"has declared an EEA 3. Energy conservation is critical. Rotating outages are underway to reduce demand on the electric system. We urge Texans to put safety first during this time. Traffic lights and other infrastructure may be temporarily without power. 01:25:40 150221"
"Rotating outages primarily affect residential neighborhoods and small businesses and are typically limited to 10 to 45 minutes before being rotated to another location."
Edit 1:54am - First blackout lasted exactly 10 minutes. They got this down to a tee.
Edit 2:37am CT - Second blackout started.
Edit 3:00am - Second blackout ended.
Edit 3:17am - Third blackout started.
"each utility is required to lower the demand on its system based on its percentage of the historic ERCOT peak demand.
"each utility is responsible for determining how to implement the required demand reduction, most utilities use rotating outages for this purpose."
There's about 25 different utilities, so who knows what each does.
I'm surprised voltage reduction isn't used. It's very effective at reducing resistive loads (ie: heaters and incandescent lights).
https://www.ieso.ca/Corporate-IESO/Media/News-Releases/2019/...
Would be very effective with the space-heater (or oven?) driven demand right now in Texas. Not effective for A/C-driven demand (motors will draw more current).
Out of curiosity, where did you find this?
I don't understand. Here they shut down a couple large factories (that have agreed beforehand to emergency shutdowns) when there are capacity problems. Those eat so much power that it usually solves the problem.
They don't shut down power to residential just for capacity, if you're without power at home it means something blew up on the path that delivers to you.
Also, how can a gas pipeline freeze? Almost everyone is heating with natural gas here, we have a cold wave, and the only question is if they can deliver enough volume. Which is again fixed by shutting down some large industrial consumers, not by freezing homes.
They've asked everyone who CAN go to backup generators (think: hospitals, datacenters) to do so. If short-term shedding of residential load doesn't work, the next step is to blackout commercial players - think Walmart, etc. Those usually occur for longer periods of time and have security risks involved.
Natural gas pipelines have some water in them, they can freeze if they're not buried deep enough.
Yeah, my point is they have the order wrong. They're shutting down residential first with the associated health risks instead of shutting down commercial which will just send people home for a day or three.
You can see the forecasted gap on the home page. It’s going to her worse.