If there’s an EMP that effectively destroys the electrical grid, you’ve got far bigger problems than your rooftop solar not working afterwards. Handheld electronics on the other hand, with their tiny conducting areas relative to hundreds of miles of powerlines are likely to fare well; the mildly hardened electronics of modern cars fared well when tested.
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I would also imagine that there are restrictions on storing any fuel as well on a balcony.
Likely a safe bet that if a grill is not allowed a generator is not going to be allowed for fire code on top of the CO issues.
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The flip side of that is that EVs provide a lot of distributed storage that can be fed back into a home to temporarily reduce load on the grid.
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I know of at least one DMS member using their EV as a multi-kWH UPS for small loads in their home.
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My understanding is that Tesla passenger cars store 75-100kWh, which would help some. It’s not going to run AC for long but might keep a furnace blower going for a couple of days. Haven’t done the math.
Bill Forstchen’s book “One Second After” is a pretty good piece of post-apocalyptic fiction.
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The retort from engineering explained is that EV adoption rate is significantly slower than the rate we’ve historically been able to build up grid capacity, so it’s unlikely to be a limiting factor.
Wellllll…I felt we did everything right and we’re prepared but our pipes busted anyways.
No need to worry about us - We have insurance and two incomes. Thousands of families are far worse off.
I have no point. I just wanted to say this sucks.
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AMAZING trilogy!!!
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And what ever they’re connected to - pcb traces, etc. Tiny fab geometries make them much easier to damage. If enough cell towers go down, it really won’t matter.
And smaller silicon components alongside lower gate voltages also make them more susceptible to damage than earlier solid-state electronics. But unlike hundreds of miles of the power grid, they’ve got a minuscule area for an EMP to act upon.
The Texas Power Outage situation has been quite an experience for my family.
I felt we were better prepared than many. We stocked up on bottled water, we have a gas fireplace, a propane grill with 3 extra tanks all pretty much full except the one in the grill, plenty of food in the pantry, a battery based Duracell powerpack pro for charging electronic devices, full gas tanks in the vehicles (3) and lots of warm clothing and blankets.
Still it was a very difficult experience in many ways. The coldest night was 41 degrees in the bedroom with no fireplace. We put on 6 layers of blanketing and while we were warm under the covers getting up to go to the bathroom was chilling. It was 55-60 in the den with the fireplace. Power was off an on and the worst part is that there was absolutely no way to plan for anything. The longest time it was off was for 8 hrs or so. We lit candles and talked about all kinds of things around the fireplace. It was much like camping in the cold when I was in the Boy Scouts. So far we have no busted pipes. We dripped both hot an cold water since the freeze hit.
We ventured out in my 4WD pickup yesterday and the day before to get a Wendy’s lunch. Man was it awesome under the circumstances. I used the propane burner on my grill to make hot coffee and tea.
It was frigid outside and took a little while to reach boiling but it was delicious when we drank it.
All in all a pretty embarrasing event for Texas and their power management I think. It doesn’t matter to me that the politicians say it was a once in a lifetime event. In this modern age of electronics and information management we should be able to plan better. You’d think we could build power plants equipped to deal with cold weather.
It doesn’t make sense that so many people had to suffer so unnecessarily. I feel my family weathered the storm pretty well, but then I also feel blessed to have a great number of resources to deal with it, too.
Next up I’m going to buy a 12,000 watt generator to power my heater blowers and appliance essentials when the power goes out in another 20 years. (Sooner some say due to global warming.)
I really empathize though with those who had it so much worse than my family did. Next week the weather will be much better and we’ll see how our elected officials develop plans for a future occurence.
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While not an immediate life-essential thing like food/water/shelter, reliable electricity is fundamental to the modern economy and this disruption is going to cost several orders of magnitude more than the remediation expenses that the industry ‘saved’, which are normal and customary winterization practices in the rest of the country.
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So long as you were born after 2011…
We CAN (plenty of states deal with temps like this for 4 months of the year) but profits have clearly trumped preparedness.
I for one fairly vehemently deny our former governor’s statement about a desire to stay independent of federal regulations on utilities. Some things in this world do better when there is real oversight.
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At this point it’s more childlike determination to defend a narrative rather than anything of substance. Pretty much the rest of the US grid under FERC regulations doesn’t suffer these kinds of outages at this scale and their electricity is no more expensive than ours.
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Just an observation I’ve made before on similar threads: until we change our consumer and investing behaviors, businesses will not change. We have to be willing to pay more and accept marginally lower returns for business behavior to change.
Something tells me if TXU/Oncor could offer a ‘we won’t brownout/blackout you’ plan at a higher rate and many would switch. Myself included…
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Negative. Our power is relatively cheap, but there are plenty of other states that are comparable or cheaper that are also subject to FERC regulations.
I can do nothing by myself to harden the grid. A makerspace can do nothing by itself to harden the grid. A large trade association like the IEEE can do nothing by itself to harden the electrical grid.
Some people contend that Y2K was much ado over nothing. If countless people had not worked many hours testing and fixing computer code, there may well have been major problems.
Knowing that if a skyscraper was built like computer software, that a scratch on a doorknob can cause the entire structure to come crashing down, I way over prepared for Y2K.
I had stockpiled cases of MREs, a small mountain of canned vegetables and chili, piles of rice, pasta and beans. And then there was sterno to heat it and more than enough ammunition to defend it all. Many months of used 2 liter bottles were rinsed out and kept. If problems surfaced in Australia and Japan early on Jan 1, the plan was to fill the bottles and bath tubs.
It took over a year to eat up that food and I have been very lax ever since.
That said, with the cold forecast, I had a week of food and water ready.
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Not really.
According to this, only $3.8 billion, double what some are wanting to spend for the next installation of “stimulus.”
If an EMP event does happen whether anthropomorphic or natural, our fate for the forseeable future would resemble the past week only worse.
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