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2020-21 Winter weather; bring it on


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I get your anger and fear (especially having babies in the house and probably being a first time father you’re very protective) you’ve probably experienced over the last several days, but damn with the fuck yourself part. I think inkas point was missed with the way he said it (I think he even came back to add context and apologized before your response). I wasn’t as prepared for this as I should have been and I have some regret. My oldest is off at college and went 48 hours without power and an extended time without water. I haven’t slept for days due to my worries about him. I wish I would have prepared him better for something like this (they’re fine and have had power and water off and on since this morning). I never thought to advise him to buy candles and his biggest issue wasn’t the 46 degree apartment or no water or no warm food. It was the total darkness all around him. Nothing had power. He just wanted to have a bit of visibility. Talking to him last night he stated that it’s on us to do our best to be prepared and not depend on others and I agree.  I mean read these threads. None of us know what we should do regarding our damn faucets. Full blast, stream, trickle, cut off main water at street, should we get out and blast them with blow dryers. I don’t know the best thing to do regarding faucets. I’ve always just wrapped my spigots outside and covered them with the styrofoam covers.  Should we all have generators? Should we all carry a set of winter tires? should we all go buy propane heaters? Should we all buy 4x4s? Look at the thread Is pools worth it? Should we all go and no whatever northerners do with their pools during winter? I mean the list goes on.  I don’t know, but I’m going to be better prepared next time. 
The power issue I get. I’m pretty damn frustrated with how our state handled it.  Also, hobbs I totally understand where you’re coming from. I just hate this site when we start cussing and hating one another. 


Cool manifesto bro. Go fuck yourself.
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I’d love to hear one argument for why cold weather is superior to warm weather after all of this shit. Christ.

I mean, the bigger issue is that living in a first world state is better than living in a third world state, but if you live in Texas you get the short end of that.
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5 minutes ago, SubliminalHorn said:

Morning! Coming up on 78 hours now. I think I could get used to no power. Who needs it

Unbelievable.

If it's any consolation, a lot of progress was made overnight and it shouldn't be too much longer.

Texas Power Outages Map

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I mentioned in an earlier post about my future in-law (the dad of son's GF) is a big-time plant operations manager for some 15 power plants.  He was going to give me the scoop on things, but as you can imagine, he was pulled to the phone and in his office for work. Guy slept ONE night since Friday.  He's a great guy, hard-working, prefers hands-on fixit to management, but they kicked him up the ladder he's so good.  Also, he has no stake in, nor any "ol boy" relationships with any of the playes (ERCOT, energy companies, etc.).  He's a great, honest dude, so I trust him - he has NO agenda, just a hard worker and very competent engineer.   

Anyway, all he would say with the little time we had, mostly in the ride to/from his house (where he volunteered in the midst of his crises to pick me and the missus up and bring us back to his powered house) is that not all, but most of the blame is ERCOT's really screwing up preplanning and not cutting a lot further back over the past week gradually.  He also said that although he couldn't confirm it, he did some simple math (to him) and told me that all through this ERCOT has been overstating on their graphs and PR stuff what their capacities are, by about 15K to 20K megawatts.   Makes sense to me, perfectly explains if you do the numbers why despite these "increased capacities" which should have serviced almost all Texas households out of power, the reduction in those without power was slow, and even rose when it looked like demand was way below capacity.

tl;dr:  don't believe everything you're told.

The other thing is that he has again, no agenda for or against any power companies, he just happens to live near Austin's.  He said that many of these companies have done a bad job of management, that they rolled off people too fast in response to ERCOT to leave space for rolling blackouts (kind of like a sliding puzzle where you have little tiles you move up and across with one empty space.  Well that empty space was supposed to be the place to roll people to/from.  But they filled all the tiles in as they shed to meet the grid, so there was nowhere they could roll people without risking busting the grid.  Apparently the DFW area did a much better job than especially Austin and Houston (not sure about other places) in doing it right, which is why I believe you've heard a lower percentage of huge straight-hour outages for the same people/sections.

He was spending his days trying to get his engineers and operators maintaining plant operations in subfreezing temps - and some of those plants are open-air(!!) (i.e. no freaking buildings, just a roof essentially!).  It's like he was given a shit sandwich of bad designs and was constantly getting trucks to deliver gas, oil, etc. to these plants to keep them going.  I think he had like 11 of 15 or something of his plants maintaining operations - incredible.  Again, these plants simply make electricity and supply the grid for ERCOT to divvy up - he has no say in who gets the power, he just sends it to the "pot" so to speak.  This guy undoubtedly helped at least 2-3 million people stay on (or at least roll off and on decently) during all this.  He should get a fucking medal.  But no one will even know what he or some of these other plant operators have done - I believe they're the unsung heroes in all this.  Anyway, that's what he said.

Oh yeah, this is the guy who, in the middle of his own crises, insisted that he could come over and in 10 mins. hook up a generator to my breaker box, punch it on, and give me electricity.  I mean, who the fuck does that?  I had to practically repeat several times not to.  Of course he loves doing that kind of hands-on stuff so I get it.  But my god, this guy is something else.  Fortunately we got power and I feel good about keeping him at his house so he could get some freaking sleep.

There are some good eggs in the middle of this rotten omelette.

Does your son know you’re in love with his potential father in law?
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16 minutes ago, SubliminalHorn said:

Morning! Coming up on 78 hours now. I think I could get used to no power. Who needs it

Brother?  Stay strong. Hide your guns.

At this point I don’t give a shit if all my pipes break. Take it. Don’t care. 
 

102 fucking hours

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Bunch of us in 78756 have no water coming out of faucets, and it’s popping up all over our areas FB and ND.  
I’m finding mixed answers on whether to fuck with hot water heater or leave it going until a good 12 hours or so have passed.  Like [mention=577]Okie State[/mention] going to turn water heater down to pilot   
 
I certainly wouldn't do anything based on my advice only. I found it on the internet and have no idea what should actually be done. I assume my tank is empty or low since nothing is coming out of my faucets so it made sense to me that I wouldn't want it heating up too much.

Or maybe the tank doesn't empty at all unless you physically drain it. I don't really know how they work.
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12 minutes ago, gmr548 said:


Does your son know you’re in love with his potential father in law?

LOL, probably now.  By my pot FIL is in love with my son, who's getting into multi-resident real estate.  PFIL loves to talk to him about investments, etc.
Look man, if the guy can rescue me like that, I'll consider goin' gay for the duration of the next one of these bastards.

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4 minutes ago, crimsonlonghorn said:

Something that I have yet to see mentioned in these articles - and don't get me wrong, I don't disagree with the conclusions that ERCOT fucked up and the competitive system isn't far enough forward-looking to incentivize grid improvements- is that this happened on the back half of a four day gas trading weekend. So not only was it a five or six sigma weather event, it was also really bad timing on the trading calendar. Had this happened on a non-holiday weekday, a lot of the power supply issues would have been avoided or minimized. (Some other poster way upthread alluded to this when he was talking about buying gas for his power plant)

For the most part, these resources are traded and managed "day ahead", meaning that gas is purchased and power sold and plants brought up or down the immediate day before. (There is something else called "real time" but that is more like fine tuning what is already up and running, you don't usually startup cold power plants in RT)

It's hard enough to schedule and manage supply for normal weekends, which cover Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Saturday and Sunday have lower demand than Monday, but you have to trade the same amount of product for each day and then you manage it during the day after the schedule is set. Saturday and Sunday positions will sometimes get closed out at a loss with the expectation that Monday's profit will make up for it. 

For Monday holidays, they add Tuesday to the weekend package, so now you are trading four days of equal volumes and price but you have a different load profile on each of those days. 

Last Friday, when the cold was on its way here, it was already in Oklahoma and points north, and that caused gas prices to spike in those areas. Where gas is normally $2 or $3 per MMBTU it was $100 or more. And it was so cold up north that a lot of their wells were frozen off and unable to supply, so they were buying gas in South Texas and shipping it north, which made the price of South Texas gas - "Houston Ship Channel", "Waha", "NGPL STX" - spike as well, FOR THE WHOLE FOUR DAY WEEKEND. Instead of the usual $3, it was trading $200. 10-20x higher than it has ever traded. 

Well, ERCOT underestimated the demand on Monday and a lot of Texas generators woke up on Friday and looked at the Ship Channel price for the four day package and said, "Fuck that. That's too expensive." and they shut their plants down for the 4 day weekend. Then when the shit hit the fan on Monday, those plants were all cold and there wasn't any gas to run them anyway because it had all been exported north AND the wells in Texas were frozen off too AND one of the STP nuclear units got shut down because the water intake was freezing.

And that's how you end up with no power supply when demand is going through the roof. 

As I said at the beginning, had this happened on a normal weekday, a lot of those resources would have been online and available. The bad forecast for the back end of a four day weekend with record gas prices is a big part of why the power grid went down. 

I admittedly don't understand most of this, but isn't it a bit stupid to have the ability to provide a basic utility dependent on pricing that isn't regulated?

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21 minutes ago, Okie State said:

I certainly wouldn't do anything based on my advice only. I found it on the internet and have no idea what should actually be done. I assume my tank is empty or low since nothing is coming out of my faucets so it made sense to me that I wouldn't want it heating up too much.

Or maybe the tank doesn't empty at all unless you physically drain it. I don't really know how they work.

I did some research.  Our tanks do not push out water unless there is water coming in.   No outflow pressure if no inflow pressure.  Can’t believe I did not think of that.  So our tanks are full.  Leaving it alone.  

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Just now, Biff Tannen said:

I admittedly don't understand most of this, but isn't it a bit stupid to have the ability to provide a basic utility dependent on pricing that isn't regulated?

Sounds like you understand it perfectly. Now it's up to the public to demand this is remedied in a reasonable way.

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I did some research.  Our tanks do not push out water unless there is water coming in.   No outflow pressure if no inflow pressure.  Can’t believe I did not think of that.  So our tanks are full.  Leaving it alone.  
Yeah just looking at where the pipes connect that makes sense. So I guess there's no need to do anything.
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It's snowing in 78132. Never thought I'd ever get to the point where I'm like "it's snowing again in Texas. Fuck", but here we are. Even my two year old who thought the big snow earlier this week was the best thing of his life was like "it's snowing" then went back to the couch to watch Paw Patrol.

Edited by BradInATX
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1 minute ago, Okie State said:
9 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:
I did some research.  Our tanks do not push out water unless there is water coming in.   No outflow pressure if no inflow pressure.  Can’t believe I did not think of that.  So our tanks are full.  Leaving it alone.  

Yeah just looking at where the pipes connect that makes sense. So I guess there's no need to do anything.

There’s also mechanisms to keep them from running dry, etc.  pretty simple stuff.   Guess we are all having to learn stuff we took for granted.   

 

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Just now, SubliminalHorn said:

I just don’t understand. Austin Energy talks about prioritizing those who have had power out the longest. Well motherfuckers, I’m waiting

My outage was not a deliberate blackout, but instead a blown transformer. For whatever reason, my neighborhood was spared a rolling blackout.

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Morning! Coming up on 78 hours now. I think I could get used to no power. Who needs it

giphy.gif
Live look at subliminal.

I remember watching “alone” last summer. After getting rescued, and spending like 80 days by himself in Outdoor Alaska, a contestant got acclimated to nature and admitted he missed compared to being at home with his wife and kids lol
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56 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

"Circuits we could restore" to me implies a problem with the infrastructure.  It could be as simple as ice damage, or it could be something like poor maintenance.

In any event, it seems something is a little bit extra wrong in Atown.

Yes austin energy has fucking idiots working for it. Since last thurs I have had outages of 33 15 10 and now 26 hours and counting. Neighbors across street have been down about 15 total and have been up the entire time this 26. 

I'm glad it hasn't been 85 straight but fuck this.heads need to roll.

Some bullshit excuse about a frozen breaker but they cant tell me if  a crew is working It now.

This is a massive failure and complete incompetency at this point.

 

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12 minutes ago, South Austin said:

Son of a bitch. I was out for 28 hours and it was pure misery. Really hope things turn for you soon.

We really won the outage lottery if we can remain online. Got through the major deep freeze plague with power and then lost it for the most balmy night of the ordeal and even in that lens it still sucked....

God speed @SubliminalHornwe are pulling for you

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1 minute ago, Pimphand said:

We really won the outage lottery if we can remain online. Got through the major deep freeze plague with power and then lost it for the most balmy night of the ordeal and even in that lens it still sucked....

God speed @SubliminalHornwe are pulling for you

Same.  I'm trying to have perspective.  Never got below 65 in my house, which is what I had the heat set to anyway.

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6 minutes ago, dcar00 said:

Yes austin energy has fucking idiots working for it. Since last thurs I have had outages of 33 15 10 and now 26 hours and counting. Neighbors across street have been down about 15 total and have been up the entire time this 26. 

I'm glad it hasn't been 85 straight but fuck this.heads need to roll.

Some bullshit excuse about a frozen breaker but they cant tell me if  a crew is working It now.

This is a massive failure and complete incompetency at this point.

 

phd's post alluded to particular problems in Austin managing the power shed.  I wish I understood it better, but I do know that flipping power back on is not as simple as flipping a really big switch.  And I have read allusions to the fact that there are some local grids that can't simply be switched on and off repeatedly  without damaging them.

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3 minutes ago, Chet Steadman said:

Has the CoA provided any timing updates on when they expect to restore water pressure?  
 

Our neighborhood has been running between 0-30% pressure for the past 24 hours or so.  

My uneducated guess, probably after the freezing temps are done with. Hospitals and firehouses are top priorities.... here in Galveston, with freezing temperatures behind us. I notice my water pressure slowly increasing. Been using my towels like I'm Mark Mangino, cNt wait to take an actual shower 

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17 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

There’s also mechanisms to keep them from running dry, etc.  pretty simple stuff.   Guess we are all having to learn stuff we took for granted.   

 

Water goes out pipes at the top, right, so no way they can empty with no water pressure coming in?  

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8 minutes ago, Pimphand said:

We really won the outage lottery if we can remain online. Got through the major deep freeze plague with power and then lost it for the most balmy night of the ordeal and even in that lens it still sucked....

Yeah, really trying hard not to bitch about my situation. I even have good water pressure notwithstanding the boil water notice.

After all of the shit we’ve gone through the past year, that first cold beer at DKR in September is going to be glorious.

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