Severe Weather Thread

5° here, no wind and sunny. So not too bad.

 

Knoxville. Power is back on now. Off long enough to give me a reason to call into work, so 4 day weekend.

 

They canceled the ice bears game. How can we show our faces in Canada after this

 

And now we lost power. Sunny, no real wind to speak of. Just lost power.

 

Apparently CUB is instituting rolling blackouts to keep the grid from being overrun. Glad we live in a third world country.

Edit: TVA is actually "requesting" this of all the power companies. Guess we cannot laugh at Texas any more.

 

Mine just went out, presumably from the blackouts as I never lost it last night or early this morning. I’m not gonna jump to assume anything, but I wonder why it’s necessary, I can’t recall this having happened before here.

 

KUB and LCUB are doing the same thing. We are out right now running errands so hopefully they shut our shit off while we are out.

 

No one wants to live in reality on our grid. It needs real investment and can't afford the politics of propping up aging facilities

 

More use with the same or less output. Pretty simple.

 

Housing and business explosion in east Tennessee and all those heat pumps added to the grid. I have a gas furnace but still need a little electric to run the air handler

 

I meant what is different now than in the past. It’s been this cold before. More households? More usage per household? I’m not trying to be a smartass.

 

Yes and yes. More houses/pop, self explanatory. Now consider size of houses and commercial space. Consider the rate at which we put new power facilities on the grid. Consider how an aging plant produces less efficiently over time.

The heating degrees necessary in weather like this are high, and this time pretty much the whole country at once is experiencing an increased need so there is nowhere to pull from. This isn't just cold temps, it is a shared event amongst most of the country.

 

Clearly I wouldn’t ask if I knew much if anything about power generation, age/efficiency of facilities, etc. But even without knowing I’m sure after 30 minutes of research I’d be able to tie this conversation back to our conversation yesterday about how things are more broken than they’ve ever been.

 

There are no more spots to build hydro, coal is no longer cost effective, no one wants to live near or pay for nuclear, no one wants to see wind turbines, or site concentrated solar, no one wants to have more ng pipelines cutting through their property, no one wants to pay for a distributed grid with distributed small generators.

We are among the most selfish and short sighted generations in American history. We seemingly have no interest in what the next generation inherits.

 

I agree on the selfish part. Though to me it seems like our biggest problem as a citizenry is just apathy. We know we don’t have any real leaders in government, all they do is lie, cheat and steal. Is our country even capable of meaningful infrastructure investment right now? Even if the public wanted it and you funded it, could it get done or would the money just get siphoned off the same way it’s done for everything else?

 

The way forward is to not make decisions based on special interests or based on phony libertarian individual feudalism. Like we did any time we accomplished anything in America.

 

I’m loving the “privatize the grid” takes over the last couple days

Yeah, go ask Texas how that goes.

 

I even saw a couple people on Twitter blaming it on wind power.

Wind power, at last check, accounted for less than 1% of the state’s power generation.

 

Oh look. Power is out again.