Texans, how you holding up?

[red-beard]

We'll have to meet up over at Senate Brewing

[mattdavis11]

Originally Posted by slow&rusty

The hot water heater is acting crazy and hoping I can limp it along for the next few days

Must be nice to be able to heat water twice. We only have one water heater. Stay warm!

[drcoastline]

Stay safe everyone.

Is it true the electricity is out because the windmills froze?

[David]

Originally Posted by drcoastline

Stay safe everyone.

Is it true the electricity is out because the windmills froze?

No. Some windmills down but problem is mostly lack of natural gas that has been diverted to heating. Doesn’t help that some coal plants are offline for maintenance this time of year.

I heard one news person ask why power plants didn’t just start back up from their outages this weekend when it got cold. Kind of hard when the turbines are out of the unit and huge parts of the boiler have been cut out for replacement.

[KFC911]

Be safe guys ... can't imagine that kind of cold for an extended period of time.

[livi]

Stay safe and reasonably warm guys.

And don´t forget to pray to the Gods of Global Warming.

[red-beard]

Originally Posted by drcoastline

Stay safe everyone.

Is it true the electricity is out because the windmills froze?

Partially true. About half down, but the remaining are spinning faster with high winds, offsetting the wind issue.

David is right. Coal fired plants offline for major maintenance (outage season, normally low demand), and gas is curtailed for heating in other parts of the country.

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/14/historic-winter-storm-freezes-texas-wind-turbines-hampering-electric-generation/4483230001/

[David]

They cut our power at the house around 4 this morning. Many of my coworkers have been without power since yesterday morning. We had some friends who lost power yesterday come by for hot showers and dinner last night.

I’m keeping the shop closed again today. Working on turbines today does no good in the short term. All the shop can do to help the power plants right now is to use as little power as possible.

[GH85Carrera]

Cold enough this year to stop wind turbines in North Dakota – Oklahoma Energy Today

It is indeed too cold for many windmills. Just when we really need them they shut themselves down. Solar is useless when the panels are covered by several inches of snow.

Our local electric company is OGE (it was OG&E but the dropped the &) and like all power companies in the region they are all part of the southwest power pool. That is a separate company that much like air traffic controllers are not part of the airline industry, they control exactly where the aircraft can go. Only the power pool tells the power companies where to generate and send the electricity.

Oklahoma was going to do the rolling blackouts but they managed to get all fossil fuel the power stations back up into 100% operation and make enough power to keep the families at home warm.

Several companies that are large power users have shut down for a few days to conserve power.

[Sooner or later]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

Cold enough this year to stop wind turbines in North Dakota – Oklahoma Energy Today

It is indeed too cold for many windmills. Just when we really need them they shut themselves down. Solar is useless when the panels are covered by several inches of snow.

Our local electric company is OGE (it was OG&E but the dropped the &) and like all power companies in the region they are all part of the southwest power pool. That is a separate company that much like air traffic controllers are not part of the airline industry, they control exactly where the aircraft can go. Only the power pool tells the power companies where to generate and send the electricity.

Oklahoma was going to do the rolling blackouts but they managed to get all fossil fuel the power stations back up into 100% operation and make enough power to keep the families at home warm.

Several companies that are large power users have shut down for a few days to conserve power.

PSO is shutting areas down now due to capacity issues. West side of Lawton out towards Cache is currently turned off. About 800 in each of Sayre, Bartlesville, and Spavinaw due to capacity issues. Probably others that I missed.

[Sooner or later]

They're shutting areas down for 2 hours at a time.
Currently, a total of 3,000 in Lawton area.

[masraum]

Out at our property, we had proper rolling black outs. At or apt we were without power for 24 hours (2 am - 2 am) and without water for almost 24 hrs. We have both back as of right now.

Or daughter in the burbs with the grandkids had been without power closer to 30 hours and it's still out. She also has no water. Her husband has been at work through all of this but is supposed to be home this morning. She's getting ready to go to a friends house where they are in better shape.

[Jay Auskin]

Originally Posted by masraum

Out at our property, we had proper rolling black outs. At or apt we were without power for 24 hours (2 am - 2 am) and without water for almost 24 hrs. We have both back as of right now.

Or daughter in the burbs with the grandkids had been without power closer to 30 hours and it's still out. She also has no water. Her husband has been at work through all of this but is supposed to be home this morning. She's getting ready to go to a friends house where they are in better shape.

That's tough when you have a house not built for cold. Worse, can't even trickle your water pipes to keep those from freezing because the water stopped flowing.

Hang in there guys, looks like 50's/60's back this weekend! Hopefully not too much damage once this is over.

[mattdavis11]

We have been very fortunate. Just one power outage, no rolling black outs, water is fine. Others in our town lost power for quite awhile.

More frozen precipitation coming tonight.

[flatbutt]

We're up to 35 F with some sun so there is a bit of melting going on. Another 8" forecast for Thursday.

[Chocaholic]

Originally Posted by Joe Bob

I b prayin fer youse guys....no picnic here. Low 20s overnight, high of 32F and black ice warnings, Lake Acworth has floating ice. At least there is no wind. My old home town of Santa Barbara looks like it will be a high of 71.

I'm staying home and working on the 9. Electric heater in the garage and Pandora on the cell phone....plenty of beer and Schnapps.

What can go wrong?

Floating ice on Acworth? I’m on Hartwell...nearby but not even close to freezing.

[Jolly Amaranto]

Pipes froze in middle of the night. Got up to take a leak and found out. So ripped all the insulation off of the pipe coming out of the ground before it goes through the wall over the slab (standard practice in construction around here) got out the heat gun and thawed it out. Put an ice chest over it all with a light bulb and went back to bed. Power went out at 8 this morning and has been gone ever since. Got a fire going in the fire place now. Worse comes to worse I will have to get the generator out and figure out how to connect it to the gas furnace blower.

[stomachmonkey]

Managing to keep temps in the high 50’s in the house.

Gas supply systems being stressed now so hope we don’t lose that service. My HVAC is gas’s fired.

So far water is holding up although surrounding areas are now under fill your tubs and boil alerts.

This sucks

[DonDavis]

Holy smokes. Crazy stuff. Living in the Phoenix area, I miss snow sometimes. But not like that.

Hope everyone gets through this ok.

[masraum]

Power and water just went out again.