"Rolling blackouts," they said. "15 to 30 minutes," they said.
Here's what wasn't said until later on: multiple electricity-producing nodes
on the grid failed — the wind turbines were failing because they were icing up,
but no explanation was offered for the failure of the conventional gas/coal
nodes. All of these failures reduced the total capacity of the Texas grid (by the
way, Texas is the only state in the union to have its own power grid; the other
two grids basically handle power for the west and east halves of the United States,
less Texas.) That capacity, as of Sunday night, was instantly and collossally
exceeded by record-breaking demand, resulting in direction to power companies to
kill as much demand as needed to match available supply.
It's like this: let's say available supply for the Texas power grid is 1.21
jigawatts. Multiple power companies (and I do mean multiple: Texas'
power is deregulated, sorta like when AT&T got busted up in the mid-80s. Power
companies here are like the "baby bells" were then) supply some percentage of
state electricity consumers with power from the grid. So in situations where
demand exceeds supply, ERCOT — whose job it is to protect the grid — can
direct power companies to bring demand down to match supply. So if demand is
4.8 jigawatts statewide, ERCOT tells the power companies to drop the excess
demand. Commonly, "drop the excess demand" means killing enough power to their
subscribers to meet the ERCOT mandate.
On Sunday (2/14) and Monday (2/15), "drop the excess demand" happened for
about 7 hours each day.
Weather forecasters indicate another round of snow and sleet are headed our
way tonight, with ice predicted for a huge swath of Texas to the south east of
DFW. I am very concerned that we'll have problems with wind turbines icing up
again. Hopefully the conventional nodes won't fail again, but yesterday,
3 million were without power; I'm afraid of that happening again.
In fact, this morning when my alarm went off, I was very happy to hear our
HVAC system running, and wasted no time in getting coffee made. It's not like
they sound a siren or send some notification to mobile phones when they're about
to drop power. (Actually, I just sent a note to the city asking if they would
consider making power companies do exactly that.)
Yesterday, they dropped our power at about 2:45 PM. I'd read the power companies'
intention was to have rolling blackouts of 15 to 30 minutes. I kept waiting for
the power to come back. We built a fire in the fireplace, and at dinnertime, we
prepared tacos using our grill.
Not pictured above: all of us wearing hats and coats, using the candlelight to
fix our meals. Also not pictured above is the giant tree branch we dragged into the
garage to try to break apart (we couldn't). Pictured, though, is the braided wooden
hamster furniture that "took one for the team" a short while later.
The local school district closed through Wednesday, in advance of the arrival
of a second winter storm tonight, and the expectation of more power outages
disrupting even online learning at home.