Statewide power emergency in Texas: rolling blackouts

[RandomGuy]

Coming soon to your neighborhood.

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/conte...ide_power.html

By Claudia Grisales, Tony Plohetski, Ben Wear | Wednesday, February 2, 2011, 09:02 AM

An increase in demand for electricity overnight has forced rolling blackouts across the state, including Austin and Central Texas, utility officials said.

The periodic power shutdowns, which can last between 10 minutes and one hour, have affected traffic signals, businesses and schools, officials said.

The outage requirement is being led by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, the state’s power transmission grid operator, Clark said.

“The locations and durations are determined by the local utilities,” ERCOT spokeswoman Dottie Roark said in a statement. “It is not known at this time how long the need for rotating outages will last.”

An Austin district spokeswoman said some campuses have lost power this morning but that the district is holding classes as scheduled for now.

As of 8 a.m., about a dozen schools did not have power, spokeswoman Roxanne Evans said.

Pease, Wooten and Casis elementary schools were reported to be without power, as well as the district offices on West Sixth Street.

In the Leander school district, classes at Steiner Ranch, Bush and River Ridge elementary schools and Canyon Ridge Middle School will start two hours later because of intermittent electricity in those buildings.

Round Rock school officials said they are on a regular schedule although there have been various outages throughout the district. “We are working right now to identify and provide resources and assistance to campuses if needed,” a district spokeswoman said.

The Killeen district also has announced regular class hours will be observed.

The outages have also affected traffic signals, which should be treated as four-way stops, officials said.

Related story: Central Texas under wind-chill advisory; snow remains in Thursday forecast

The rolling power blackout plan, which began in the Austin area about 5:40 a.m., does not include critical power loads to hospitals and emergency resources, Clark said.

As of 8:45 a.m., Austin-Bergstrom International Airport was reporting 14 cancelled arriving flights, primarily from Chicago, New York, Boston and Dallas Fort Worth. And the airport’s website showed 12 cancelled departures, again involving that same roster of cities.

That list could grow as the day goes on, however, and travelers (or those planning to pick up travelers) should check http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/austinairport/airlines.htm to see what’s up with their particular flights.

Initially, Austin Energy officials projected that outages would last seven minutes, but the outage time was increased 30 to 40 minutes as the power emergency requirements continued.

The rotating outages are initiated when supplies of reserve power are exhausted, ERCOT said.

“Without this safety valve, generators would overload and begin shutting down to avoid damage, risking a domino effect of a region-wide outage,” ERCOT said.

“Consumers and businesses are urged to reduce their electricity use to the lowest level possible,” the statement said.

ERCOT is urging consumers and businesses to follow these steps:

Limit electricity usage to only that consumption which is absolutely necessary. Turn off all unnecessary lights, appliances, and electronic equipment.

Businesses should minimize the use of electric lighting and electricity-consuming equipment as much as possible.

Large consumers of electricity should consider shutting down or reducing non-essential production processes.

Austin fire officials have increased their preparedness level, and firefighters have responded to numerous home and business alarms overnight because of the loss of power.

“We are just busy doing those kinds of things,” Assistant Fire Chief Harry Evans said.

Pedernales Electric Cooperative has decreased the amount of power it distributes to members by 59 megawatts, officials said. The power co-op, which serves more than 230,000 members in more than 20 counties, said it is having rolling 10-minute blackouts throughout its system.

According to John Hurt with the Texas Department of Transportation, stop lights do not have a back-up battery system, meaning when the power is out, the lights go out.

After a power outage, older stop lights will come back online with blinking red lights, and must be reset by hand at the light’s location. Newer models should return to normal functions as soon as power is restored, according to TXDoT.

The state’s power grid system must shed 4,000 megawatts of power, and of that, Austin Energy share of that is about 158 megawatts, Clark said.

“All generators in ERCOT are required to participate - regardless of whether (Austin Energy) has sufficient power in our community, which we do,” Clark said. “This emergency is due to an imbalance in the statewide electric grid between the power being demanded statewide and the generation online at this time.”

The rolling blackouts did not affect the University of Texas’ main campus, which has its own power plant, said Don Hale, a UT spokesman. Austin Energy has assured UT that the Pickle Research Campus in North Austin would be spared from the rolling blackouts to avoid disruption to experiments and other work, Hale said.

Samsung Austin Semiconductor has been assured that its massive manufacturing operations in northeast Austin will not be affected by rolling blackouts around the state.

“It is not affecting us. We will not be impacted,” said company spokeswoman Catherine Morse.

Samsung is by far, Austin’s largest user of electricity and water. Because a power outage could create a very costly disruption in its chip manufacturing operations, Morse said the company has been assured by utility officials that its power will be kept on.

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Of course, if you are affected, you probably aren't reading this.

[easjer]

Houston's affected too (much of the state is).

Created hideous traffic problems when they shut off power to the Galleria/Loop area during rush hour.

Several HISD schools with no generators had to close and redirect students to other schools.

The CenterPoint spokesperson who was on the 'breaking news' about this was clearly frazzled by it. It was sort of funny the way her voice got very tight and clipped when she kept repeating "Well, it's ERCOT's decision, you'd have to direct that question to ERCOT. It's not a CenterPoint decision, but we'll keep you informed."

[baseline bum]

I remember these in the winter of 2001 in Cali. Power emergencies & rolling blackouts = Enron fraud back then.

[mrsmaalox]

CPS implementing rolling blackouts now, I heard from a friend at I-10 and crossroads they are powerless.

http://www.ksat.com/weather/26708171/detail.html

[CubanMustGo]

Like most of the state, Austin too - Austin Energy has been spreading the pain. I live in the Pedernales Electric Coop service area (Brushy Creek) and we had one for about 15 minutes around 9AM.

Too many damn ppl with electric heaters.

[slacker77]

Ya,I was out of power around 6 this morning.What really sucks is that this happened while I was in the shower.I had to bring out the candles and flashlights.

[MannyIsGod]

I refuse to believe the state is using more power now than in the hot summer months. Something is wrong. They either have plants offline or something is just ed up.

[RandomGuy]

Keep in mind a couple of things:

As a system, you have to manage down time for power stations, all very complex systems, to do routine maintenance.

Given that peak electrical demand in Texas is in July-August-September, and low demand is in colder parts of the year, I would guess the most logical time to have units down for yearly maintenance is in colder months.

So I guess we have stations having to operate at lower capacity at the same time you have more stations offline, then get hit by a whammy of demand, it gets ugly.

This is a good argument for distributed power generation, since the problems here seem to be more in the transmission than the generation. (note: about 25% of all electricity in the US is simply wasted due to resistance involved in transmission)

[timvp]

timvp is at HEB right now and the power went out there. So far, everything is fine at home though.

-- Kori

[benefactor]

My wife said the power went out for about 15 minutes this morning while she was getting ready for work. I guess that's what it was.

[gospursgojas]

I refuse to believe the state is using more power now than in the hot summer months. Something is wrong. They either have plants offline or something is just ed up.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/loc...ers-991690.php

This article states CPS as says they have enough power, some other grids in other areas are offline today for matienence.

Lewis said the brownouts were made necessary because a number of plants in other regions of the state were offline for regularly scheduled maintenance.

She stressed that CPS Energy had sufficient energy on hand to meet its customer's electricity demands.

“But ERCOT says that there are not enough power plants (producing energy) to meet the statewide demand,” which triggered the brownouts, she said. “We have been asked to help out other areas of the state that do not have sufficient power.”

CPS was ASKED to start the "brownouts" bc other companies couldn't provide power???? WTF! Unless ERCOT has some kinda state authority, (which I don't know if they do) take care of your PAYING customers first.

[BlackSwordsMan]

Its freezing balls outside.

[spursfan09]

Did the Spurs participate in this last night? I'll blame this loss on a brown out.

[Viva Las Espuelas]

Power just went out where I work Oh well

[SpursWoman]

My daughter is at Judson and text'd me that power was out there. I fear for her life.


All of the kids are using the flashlight apps on their phones because a lot of the classrooms don't have windows. Brilliant.


I work right across the street from the airport ... I don't know if we'd be included in the blackouts or not. But we have a huge backup generator so it wouldn't matter for us anyway.

[BlackSwordsMan]

How ty would it be to be on an airplane right now. that

[baseline bum]

Someone's making some serious money today.

[jack sommerset]

Our power has gone off 4 times so far. Hard to keep house warm at this rate. It's 12 degrees outside!!!!

[MannyIsGod]

Shorter brownouts would be better because I'd imagine heating a house that had been without heat for an hour would be harder than heating one that was out of power for 10 minutes.

[Viva Las Espuelas]

doesn't it take less energy to heat up homes than it is to cool?

[jack sommerset]

doesn't it take less energy to heat up homes than it is to cool?

I have vaulted ceilings and tons of windows. I have the heat on 72 and it's 59 in here now. It will climb back up to 66-67 and the electricity goes off again and goes down rather fast.

[jeebus]

The power's gone out twice in my apartments today, this last one was for 30 mins or so. Not too bad, I just use the time to clean the place or do whatever plus it stays fairly warm in here..
I dunno why CPS is calling it a brownout; everything is cut off aka a rolling blackout.

[Bito Corleone]

I refuse to believe the state is using more power now than in the hot summer months. Something is wrong. They either have plants offline or something is just ed up.

This is exactly what has me pissed off. How is it that we don't have the need for these blackout when it will be 100+ degrees for weeks at a time, but the second the temp drops to 20 our power needs to be cut off? Doesn't make any sense to me.

[MannyIsGod]

doesn't it take less energy to heat up homes than it is to cool?

I guess it depends on a lot of things but I'd imagine heating takes less energy.

[Stringer_Bell]

Our power has gone off 4 times so far. Hard to keep house warm at this rate. It's 12 degrees outside!!!!

I was thinking about the safety of the elderly, they might freeze or turn up their heater stuff to dangerous levels not knowing its an actual outage.