This is not a good sign. In San Antonio all day we have been having rolling brown outs. The News reports Houston and Dallas are as well. My Power has been going off and on all day but never stays off for more than a few seconds.
This might be a long damned summer.
I think it is HighRollers fault, he probably pluged in his new booze cooler for the first time.
One of my businesses sells and installs interruptable power equipment for oil companies. It boggles my mind how much the power companies pay just for the right to shut things down. They rarely if ever exercise, I wonder if today was one of those days. Hell, I even had a power failure at MY house!
I dont understand the whole power grid thing. Can someone explain in laymens terms how a rolling "brown" or "black" out helps?
Is power stored in pseudo capacitors and are the reserves really low enough to only be able to "light" a few sections at a time?
WTF?
No, actually it's the opposite ... since power is NOT stored, every little dollop of electricity that comes off the grid each and every second had to come from somewhere right that instant (note to physics majors: he asked for a layman's explanation and I'm trying to simplify).
If you imagine that the wire to your house is just ganged up with all the other wires in your city and runs right back to a generator, you wouldn't be far off from how it works (except there are multiple generators and there are transformers and all sorts of complicated things). But basically, every electron that flies into your house was energized by a generator somewhere.
If people are demanding more power than the generators currently on line can generate, That Would Be Bad (ref: Ghostbusters). One way or another the system will acheive balance -- either chaotically/catastrophically, or else by the engineers deciding to cut off parts of the grid to reduce the load.
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She's so fine / There's no telling where the money went
Apparently April is usually a "maintenance" month for the power grid in Texas as April is usually a mild month here and thus, they shut down some of the capacity in order to perform yearly maintenance and get everything prepared for the summer demand. This year the weather and corresponding demand is different and it caught the power guys off guard. Like every other year, some of the capacity is shut down right now so they can perform annual maintenance but unlike every other year, it ended up leaving us Texans with less capacity than what was necessary due to the hotter than normal April we are having. Thus, the power grid guys asked each of the electric companies for a certain amount of savings so the grid would not be overloaded while in its maintenance mode. I believe they asked Austin Electric for 1000 megawatts of savings and in order to comply Austin Electric strategically began the rolling blackouts...and thats how rolling blackouts help.
our electricity was off at the House for about 30 mins...but what sucked even worse was trying to get out of downtown Austin with all of the traffic lights on the fritz...
i waved at your Gate House as i drove by on SW Pkwy today HR.
Last edited by Lawboy : April 18th, 2006 at 10:51 AM.
well....lets analyze it... we are having black outs because we are having a hot ass April. i think we are having a warmer April than normal due to global warming. Global warming is no doubt being caused by several things including particulates being cast into the air by construction. Highroller is currently building the world's largest house just a few miles north of you. Hence, Highroller's home construction is causing global warming which is causing the hotass April which caused the increase demand during a "maintenance" month thus resulting in the rolling blackouts.
As such, it appears that Highroller's palace is the root cause of the rolling blackouts across Texas.
What would you be willing to settle for? the gate house or the Uphill house?
let me know and i will see what i can do.
(PSSSSST Highroller: my services are, of course, for sale to the highest bidder. if you want to make this "go away" lets talk price and my use of the Uphill house and i will tell Jeff and the angry mob they dont have a case! shhhhhhhh let me know....)
