As of noon I am back above freezing temps and out of this extreme cold frontal system. I still will have a couple of nights when the temps will drop below freezing, but just by a few degrees. It got down into the low 20's last night but the power stayed on for nearly 48 hours now without any outages. So it appears that the power grid has been stabilized. People are now having problems with broken water lines, mains, shortage of food, water supply, and gas. I was smart enough to gas up right before this happened. Because of frozen road conditions, trucks have not been able to get to the grocery stores, Walmart, etc., to restock them. Apparently, tons of frozen food had to be discarded due to lack of power or power generators to keep store frozen food containers frozen... I will further respond to Dave's comments in email rather then put them all here...
Regarding Dave's comments, I can tell you this. Decades ago, Texas made the decision NOT to join the Nationwide power grid setup that so many States use and share power with each other when needed. They made a decision not to join the National power grid created by Pres. Roosevelt in 1935. Texas wanted no US government control in charge of their power system, so they created the Texas Interconnected System and have been running it ever since. During WW II, Texas created its own power grid because of the large amount of energy required to run the petroleum plants along the Gulf Coast. More recently controlled by ERCOT (Energy Reliability Council Of Texas, created in 1970). This is the non-profit organization that is being blamed for much of the disaster that just struck us and is under investigation as to what went wrong.
Regarding Dave's comments, I can tell you this. Decades ago, Texas made the decision NOT to join the Nationwide power grid setup that so many States use and share power with each other when needed. They made a decision not to join the National power grid created by Pres. Roosevelt in 1935. Texas wanted no US government control in charge of their power system, so they created the Texas Interconnected System and have been running it ever since. During WW II, Texas created its own power grid because of the large amount of energy required to run the petroleum plants along the Gulf Coast. More recently controlled by ERCOT (Energy Reliability Council Of Texas, created in 1970). This is the non-profit organization that is being blamed for much of the disaster that just struck us and is under investigation as to what went wrong.
Basically, what this all boils down to is that for decades, those in charge of our energy in Texas NEVER thought that we could have such a disastrous extreme cold front hit us as this one did. They have been, as Dave said, relying on our normally higher temps to prevent something like this to happen. This is truly a historic event to hit this deep into South Texas all the way to the Gulf Coast. So things that are routinely done in Northern States, were never done here, and should have been...Yes, my house heating energy is provided by gas and the AC power to run that unit. We had a few examples in past years as to what could happen, but they were forgotten about and nothing has been done to handle and prevent anything like this. This is how I see it.
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