Frustrations are mounting across southeast Texas as residents enter a fourth day of crippling power outages and heat, a combination that has proven dangerous – and at times deadly – as some struggle to access food, gas and medical care.
More than 1.3 million homes and businesses across the region are still without power after Beryl slammed into the Gulf Coast as a Category 1 hurricane on Monday, leaving at least 11 people dead across Texas and Louisiana.
Many residents are sheltering with friends or family who still have power, but many can’t afford to leave their homes, Houston City Councilman Julian Ramirez told CNN. And while countless families have lost food in their warming fridges, many stores are still closed, leaving government offices, food banks, and other public services scrambling to distribute food to underserved areas, he said.
Ercot literally said a month ago that they were planning rolling blackouts in August. Texas can’t handle itself under projected circumstances, so of course they will be fucked every time a disaster hits.
ERCOT says that every summer, but also that article says there’s a “12% chance” of rolling blackouts, not that they’re planning them. Last summer was our hottest on record, as it was many places, and there were no rolling blackouts. This summer in Texas hasn’t been nearly as hot as it was last year.
Here are similar articles about pretty much everywhere else:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-midwest-danger-rotating-power-blackouts-this-summer-2022-06-03/
https://www.eenews.net/articles/grid-monitor-warns-of-blackout-risks-across-u-s/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/us/storm-blackouts.html
Again, these outages are due to downed power lines, not ERCOT and not generating capacity. Does everyone here really not understand the difference lmao
Yes. We understand that the difference is the lack of redundancy in your grid due entirely to profiteering and cost cutting.
You’re literally the only person who has had anything productive to say here, so when you say “we,” I’m not sure who you’re referring to. Yes, better grid redundancy would mitigate outages. At the same time, I’d like to see any kind of evidence that Houston has poor grid redundancy compared to any other city of comparable density, or that “profiteering and cost cutting” have played a role.
My previous point stands that ERCOT and the Texas Interconnect being independent has absolutely nothing to do with this
Except that the only reason your grid is independent is so they can cut corners on quality and soak you for every penny they can. If they were connected to the rest of the country they’d have to conform to superior codes.
That’s not “the only reason” though? The Texas grid was created in like the 40s…today’s politics really didn’t apply
Of course today’s politics apply! Nothing about the 1940s applies to today’s grid. They’ve had 80 years to get your lousy grid up to a modern standard and every year the rest of us have to bail your state out when it inevitably breaks down. They’ve had 80 years to soak you suckers for every last penny they can, but instead of making them fix their hardware and lower prices, you’d rather strut around bragging you could be your own independent country. It doesn’t make y’all look good.
Uhhh…what bailouts are you talking about? What have you done for us exactly?
What happened in Houston here was a hurricane knocking down power lines, not a “grid failure.” The complaint is that it’s taking Centerpoint Energy 48-72 hours longer to restore power than they probably could have if they had more effectively prepared.
It should be noted my utility rates (at my municipal utility, owned by the City of Austin) are really reasonable, well below national averages, so I don’t know how you think I’m being “soaked for every last penny.”
Power in TX is about .09/kilowatt hour where as in MI it’s .215 during the summer. This is slightly SE of houston in an area not connected to the ERCOT grid. Power was also out for ~4 days for all the reasons you mentioned.
i hear you, fellow texan. no fan of ercot, but reading this thread has been infuriating.
for anyone else reading my comment - some years ago, i lived in oklahoma for a little while. years of drought, one year a lot rain. lots of trees with a lot dead branches weighted by new growth, then that winter an ice storm hit. trees bigger than my car came crashing down and it was all over the town i lived in. for three days in the silence, you could hear branches cracking and falling. two houses down a tree went right through their living room. one end of our street was impassable for several days until someone could cut one tree into small enough pieces to clear it.
needless to say, power was out. parts of town had power back within days, some parts of the state, if i remember correctly, didn’t have power for weeks.
grid stability or redundancy couldn’t have prevented that problem.
https://www.weather.gov/oun/events-20071208
Appreciate you. Outages like this happen all over the country when there are severe weather events, especially hurricanes. Folks on here seem to have a poor grasp of electrical systems and why the power’s out in parts of Houston