"has declared an EEA 3. Energy conservation is critical. Rotating outages are underway to reduce demand on the electric system. We urge Texans to put safety first during this time. Traffic lights and other infrastructure may be temporarily without power. 01:25:40 150221"
"Rotating outages primarily affect residential neighborhoods and small businesses and are typically limited to 10 to 45 minutes before being rotated to another location."
The grid has basically zero capability to change the voltage; frequency is all that matters. Frequency is so low that in the past hour any power line time base has fallen over 5.5 seconds behind. That’s a massive drop in frequency.
No, voltage can be dropped a bit. "Brownouts" are a thing. But they're less effective than they used to be, because everything with a switching power supply will draw more current if the input voltage drops. That's now a big fraction of the load.
But heaters on thermostats will just run more if they are putting out less wattage. So across your whole population of houses, you won't move that part of demand much (maybe a few were already running at 100% duty cycle).
Would be very effective with the space-heater (or oven?) driven demand right now in Texas. Not effective for A/C-driven demand (motors will draw more current).
> "Rotating outages primarily affect residential neighborhoods and small businesses and are typically limited to 10 to 45 minutes before being rotated to another location."
I don't understand. Here they shut down a couple large factories (that have agreed beforehand to emergency shutdowns) when there are capacity problems. Those eat so much power that it usually solves the problem.
They don't shut down power to residential just for capacity, if you're without power at home it means something blew up on the path that delivers to you.
Also, how can a gas pipeline freeze? Almost everyone is heating with natural gas here, we have a cold wave, and the only question is if they can deliver enough volume. Which is again fixed by shutting down some large industrial consumers, not by freezing homes.
They've already done that - that is EEA 1 and 2 (1 being voluntary shutdown, 2 being involuntary shutdown).
They've asked everyone who CAN go to backup generators (think: hospitals, datacenters) to do so. If short-term shedding of residential load doesn't work, the next step is to blackout commercial players - think Walmart, etc. Those usually occur for longer periods of time and have security risks involved.
Natural gas pipelines have some water in them, they can freeze if they're not buried deep enough.
Yeah, my point is they have the order wrong. They're shutting down residential first with the associated health risks instead of shutting down commercial which will just send people home for a day or three.
I was wrong - there is no EEA 4. It's up to the local utilities to determine how to shed load; I suspect many office parks are already without power (but at 4 AM they're also probably not using much power).
"has declared an EEA 3. Energy conservation is critical. Rotating outages are underway to reduce demand on the electric system. We urge Texans to put safety first during this time. Traffic lights and other infrastructure may be temporarily without power. 01:25:40 150221"
https://twitter.com/ERCOT_ISO
"Rotating outages primarily affect residential neighborhoods and small businesses and are typically limited to 10 to 45 minutes before being rotated to another location."
http://www.ercot.com/eea_info/show/26464