To quote Spock “It is not logical”
Via WFAA
A battle of supply versus demand threatens to leave North Texans in the dark… in the cold… and without electricity.
The mercury is forecast to dip into the teens again across the region overnight.
Two power-producing generators in North Central Texas froze up as temperatures plunged Monday morning and went offline.
At 6:52 a.m. the Electric Reliability Council of Texas issued a Level 1 Energy Emergency Alert. Just nine minutes later, the alert was escalated to Level 2.
Customers were asked to conserve.
“Be neighborly, I would say. Everybody has to share here, and nobody wants to be without lights,” said Kendall Geldard.
Big companies also joined the conservation campaign.
“We want to be that good corporate citizen and do what we can to reduce the load on energy across the area,” Bell Helicopter spokesman Jason Kravik. “The last thing we want to have is someone else not have energy because we’re using more than what we need.
Power consumption went down, and those malfunctioning generators thawed out. Had they not, rolling outages would have been implemented.
“I think we were close,” said ERCOT spokesman Dan Woodfin. “Probably if we’d lost another unit, it would’ve put us into an EEA 3.”
Blackouts begin at Level 3, which we last saw in February 2011. On Monday morning, North Texas was only about 800 megawatts below the all-time winter peak reached three years ago.
We also had to borrow power from Mexico, and a grid covering the Eastern United States.