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Comment by txlpo78 | Hacker News Reader

https://www.kmbc.com/article/southwest-power-pool-again-orde...

Oklahoma has been dealing with rolling blackouts for the past several days. Tell me why this is, since apparently you think Oklahoma is able to magically get power transferred to them all the way from Washington? If WA has the excess capacity, why are Oklahomans still without power?

> Everyone else in Texas that's on the other, federal, grids, are not experiencing widespread power outages.

Completely wrong. Eastern Texas (eg Orange), which is under MISO, and is dealing with blackouts. And parts of the Texas panhandle like Lubbock, which is also not part of the Texas grid, is also struggling with power outages.

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I'm sure you can see that a rolling outage affecting 200k people for 4 hours is quite different than an outage affecting four million customers for 3 days.

Check out the map. It's pretty clear that what you said is wrong. ERCOT territory is all broken, panhandle, east Texas, and El Paso area are not having problems. https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas

The site you are referencing is a crowdsourced site. It takes five seconds of looking at the numbers to see that it has incomplete data. Most major public utilities are saying that they are not tracking these storm-related blackouts as “outages” and therefor do not show up on most utility outage maps.

I have family and friends in every place you just said is “not having problems” and I can assure you that you are entirely incorrect.

> I'm sure you can see that a rolling outage affecting 200k people for 4 hours is quite different than an outage affecting four million customers for 3 days.

The 200k customers mentioned is only talking about the numbers from one relatively small provider. If you want to only look at one provider in Texas: Austin Energy, the provider for all of Austin, is currently reporting only 200k customers affected as well. But obviously that’s not the whole picture in Texas, just like 200k isn’t the whole picture in the SPP.

All other providers in the SPP are affected, not just the one in the article. Many more than 200k people were affected, and the blackouts have been happening over the past three days, not four hours.

You've got it basically 180° the wrong way around. "I know people in all these places" is literally crowdsourcing. It is anecdotal. PowerOutage.us is plugged into the API of every utility provider in America. It's the existence of the APIs that is crowdsourced, not the data itself.

Somehow speculation causes points to be missed on both sides and conversations like these become meaningless semantic arguments.

Do you not realize that utility providers outage maps are updated based on crowdsourced information from customers?

And as I mentioned in my comment, utility providers do not consider blackouts due to capacity constraints to be “outages”, and thus are not reporting them as outages on their outage maps, which means this website does not have the correct information on blackouts. They are tracking outages only if the outage is due to something like a downed power line. Please attempt to read the full comment and understand it before replying.

You’re wrong about that, newcomer. The APIs I’ve been scraping report smartmeters that are off the air. It’s all automatic.

> You’re wrong about that, newcomer.

please don't do that, it's ad hominem and definitely not the way to talk to new posters here.

Nope, if you even took five seconds to read up on how the OMSes at power utilities work, you’d know this isn’t the case. Utility companies are not even close to having their grids fully automatic, and most OMSes are manually updated by human operators whenever customers call in with outage reports.

This is an area that you clearly do not have any experience in, yet you insist on being an armchair expert. Quite frankly, we don’t need armchair experts, especially ones that are blatantly incorrect and refuse to educate themselves even when information is put right in front of you. Please reflect on this.

As for your “newcomer” comment, lol. I have been on HN for years longer than your account. Apparently you’ve never heard of the ability to create new accounts, though. GTFO of here with that ridiculous gatekeeping bullshit, it’s not welcome on HN.

You’re being unnecessarily confrontational and hostile.

wow, this is one of the most pathetic comments I've read on HN. You've clearly stepped beyond your area of knowledge and are trying to cover it with ego.

I feel I am doing right by our community when I say to you: You are not as knowledgeable and important as you think you are.

>I'm sure you can see that a rolling outage affecting 200k people for 4 hours is quite different than an outage affecting four million customers for 3 days.

((3 * 24) / 4) * (4 000 000 / 200 000)

Holy crap, that's literally 360 times worse.

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