Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Rolling Power Outages in Texas

Must be a politician living nearby.

The power has not went off here. An absolute miracle. Our power usually goes off if the sun goes behind a cloud.

De Flave, The power outages in Calif the last few years have nothing to do with generating or grid capacity. They are the result of poorly maintained lines and rights of way in areas of heavy dry vegetation...when high winds and fire danger is predicted, the grids are shut down to prevent catastrophic wildfires. On very rare occasions, during extreme heatwaves, mostly southern Calif, suffers from brownouts due to high demand. Wind could provide 6% of Calif power, but for some reason on any given day, the windmills have the blades feathered and are shut down??

And just in case they weren't screwing you enough, they've decided to bust out a bowling pin....If you have power, prepare to have your rates jacked.

https://www.kvue.com/article/news/l...269-53ab63e2-8dcf-4485-8b9b-be6ad75316b4

Rolling blackouts are all over the region right now. The power price is through the roof and no one wants to risk going off line. It’s safer to schedule controlled blackout out than it is to burn something up and go down long term.

Coal has been on the decline for years. That has removed the ‘peaker’ response for the grid in times of high demand. There will never be enough predictable wind to supply base load. This problem has been brewing for some time. The raw truth is our infrastructure is old and not ready for any extreme. We are definitely not ready for ‘green power’ even if the production capacity was there.

Right now, $$$ is the motivational factor for the controlled blackouts. Green rage is just manufactured in this instance.

Always remember, you comfort and safety are secondary to the dollar bill.

Just got power back after 32 hours. From 2 AM Monday morning until 10 AM today. Near the Woodlands, TX north of Houston. Still just 18 degrees with bright sun outside. Streets are like skating rinks....

So much for wind turbines picking up the slack per the Green New Deal.. Our outage was a planned rolling blackout event in case power stations failed. They did.

Hopefully the power stays.

It’s too bad something like this didn’t happen in the DC area instead of flyover country. Be nice for DC to deal with some reality and the consequences of their actions for once.

I’m 20 miles from a wind farm in Wadsworth, 10 miles west of there is a nuclear power plant. 10 miles to my east is a huge LNG ( liquid natural gas) facility. I’m sitting in the dark with no power. Someone’s head should roll.

ALL their heads should roll.

But they will get raises and promotions instead, for "getting us all through this emergency"....

You know, like Cuomo helped NY...

30 minutes on and 30 minutes off currently. Guess I should count myself fortunate as others are going an extended amount of time without power. Texans sure as hell aren't prepared and equipped for this type of weather for this amount of time. Usually we get some ice or a dusting of snow and by lunchtime it's all but a memory!

They are turning ours on for 20 minutes and then off for 30 minutes to an hour
About 50 degrees in the house.

Have some friends that have been without power for 36-48 hours

Internet has been down here for 24 hours
Cable TV down for 24 hours also

There is no firewood to be had.
Fortunately I had a pretty good pile but have burned over 1/2 cord and getting low
Started cutting up scrap lumber yesterday
1 lb bottles of propane? Nonexistent

Heads need to roll 😡

The power brokers are making huge money right now selling to the pool.

You better be up and running to supply your contract. That is why there are rolling blackouts where the grid is still intact. Hell, they have even shut down maintenance activities that could reduce production right now.

This is a pure $$$ play.

For a town of 65k + folks, it's asinine they don't have a backup generator. Hopefully this is a wake up call.

ERCOT has been in on the closure of 19 Texas coal powered plants since 2018, that wind energy is some cold stuff around here lately.

Well, well...

Not only did ERCOT “ok” the closure of about 3GW of production capacity, but the old plants have been “sold” to a company that’s probably maybe gonna shut down the public access to the parks/lakes by them, as well. Monti may be ok, not sure if they bought the land around Fairfield Lake... A real win/win for the homeowners/fishermen/campers of Texas....🙄

https://texasfishingforum.com/forum...lo-and-big-brown-plants-purchased-by-clp

They close plants, they can raise prices, sounds like a fair deal for consumers. Get prices up, reopen shuttered plants.

I would bet my mothers false teeth that the fires are started by the have nots.

Coincidence?

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing...toring-science-to-tackle-climate-crisis/

I'm gonna burn some tires tonight.

As far as people here wondering why the Wind Producers going off-line in the winter and not in the summer when usage between the two times are roughly the same during peak, it isn't simply the cold that is the problem. It's the ice build up on the wind vanes. The diameter of that much spinning mass being that imbalanced with uneven ice buildup will destroy the rotating mass in very short order. Only answer is stop rotation and de-ice vanes. The principle of balanced rotating mass and ice build up has been a problem since the beginning of time with rotating air moving vane props be it cooling tower fans, Wind Generating Turbines or anything else such as this. If someone here has a fix for this, they are sitting on a Goldmine. Believe me, the Wind Turbine operators will pay you what ever you want for that fix. I've worked at a 1640MW Generating plant for 20 years. We still use coal fired boilers at our plant, but the company use Combined Technology Turbines, Solar Grids and Hydro plants also. We have stayed away from Wind Turbines to this point because the massive failure self destruct tendencies of vanes in our climate here in KY. That is why they are in Texas and West Coast more so than East Coast. And as far as Coal plants being Peaking Plants, ain't gonna happen. It takes three days to get a cold boiler up to 1000 degrees Fahrenheit and 2500 psi without destroying it. Our boiler tubes grow about 12" in 14 stories of height and our high presser part or the turbine grows over six inches in length and slides on a sliding base to accommodate that. Spinning sections have to be aligned "cold" as much as .250" vertically to accommodate growth in height between turbines and generators when fully "heat" saturated. The Grid Management Alphabet agencies that oversee the grid day to day operations is almost Nazi oriented in power. Unbelievable how much power they have grown into, we hardly have any say in planning maintenance and outages anymore because of the way the Grid is managed now.

FERC