[reportingsjr]

This does not seem to be true at all. If you look at a power outage map of Texas you can actually see exactly where the ERCOT boundaries are. Everyone else in Texas that's on the other, federal, grids, are not experiencing widespread power outages.

https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/landing_pages/89373/ERCOT-I... https://poweroutage.us/area/state/oklahoma

Per your comment about long distance transmission, that doesn't matter in a situation like this. If you're on a large grid you don't necessarily need to transmit power to Oklahoma all of the way from the PNW.

You need the areas surrounding OK to supply excess power to them, then those surrounding areas can get whatever excess they may need from slightly further areas. This needs less and less excess as you go further since every area is over provisioned.

Eventually at some point, yes, the PNW may be supplying excess power to states around them as a result of Oklahoma having outages, but that power isn't going straight from PNW to OK.

[txlpo78]

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.

[jeffbee]

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

[txlpo78]

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.

[jeffbee]

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.

[txlpo78]

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.

[jeffbee]

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

[atian]

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

[Qwertious]

>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.

[Element_]

I am not sure it's that simple, I read some where else yesterday that at least one of the non-ERCOT grids had paid to winterize their local power plants after the last ice storm so their plants have been operational throughout this storm and as a result had no outages. I have no idea how accurate that is though, I don't know anything about the electric grid...

[briffle]

There is a 3.6GW DC line that goes from about an hour East of Portland, Oregon, down to LA. Its 2 wires. Texas doesn't have any interconnections with the west. But even if they did, 3GW would not be nearly enough to solve their problem could could replace many natural gas plants that are currently down.