What's normal about today's weather?
It’s near record cold. Power grid is going to get strained.
Yeah It’s 14 degrees here. I stayed in an RV for a while and feel for you in those temps.
Intermittent power sources like solar and wind makes capacity feel more expensive to maintain because you get to run it and make money off of it less. Would not be surprising if tva has not added capacity to match load growth.
Look up what the TV in TVA stands for, check the temps over the last 12 hours in that area, then get familiar with the concept of "**** rolls downhill". It's abnormal/rare for this widespread extreme cold. But if you want to upgrade the infrastructure to allow for the extremes and to prevent 15-30 minute rolling blackouts, I can point you to some politicians that will gladly take your money.
We have had temps this cold before, we have never had rolling blackouts in TVA country. It stayed in the single digits + and - for several days straight in 1989, no rolling blackouts then.
30 years since 'Freeze of 1989' (wapt.com)
I am even less dumb on this particular subject than you might imagine. I will leave it at that although I suspect you will not.
That’s kind of the whole idea of having a 1st world, reliable electrical power grid. You build it to handle days like today. We had that for decades. We’re starting to lose it, did several reasons.
We had about 226mil people in this country in 1980 (the good old days) and now a short 40 years later we have over 330mil . "the new normal" is a moving target that changes by the minute.
Do you though? I'd prefer it bc we live in a wealthy society, but is everyone comfortable paying the rates/taxes it takes to sustain a system that would only be stressed in a once a couple decade or a generational event? And would partial scale 30 minute blackouts be an unreasonable reaction to those rare instances? Not going to bother me too much. I'm more pissed about my 6 hour outage last night bc my utility provider doesn't know how to keep limbs off their lines.
Yea that’s true I don’t want to pay for an event that happens every 10 years or so, but I also don’t want to end up like Texas having a complete failure. I feel okay with where we are now. Just don’t want to drift too far.
I remember that one well. We lost power for 5 days (thank goodness for gas ovens, stoves, and heat). But the issue was heavy, heavy ice, not just sub-freezing temperatures. Powerlines and poles were absolutely trashed during that event.
That’s a pretty naive take. Just wait 5-10 years. If that long.
