Rolling Blackouts Question (Austin, Kyle: homes, dangerous, generators)

[CarnivalGal]

Originally Posted by Austin97

driving today was no big deal with 4x4. I hit some of the biggest hills and was fine. Lots of rear wheel drive cars got stuck. Front wheel drives struggled. 4x4 was totally fine.

Good to know. Thank you!

[Trainwreck20]

The Texas utility companies schedule maintenance turnarounds in the winter, when power demand tends to be much lower, and therefore there is less capacity than summer times to start. Then there are some plants that can't operate with temperatures this low - they don't have critical systems that are heat-traced and such - and have to shut down or risk failure.

In any case it looks like the amount of reduction Austin was required to make was basically all the non-essential sub-grids in the city, so it was impossible to roll the outages. If you have power still, you are most likely on the same sub-grid as a hospital, fire station, or other essential structure.

[Trainwreck20]

As an aside, we are now housing a 'sleep over' for a good friend of our daughter and her little sister, since their house is now approaching 24 hour w/o power.

[CarnivalGal]

Maybe a silly question, but wouldn't the demand for energy go down overnight? I get that it gets colder, but also no one has lights and TVs on, etc.

[Need4Camaro]

Originally Posted by CarnivalGal

Maybe a silly question, but wouldn't the demand for energy go down overnight? I get that it gets colder, but also no one has lights and TVs on, etc.

Most of my lights are LED Bulbs and those hardly draw any power so turning them off would do little in terms of power consumption. TV’s I guess maybe alittle, but probably not enough to compensate for the additional strain on HVAC systems as temperatures plummet into the single digits.

WilCo stated they are having problems keeping their ‘command center’ online which basically controls the county communication infrastructure.. they mentioned it was more difficult to do so at night than day..

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.kvu...5-53fdc37af6f4

[Trainwreck20]

Originally Posted by CarnivalGal

Maybe a silly question, but wouldn't the demand for energy go down overnight? I get that it gets colder, but also no one has lights and TVs on, etc.

I don't know what percent of the houses on AE's grid are electric heat or gas heat, but the electric heat will cause consumption to go up quickly as the temperature falls at night. In addition, many people will be using electric heaters to help heat their house or keep pipes from freezing.

The next biggest users are stuff like TVs and computers.

[riaelise]

It’s not “rolling” in our case the power in our entire area is flat-out out.

No power for over 14 hours. 14 hours my family sat in a home that’s less than 50 degrees with no heat and no cell service or internet unable to have any contact with the world

[atxcio]

Originally Posted by riaelise

It’s not “rolling” in our case the power in our entire area is flat-out out.

No power for over 14 hours. 14 hours my family sat in a home that’s less than 50 degrees with no heat and no cell service or internet unable to have any contact with the world

Yeah they really botched the whole rolling blackout process. The whole point is to keep people from having dangerously long stretches without power. To share the burden instead. Now we have homes approaching freezing temps INSIDE because of the length of their outage. If the rolling blackouts had been done properly everyone would probably be able to maintain 60 degrees or better.

I hope they realize how serious this failure was.

[Trainwreck20]

Originally Posted by atxcio

Yeah they really botched the whole rolling blackout process. The whole point is to keep people from having dangerously long stretches without power. To share the burden instead. Now we have homes approaching freezing temps INSIDE because of the length of their outage. If the rolling blackouts had been done properly everyone would probably be able to maintain 60 degrees or better.

I hope they realize how serious this failure was.

They couldn't really roll the outages without cutting off power to critical infrastructure - ERCOT required them to cut too much for that to work. Basically, everyone that has power now is part of a grid with critical needs on it, everyone who doesn't have power doesn't share such a grid. ERCOT has never required AE to offline 200k homes (not people) at the same time - 40%, give or take. Their system is just not designed to handle that and there is nothing that can be done immediately.

So the problem could not be addressed 'today' - either ERCOT has to require smaller capacity by having more power generation available, or Austin needs to re-work their entire grid setup to allow isolating smaller blocks isolated from critical infrastructure.

The only way to meet ERCOTs requirements and roll the outages would be to include hospitals, police stations, fire stations, etc. in the roll.

The 'botching' happened previously. Were scheduled unit turnarounds staggered properly? Did some run over schedule but other units get put offline anyway? Why is the ERCOT grid run so close to capacity (hint: deregulation that brought you cheap energy).

[atxcio]

I’m not close to a hospital or critical infrastructure. I guess it is possible I’m connected to some distant critical infrastructure somehow, but it doesn’t seem like it. Some of my neighborhood is out, some have power. My next door neighbor is out, and I have power. Also it’s not only an Austin thing - my family in DFW are experiencing the same thing. If they were turned off last night, they are still off. The inability to roll the blackouts seems to be statewide.