Thursday, February 3, 2011

Did You Know About the Rolling Power Outages in Texas?

Did you know about the rolling power outages in Texas?

I've heard hearsay about it, but still don't really understand it. I did find this article which tries to explain it a bit better than I've heard, but I still don't understand why or even really how it helps.

Supposedly, by outing electricity in certain areas, it helps with the power supply elsewhere in the state. Honestly I don't understand how that works or how they decide which areas to out and why those areas are out so long instead of the 45 minutes to 2 hours. It was very frustrating yesterday for all those affected. I would think those parents whose kids had to still go to school but sit in the dark cafeteria because of the power outages should be a bit riled too...

Hopefully they will get things back under control and be able to run as they should, according to the mentioned article.

2 comments:

Montucky said...

I have been following the Cold weather in Texas with interest. The rolling outages make a lot of sense because they spread the lack of power across most of the users. I think (they didn't say in the article) that otherwise the system would hit capacity and then outages would be random and uncontrolled and some folks would be down for a long time. I found it strange that the cold would cause that kind of problems to the power generating plants.

I'm still happy to have wood stove heat though!

silken said...

I didn't understand the cold causing it. I guess some of the lines were iced over. we are just in no way equipped to handle it when it gets cold like that.