I’m in East Arlington (near 360 & GM Ranger Stadium) power hasn’t been out yet, but furnace running about 90% of time to keep up. Think how great it’ll be when everyone has an EV to add to the electrical load.
Griddy emailed and called me last week to tell me to switch to a month of another provided because of this.
Glad I took it.
1 Like
Crap, I just realized my contract ended middle of last month. Hopefully they won’t need to take my first born. Well maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.
2 Likes
I for one am so happy we have an “independent” power grid operated by a for-profit company not subject to open-meetings regulations. I would hate to live someplace where electricity was treated like simply a part of the vital infrastructure, instead of allowing shell corporations and LLCs to squeeze every last nickel out of every customer.
7 Likes
What about all the summer power outages because of wind, poor right of way and infrastructure management, and fire risk? How have open meetings prevented all those California outages?
2 Likes
I’m in GP&L country, but a message this morning indicated that they had found that the outage mapping wasn’t able to keep up with current situation. So they plan to work on our map once things are (sort of) normal again.
1 Like
You’re right, I was silly to criticize Texas for having a separate grid with insufficient generation capacity to keep up with demand and no way to easily tap into energy from other states. My bad.
7 Likes
The outage rolled rather slowly. My power was out for 12hr 45 min.
2 Likes
Same, somewhere around 3A until 4P was out. It came back from 4P until 5P and it’s back out again.
“The wholesale price of electricity spikes 10,000% in a Texas power outage.”:
Have a friend here in Lewisville that was using Grisly, the rate went to $9.02/kWh. His bill for yesterday was $180. This is after trying to switch last week. All providers where updating the transfer software and told him approx the 20th before his switch would be completed.
I called and switched on Friday. Griddy sent a list of providers and info for same-day switch and a curated list of no-contract providers.
2 Likes
I have no complaint with criticizing the Texas power grid situation. I’m only objecting to you responding to the Californication of the Texas grid as if it is a good thing, when it appears they actually have more down time from bad management.
When Texas split Oncor off from TXU, and created competitive billing companies, many suggested it was going to be at the cost of infrastructure build and upgrade. I’m honestly surprised if has taken this long to have this level of impact.
But also, this is such unprecedented weather for this state, and you never see this much of the state this cold, that most would have seen the heated windmill blades, and other cold weather prep spending as a waste of money. Sort of like why are our road departments so ill prepared for snow and ice? Because until recently, and even now, the number of days the equipment would get used doesn’t seem to justify the tax increases, or the cuts in other programs that would be required.
I’m not happy with the results today, but I sort of understand some of the tradeoffs that got us here, on what most seem to be calling a once per 100 year or less common event.
3 Likes
Electricity out all day Plano sent out message around 4 pm that it might be two days because multiile power station are down.
How economical is geothermal generation now?
Given that our peak demand tends to come when the ambient air temperature is either very high or very low, the delta T makes geothermal most effective when it is most needed.
On the flip side, imagine millions of EV chargers plugged into the grid. Future units may have mandatory controls to allow ERCOT to shut them off during a power emergency.
Mine was on for an hour and has been out since.
Could we voluntarily cut power to the space to reduce the strain on the grid? Or at least go around and unplug anything not being used? Sorry if that’s a dumb idea, i don’t know too much about stuff like this, I just figure we’re all holed up at home so the space isn’t really being used much
We have another run at power right at 6 hours after the first. I assume we’ll have it for about an hour and then it’s going off.
Edit: we made it an hour and 45 that time.