{"id":53032,"date":"2021-02-17T12:38:33","date_gmt":"2021-02-17T16:38:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=53032"},"modified":"2021-02-17T12:38:33","modified_gmt":"2021-02-17T16:38:33","slug":"texas-power-shutdown-plunges-up-to-15-million-people-into-darkness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=53032","title":{"rendered":"Texas Power Shutdown Plunges Up To 15 Million People Into Darkness"},"content":{"rendered":"

20 Dead Across US Amid Wild Weather As Texas Blackouts Plunge Up To 15 Million People Into Darkness<\/h1>\n

ZeroHedge.com<\/p>\n

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Millions of Americans are without power Wednesday morning as\u00a0winter storms<\/a>\u00a0and freezing temperatures batter the country. At least\u00a020 people are dead<\/strong>\u00a0due to weather-related incidents. As for\u00a0Texas, the state with the most power outages<\/strong>, millions are still without power heading into the fourth day.<\/p>\n

Bloomberg<\/a>\u00a0makes an interesting inquiry into the blackout’s actual size across Texas in recent days. Considering utility companies count outages by “customers” and not actual people – the real number could be north of\u00a015 million people who have been plunged into darkness amid frigid temperatures.\u00a0<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

Texas power grid operator ERCOT, which manages 90% of the state’s electric load, serving more than 26 million customers, was forced to\u00a0cut power to millions of customers<\/a>\u00a0as Arctic air spilled into the state,\u00a0freezing wellheads<\/a>\u00a0that impeded the flow of natgas to power\u00a0stations, triggering electric shortages\u00a0as demand overwhelmed the grid.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0high concentration of natgas generation<\/u>\u00a0on\u00a0ERCOT’s grid<\/strong>\u00a0makes it\u00a0vulnerable<\/strong>\u00a0to power disruptions if fuel flow is disrupted.<\/p>\n

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What’s worse is that\u00a0ERCOT is a separate grid than the rest of the country<\/strong>. This means\u00a0ERCOT had limited abilities to pull power from other grids<\/strong>\u00a0which was the resulting factor of why blackouts occurred.<\/p>\n

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The highest amount of power outages in the Lone Star state occurred on Tuesday when PowerOutage.us recorded\u00a04.423 million customers were without power. Bloomberg makes the point that since a customer is not factored into the number of people in a\u00a0household,\u00a0the number of people left in the dark could be “at least 15 million people.”\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Data compiled by Bloomberg shows more than\u00a026,000 megawatts of load have been wiped off the grid since Sunday<\/strong>. ERCOT warned customers over the weekend that rolling blackouts were needed to prevent a grid-wide collapse. For some context, a megawatt powers roughly 200 average homes in Texas.<\/p>\n

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Source: Bloomberg\u00a0<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The blackout’s real size remains a mystery, but it’s undoubtedly one of the largest forced ones in the country’s history. In the last several days,\u00a0Texas has been transformed into a third-world country<\/strong>, with rolling blacks, controlled power outages, cellular networks down, water treatment facilities offline, and millions of people freezing in their homes while the state’s economy grinds to a halt.<\/p>\n

PowerOutage.us<\/a>\u00a0shows\u00a02.965 million customers are still without power in the state on Wednesday morning<\/strong>. With millions of Americans in other states battered by winter weather and also suffering power outages, at least\u00a075% of the Lower 48 states are covered by Snow. This week, at least\u00a020 people have died from the wicked weather across the country.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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ERCOT wholesale electricity prices topped the grid’s price cap of $9,000 per megawatt-hour several times in the overnight session. Reminding readers, ERCOT prices are usually around $25\/MWh.<\/p>\n

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The mystery remains – how many total people were thrown into darkness (and remain there) by ERCOT’s failures to weatherize its grid against a cold blast.<\/p>\n

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\nhttps:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/markets\/real-size-texas-blackouts-could-have-plunged-15-million-people-darkness<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

20 Dead Across US Amid Wild Weather As Texas Blackouts Plunge Up To 15 Million People Into Darkness<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53032\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}