Rolling blackouts

[Bird]

We're keeping our fingers crossed. Our house is total electric, although I do have one box of imitation logs I could burn in the fireplace if I had to. In 5 years, we've never used the fireplace. All the news media said we'd have the rolling blackouts; 15 to 30 minutes at a time, but they've missed us so far. Of course tonight is supposed to be even colder than last night, so we may be participants yet.

One of our daughters lives on the north side of Ft. Worth and has natural gas heat. Their electricity was only off less than an hour, but the gas was off nearly 10 hours. She said it got pretty cold in that house.

 

[Samandothers]

THEGOOSE indicates 'The Texas Grid is mostly indepenedent of the other two. We have plenty of capacity, but as stated earlier we have several plants who went down due to cold-weather related failures.'

Sounds like independence may not be a good thing. Stronger ties would seem to allow more flow back and forth to adjacent grid. Why are the ties so weak.

 

[Wayne County Hose]

Wait til electric cars start charging their batteries drawing at least 30 amps each at 240v.

 

[TheGoose]

I don't work in the power industry so I really don't know the full reason. There is some tie-in with the other grids but I am unsure how much. Not all areas lost power anyways so only certain areas are affected. We are nowhere near our capacity as far as I can tell. It's just a freak thing, it rarely gets this cold across the entire state.

 

[F250DSLPWR]

I live in Austin and we lost power starting at about 6:30am Wednesday morning lasting until around 2pm. Every 45 minutes the power would come back on for about 10 minutes. I had some errands to run and the neighborhood next to ours the power never went off. After reading the local news channel ERCOT and Austin Energy were selectively cycling power in some neighborhoods and not others. I have a Deerborn heater that runs on propane so, it was not a big deal to keep the house warm. I almost went and got the generator and hooked it up, since I need internet access to work.

 

[johnrex62]

I live outside of Austin, just inside Bastrop County, and despite all the turmoil on the grid have not had any blackout affect me. I am on Bluebonnet Coop and either they are not part of the ERCOT grid or they just never got around to me, I don't know. My internet comes from a tower in Travis county and it got hit a number of times today, but my juice kept running the whole day.

I wasn't even aware of the emergency until nearly noon when my daughter saw the story on the TV news. Earlier I was leaving messages on the support voicemail at my ISP asking what was up and getting the "cold shoulder" from them. :laughing: I finally saw a status post online that told me the story, but that was well into the afternoon.

 

[Egon]

If we get into that situation My sleeping bag is good for -25C. The camper has a heater and has kept us comfortable for several nights at -45C.

 

[ronjhall]

Oh my! We can deal with it just fine. but it's good to know that it is just a rolling blackout and not a serious problem with my electricity or the Co-ops lines. I have an all electric house with foam insulation and have not used my central heater this cold spell. And yes I do have an electric car. And the juice can always come from my emergency generator which I don't have to power up because of the knowledge of the short duration. We got it all covered here in Texas no need to call out the Reserves or the Feds.

If you want to see who's running to the border just look at the license plates of the RVs in the border towns. (Hi Ron.)

I even went to town and timed my haircut in-between outages, but I didn't quite make it to the grocery store in time, I had to shop in the dark, but I knew where everything was anyway.

Us Winter Texans are doing OK. Propane tank is full and the Generator is set on Auto Start. No blackouts here yet. But come on, you Full Time Texans can turn the heat back on anytime. 32 degrees in McAllen this morning. Weatherman reports that will be the high for today. Farmers are trying to get all the crops in or protected. Sunday, if we survive this cold spell should be in the upper 70's.

 

[The Dougster]

I live North of Austin. Actually five miles North of Seward Junction, which is about five miles North of Leander. While Austin, Round Rock and Leander were affected by the blackouts, it has not affected us. Another all electric home. Hopefully they have the problem resolved by now.

 

[texasjohn]

Only the one outage (yesterday) so far here at the house.

Snow on the way for Austin and surrounding area.... up to 3 inches predicted to cover about half of Texas, even the Rio Grande valley. Doesn't sound like much, but it will all stick because of multidays of below freezing. Further, few really have extensive experience driving in snow/ice thus drive too fast

Soooo, need to prepare for more power outages, this time caused by snow messing with delivery structure, cold messing with production and causing high demand.

17 degrees in Jarrell now, 6 degrees wind chill.

TV just announced that more rolling power outages in the Austin area have been initiated, plan to continue all day.