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Did the utility companies ask for voluntary reduction in power consumption ahead of time? We had a situation here where extreme weather and a natural gas pumpi
by brohoolio 6y ago
Did the utility companies ask for voluntary reduction in power consumption ahead of time?
We had a situation here where extreme weather and a natural gas pumping station that exploded caused real problems in our natural gas supply. The utility asked everyone to lower their consumption by turning their heat down to 65.
Luckily, that was the extent of the rationing.
- abhisuri97 6y agoThere have been calls from our utility company asking people to conserve energy and a lot of messaging on the local news.
- slenk 6y agoMy companies office volunteered to power off so we got to all work from our homes. That was only good for those of us still with power, though.
- teraflop 6y agoTechnically yes, but they went from "stage 1" alerts (voluntary conservation) just after midnight on Sunday night, all the way to "stage 3" (rolling blackouts) by 1:30 AM. https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO/status/1361197991659503618 https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO/status/1361197991659503618 https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO/status/1361215084010352644 https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO/status/1361215084010352644
- tpmx 6y agoAfaik, the way abnormal situations like these are handled in northern Europe is that the grid suppliers have agreements with the very large industrial consumers (think aluminium smelters) who agree to shut down immediately when the grid frequency goes below a certain trigger level. The way I understand it, this is useful both in time-critical emergencies (like keeping the grid at 50 Hz when a nuclear plant suddenly goes offline for some random safety reason) and when things are moving a lot slower, like during periods of extreme colds and extreme electicity demand from heating houses. So, this approach is useful in removing the need for rolling blackouts, at least until demand reaches some very extreme level, but it does require ahead of time investments in shutdown agreements. Perhaps Texas hasn't been in this extreme situation before, and they simply don't have enough industrial shutdown agreements in place?
- cowboysauce 6y agoERCOT does have shutdowns agreements in place, but there’s a limit to what you can do when simultaneously facing record demand and having ~30,000 MW of capacity go offline. For comparison, on Sunday evening demand was roughly 70,000 MW.
- s0rce 6y agoIsn't it immensely difficult to restart an aluminum smelter? Also, my vague memory of these is that in North America most of them are in areas with abundant hydro power.
- tpmx 6y agoProbably. I just picked something at random that I know uses a lot of power - I think in the order of one nuclear reactor for a typical installation. Should have known better than to do that here.
- sjg007 6y agoThey can probably run at lower power? I imagine you slow everything down. After all you just have to melt it again.
- askvictor 6y ago
- zrail 6y agoI remember that. What an awful winter.
- slenk 6y agoI had to learn how to manually light our furnace because the starter (or whatever it is called) died in the middle of a cold snap. Scary as hell in the beginning, but only nervousness-inducing at the end.
- canada_dry 6y agoPretty damning the pics of downtown in various Texas cities lit up like normal! https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/over-200000-people-in-austin-remain-without-power-while-downtown-sits-exempt-from-outages https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/over-200000-people-in...