421–430 of 1001 posts
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We were at 0 F today morning north of Dallas.
Wow, I had no idea it had gotten _that_ cold down there. I've never seen it that cold here in the PNW - west of the Cascades, anyway.
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Gas furnaces need power for the circuitry & blower. My experience with fireplaces is that the house winds up net-colder, but you can warm yourself with radiant heat while it burns. Freestanding wood stoves on the other hand are very capable of warming a large space.
A tight wood stove in the hands of an experienced user is a remarkable thing. The amount of heat that can be extracted from a large oak log is nothing short of remarkable. Sadly, most wood stoves are not tight, nor are most users experienced.
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gas furnaces do not have batteries.
That's a failing of gas furnaces. I don't know why you'd design a system without them except to breed dependency.
One thing the NEC 2020 update allowed is bi-directional power between an EV and its charger, you can set up an EV to provide backup power your house, with a transfer switch and everything.
Radiant heating systems with boilers require electricity for the pump, even if they’re gas fired. Electric resistive heating needs electricity. Forced air heating needs electricity to run the fan. All heating systems require electric power, even if the heat is generated by burning natural gas.
Did the utility companies ask for voluntary reduction in power consumption ahead of time? We had a situation here where extreme weather and a natural gas pumping station that exploded caused real problems in our natural gas supply. The utility asked everyone to lower their consumption by turning their heat down to 65. Luckily, that was the extent of the rationing.
I remember that. What an awful winter.
Scary as hell in the beginning, but only nervousness-inducing at the end.
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I've had power out for over a day and am fine. I would not pay any more money to avoid this once every thirty years, or even once a decade, for a few days. Mostly because paying the cost to prepare for one of these is reasonable, but preparing for all of them would be very expensive and I will trade cheap power for the occasional inconvenience.
Hey great. My blue-lipped toddler is very happy for you. Hour 42.
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Anecdote: All 7 developers in my Houston team (semi-geographically scattered in the city) lost power; half for >24 hrs (it's 10-25 degrees F here for the last 2-3 days). Most lost water for some stretch of time and some still don't have it. I don't think any completely lost heat (most have gas) but at least one person found their gas fireplace they were hoping would heat them up when out of power didn't really work t…
We had an incident early this AM and of the eight people we paged, only one had power. I’ve been without power, heat, internet, water, or septic more than 90 minutes at a time for two days. My house was 44 degrees this morning when I woke up. Sunday night we were without power or heat for seven and a half hours. Our DR plan didn’t really account for all of our staff being on the same power grid!
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> This is a black swan event -- this is the coldest it's been in over 100 years. While everyone else is taking you to the woodshed for the rest of the comment, I'd like to take a moment to address this, because I think it's a misunderstanding of the term and a misreading of the book. The point of "Black Swans" was that an over-reliance on standard distributions derived from historical data generates predictions and c…
It's even worse than that, because it's not even that there's no historical data to draw from! It got just as cold as this back in December 1989, resulting in power shortages and rolling blackouts, because of increased demand and reduced generation capacity. And then it happened again in February 2011, for almost exactly the same reasons, despite the weather not being quite as severe. https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/F…
This is unprecedented in the modern era. Statewide load on the grid, for this time of year, is unreasonably high. Black swan.
Maybe having more nuclear power plants instead of wind would have helped? It sounds unrealistic for the energy generators to sell electricity at a loss over a 10 year period. It would be nice to see some of the data that the professor is referring to.
Cutting costs on the cold-proofing of wind turbines in Texas is somewhat understandable. But as far as under-investment due to lack of profit goes, nuclear isn't much better off. The economics of building a traditional nuclear plant right now don't work out: they are incredibly expensive to build and tear down, take a decade to plan and another decade to build. In the time until a new nuclear plant is built and has p…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_pow...
Anyone have break down of which areas had their power cut for how long?
Currently in ATX we haven't had power for over 24 hours, wood fireplace is saving the house from completely freezing but the whole city of Austin needs to evaluate how they setup their critical infrastructure to allow for rolling blackouts instead of having parts of the city with power and parts without for the entirety of an outage.