Heat wave in upstate NY this morning: 18 degrees, feels like 4. But this is pretty typical February weather for us.
Brrr. How cold is it where you are?
- Thread starter South Dakota Guy
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Cannot turn the heat up here. They are talking about fining people for not "conserving" and one town near by is shutting off the whole towns gas and supposedly implementing a mandatory evacuation of the town. Gas shortage of some sort.
I have somewhat of a difficult time accepting Heat/AC as necessities as I did not grow up in the US and did not have indoor plumbing, central Heat or AC until I moved here.
On another note... Can someone closer to the situation in Texas tell me what's going on?
We get plenty of power outages here in the Northeast from Snow/ICE/Thunder Storms, Microbursts.... Lots of people are out of power for 24~48Hrs or more fairly regularly. I don't mean to downplay the seriousness and I do know that people have died but the media chatter seems really loud. I work with a bunch of people in Austin and mostly they are managing fine through the rolling blackouts.
Last weekend we finished a cold streak dutch style after -15 to 20 Celsius we had ice ice ice baby
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Weeeeeh and next weekend it is going to be 20 Celsius spring temperature ice is gone!
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Weeeeeh and next weekend it is going to be 20 Celsius spring temperature ice is gone!
We are getting too dependent on the "comforts" of the world. I am struggling with that at the moment. Fixing to take the kids on a real camping trip and not a glamping trip. They like to play "survivor" in the woods behind the house. May as well give them a better realization of it. Good to know what it feels like to not be 100% comfortable at the push of a button.
It was -27 Celsius(-32 with wind chill) this morning when I woke up. It's warmed up to about -20C(-27 windchill). Feels like spring after last weeks temperatures which nightly lows were -40C area, wind chill dipping into the -50s. Supposed to be single digits this weekend and I am looking forward to outside adventures.
It's a balmy 30 degrees here in central PA. Bad news on the way though. Six to ten inches of snow expected from tomorrow morning through Friday.
-12 celcius (-22 with wind real feel ) today
It's 61 degrees here now. I'm in Arizona.
The problem we are having down here in South Texas is that the blackouts are not rolling; they have landed on top of us and stayed. Thousands have been without electricity and water for 3 days now. If we had wood burning stoves and were used to this type of weather all would be fine. But we have nothing for this.
Many people live in sub standard shacks in neighborhoods called colonias.
Also fuel trucks and trucks that supply grocery stores have not made it this far south.
It is currently 54° today but going back down tonight.
Many people live in sub standard shacks in neighborhoods called colonias.
Also fuel trucks and trucks that supply grocery stores have not made it this far south.
It is currently 54° today but going back down tonight.
-4 degrees when I got off work at 6:30am
- 25 °C, A week ago
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I am in Central Texas. I have lived in Texas for 43 years so I have some perspective on how "unusual" this is.
Without trying to start a political thread, I will try to answer. Note that at the end I make statements that some folks may not like. To those people, I say the following, if you chose to respond to broadcast your views, it is your right. Just understand that I don't care what you think so do not waste your time in trying to sway me to your point of view. Your posts are to signal your own beliefs to whoever might be listening. I would rather listen to a rendition of "Jingle Bells" composed of farts than listen to a rationalization that this is about Green Energy or Immigration or Democrats or Liberals or some other scapegoat. I lay the blame where I think it belongs. If you feel differently, great, good for you, but I don't care. I spent 4 years listening to the town drunk as our past president and I am all out of patience.
The infrastructure is not setup to handle these types of temperatures across the whole state at the same time. This type of situation is a 30-40 year event. It is not unprecedented but is unusual. Natural Gas wells froze, NG generators froze or could not get NB, Coal generators froze, Nuclear froze, Wind Turbines froze and Solar didn't work due to the snow and cloud cover. The weak point for the NG/Coal/Nuclear was water supplies in general. Wind Turbines it was icing of the blades, gearboxes and generators.
All of the generation was knocked offline at roughly the same time as demand skyrocketed. Most homes in Texas do not really have alternate forms of heating, the fireplaces are largely decorative. Most folks away from the coast don't have generators and most only have enough fuel for 1 or 2 days. Most homes aren't built to the same cold weather standards as they are in other states.
So large spike in demand on Sunday, about 70,000Mw (peak in summer is 75,000Mw) combined with about 40,000Mw going offline. How much of that was reserve capacity, I don't know.
Bottom line there was a sudden and large gap between supply and demand. The large majority of that was from NG/Coal/Nuclear going offline. Exact numbers will eventually be published, but what I saw was about 85% of the shortfall was NG/Coal/Nuclear and 15% was from Wind/Solar. Given that Wind/Solar is only 25% of the power supply and NG/Coal/Nuclear are 75%, these numbers are probably not far from the truth. Whatever the final numbers, the entire system was hit not just one area of it, because it was not winterized to an extent required for these storms.
This led to sudden power outages in order to keep the grid from having a statewide blackout. According to officials, we were minutes away from the entire state going dark. According to others, if that was to happen, it could have taken months to get everything back online.
So now you have people on Sunday night/Monday morning without power, about 10% of the state. Realistically, I think factoring in the rotating outages, the number was far higher. Of the 20 people I talked to, 6 were without power. I think when the final numbers are calculated, about 20% of the people were without power. Thats 7 million people in Texas.
Now, the storm went on for 4 more days, with 3 more waves of winter weather and those folks didn't start getting power back for 3 days. Cold air, cold pipes, homes not built to really handle this kind of weather, people not really prepared and you get a disaster.
In my own lifetime, I have lived through 3 of these, '83, '89 and now 2021. I confirmed this with my parents, there was none of this rolling blackout or forced outage nonsense in the prior two storms. Both '83 and '89 set records that this storm has barely or not surpassed at all, so the comparison is valid. I haven't bothered to look at the storms from '37 or '49 but supposedly those were worse.
This was unusual but not unprecedented. We keep records precisely to avoid disasters like this. In short, this was 100% preventable by winterizing our power grid. Dumping the blame on the citizens is only partially correct. The system we have was voted in by Texans, in so much that we voted for this crap, we got what we deserved.
Plain and simple, the power grid was deregulated, people got greedy and cut corners and now people have died because of it.
If the grid had collapsed, the insurrection at the Capitol would have looked like child's birthday party in comparison to the chaos that would have taken over. Hopefully this is as close to Anarchy that I will ever come in my life or the lives of my children. To hear we were minutes away from that is unacceptable.
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Thank you for your opinionated essay and political commentary, @FloppyJoe, although the charts I have have seen show a very different story regarding the output of various power sources in Texas during the past week.
It's funny how quickly the people up here in the Northeast seems to have forgotten Isaias. Here in NY, the state is seeking penalties from the Utility companies. There was also Irene, Sandy...
We get storms that knock out power almost annually (more like several times a year). They knock out power, in most cases for a day or two, but for the larger storms, it's not unusual for rural communities to be out of power for a week or more. Most are on well, so no water... and sadly, a few deaths now and then. I'm going to say that we are probably more resilient in these situations because we are more accustomed to it. Every time there's a snow storm on the way, people charge up all the battery packs, make sure they have enough drinking water, etc.. and yes, many have generators. We are also geared to prevent freezing/bursting plumbing anytime we lose power in the Winter.
What's particularly distasteful is that some people here in NY are feeling schadenfreude, some are even visibly gleeful over Texas' misfortunes. Sad. I've got no time for "See? this is what Red/Blue gets you!".
Boy I remember 83 and 89.
Those were something.
Those were something.
Unfortunately many of the natural gas lines in Texas are not insulated to protect them from freezing. Throw that on top of the substandard power grid and this is what you get. Very sad. The folks suffering have my sympathy. Unless they are Cowboys fans. I’ve hated them since they stole an NFC championship game from the Vikes back in about 1977.
Back to the theme of the thread, today in Minnesota 10 miles from the Canadian border we broke above zero finally. A week or so back I got up at 3am to answer natures call, glanced at the outside thermometer and it was -42. Not terribly unusual this time of year. Inside the hunting shack it had dipped to 62 degrees so I chucked a couple logs in the old Franklin cast iron stove. Was back up to 70 in no time.
Back to the theme of the thread, today in Minnesota 10 miles from the Canadian border we broke above zero finally. A week or so back I got up at 3am to answer natures call, glanced at the outside thermometer and it was -42. Not terribly unusual this time of year. Inside the hunting shack it had dipped to 62 degrees so I chucked a couple logs in the old Franklin cast iron stove. Was back up to 70 in no time.
shavefan
I’m not a fan
We're thawing a bit in Dallas today (with a high of 38°) and one more night in the 20°'s before we finally warm up to normal in the 40's/50's. Forecast calls for 68° next Wednesday. It's been a long week. We had 6 days of below freezing temps with dips to around 3° and wind chill that hit -15°. I'm grateful that there is light at the end of this cold long tunnel.
Today we reached 36°F. Tomorrow is forecast to be in the 40’s. Is that light at the end of the tunnel, or a freight train bearing down on us?
