I wonder what is the Texas equivalent of kids in New England learning from Ben Affleck that you have to lie together naked in a sleeping bag to treat hypothermia.
1 Sucking the poison from a rattlesnake bite?
Learning from Ted Cruz that you live among people dumb enough to elect Ted Cruz?
So the district made some mealy-mouthed statement telling the teachers to have grace with their students and try to be asynchronous, but not actually telling them to cancel classes because they don't want to make up the days. So of the elementary school teachers, we had 1 teacher who cancelled everything, 1 teacher who said "show up if you can", and 1 teacher who said "you must be there or else I will count you absent." Ace was very upset. (We have a lot of annoyances with this teacher.)
Ace logged on for the morning zoom. After 5 minutes, the teacher lost her internet. She sent a message to another student's parent to please tell the class saying that she has lost power due to a blackout and she'd see everyone at 1 pm. Heh.
It's a lot like 12:30, but a little later.
5 to 3. You know those small population tipping point states? Are any of them in double digits Fahrenheit?
Us? we are. The kids logged themselves on, we told them it was fine if they didn't. Anyway, we're bundling them up to go play now.
8 not directed at you but at the school.
Why do you have school on President's day?
telling the teachers to have grace with their students
Pretty sure there's a court case that says they shouldn't do this.
not actually telling them to cancel classes because they don't want to make up the days
That feels like it would be liability-inducing if someone crashed on the road, no?
They declared it a remote day. Just not canceled.
Why would a teacher say "show up if you can" if it's a remote day? Is that a reference to power outages / higher lag as opposed to ice?
My university is absolutely the worst for handling closures. They never want to close. OK, fine. Most of our students commute, however, so when there's a bad snowfall, it's non-trivial to try to get to class. Most of the professors live very close to campus, so even when there's considerable snow most of us can get in. So the university adopts the position "erm, ask your professors if they are having class" which invariably means that some cancel, some don't, and students are pissed.
My kid is 22 and at U of Fayetteville, where it is currently -1 degrees F. His teacher said that he wasn't going to take roll, but that students would be responsible for the content of the lecture.
I'm thinking of giving my students a three or four day extension on all their work (it's online this week anyway). Not going to do lectures, and may cancel the zoom workshops I had planned.
There is ice on the inside of my windows and the local power company is begging us to conserve energy, I guess so that we don't have to have rolling blackouts like heebie.
About six inches of snow here so far, and more coming tomorrow.
I wonder how the ecology is going to be wrecked. Presumably there are a lot of bugs and lizards and other critters that overwinter in Texas and aren't really adaptable to a hard freeze. A massive die-off at the bottom of the food chain is going to have reverberations.
It's gross rain right now here in suburban Boston. I heard we were supposed to get snow again.
My car battery died, but I'm not using my car much and afraid to go to my regular Toyota place, because they were not great about masks.
Tim's Subaru dealer is a lot better.
Out power just came back on after a two hour outage. It's 61 in the house and I'm freezing!
Its 62 in my house and that's about usual.
how do you bring yourself to get out of bed?
do you wear gloves inside? I'm wearing leggings, sweatpants, two long sleeve shirts, and a sweatshirt. I don't understand what else one would do.
You are on the right track, multiple layers of pants is definitely important.
Got any hot chocolate?
In seriousness, if your furnace ducts have dampers and you've never switched their positions, now might be a good time to try doing that.
So is this a "haha, they said global warming" moment, or an "oh shit, this is pretty weird" moment, or a "perfectly normal variability" moment, or a "the children's blood that was powering the sun is all being consumed by the cabal" moment?
Killing the cold-blooded lizard people moment.
Quite extreme all through the central part of the country. Map via Capital Weather Gang
Link to just the map. Shows locations with record lows for day/month/all-time.
The lenght of time it stays that cold will be the main determinant of human/natural environmental damage. I think this one will be relatively long. The one I experienced in Houston was not that cold, but it extended for several days.
It's been snowing here all day, but is in the 20s, finally, so nbd.
18 -- The bugs are already gone. At least that's the sense you get taking long summer drives these last couple of years, compared to a decade or two ago. Our huge experiment in habitat modification is going to be a big failure, the only question is how big a failure.
I remembered a big snow storm in Ft Worth in 1964, and from the internet I see it was 7.8 inches one day and 4.3 inches the next. That was a damn lot of snow. Obviously not as cold and what you're seeing now.
Ironically we'd like it to be a little colder here. It's low to mid 30s which is too warm for any skating, sledding, or skiing, but too cold to enjoy outdoors otherwise. The pond where we skate was slushy and gross this morning. It's also going to sleet or ice tonight which is more dangerous than fluffy snow that can just be pushed away.
Apparently, Lincoln had a rolling blackout.
We had power for about 45 minutes, and then lost it for another 2 1/2 hours, and then it came back on recently. In the meantime, we went sledding on some very meager hills but it still wore us all out.
Hey let the guy drink as much as he wants, he was in a stressful position with the Civil War and stuff.
Apparently, Lincoln had a rolling blackout.
I thought that was Grant.
I'm wearing leggings, sweatpants, two long sleeve shirts, and a sweatshirt. I don't understand what else one would do.
Keep your head and your feet warm, and you could probably eliminate a couple of these layers. So: a pair of cosy socks or slippers for your feet; and some kind of cap or toque for your head. All else is superfluous: you're not really cold if your feet are warm.
No, it was Abe.
Our power is still on, but the internet died a few hours ago (apparently city-wide) and everyone using so much data has basically recreated dial-up speeds.
You know who has a nice, static, text-based interface, however? hiya everybody.
Text- only is still the best. The pivot to video has been an annoyance.
Good to know the blog is apocalypse ready.
Ironically when I posted that I got a database error. It's very self-conscious.
40 last - you will feel it in your feet first, but for the long haul you really need to keep your core warm. If you can heat up water, a hot water bottle tucked under a down vest with a thick wool layer on top (blanket, jacket) works well. do not put the hot water bottle next to your skin - so on top of the sweater, but under the insulating vest and wool blanket.
I don't understand what else one would do.
This seems like good advice. (tlazy;dc: tent on bed)
Sleeping bags also seem like a good idea.
My university cancels at the stop of a hat, as it should be, and professors can also unilaterally cancel their classes if they think travel to campus is unsafe. The university doesn't tend to make the call until 6 am that morning, so if I think a cancellation is imminent I'll usually just go ahead and tell my students the night before.
OT: This hotel has a microwave with a metal rack in it. Not just dumped there. It's got a built in mount.
It's a thing: https://www.westsideappliancerepair.com/2020/09/11/is-it-ok-to-use-the-metal-rack-in-your-microwave/
SP: "what is the Texas equivalent of kids in New England learning from Ben Affleck that you have to lie together naked in a sleeping bag to treat hypothermia."
Learning at what point it's so hot you can't spend appreciable time outside performing any physically taxing activity without ending up with heatstroke. I remember reading about an epidemic of kidney and other organ diseases among young men in Honduras (or maybe Guatemala) that had been tracked down to basically these men working in really hot conditions, and their kidneys giving out as a result.
These recent temps are pretty cold, but growing up in D/FW (70s), we know that every winter we'd have a few "blue northers" that might put snow on the ground, but definitely would put sleet everywhere. Break off a ton of tree branches, down power lines everywhere, and so you'd have to be prepared for no power for a couple days, waiting for the crews to go remove the branches and restore the lines.
52: They are clearly just fucking with people.
51, 54: I've got one! It works!
I have no idea WHY there's a rack there, and it serves no obvious purpose. Mostly it's annoying to take it out if you want to heat up something in a container talker than a small bowl. But no sparks, fires, or explosions.
My sister's microwave has a metal rack because you can use it when the oven is used on its convection setting. It took me WAY too long to confirm this via a web search for the owner's manual, and I have reference librarian research skills.
(Turns out you can bake an angel food cake in a metal bundt pan on a metal rack in a microwave oven using the convection setting, and it turns out mostly as good as a regular oven.)
Also, stay warm, Texas. I've mostly dealt with power outages in hot weather. Power outages in winter are scary.
It's been colder and much snowier here than is now typical, and the effect has been that our house is noticeably warmer than in winters past, because there's a two-foot shell of snow on the entire roof. So hang in there, Texas; a couple more weeks of cold and snow and you'll be toasty too.
I liked the movie American Hustle (watched a couple nights ago), especially Jennifer Lawrence using the microwave.
Advice is being shared on Twitter ... a bit dystopian but it agrees with what I experienced during the ice storm in '98.
https://twitter.com/CherryGryffon/status/1361409501132374027
Lost power again around 8:30 last night. We all went to bed. At some point we had power over night, but then lost it again. Woke up to 7° outside, 57° inside, and 3 kids in bed with us.
At least phone data isn't quite as slow at 7 am.
Jeez. That doesn't sound pleasant. But think how much you're going to enjoy annoying your kids by reminiscing about it the rest of their lives. The real electrical power, etc.
At first I'm shocked and baffled by this. How can Texas have it worse than I ever did growing up? And then I remember, oh yeah, we heated our house with wood. In theory we could have gone without power for weeks if we were willing to heat bathwater in pots on the stove. (For literally weeks, we'd run out of food, but I can't imagine being cut off for that long, power or no power. When Hurricane Irene washed out the roads in 2011, someone got to my parents with an ATV in 2 or 3 days. But I digress...) Vermonters who don't have wood stoves are probably familiar with the tips in 60.
The museum scenes in American Hustle were filmed at a place I used to work. I had to oversee their crew in the galleries. It was remarkable how afraid they all were of the director, who I gather is legendary for being an asshole. It was also hard not to stare at Jennifer Lawrence. Fun fact: the Rembrandt that they talk about being a forgery probably isn't an autograph Rembrandt (though it's definitely Dutch 17th century and closely related.)
Several years ago we had a storm that dropped about three feet of snow. My parents lost power and it took days not only for them to get it back but for their road to be plowed. It was very frightening to talk to them and think of them and their elderly neighbors all stuck in the cold, unable to get out or for me to help them.
We have power! still no internet. But hooray for heat.
However, I am wearing: wool socks over regular socks, leggings and two pairs of sweatpants, two long sleeve shirts under a heavy wool sweater, and a hat. So I was feeling better. But glad to have power.
I'm not going to post until the internet comes back online, though.
People talked about the blizzard of 1949 when I was growing up. One guy's dad's family killed a pig for food and kept the meat in a part of their house they couldn't keep warm. The National Guard had dug out her highway, so they would walk to the highway and hitch into town for supplies and to stop boredom.
They probably lost power but nobody worried about it much because they barely got power a couple of years earlier.
The current temperature here is -27. That's not windchill.
From the Twitter advice at 60:
If your pets are too cold, put socks on their feet and/or other clothing you have that fits them
Are we sure this isn't just wanting an excuse to make them look extra adorable?
An Italian Greyhound would look good in fishnet stockings, but would not be warm or adorable.
Some bad advice in 60. Not a great idea to totally seal the room you're in with a space heater.
Poor phrasing in 72, you're not sealing your room with a space heater but you know what I mean
I'm having my boiler replaced today and am grateful it's currently 46 here. Last week it was in the single digits.
but would not be warm or adorable
True. If a "three-dog night" is measured with respect to a dingo as reference standard, then that's, like, a five-greyhound night. Too skinny.
I'm driving back tomorrow when it is just going to be regular cold. I don't know if I would have driven across county in weather like today. I've read "To Build a Fire. "
You want a husky in the car with you to make fun of your wilderness survival skills and abandon you.
Can it be the same one that says "That problem is so easy to solve in R" and then abandons me when I'm using SAS?
I thought you needed a border collie for that level of intellectual scorn.
Will someone go start my car for me?
|| I have a question. A fairly high proportion of the phone calls I get are spam, so I barely answer the phone. From time to time, though, I'll google the number, to see if it might have been a potential client or opposing lawyer or something. And, as has been the case since the beginning on the internet, this does not produce anything like a straight-forward answer. Even the 'reverse look-up' service ads don't list numbers in numerical order. You'd think this would be just about the easiest thing. And yet it's nearly always a stupid waste of time. I think it's a conspiracy of the search engines. Or is this SEO, with a sick meaning of O? |>
67: For us it was the Blizzard of 78. Now that's 40 years ago, but I think it's entered our collective unconscious. People were trapped, so now everyone rushes to buy bread, eggs, and milk before a storm in New England. This baffles Tim. Ottawa and even the small "city" a couple of hours from Toronto where he grew up don't experience this mad rush.
82: I think the spam now uses spoofed numbers anyway.
|| The Montana legislature is considering outlawing discrimination based on vaccination. Including in employment. Also barring the use of vaccination records ("immunity passports") by governments, employers, or public accommodations. |>
Does that mean the kids can go to school without measles shots?
83
People were trapped, so now everyone rushes to buy bread, eggs, and milk before a storm in New England.
It's a meme on the DC subreddit. It seems like 2 or 3 times a year we get a forecast of 5 inches of snow, a rush at the stores, an OPM announcement that everything is closed (although not this year; the pandemic has ended snow days, apparently), actual accumulation of 0.5 inches, and accidents and terrible traffic anyway.
It's bread, milk, and toilet paper in Pittsburgh. We're always thinking about poop.
It's a quasi-official forecasting system at this point
My rental car is helpfully reminding me that roads might be icy every time I put it in gear.
87 Yes. Why let the paranoia unleashed by the supposed defeat of Trump go to waste?
1. 86 is super shitty.
2. our power seems to cycle on for 30 min every 2-3 hours. It's enough to keep our house in the low 60s. I'm sick of it, though.
3. Neighbors burst a water main and their front yard was flooding, and they aren't here.
We couldn't get through to the city, couldn't get ahold of the landlord, and Jammies felt nervous about shutting off their water without permission. Eventually we flagged down a city truck passing by and they shut it down.
3. other people are going without power for 12-24 hours, though. It means there must be a lot of people in town (or state) with no heat, and if their pipes froze, no water. Cell service is intermittent, too.
Jammies has the ability to turn off water at will?
the shut off valve is in the front yard.
I hope you have ice skates so you can use their new front yard appropriately.
No wonder you guys have all the signs about not messing with you. It's just too easy.
Heebie, I'm glad you're OK. Friends in Austin have been without power since yesterday and just went to stay elsewhere. They said their house hit the 40s. I'm seeing pictures of downtown Austin lit up with lots of angry comments. I usually am fine making fun of Southerners doing stupid things in the cold (while understanding the infrastructure just isn't at all meant for it, so things fail in very foreign ways), but this is dangerous and awful. We had a similar blackout in MI a couple years ago when we lived in a cheap rental cottage with water from an electric well and made it two days before asking friends if we could stay with them.
|| The bill precluding certain medical treatment of trans kids lost in a close vote a couple of weeks ago. The obvious answer? A new bill! They killed a bill increasing the minimum wage to $12, and one capping insulin costs. Why am I still hearing about 'economic anxiety' and 'the forgotten man' and being urged to go to a diner and hear them out, they just might be right about something? |>
Houston Chronicle says the Texans are suffering from too much renewable energy.
Also: Utilities aren't permitted to charge what it costs to produce electricity.
Texas has capped the market price of wholesale electricity? That's hilarious.
"We want maket-based electricity pricing but only the good parts."
Yeah - they've got one source who apparently is a former utility executive now affiliated with a university.
Sounds like Texas has several different problems with its electric system that are intersecting in a particularly unfortunate way in this crisis.
Our school district is handling it so badly. The entire day yesterday, they kept sending the teachers messages to get their students to do SOMETHING asynchronous so that they could be counted as present. They wouldn't cancel school. The actual school district website where attendance is tracked was down for most of the day, and Jammies got a text message telling him to text parents with an assignment for their high school students. Jesus fucking christ.
Finally Monday afternoon, they announced that school would be canceled on Tuesday.
Today they have announced that school will be canceled tomorrow. However, we have a friend on the school board, and the superintendent has already decided to cancel everything on Thursday and make Friday a day to check in with students and reconnect. But they haven't told the teachers yet. So Jammies has colleagues who are reshuffling lesson plans and trying to figure out what to do on Thursday during those hours when they have power, because they won't just plain reveal their plans to teachers. It's just so shitty.
Also in our neighborhood FB group there was someone who said "we have no food - help?" and a bunch of people are offering up canned goods. But on a sneaking suspicion I went down the road to the address with a box of pop tarts and nutrigrain bars. The woman hugged me for bringing snacks instead of cans and, uh, has a very very serious case of meth-mouth going on, and is 25 going on 80, and I think I was right to intuit that they needed kid food, not ingredients.
ERCOT is generally considered a very good grid operator, but their isolation from other grids is showing its downsides right now.
When I was there, it was right next to Disney, but more boring.
How do you tell meth-mouth from pop tart-mouth?
Wait I lost all connections to EPCOT except of.
Eating Rotten Grain Organization of Texas be trippin'
Everybody else initially reads "WFH" as "What the fucking hell?!" too, right?
3 kids in bed with us.
Endearing but maybe a trifle crowded. If the cats joined in that's basically a nest.
I do wonder what Rascal will remember from this, and from this past year. I have distinct memories of the Northeast blackout that happened when I was four.
Apparently, Lincoln had a rolling blackout.
Very uncool way to describe the impact of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Glad you've been okay, Heebie. Hope you stay that way.
That came out sounding weird and ominous and not like sincere Tos and pears. Just sending hugs.
Not that Ile is TOS. Just riffing.
Gov. Abbot on Hannity last night that the true winters storm power emergency is the friends we bash the Green New Deal with along the way.
Apparently a major problem is that the pressure of natural gas feeds to power plants dropped too low because of the cold temperatures. The conservatives were right, Texas was destroyed by the Gay-Loussac's.
Guys! guys! we've had continuous power since yesterday, and our internet came back overnight at some point, and our pipes are thawing. There was a bit of an ice storm yesterday, and that's surely causing problems, and some of our friends haven't had power for multiple days now. So as a state things are rocky, but I'm so happy to start to trust the electricity and warmth again.
My brother's always joking about how El Paso is really more New Mexico than Texas, but this week it's literally true. Power there is fine because it's not part of Texas for power purposes.
Yeah, Jammies went to college in Las Cruces, and El Paso is much more similar to that than to the rest of the world. Also, like Amarillo, they already get snow every winter.
When we've had dustings of snow before, it's always been gone by noon the next day. It's almost more surreal to be in the muddy sludge stage. My neighborhood looks like Michigan!
Do you have armed men threatening the government?
My high school principal (a Franciscan sister) retired to El Paso.
I think Amarillo's part of OK for power purposes? The boundary of the Texas Interconnection gets a little weird up in the panhandle though.
The worst is when you get a quick temperature drop and that muddy sludge stage then freezes over. Those 6-9 inch clumps in the driveway that you just drove over when they were slush turn into cinder blocks and the big clumps you shoveled or plowed become concrete walls.
The next few nights are still supposed to be hard freezes, but it looks like it's supposed to be in the 30s or 40s during the days.
You guys, I am just so glad to have power and not be jumpy that it's only going to last 20 minutes.
I am putting an ADU in the backyard and it will be fully electrified with solar. I've been kinda waffling on the battery because it is so expensive and SMUD is very reliable. But really, I think I'll get the battery.
That's not a bad idea. Would you do one with full plumbing?
California has bowel movements, but not in a way we can understand.
Because it's right on a giant crack.
Federalism is so fucking great exhibit #17,847.
(For the non-link clickers amongst us--one direction of State Line Ave. In Texarkana plowed, the other not.)
Or this asshole mayor of a Texas city.
Dollars to donuts he is writing that with one particular enemy in mind, like a family member who he considers to be a lazy entitled shit.
137: With this sort of municipal services, there's no way Texarkana is ever going to be able to serve as the future seat of the papacy.
Looking forward to reading a long article about the history of Texas grid/interchange regulation.
The other thing that makes me angry about all this is how little information has been available about the power outages. If you have rolling blackouts, it would be super helpful if customers knew what time their power would go out. If you have unexpected power outages, it would be super helpful for customers to know that this is something that needs to be fixed and the time is uncertain. Or whatever. They certainly know this on the backend, but they're not sharing any of it.
OK to masturbate to Rush Limbaugh's death.
Also I have electricity guilt, because ours is seemingly stable and everyone else we know is still having ongoing outages.
My electricity is so unstable it keeps cycling back and forth sixty times a second.
I can only assume the warnings that power could be unreliable for up to a month (!) are mostly a cynical exercise (it might have been a month, but look, it was only a week! we're doing great!).
So they knocked down an old Trump casino today, Mitch and Trump are engaged in a vicious public feud, they filed charges against Brent Bozell's kid, and Rush Limbaugh is dead. Is it possible to overdose on schadenfreude? We're going to find out!
142: I was just about to comment on that, but "no more" seemed wrong. Why would you do that when he was alive.
The real ones know there's only one conservative icon who really mattered who died today, NMM to musical legend Carman. First arena concert I ever went to.
Technical question, can you still get off to this video if you're very careful to only think about Toby, Mike, and Kevin?
Is it possible to overdose on schadenfreude? We're going to find out!
Now everyone is losing water. We're filling up tubs.
If you fill them to different levels, they'll make different sounds when you thump them.
They get drained down, but they get filled again. They don't let anybody keep them drained.
Looking forward to reading a long article about the history of Texas grid/interchange regulation.
I don't know a whole lot about the history, but part of the deal with the current setup is that the ERCOT grid is entirely within the state of Texas so it's only under the regulatory of the Texas PUC rather than FERC, which regulates interstate grids. This is why certain parts of Texas are not part of the ERCOT grid. There are some points of interconnection between ERCOT and the Eastern and Western Interconnections (the two main North American grids), but they're not set up for regular exchanges of power and can't handle the scale that would be necessary in a crisis like this.
In other words, Texas said "get the FERC off our PUC so we can have ERCOT and eat it too?"
I don't think Texas's allergy to federal regulation is particularly at fault in this case, though. They have central planning too, it just didn't prepare sufficiently for this. California might not have precisely the same issues, but we've been falling down in other systemic ways.
I think someone needs to write a giant article showing how Republicans have turned Texas into Venezuela with funny hats.
It strikes me as really stupid that Texas has all this wind power and isn't set up to export it to the rest of the country.
158: Agreed, up to a point. As I said above, ERCOT has a generally good reputation for grid operation, and planning for contingencies is an important part of that. (They're certainly way ahead of Alaska, which doesn't have a centralized grid operator at all.) It seems to me that the problems here mainly stem from over-reliance on natural gas, which has a systematic vulnerability to this kind of crisis because of the physical characteristics of gas lines. That's not unique to Texas; lots of places rely heavily on gas for generation and are equally vulnerable to a freak event like this. Wind turbines freezing is a lesser issue since they account for a much smaller portion of generation but is somewhat more Texas-specific since they comprise an unusually large portion of generation there.
What is unique to Texas is that once gas plants and wind turbines started going offline they had no way to replace that power by buying power from somewhere else, because their isolated grid doesn't have the capability of doing that at the scale necessary. That does come down to the regulatory issue. In this particular case surrounding states were having the same problems, of course, so having the option to buy power from them may not have helped anyway, but it is a complicating factor that made rolling blackouts the only available option.
Alaska would be so fucked if something comparable happened here and knocked out most of our gas generation. It wouldn't be a winter storm, of course, since Alaskan infrastructure is built to withstand much colder temperatures than Texan, but there could easily be some other issue that disproportionately affected gas plants. We'd probably have rolling blackouts for weeks.
Being in the north, Alaska would be pretty vulnerable to a solar flare event.
152: I can only view this as an assassination attempt against me. Well, it won't work because I have an unusually high tolerance for schadenfraughhh.
Fucking boil water advisory until next TUESDAY.
It can't possibly take that long if you have electricity back.
Apparently the city can't test the water until next Tuesday?
Anyway, the next town over has no water, nor major parts of our city, including the hospital. I seriously have guilt over our stable electricity and water - 24 hours at this point. We're extremely fortunate.
166 was more of a joke about how long it takes to boil water.
I'm not allowed to get jokes until next Tuesday.
167. Yikes! The local hospital without water! What a disaster. It sounds like your having power and water is very much a matter of luck. I hope your luck holds and that conditions improve all around.
Another snow day here. School was cancelled (or rather, is fully remote, which is a different set of problems). The forecast is for 3-6 inches. Should be fun.
Except for 152, I've done very well at giving up Twitter for Lent.
165/167: Eek! That's not good.
This was a good article about the weather patterns leading to the freezing weather: https://heated.world/p/the-climate-is-drunk-again
140.1: Leibowitz, now there's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.
152: Wait a second, I just realized that guy goes by "Jean-Michel Connard"? Reminds me of a scene from Spaceballs.
How do you even set your luggage combination to that?
Ted Cruz Goes to Cancun, Like the Turd Muncher We Know Him to Be.
It's gone from flaking to actually snowing hard. Like, the current snowing level would be a once-every-ten-years event on its own, were it not caged inside this crazy week.
This is a good take on ERCOT, etc.
I cannot for the life of me get that tweet thread to start at the right tweet. It's supposed to start at "Generation is stubbornly staying at 47K Megawatts" and then go from that tweet on.
It starts at the right tweet for me.
After all this time I still barely can figure out Twitter. (I don't even own a TV, or whatever the modern version is.) I can only figure I'm using it wrong by continually assuming that tweets should have a coherent narrative.
I see a link to a tweet, here or on Facebook or Reddit, and someone says it's a good take or something, so I follow the link. OK, it's a sentence or two, or a screenshot or short video. It's usually roughly what I would have expected from whatever sent me there. Sometimes it's numbered and part of a series and I can usually read them all in order. Then I'll often keep reading, because other stuff is right there. It seems completely random whether the next tweet is something else by the same person in chronological order, something else by the same person on the same topic (but out of chronological order), something else by a a different person on the same topic, or something completely random and unrelated.
I don't generally take pride in ignorance but I think it might be OK in this case.
We were without power on Friday (localized outages due to ice, branches on lines, etc.) but have had power and water since then, knock wood.
The "rolling" outages in Austin didn't roll because ERCOT required such a large power cut that rolling would have involved essential circuits, so 40% of residential customers were out starting Sunday night. People are slowly coming back online but now transformers are blowing all over the place.
At this point I'm more stressed about the possibility of losing water than electricity. We're stockpiling boiled water and hoping we won't have to resort to snow to flush our toilets.
It seems completely random whether the next tweet is something else by the same person in chronological order, something else by the same person on the same topic (but out of chronological order), something else by a a different person on the same topic, or something completely random and unrelated.
Yeah, there was a time you'd just see the content linked, then Twitter started adding more stuff to catch people's attention, and it's always seemed semi-random. I got the muscle of stopping reading at that point.
people filling up jugs of water at the river. Smart but depressing.
Optimistic spin is that it's just easier and quicker than getting in and out if HEB. But still.
The thread in 182 is really interesting and clarifies the regulatory issues considerably. Apparently Texas doesn't require the same winterization procedures for power plants and gas pipelines that every other state does.
Hope they're boiling it!
My parents got back power this morning (Austin). Not sure if it stuck.
193 I'm not sure I'm really ready to accept that Florida has better winterization requirements. Because that would really be something.
This from the thread in 182 is particularly important in understanding the regulatory failure here:
When regulators make a knowing decision to not require a safety apparatus, they are telling companies not to spend money on that apparatus because the business won't be reimbursed.
Utilities can't just spend money on whatever they want and recover it in rates. Everything has to be approved by regulators, who are primarily focused on keeping rates as low as possible while maintaining adequate levels of service. Spending extra to build infrastructure to a higher standard than legally required is called "gold-plating" and isn't allowed to be recovered in rates. (Utilities can still spend that money, but it comes out of their profits. Allowable profit margins are also set by regulators and are generally pretty thin. This is the tradeoff with being a regulated natural monopoly.)
Given that context, the minimum standards that a PUC sets via regulation are actually really important for ensuring proper operation of the system. Nobody is going to go beyond the minimum standard, so it really needs to be set at a level that really is sufficient for system resilience.
Update: It stuck for the past few hours at least.
I'm curious if the higher standards in other states are thanks to the state regulatory boards making the right decisions, or if being in a larger network creates more super-regional leverage to create consistency around the right standards, even if the Florida board would do the same as Texas on its own.
Does anyone understand this? The worst case scenario: Demand for power overwhelms the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down. I guess I'm provisionally accepting that things blow up if supply can't meet demand, but none of the explanations really make sense to me.
199: Electricity can't be stored economically at the scale necessary to balance a transmission grid, so supply always has to equal demand within a certain tolerance. Grid operators monitor demand on a minute-by-minute basis and dispatch units as needed to meet projected demand in the next five minutes (in addition to longer scale forecasting on the scale of days to weeks to ensure that enough plants are running to meet the base load). Ordinarily there are a certain number of units running but not connected to grid (called "spinning reserve") so they can be quickly dispatched to replace a unit that falls off unexpectedly due to a malfunction and keep the overall system stable. In this case, though, so many units fell off so quickly that there wasn't enough reserve capacity available so they had to shut down portions of the grid to keep the remaining parts going at all. It's definitely true that just letting the whole thing collapse would have caused catastrophic damage to the infrastructure that would have taken months to repair.
If I recall the only good way to store electricity is to pump water uphill, but there's long-term issues with evaporation. The other technique is to fill trains with rocks and drive them uphill.
Yes, pumped water storage is the only technology that can provide the scale of storage necessary for grid regulation, but it's very expensive and only feasible in certain contexts for obvious reasons.
Apparently rolling blackouts are over, at least locally?
Not filling out the name box probably saved a couple nanowatts.
I got pulled over today, I think because my rental car has Texas plates and they were afraid I was stealing utilities. The stated reason was obvious bullshit (I signaled a lane change but didn't keep the blinkers on until I was completely in the new lane).
So, is this Ted Cruz thing going to stick, or is it just another funny news cycle?
206: You're welcome! I'm glad my hard-won expertise in the exciting field of utility regulation is finally relevant to national news.
I feel like it's too long until his next election to be a huge deal for him. But it's something for his next Dem challenger to milk regardless.
It's pretty amusing that family or friends are sharing their texts with the NYT, though.
There are some benefits to the subject of your story being one of the most obnoxious assholes in the world.
Now I'm at the emergency vet because my cat can't pee. I was a wreck trying to decide to wait until morning or just go, but in the end the highway wasn't too bad, mostly dry.
Here it is not snowing but my mother is dying and in hoping she lasts till my sister gets here this afternoon.
oh no, Nworb, my heart goes out to you. Your dear mother.
Oh gosh, so sorry Nw. All the best.
I'm so sorry, NW. What a long road for you.
Heebie, good luck with the kitty.
214- I am so sorry, NW. Hoping you and your sister can be there with her.
Very sorry to hear about your mother nworb.
my deepest sympathies to you and your sister, nw - thinking of you and ume.
WEll, as of this evening, she is still alive, if hardly kicking; having seen sister she seems able to hang on.