[txlpo78]

> Now that statement would make sense if 'extreme cold weather' had caused problems in other parts of the USA.

Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri all had blackouts this week. The SPP had to stop sharing electricity with the Texas grid because they had no spare capacity due to dealing with their own power emergencies.

The headlines this week have all focused on Texas, but this was happening over the entire region.

[jussij]

So are you claiming Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Missouri have experience state wide blackouts similar to those found in Texas in recent days?

Or are you saying these states have experienced short term blackouts?

I don't think there is an electricity grid in the world that is immune to short term blackouts.

[gwoplock]

> So are you claiming Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Missouri have experience state wide blackouts similar to those found in Texas in recent days?

Yes. That grid operator did have to implement EEA3 load shedding (rolling blackouts). However, I should note that the Texas rolling blackout seemed to go wrong when they tried to bring locations back online.

[rcurry]

Texas didn’t have a statewide outage. I live in Rockwall and our power hasn’t so much as flickered all this week. There were a lot of outages in outlying areas for sure, I think it impacted about 1/3 of the population here in some way or another.

[belltaco]

You might be on the same circuit as a hospital or fire station or other essential place that power stations avoid load shedding to at any cost.

[rcurry]

Good point - I’m right off Lake Ray Hubbard, and we have a big natural gas power plant on the other side of the lake.

[JamesBarney]

I live in Houston and I only knew 1 person who had electricity the whole time.

85% of the people I know plus myself had over 24 hrs of contiguous down time.

[txlpo78]

You asked if extreme cold weather had caused problems in states other than Texas. It did, and I commented so.

But if you want to play “move the goalposts”, I’m not going to bother trying to discuss something with you that you obviously have already made your mind up on. Keep stubbornly believing what you want to believe, I don’t care.

[jussij]

So you are in fact claiming Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Missouri are experiencing the same 'extreme weather' blackouts as those currently going on in Texas.

For example Texas has seen millions people with out power for days, millions people with no running water for days, people dying because of the cold.

And the exact same think is going on in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Missouri but no one is reporting on this in the news or on social media?

I think not.

[gwoplock]

Yes. https://spp.org/markets-operations/current-grid-conditions/

> Feb. 16 at 6:15 a.m. SPP declared an EEA Level 3. System-wide generating capacity had dropped below current load of approximately 42 gigawatts (GW) due to extremely low temperatures, inadequate supplies of natural gas and wind generation. SPP directed member utilities to implement controlled, temporary interruptions of service.

[kadoban]

That sounds like rolling blackouts, and looking at it deeper looks a lot like a few minutes worth. That's not great, but it's not the same as being without power for multiple days.

[Throwawayaerlei]

Looking in my area of the SPP, they were scheduled to be one hour long, "call us if your power is out longer, especially after 90 minutes."

That's just for residential customers, commercial and industrial customers were required to shed a great deal of their load; for half a work day according to one report I read of someone who what sent home yesterday or so.

Agreed not anything like being without power for multiple days. From what I've gathered so far, the Texas grid operator had the lack of courage required to shed load early before things get catastrophic. After the northeast blackout of 1965 which resulted in a lot of reforms, a common if not nearly universal final cause of these sorts of disasters.

[evgen]

You have suggested this twice as proof of actual rolling blackouts of any significant size, but for some reason fail to note that while SPP did order rolling blackouts to shave about 1.5% of the load within 50 minutes they rescinded this order and returned to EEA Level 2. Why fail to mention this I wonder?

[NortySpock]

(Not the parent poster) At a press conference, a SPP spokesperson said they had to cut up to 6.5% of load for 3h21m on Tuesday (Feb 16).

https://youtu.be/NUa3AKdCYvM?t=693

(Just wanting to set the record straight, under the SPP region myself. Given what I've seen, I'm pretty happy with how they've acted considering it could have looked like Texas. I wish there had been more and better communication with the public about the importance of conserving electricity but it's not like I followed their Twitter feed at the time.)

[8note]

comparable seems like an implicit part of the question? Cold weather caused problems in all states; Somebody surely slipped and fell down somewhere. That doesn't give information on whether their grids are better at handling weather changes though

[netflixandkill]

Had Texas been attached to the eastern interconnect, and remained connected through 25-30 GW of shortfall, yes, rotating blackouts would have been spread across dozens of states.

The blackouts in the MISO and SPP areas were not as bad, but still had to happen to weather (pardon the pun) generator failures.

[pasttense01]

States like Minnesota and other northern states have had much more extreme cold temperatures than any of these Southern states--yet they haven't had this blackout problem. Why not? Because they seriously winterize their systems.

[rcurry]

Not trying to be a jerk, but I’ve lived in MN and WI and can’t count the number of times we lost power in the winter - usually for somewhere between 4 and 8 hours, so no big deal, but it does happen. I never minded it, power outages are a great opportunity to catch up with ham radio friends, ha ha.

[Armisael16]

How many of those were because the grid went down vs because your power lines came down because of ice?

They’re very different problems to handle.

[rcurry]

I agree. The only time I’ve seen a grid collapse was NYC in 2003. Fortunately I was able to sleep in my office and a co-worker had the good sense to raid the deli downstairs the moment the power went out. We dined by flashlight on salami and a bucket of cherry tomatoes. Good fun.

[duxup]

I lived in northern states all my life. Never experienced a power outage due to cold.

[542354234235]

> The headlines this week have all focused on Texas, but this was happening over the entire region.

Texas had huge parts of its grid fail and leave millions of people without power for multiple days. Other states had minutes long rolling blackouts.

They are both cold weather power problems in the way that getting a cut on your hand cutting a bagel and dropping a running chainsaw on your leg are both injuries. The significance comes from the severity.