Texas is hot. And those living here are perhaps right to be concerned. Many of us are “glued” to ercot.com, a site that attempts to help us predict the potential for a rolling outage in the state. And the minds at ERCOT have decided to change the graph. We think this change is worth noting, so we’ve documented it below.
The new graph removes the “Quick Start Capacity” indication in favor of more dots. It’s difficult to say whether this indicator was useful. Frankly, we are surprised we have not experienced rolling blackouts already, given the recent temperatures and lack of wind. It’s a difficult time to live in Texas and today’s wind temporarily solved the energy issues, but created an additional risk for fire. There’s a graph to show renewables, too.
In several of the last few days, it seems we have been saved by small amounts of wind. Now that the wind has increased, so has the risk of fire in North Texas. It’s an unfortunate compromise and we hope everyone can stay safe. It’s not clear how long these conditions will last.
As climate change takes center stage, we encourage everyone to prepare for outages in advance with UPS battery and generator systems. Create an outage by flipping a breaker to monitor how quickly the temperature in your space will increase in an actual outage. It’s always better to fail on our own terms, an important lesson in testing and life.
We’re testing some new devices to help us prepare for outages and the data can be valuable in planning. This is a good time to take inventory of your power consumption and devices like Sense and Kill-A-Watt meters can be highly informative. We’ll discuss more about those later. Until then, stay cool, everyone!