Posted on 03/03/2014 4:03:21 PM PST by george76
The Texas electric grid operator extended its call for residents and businesses to conserve power until Tuesday morning as a late arctic cold front that barreled as far as South Texas boosted the state's electricity consumption to a monthly record on Monday.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state's primary grid, had issued a public call for conservation on Sunday evening, citing freezing temperatures that would strain available generation capacity.
"With the continued cold weather, we expect conditions to remain tight, especially during the early evening tonight and early morning hours tomorrow," said Dan Woodfin, director of system operations for ERCOT.
"We have asked all available generation units to remain available, but we believe conservation by consumers also will be necessary to help maintain reliability during this cold March weather," said Woodfin.
...
The record autumn and winter power usage has come as regulators and some power plant owners disagree about whether Texas' $35 billion power market needs an overhaul to encourage construction of new power plants.
Last week, ERCOT issued its summer supply outlook after lowering expectations for peak power use in the years ahead.
ERCOT was able to avoid a repeat of the emergency steps taken in early January to prevent rolling outages.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Dammit, they aren’t helping my case much.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3128984/posts
Conserve energy, oh wait, because you did so well, the government will increase your rates
Gee aren’t all those windmills working out very well?
Dear EPA,
Thanks for shutting down our clean coal - affordable - power plants.
Not sincerely,
The Broke middle class
This has been happening the last several winters as well as our 110 summer temps. Here’s an out of the box idea - kick out the illegals to save on power usage.
if you conserve they raise rates because sales go down.
if you use too much they raise rates to increase capacity.
if you use thesame they raise rates and blame infrastructure repair and maintenance.
there is always a reason to find to raise rates.
The cause was the weather, coldest temps in March in 20 years.
Generators did not want to be off in the historic winter months and be ready for the summer demand.
Trust me, I know what I say is true.
I wonder how much of the “underpowered” Texas grid comes from “Green energy” providers that don’t actually produce their promised share of power generation.
Here's another idea, STOP CHARGING CARS ON ELECTRICITY WHEN THEY CAN BE POWERED BY PETROL.
Temperatures dropped this low in 1998 or 99 as well.
I think the EPA recently shut down a few coal-powered power plants
All that crony money tied up in the Texas ETF/TEF with windmill farms and we have an energy problem. Local Austin TV stations making PSAs for Austinites to reduce their electric power usage. I’m LOLing.
It was a different. Now is a new market. The local hero's in Austin passed SB 7, to "give you a choice". For about two weeks it was about lower rates and then it changed to "choice."
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