5 ms·

Lacking official sources, some Texans use Whataburger app to track power outages

56 points by coloneltcb 2y ago

whalesalad 2y ago
https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas
- mikestew 2y ago
  Quite a few co-ops on that page that aren’t tracked, perhaps the xitter’s power comes from one of those. Handy page, though, especially for areas where I might not know the power company page off-hand.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dminvs 2y ago
s/Texans/Houston-area customers of CenterPoint
- coloneltcb 2y ago
  Don’t think that would fit, and it’s still accurate, as Houston area customers of CenterPoint are Texans that lack official sources Edit: changed to _some_ Texans
- adenner 2y ago
  The outage us website says "CenterPoint Energy’s primary outage management system is currently offline. They are currently only able to provide the number of customers out across their entire service territory."
Paul-Craft 2y ago
Eh, why not? We've already got the Waffle House Index, why not the Whataburger Indicator? lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index
ramesh31 2y ago
Just like their energy system, the free market has spoken. Welcome to Costco, I love you.
Night_Thastus 2y ago
I really don't understand why Texas has such a problem with energy. It's a HUGE state. There's opportunities for plenty of solar or wind, and I'm sure they're not opposed to some natural gas and coal to make up the difference. It's not like it lacks wealth to pay for those things, at least as far as I know. I know it lacks inter-state interconnects, but that can't be the sole reason.
- andsoitis 2y ago
  > There's opportunities for plenty of solar or wind, According to Newsweek article in January: ”Texas wind farms generated nearly 120,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2022, about as much as the solar output of the four next-most-prolific states combined, and 17 times more than California. The 20 gigawatt-hours (GWh) put out by Texas solar panels in 2022 took a back seat only to California's 35 GWh—but only because California vastly exceeds Texas in the number of home-roof-mounted panels, thanks to homeowner incentives that Texas doesn't offer. The electricity from Texas' solar farms already exceeds that produced by California's—and has been doubling each year for three years. "Solar costs have dropped 80 percent in the past decade," says Metzger. "The state is pouring enormous investment into it." — https://www.newsweek.com/texas-greenest-state-energy-wind-solar-1847348 https://www.newsweek.com/texas-greenest-state-energy-wind-so...
  - Night_Thastus 2y ago
    So if they're making so much power, why is their grid having trouble keeping up? Or is it not and I've misunderstood?
    - sickofparadox 2y ago
      There's only so much you can do with old infrastructure in an area that's already highly developed and prone to hurricanes.
    - vel0city 2y ago
      There's plenty of electricity. The power outages are localized to the city where a hurricane just hit. Its a local delivery infrastructure issue, not a power generation issue.
andsoitis 2y ago
As a household, to me most important question that I want an answer to is expected remediation for my home. I would be surprised if a Texas power utility company doesn’t provide that to their customers. I get that here in California.
- btown 2y ago
  This assumes that you trust their metric for expected remediation. But in practice, utility companies are incentivized to provide a conservative estimate of how long repairs will take, and to the extent they're training models on the data available to them, the metrics they'll expose to you from their model inference, as well as the model itself, are designed around that conservative outlook. But by looking at a map, there are clear patterns: if many isolated areas have outages, there may be many points of failure for various neighborhoods, causing a massive queue of crews to repair each area. But if there is half of the state out of power in a contiguous region, there's more likely to be a single point of failure that they're highly incentivized to fix or route around with the full technical staff at their disposal. The map is more likely to give me that insight than their biased spot estimate of timing.
  - andsoitis 2y ago
    > This assumes that you trust their metric for expected remediation. Here in Los Angeles, my utility gives estimates that I have found pretty reasonable - sometimes actual is a few hours later than original estimate, but never more than maybe 6 hours in my experience. Sometimes it is fixed earlier. Along the way, updates of new expected fix time is emailed and texted.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
How quick are the stores to marking their status as Closed? It's manual I'm assuming and not some service that's not getting a pingback because the store is offline.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  I would guess a modern franchise has significant telemetry monitoring. If the location is unreachable, easy enough for the mothership to note the site is having issues. Can a modern restaurant function without internet access to handle credit card transactions?
  - bob1029 2y ago
    > Can a modern restaurant function without internet access to handle credit card transactions? Yes. You can imprint the card and/or record the information for offline processing. We had credit cards before everyone had internet access.
    - rigrassm 2y ago
      Heh, I had forgotten about those card imprint machines! Think I used one 2 times in one of my first jobs.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
      Those technically exist, but who still has them? Are they even still allowed with modern credit card agreements? What about the percentage of people who no longer carry physical cards and rely on a smartphone/smartwatch credit system?
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Notice Whataburger marketing in the replies offering free swag to OP for "using the app so creatively"
snowpid 2y ago
This is a very good example of bad policy in the USA: in my whole life I encountered two power outtages. None in Germany (where I mainly lived ) , one in Poland and one in Ukraine (both 5 years ago). Leaving nuclear power was a stupid decision but compare to Texas, this is miniscule.
- vel0city 2y ago
  Do Germany and Poland get many hurricanes?
  - snowpid 2y ago
    Since this thread is full of bad decisions in Texas hurricanes is a lame excuse. (also nature isn't stable in both countries, flood are a huge problem now)
    - vel0city 2y ago
      As if flooding isn't also a problem in Houston... What a joker. And you're right, this thread is full of misinformation, inaccuracies, and misunderstanding of the current situation.
      - snowpid 2y ago
        So I never needed an app to watch for power outtages. So correct the people. Do you claim there have been no outtages. Just during hurican season? Be precise
- rigrassm 2y ago
  Maybe some perspective helps, the hurricane would have given probably half of Germany hurricane force winds. Hurricanes cause power outages, I don't think I've ever heard about a hurricane anywhere that directly hit a populous area and didn't cause power loss. https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/texas-usa/germany https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/texa... Fact is, these storms are stupid powerful (even the "little" cat 1's) and big trees are heavy as fuck which is going to be the major cause of our outages. I can get pictures of some of the 15+ meter trees with trunks over a meter wide that ended up completely uprooted and toppled over. It's impossible to just not build around these trees (best we can do is try to trim the ones around power infra but our area is just so dense it's impractical to keep them completely cut back everywhere) so it's just a fact of life that there will be power infrastructure damage during extreme weather. Now the response speed definitely needs to be addressed but I cover that in my to level post so I won't rehash it here again.
cthalupa 2y ago
As a note, Centerpoint generally does have an outage map - it was just experiencing an outage itself.
mrguyorama 2y ago
CMP here in Maine is rated one of the worst in the country for reliability, but they have good, and granular, outage tracking. However, Spectrum has much more granularity in their monitoring in that they get heartbeat pings from every modem on their network, and will quickly see if a ping stops coming in. The result is that I often get a notice from Spectrum that my internet is out, before CMP even knows there's been an outage.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
This should show up via observability requirements of the National Electric Vehicle Charging Network too. Chargers need basically realtime status (what charge rates do you offer) & availability information to be publicly available to qualify. Watching where chargers are & aren't should provide a higher resolution feed for this data.
rigrassm 2y ago
As someone currently chilling in my car (better than cooking in the house!) on the North side of Houston waiting for power to be restored, I feel relatively qualified to offer some insight. I won't get into any of the politics of things as I'm not an expert on energy policy. Also, posting from my phone so I'll definitely mess up formatting so apologies in advance. To start, this has little if not nothing to do with Ercot and all the stuff that's been brought up repeatedly since the freak winter storm (which I also went through), we aren't low on light juice, no rolling brown outs, etc. Onto the the important points, a few things I've seen posted in comments here stuck out to me as being inaccurate: >> No outage tracker available No, we don't have a "down to the house" level outage tracker but that's not unreasonable given the large number of circuit level outages. That said we have had the following: - Published sometime Monday and updated every 5 minutes: https://gisoutagetracker.azurewebsites.net/ https://gisoutagetracker.azurewebsites.net/ - A much more detailed map that shows the status of things down to the circuit level: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/195bcf03ae0c491f9f14bf77f2c43420 https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/195bcf03ae0c491f9f14bf7... >> It was just a small category 1, how could it be so bad? As an outsider, I'd probably be asking the same thing but there were a few things that made this situation worse than it would normally be. - Lack of preparedness But not in the way you're probably thinking. Our forecasted tracks when it was coming off the Yucatan started out with this thing staying well South of the Houston area. As of July 6th, 2 days before landfall, it was confidently projected to make landfall around Corpus Christ and Houston would just get a bunch of rain. But that's not what happened, It ended up being a worst case track with the eye going right up the west side of Houston putting the entire city under the "Dirty side" of the storm. - It's been wet AF the last month! We probably got lucky that the week before the storm it finally stopped raining for a while. I bring this up because just in my neighborhood alone, I saw at least 5 old and very very large trees that fell and had huge chunks of root system pulled up out of the ground. These are trees that have survived at least 2 major hurricanes in the past that just popped out of the ground and laid over. I suspect, especially in the suburbs on the North and West side, that a bunch of harder to get to lines were damaged which, in my mind, helps explain why there are a ton more complete circuit outages (No traffic lights, major buildings like grocery stores completely disconnected) in our areas. All that said, it sucks and is uncomfortable but on the bright side, this time last year we were in the middle of a month long heatwave (hitting 100°F+ almost daily) but since the storm blew through it stayed relatively mild and even fairly pleasant. It was actually really nice out just chilling under a pop up tent yesterday afternoon! Hope this helps give some insight into things from a first person perspective.

56 points by coloneltcb 2y ago

whalesalad 2y ago

https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas

mikestew 2y ago
Quite a few co-ops on that page that aren’t tracked, perhaps the xitter’s power comes from one of those. Handy page, though, especially for areas where I might not know the power company page off-hand.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dminvs 2y ago

s/Texans/Houston-area customers of CenterPoint

coloneltcb 2y ago
Don’t think that would fit, and it’s still accurate, as Houston area customers of CenterPoint are Texans that lack official sources Edit: changed to _some_ Texans
adenner 2y ago
The outage us website says "CenterPoint Energy’s primary outage management system is currently offline. They are currently only able to provide the number of customers out across their entire service territory."

Paul-Craft 2y ago

Eh, why not? We've already got the Waffle House Index, why not the Whataburger Indicator? lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index

ramesh31 2y ago

Just like their energy system, the free market has spoken. Welcome to Costco, I love you.

Night_Thastus 2y ago

I really don't understand why Texas has such a problem with energy. It's a HUGE state. There's opportunities for plenty of solar or wind, and I'm sure they're not opposed to some natural gas and coal to make up the difference. It's not like it lacks wealth to pay for those things, at least as far as I know. I know it lacks inter-state interconnects, but that can't be the sole reason.

andsoitis 2y ago
> There's opportunities for plenty of solar or wind, According to Newsweek article in January: ”Texas wind farms generated nearly 120,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2022, about as much as the solar output of the four next-most-prolific states combined, and 17 times more than California. The 20 gigawatt-hours (GWh) put out by Texas solar panels in 2022 took a back seat only to California's 35 GWh—but only because California vastly exceeds Texas in the number of home-roof-mounted panels, thanks to homeowner incentives that Texas doesn't offer. The electricity from Texas' solar farms already exceeds that produced by California's—and has been doubling each year for three years. "Solar costs have dropped 80 percent in the past decade," says Metzger. "The state is pouring enormous investment into it." — https://www.newsweek.com/texas-greenest-state-energy-wind-solar-1847348 https://www.newsweek.com/texas-greenest-state-energy-wind-so...
- Night_Thastus 2y ago
  So if they're making so much power, why is their grid having trouble keeping up? Or is it not and I've misunderstood?
  - sickofparadox 2y ago
    There's only so much you can do with old infrastructure in an area that's already highly developed and prone to hurricanes.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    There's plenty of electricity. The power outages are localized to the city where a hurricane just hit. Its a local delivery infrastructure issue, not a power generation issue.

andsoitis 2y ago

As a household, to me most important question that I want an answer to is expected remediation for my home. I would be surprised if a Texas power utility company doesn’t provide that to their customers. I get that here in California.

btown 2y ago
This assumes that you trust their metric for expected remediation. But in practice, utility companies are incentivized to provide a conservative estimate of how long repairs will take, and to the extent they're training models on the data available to them, the metrics they'll expose to you from their model inference, as well as the model itself, are designed around that conservative outlook. But by looking at a map, there are clear patterns: if many isolated areas have outages, there may be many points of failure for various neighborhoods, causing a massive queue of crews to repair each area. But if there is half of the state out of power in a contiguous region, there's more likely to be a single point of failure that they're highly incentivized to fix or route around with the full technical staff at their disposal. The map is more likely to give me that insight than their biased spot estimate of timing.
- andsoitis 2y ago
  > This assumes that you trust their metric for expected remediation. Here in Los Angeles, my utility gives estimates that I have found pretty reasonable - sometimes actual is a few hours later than original estimate, but never more than maybe 6 hours in my experience. Sometimes it is fixed earlier. Along the way, updates of new expected fix time is emailed and texted.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

How quick are the stores to marking their status as Closed? It's manual I'm assuming and not some service that's not getting a pingback because the store is offline.

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
I would guess a modern franchise has significant telemetry monitoring. If the location is unreachable, easy enough for the mothership to note the site is having issues. Can a modern restaurant function without internet access to handle credit card transactions?
- bob1029 2y ago
  > Can a modern restaurant function without internet access to handle credit card transactions? Yes. You can imprint the card and/or record the information for offline processing. We had credit cards before everyone had internet access.
  - rigrassm 2y ago
    Heh, I had forgotten about those card imprint machines! Think I used one 2 times in one of my first jobs.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    Those technically exist, but who still has them? Are they even still allowed with modern credit card agreements? What about the percentage of people who no longer carry physical cards and rely on a smartphone/smartwatch credit system?

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Notice Whataburger marketing in the replies offering free swag to OP for "using the app so creatively"

snowpid 2y ago

This is a very good example of bad policy in the USA: in my whole life I encountered two power outtages. None in Germany (where I mainly lived ) , one in Poland and one in Ukraine (both 5 years ago). Leaving nuclear power was a stupid decision but compare to Texas, this is miniscule.

vel0city 2y ago
Do Germany and Poland get many hurricanes?
- snowpid 2y ago
  Since this thread is full of bad decisions in Texas hurricanes is a lame excuse. (also nature isn't stable in both countries, flood are a huge problem now)
  - vel0city 2y ago
    As if flooding isn't also a problem in Houston... What a joker. And you're right, this thread is full of misinformation, inaccuracies, and misunderstanding of the current situation.
    - snowpid 2y ago
      So I never needed an app to watch for power outtages. So correct the people. Do you claim there have been no outtages. Just during hurican season? Be precise
rigrassm 2y ago
Maybe some perspective helps, the hurricane would have given probably half of Germany hurricane force winds. Hurricanes cause power outages, I don't think I've ever heard about a hurricane anywhere that directly hit a populous area and didn't cause power loss. https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/texas-usa/germany https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/texa... Fact is, these storms are stupid powerful (even the "little" cat 1's) and big trees are heavy as fuck which is going to be the major cause of our outages. I can get pictures of some of the 15+ meter trees with trunks over a meter wide that ended up completely uprooted and toppled over. It's impossible to just not build around these trees (best we can do is try to trim the ones around power infra but our area is just so dense it's impractical to keep them completely cut back everywhere) so it's just a fact of life that there will be power infrastructure damage during extreme weather. Now the response speed definitely needs to be addressed but I cover that in my to level post so I won't rehash it here again.

cthalupa 2y ago

As a note, Centerpoint generally does have an outage map - it was just experiencing an outage itself.

mrguyorama 2y ago

CMP here in Maine is rated one of the worst in the country for reliability, but they have good, and granular, outage tracking. However, Spectrum has much more granularity in their monitoring in that they get heartbeat pings from every modem on their network, and will quickly see if a ping stops coming in. The result is that I often get a notice from Spectrum that my internet is out, before CMP even knows there's been an outage.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

This should show up via observability requirements of the National Electric Vehicle Charging Network too. Chargers need basically realtime status (what charge rates do you offer) & availability information to be publicly available to qualify. Watching where chargers are & aren't should provide a higher resolution feed for this data.

rigrassm 2y ago

As someone currently chilling in my car (better than cooking in the house!) on the North side of Houston waiting for power to be restored, I feel relatively qualified to offer some insight. I won't get into any of the politics of things as I'm not an expert on energy policy. Also, posting from my phone so I'll definitely mess up formatting so apologies in advance. To start, this has little if not nothing to do with Ercot and all the stuff that's been brought up repeatedly since the freak winter storm (which I also went through), we aren't low on light juice, no rolling brown outs, etc. Onto the the important points, a few things I've seen posted in comments here stuck out to me as being inaccurate: >> No outage tracker available No, we don't have a "down to the house" level outage tracker but that's not unreasonable given the large number of circuit level outages. That said we have had the following: - Published sometime Monday and updated every 5 minutes: https://gisoutagetracker.azurewebsites.net/ https://gisoutagetracker.azurewebsites.net/ - A much more detailed map that shows the status of things down to the circuit level: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/195bcf03ae0c491f9f14bf77f2c43420 https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/195bcf03ae0c491f9f14bf7... >> It was just a small category 1, how could it be so bad? As an outsider, I'd probably be asking the same thing but there were a few things that made this situation worse than it would normally be. - Lack of preparedness But not in the way you're probably thinking. Our forecasted tracks when it was coming off the Yucatan started out with this thing staying well South of the Houston area. As of July 6th, 2 days before landfall, it was confidently projected to make landfall around Corpus Christ and Houston would just get a bunch of rain. But that's not what happened, It ended up being a worst case track with the eye going right up the west side of Houston putting the entire city under the "Dirty side" of the storm. - It's been wet AF the last month! We probably got lucky that the week before the storm it finally stopped raining for a while. I bring this up because just in my neighborhood alone, I saw at least 5 old and very very large trees that fell and had huge chunks of root system pulled up out of the ground. These are trees that have survived at least 2 major hurricanes in the past that just popped out of the ground and laid over. I suspect, especially in the suburbs on the North and West side, that a bunch of harder to get to lines were damaged which, in my mind, helps explain why there are a ton more complete circuit outages (No traffic lights, major buildings like grocery stores completely disconnected) in our areas. All that said, it sucks and is uncomfortable but on the bright side, this time last year we were in the middle of a month long heatwave (hitting 100°F+ almost daily) but since the storm blew through it stayed relatively mild and even fairly pleasant. It was actually really nice out just chilling under a pop up tent yesterday afternoon! Hope this helps give some insight into things from a first person perspective.