two things of note;
1. From Mayor Pro Tem Mike Martinez: power outages around town are due to rolling brownouts that are state mandated on Austin Energy in times such as these when we are reaching peak demands state wide. Hopefully your power will only be out for an hour or so. We can get through this.
At about 5:40 a.m., the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) enacted a system-wide emergency curtailment (EEA-Level 3) due to insufficient on-line generation to meet ERCOT statewide demand. The ERCOT system must shed 1,100 MW. Austin Energy’s share of that 1,100 MW is about 80 MW.
This means Austin Energy – on a rotating basis- must turn off about 40 circuits (we have 350 circuits) for about 30 minutes at a time following a pre-designed plan that distributes the circuit outages evenly throughout our service area. A circuit powers between 1,000 – 3,000 customers. The plan avoids critical loads such as hospitals and emergency resources.
There is no need to call in outages. Once power is off, customers are asked to turn off as many electronic appliances as is reasonably possible to make it easier to power Austin Energy circuits back up.
All generators in ERCOT are required to participate – regardless of whether Austin Energy has sufficient power in our community (which we do). This emergency is due to an imbalance in the statewide electric grid between the power being demanded statewide and the generation online at this time. More information as it becomes available.
2. If you don’t have any hot water, and you have an external water heater, its probably because the pipes are frozen. They don’t tell us these things in Texas…
