Lacking official sources, some Texans use Whataburger app to track power outages
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Handy page, though, especially for areas where I might not know the power company page off-hand.
It's a HUGE state. There's opportunities for plenty of solar or wind, and I'm sure they're not opposed to some natural gas and coal to make up the difference.
It's not like it lacks wealth to pay for those things, at least as far as I know.
I know it lacks inter-state interconnects, but that can't be the sole reason.
According to Newsweek article in January: ”Texas wind farms generated nearly 120,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2022, about as much as the solar output of the four next-most-prolific states combined, and 17 times more than California. The 20 gigawatt-hours (GWh) put out by Texas solar panels in 2022 took a back seat only to California's 35 GWh—but only because California vastly exceeds Texas in the number of home-roof-mounted panels, thanks to homeowner incentives that Texas doesn't offer. The electricity from Texas' solar farms already exceeds that produced by California's—and has been doubling each year for three years. "Solar costs have dropped 80 percent in the past decade," says Metzger. "The state is pouring enormous investment into it."
— https://www.newsweek.com/texas-greenest-state-energy-wind-so...
Much of TX energy infrastructure is above ground poles running along the highways. I don't know what the lifespan is of those but I wouldn't be surprised if many of them could be classified as antiques. If they aren't being regular inspected/replaced, they are likely to go down
Also, the energy companies can sell electricity to other states, and I won't be easily convinced that during this event they stopped doing that (because profits). Lastly, see previous winter event and direct recorded quotes from energy companies about how much money they were making by increased prices and I think there are several reasons why this keeps happening in TX.
It really was not long ago that “free non-polluting energy” was a thing that Republicans could get behind. Even Bush got very into biofuels, albeit going about it in the worst way possible. That party’s taken a strange turn in the last decade.
Government? Thats socialism.
The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout - https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1004840920/the-disconnect-power...
You can save money by not preparing for a 100 year storm. When there is a 100 year storm, you can make money by selling your power at a higher price.
The state needs a lot of new power lines to connect up renewables. I believe there's a huge queue of renewables projects that have money and planning permission lined up and just need their grid connection approved.
Based upon press releases from Entergy[0] (north of Houston/Centerpoint) a quarter million feet of wires need to be fixed. This doesn't include transformers, logging operations, etc.
I would estimate that Houston itself (Centerpoint) is probably dealing with a million+ feet of damaged transmission lines based upon the stats up here and their reported customer outage #s.
The area I (used to?) live in wont have power until the 14th because of the damage to the distribution infrastructure.
This is 99% a game of trees falling on lines and everything cascading from there.
So that 480 miles or so is probably less than a fifth of the total repairs needed.
If you're in the Houston area and don't have power - here is a status map from CenterPoint: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/195bcf03ae0c491f9f14bf7...
It seems "state_naturally_inefficient" social Engineering is similar always cheaper to solving problems.
Not to mention Houston is huge and dense so switching completely to underground would be a massive project that no one is going to enjoy.
> August 25 – Hurricane Katrina moved ashore southeastern Florida as a minimal hurricane, producing a peak wind gust of 97 mph (156 km/h) at Homestead General Aviation Airport. Heavy rainfall accompanied the hurricane, peaking at 16.43 in (417 mm) in Perrine, which caused flooding in the Miami metro area. About 1.4 million people lost power during the storm. Later, when Katrina made its devastating landfall along the northern gulf coast, its large circulation produced high tides, light rainfall, and gusty winds along the western Florida panhandle. The hurricane killed 14 people across the state, and damage was estimated at $623 million.[54][55][56][57]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Florida_hurricanes_(...
Category 1 storm knocked out power for 1.4 million Floridians.
Edit: changed to _some_ Texans
However, Spectrum has much more granularity in their monitoring in that they get heartbeat pings from every modem on their network, and will quickly see if a ping stops coming in.
The result is that I often get a notice from Spectrum that my internet is out, before CMP even knows there's been an outage.
Chargers need basically realtime status (what charge rates do you offer) & availability information to be publicly available to qualify. Watching where chargers are & aren't should provide a higher resolution feed for this data.
I would be surprised if a Texas power utility company doesn’t provide that to their customers. I get that here in California.
But by looking at a map, there are clear patterns: if many isolated areas have outages, there may be many points of failure for various neighborhoods, causing a massive queue of crews to repair each area. But if there is half of the state out of power in a contiguous region, there's more likely to be a single point of failure that they're highly incentivized to fix or route around with the full technical staff at their disposal. The map is more likely to give me that insight than their biased spot estimate of timing.
Here in Los Angeles, my utility gives estimates that I have found pretty reasonable - sometimes actual is a few hours later than original estimate, but never more than maybe 6 hours in my experience. Sometimes it is fixed earlier. Along the way, updates of new expected fix time is emailed and texted.
Can a modern restaurant function without internet access to handle credit card transactions?
Yes. You can imprint the card and/or record the information for offline processing. We had credit cards before everyone had internet access.
What about the percentage of people who no longer carry physical cards and rely on a smartphone/smartwatch credit system?
Leaving nuclear power was a stupid decision but compare to Texas, this is miniscule.
What a joker.
And you're right, this thread is full of misinformation, inaccuracies, and misunderstanding of the current situation.
https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/texa...
Fact is, these storms are stupid powerful (even the "little" cat 1's) and big trees are heavy as fuck which is going to be the major cause of our outages.
I can get pictures of some of the 15+ meter trees with trunks over a meter wide that ended up completely uprooted and toppled over. It's impossible to just not build around these trees (best we can do is try to trim the ones around power infra but our area is just so dense it's impractical to keep them completely cut back everywhere) so it's just a fact of life that there will be power infrastructure damage during extreme weather.
Now the response speed definitely needs to be addressed but I cover that in my to level post so I won't rehash it here again.
To start, this has little if not nothing to do with Ercot and all the stuff that's been brought up repeatedly since the freak winter storm (which I also went through), we aren't low on light juice, no rolling brown outs, etc.
Onto the the important points, a few things I've seen posted in comments here stuck out to me as being inaccurate:
>> No outage tracker available
No, we don't have a "down to the house" level outage tracker but that's not unreasonable given the large number of circuit level outages. That said we have had the following:
- Published sometime Monday and updated every 5 minutes: https://gisoutagetracker.azurewebsites.net/
- A much more detailed map that shows the status of things down to the circuit level: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/195bcf03ae0c491f9f14bf7...
>> It was just a small category 1, how could it be so bad?
As an outsider, I'd probably be asking the same thing but there were a few things that made this situation worse than it would normally be.
- Lack of preparedness
But not in the way you're probably thinking. Our forecasted tracks when it was coming off the Yucatan started out with this thing staying well South of the Houston area. As of July 6th, 2 days before landfall, it was confidently projected to make landfall around Corpus Christ and Houston would just get a bunch of rain. But that's not what happened, It ended up being a worst case track with the eye going right up the west side of Houston putting the entire city under the "Dirty side" of the storm.
- It's been wet AF the last month!
We probably got lucky that the week before the storm it finally stopped raining for a while. I bring this up because just in my neighborhood alone, I saw at least 5 old and very very large trees that fell and had huge chunks of root system pulled up out of the ground. These are trees that have survived at least 2 major hurricanes in the past that just popped out of the ground and laid over. I suspect, especially in the suburbs on the North and West side, that a bunch of harder to get to lines were damaged which, in my mind, helps explain why there are a ton more complete circuit outages (No traffic lights, major buildings like grocery stores completely disconnected) in our areas.
All that said, it sucks and is uncomfortable but on the bright side, this time last year we were in the middle of a month long heatwave (hitting 100°F+ almost daily) but since the storm blew through it stayed relatively mild and even fairly pleasant. It was actually really nice out just chilling under a pop up tent yesterday afternoon!
Hope this helps give some insight into things from a first person perspective.
Welcome to Costco, I love you.