City of Austin,
I thought that you had come up with every possible way to thwart my commute home from work.
School zones? Check.
Ill-timed lights? Check.
Overcrowding of poorly-maintained streets? Check.
But this is just too much.
Why on EARTH would you schedule "rolling blackouts" that impact traffic lights during evening rush hour? Sidestreets? Clogged. Major intersections? Clogged. Exit ramps and cut-throughs? Clogged.
Yes, we know it's hot. It's been getting increasingly hot for the last 2 weeks. You knew this. You saw this coming. Why is this an emergency? And seriously - do traffic lights really use up that much energy?
The definition of an emergency.
(note the flagrant use of the word "unexpected"...)
Need we spell it out for you? Apparently...yes.
I paid my electricity bill today. Maybe you could take some of that money and put it to use beefing up the infrastructure around here? Just a thought.
Now, if you really need to save some energy, I can give you the name and address of my place of business. Feel free to make cuts there anytime tomorrow between 8-5. Believe me, it's fine with me and the rest of my co-workers. Have at it.
Thank you.
6 comments:
The biggest flaw in your argument, is indeed the reference to "unexpected."
Every spring/low-energy-needed-season, the companies that control the production of energy, take a portion of their production equipment offline for maintenance purposes.
In Texas, this time ranges from March/April until mid-May-ish. These tend to be the least power-requiring months (not cold enough to run heat all the time, not hot enough to run A/C all the time).
The problem comes when situations like yesterday happen - sure, it wasn't unexpected... But it wasn't expected 6-12 months ago, when the maintenance was scheduled, or 1-2 months ago, when the plant actually went offline...
And.. CoA has very little to do with it, they're just doing their job...
- d.
I too was frustrated yesterday - thankfully we weren't the only ones - all over the state of Texas everyone was frustrated with us. These are the days that I wish to be in a small town where "rush hour traffic" is sitting for 3 cycles at a stoplight. :)
Thought you would enjoy this...its a blog that keeps us smiling here at the big pink building.
http://lobbyduck.blogspot.com/2006/04/what-fresh-hell-will-today-bring_17.html
(sorry, i don't know how to make the cool links that you do...)
LOL!! After you figure out why this was a good idea for the city of Austin, can you tell me why both routes from my house to work have to be under construction at the same time. Do Boulder and Larmie counties really want to be so divided?!
Great stuff, people, really.
Dom - good info. However, the biggest flaw in your argument is the communication. I was in the car, listening to (talk) radio when this went into effect (yes, I'm that cool). The hosts were equally, if not more, critical of the city for failing to even attempt to communicate this to people. I'm just sayin'...
Noell - totally going to read that blog. Have fun in the big pink building.
Heather - that really stinks. Really. Maybe they'll cancel work for a few days? :)
Kim,
The news about the rolling blackouts was on all the major local TV channels before it happened - and I'm sure it was announced over radio.
ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas ) initiated the "Emergency Electric Curtailment Plan" (as they call these situations) Monday at 15:25[1]. At 15:34, they shed 1150MW's of "interruptable load customers", which wasn't enough, and at 16:13, they issued the orders for rotating blackouts in Austin, Houston, and other areas, in order to shed an additional 1000 MW of load.
So we're still talking about a max. of ~45 minutes between "oh crap" and your power going out.. That's not a lot of time to get any amount of general announcement out.
[1]http://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/congestion/operations/2006/04/17/index.html
Shrug, I'm just sayin' that the scale of magnitude on these things tends to be a bit larger than most people realise...
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