. Some of this may take longer to bring back up than simply waiting for at deep thaw.
The widespread water damage in the Texas buildings is quite catastrophic when watching the videos and seeing the pictures. The plumbers and drywall guys will be busy in the next few months. Mold, rot and structural damage, will be at play also.
Knowing HOW to turn off your water main should be one of the top things a homeowner should know how to do.
Peter,
Given the importance of that I also think it's incumbent of builder and designers to make sure the location of main shut-off is obvious and easily accessible.
Yes! And to run water out of the lines.
Last week's IEEE PES seminar discussed the root causes of the TX power failures (essentially every power generation source had freeze up issues ... coal, gas, nuke, wind, etc.).
A point that caught my attention. Heat pumps are popular in TX ( I'll guess they are not of the cold climate variety). When the temperature dropped, these heat pumps transitioned over to fully resistive mode pulling 3x typical power load.
The outdoor water heaters ... cringe.
Risinger's comment ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGd9jI72Fqw&t=1418s
The Texas elephant in the room is the creed that deregulation is the answer. That includes ERCOT not having an intertie network to other states and being unregulated by FERC. It also seems to include basic plumbing standards for water in homes and also for transport of natural gas at cold temperatures. The market will solve all and government is never the answer. I'd like to think that Texas will rethink this orientation but I have my doubts. It's much more fun for the governor to blame the green new deal putting up those damn windmills. I'm in the same category as Armando; I should avoid thinking out loud.
When you take a lot of money from the construction industry...
It'll be interesting to see the forensics (percentage of damage to older or newer homes; what were the common failure points etc.).
ALWAYS have a backup system for critical/key systems!
I lived in Houston for a couple of years. Texas is unique with their flood plains (Houston is essentially one large flood zone), expansive clay soils (slab only construction). What people forget is that SE Texas ( Houston) is sub-tropical and much of the residences with plumbing issues are really old (1930-1980's). They're just not built for spending a week or more at freezing temps.
Deregulation has nothing to do with this. If regulation were the saviour then for example California wouldn't have black/brownouts and PG&E wouldn't have caused over a billion dollars in fire damage. Texas has it's own grid because didn't want to be subjected to federal regulation (1935 Federal Power Act) so that's why their system is (90%) independent. They've managed well for almost 100 years.
The reality is that it has been over 30 yrs since there was a cold snap like this but after the recent hurricanes they've had to overcome you'd think their grid would be more resilient..
PG&E... I wonder if the basic stage wasn't set by Enron (draining the banks back in the day).
Yeah, you manage well until you don't. As noted, hurricanes and now this.
There's no incentive to decrease profit to the upper-class.
Texas was short something like 12,000 megawatts. It is unlikely that much capacity could have been made up by their neighbors, many of whom were also seeing record load levels. This is the first time I can remember ERCOT having a capacity shortfall like this, and I've had involvement with them for some time with various work projects through the years (there are a number of large telecom facilities down there). Texas is also quite a ways from most of the "nearby" load centers in their neighboring states, which would mean a LOT of new transmission infrastructure. As an example, it would take 15 double circuit (6 wires) 345kv transmission lines to move 12,000 megawatts. Even using the highest transmission voltage in common use today (765kv), you'd need 7 double circuit lines. These are multibillion dollar projects.
A lot of electric industry regulation efforts have resulted in less system stability (notable in California), and tend to result in higher prices (notable TVA) than they need to be.
A study I recently read about the problems Texas has been seeing said that a lot of the issue is directly caused by regulatory issues, specifically financial incentives to wind power operators. The result is wind power operators can be profitable at negative power pricing, resulting in conventional generation being shuttered. This ultimately lead to fewer generators being available that could be brought online to help with the unusually high system load. This is a real problem that needs to be dealt with.
Bill
I'm sorry but this is propaganda dressed up as expertise. As has been said often "who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes". I wish you good luck with convincing people.
The study/article I was refering to was put out by GE, also a large manufacturer of wind turbines so not exactly biased against wind power. The article is here:
https://www.ge.com/content/dam/gepower-pw/global/en_US/images/transform/article-pdfs/a-tale-of-two-isos.pdf
I'm not sure what else you think is propaganda here. Capacity planning on the part of utilities has been fought over for decades, at least since the 70s, and probably long before that. The data is mostly publically available. The industry is not lying to anyone. Stability issues resulting from insufficient generation reserves have been predicted for at least 50 years. Reserves have tightened over time, to the point where it is difficult to cover capacity shortfalls. That's where these relatively recent shortages have come from.
Bill
Well, a very effective argumentative approach is to introduce extraneous facts that don't pertain to the original argument. The other side is then faced with the problem of swatting down those facts that are peripheral to that person's main thesis. In this case my main argument is that
1. ERCOT didn't weatherize their NG transmission infrastructure.
2. They didn't plan for unforeseen generating shortages. They didn't have and they didn't plan for calling in reserves in an emergency. Many generators were down for maintenance.
3 ERCOT was not connected to the intertie system. El Paso, which was not connected to ERCOT, had just a smattering of power shortages for a very short length of time.
One can qualify each one of those things but together they present a pattern and powerful argument. The power generators in ERCOT had no supervising regulation that would have brought them up to the standards of neighboring southern states. No one is saying that rare cold events wouldn't cause inconveniences for some people with short rolling blackouts. This event was not that. That lack of regulation and the coziness of power generators with ERCOT is what caused the full blown calamity.
In support of what you are saying I read this post on another forum from someone who claims to be an insider. Certainly sounds logical to me.
Begin quote:
I have nothing against clean energy but there is a cause and affect for everything and sometimes I think people gloss over the affects just because they feel good about the cause.
The rolling blackouts are a result of the so called "Green Energy". Over the last 15 years there has been a massive loss in base load generation from low heat rate gas plants and coal plants. As mentioned above Texas trades power on the open market and prices "money power generators make" depends on supply and demand.
Over the last decade subsidized green energy in the form of wind mills and solar farms have been built everywhere. The problem is they produce most of their power when you don't need it and almost no power when you do, like ice storms and extreme cold. This cause the power trading market to dip into negative prices when there is low demand, like during shoulder months, and you actually have to pay people to take the power you are generating. Vice verse power trades at the cap of 9k a MW during peak demands like now.
This creates the problem, if you are a coal plant, low heat rate gas plant or nuke plant that takes all day to start up or shutdown you basically are a base load plant and need to run all the time; however if wind mills are dumping power on the market all the time you end up loosing money and can't make the difference up during the high demand days.
So over the last decade they have been shutting down all the base load coal plants and replacing them with high heat rate peaker gas plants. These plants only operate when the markets swings to high prices and these plants make all there money for the year in the few days they operate.
This all works during the summer for the most part but during the winter you are going to have freeze offs and the gas supply shrinks and with the loss of gas storage in the state you have the problem we have today. There are several gas generation plants that could run but there isn't enough gas to feed everything.
Most people don't realize that when gas is produced from the ground it is not marketable, it has to be processed. This is what causes freeze offs in the gas fields.
First produced lean gas is wet coming out of the ground and at times contains CO2 and H2S and this gas must be run through Amine and Dehydration plants before it can be transported to market and Amine and Dehydration is water based process and is not fun to keep running at or below 30F. Second produced rich gas will form hydrates and freeze starting at 50-60F depending on composition and you have to pour methanol to it to keep it from freezing, then you have to run the gas through a cryo processing plant to remove all the heavy hydrocarbons (NGL's) before running the gas through Amine and Dehydration. None of these processing facilities like cold temperatures.
Usually these kinds of technical arguments against using renewables come from people who don't believe in man made climate change to begin with. If you are a person that does believe in it then I offer my apologies. However, if you don't believe in man made climate change I have to resist making further arguments and only offer this Mark Twain quote: “Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”
Amazing how anyone with a straight face, or pen, or keyboard, can complain of the subsidies the green energy is getting, when the fossil fuel industries have received them for decades. The pot calling the kettle black... but that's politics!
The bottom line is that the electric power producers were warned to improved their resiliency after the winter of 2011... remember the Super bowl week in Dallas? The industry didn't move a finger to weatherize plants and infrastructure because the probabilities of such weather events happening again, let along going all the way south to Houston and the Rio Grande, was negligible.
This was a total risk assessment failure, from the governmental entities to the industry itself; but somehow everyone is trying to pass the blame somewhere else.
Here is a secrete few people know... Everything in TX is controlled by the oil and gas money. shhhhhh......
Is there a builder better positioned than Matt Risinger to deliver an authoritative and timely statement on the resiliency of Texas housing? He moves in rarified circles, and he doesn't strike me as a big government guy, but he's got quite the online reach and he's nothing if not adamant that building needs to be done better. Maybe now more people will pay attention. There's a month or more of videos to be made.
I'd say people need to give their heads a shake and realize it's going to take at least a couple of decades to build up the alternative energy supply, re-design the electrical distribution system to handle the larger spikes and surges that go with that type of power, provide economical backup (i.e. monster battery banks) capacity, and retrofit the heating and power systems of residential homes in America.
Until then, maybe we ought to consider securing more natural gas, coal, and nuclear supply to generate the necessary heating and electrical power generation requirements of a 1st world country...
"Until then, maybe we ought to consider securing more natural gas, coal, and nuclear supply to generate the necessary heating and electrical power generation requirements of a 1st world country..."
Really?? It seems like it would make more sense to just tie in with other states electrical grid. The far western side of Texas is tied in with the western states intertie system. They have had no problems at all. There are always reserves in other parts of the country when localized problems occur. The last thing that needs to be done is to use this event to increase global warming via CO2 production. That's extremely short term thinking.
>"There are always reserves in other parts of the country when localized problems occur. "
That's not entirely useful. There is not one "power grid" there are what are know as ISOs (Independent System Operators), which manage regional systems, and coordinate multiple utilities. ERCOT is ONE of these ISOs. The next thing, which is most important here, is that there are four main "Interconnections" in North America, and those are synchronous systems that can move power around within themselves. Those four interconnections are the Eastern Interconnection (which is most of the eastern half of the US, and much of Eastern Canada too), the Pacific Interconnection (sometimes called the "Pacfic Intertie), which is most of the Western US, then ERCOT in Texas, which is an ISO and their own interconnection, and also Hydro Quebec in Canada, which is an independent system.
To move power between interconnections requires HVDC lines or converters. An example of this is the Highgate Converter in Vermont, that ties Hydro Quebect into the Eastern Interconnection in the Northeast. You can't just run lines and solve problems. You also can't really move a large amount of power from a very distance source across an interconnection, such a move requires a lot of coordination since you're doing a sort of leap frogging of power, not a bulk transfer across a long distance (hopefully that makes sense).
Interconnections and ISOs came about in the early 1900s as a way for utilities primarily to save money. Generators are most efficient when operating near full load, so the interconnections allowed for the cheapest generators to be run for long periods at near full load, with more expensive generators being brought online when load increased. A side benefit was greater ability to handle unexpected system failures and things like that.
A really large scale issue across a large geographic area will still be a problem regardless of system interconnections. Right now, I doubt the systems neighboring ERCOT would be able to come up with enough supply to meet the shortfall, especially considering that many of those systems are seeing record load levels already. On top of that, FAILURES can spread through interconnections too -- that's how large cascading blackouts (like the northeast blackout of 2003, for example) can spread so far. If Texas WAS interconnected, it's just as likely their issues could have spread to neighboring systems as it is that the interconnections might have limited the problems in Texas.
Bill
Thank you for a good explanation. Distribution isn't my strong point, but I know enough to know that the floozies running much of the electrical grid these days are out of their league. Top management doesn't have enough good Engineers in positions that matter, and we're a long way from having a robust distribution system to handle majority "green" power. It's just not that simple.
To meet what spec? And no sooner do you pin it on a given sizing and a given date that that date comes and goes and you're back in the same situation: insufficient energy to meet demand.
5% growth means a doubling in 12 years.
And by "securing," do you mean war? Or, perhaps "strength through exhaustion," running through our natural resources at an increased pace (to understand such ramifications refer to oil shale [huge money-printing to toss into that hole; of course, those business will be bailed out when the inevitably fail, and the oligarchs will walk away with their billions while the peasants freeze)]).
The US has a huge deficit which is only made livable because the USD is the world's reserve currency. Don't bank on this continuing. Lots of good talk in investing in infrastructure, but the reality is there, and I'm not seeing how we can pay off our debts while sinking in a ton of money into new stuff. I'm good with incentives (read "tax incentives") because there's no other way to move this big ship (of fossil fuels).
Decentralization is necessary. It'll come one way or another: Mother Nature bats last.
I don't care about a spec. We need some good technical people making complicated, logical decisions, not politicians and the average person on the street making recommendations based on "green hear-say".
By securing I mean "buying" or "building". Sheesh. If that means using more natural resources, then yes. We can't just turn off the tap and hope for the best while we figure out and build the proper infrastructure for mass scale solar, wind, and geothermal. Well... I guess we can... ask the people in Texas how that worked out.
Decentralization may very well be one of the answers. But until it's thought out thoroughly, and designed and built, you need heat and power in the meantime. That's all I'm saying. Sometimes the truth hurts.
I don't think it is accepted yet by you and many others that this really wasn't a "supply" problem. It was a priorities problem. Texas was struck by a severe freeze in 2011 and FERC, the national regulation authority, advised ERCOT to winterize the supply generation infrastructure in Texas. That would have included wind and NG plants. It was just advise because FERC can only give advice. Texas isn't under their jurisdiction so it was their own fault this happened again. . They chose not to implement that advice. It's their fault. They didn't want to displease the Power Generators under ERCOT's rule who gave all the donations to the political class in Texas.
Don't turn this into a technical problem all though it is that also. It primarily is a problem of poor character of politicians in Texas The people in Texas have the best government money can buy. And BTW, Zephyr is employed by a utility. Since he won't recuse himself on issues like this I need to bring that fact up again and again. He is not a straight shooter on any issues involving liability of utilities. He has shown that to be true.
IMO the issue is grid maintenance not a lack of generation capacity. Coal/NatGas produce the overwhelming majority of power in Texas.
Generation capacity is entirely dependent on supply, and so all the generation capacity in the world is pointless if you have a supply disruption. Freeze the gas wells and pipelines and you have no supply.
They just need to winterize the system and connect the grid to other states. Most of the failures were predictable and avoidable.
I'm sure there are as many explanations about the TX power outages as there are politicians, but here is a great blog on this issue.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/power-experts-cite-gas-constraints-as-main-cause-of-ercot-outages-but-syst/595255/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Issue:%202021-02-18%20Utility%20Dive%20Newsletter%20%5Bissue:32530%5D&utm_term=Utility%20Dive
Having said that, I've had several homeowners that I designed their houses calling me this week, or writing emails thanking me and the Builders for the job we did for them. Their ZERHs performed awesomely, with very little temperature drops, never below mid to low 60s, and no busted water lines. THAT KEEPS MY HEART PUMPING! 😍😍😍
I do believe, if all homes in TX were built as they should, we wouldn't have had so many home failures... ZERHs would have done even better. Is there anything more to prove?
Just cuzzz... a sign I posted on LinkedIn.
+1
Q: Don't you have outdoor Koi?
Good job Armando. One house at a time.
Thank you, Gents. Its always nice to hear from the Owners the appreciation for a job well done, plus a reassurance that the ZERH program and methods work better when the chips are down.
Coincidentally, about four of these houses were also on the path of the 2019 tornados without a scratch. I guess adding Resilience to homes works too... who would've thought!
I thought it would be interesting to add my perspective after participating in a very elaborate Climate Risk Assessment process for a Chicago project.
Top 3 climate risks to have design management strategies for:
1. Heat Wave
2. Flooding
3. Cyclone/Tornado
Cold spells came in at a LOW/MINOR risk.
The sad thing is, if you are designing for the future, the data says you don't need to plan in for these extreme cold weather events.
That was for Chicago....so I think you can extrapolate for Texas.
Cold spell in Chicago? Compared to what? It's already pretty cold there in the winter, so how much colder would you need to plan for? Absolute zero?
I'd think that the standard build in CZ5 or 6 would survive a winter of CZ7 much better than a CZ1 or 2 build experiencing CZ6 weather for just a few days.
Some of the TX homes with burst pipes did not lose power, but just had the plumbing exposed in the unconditioned attic.