We were among those in Texas who experienced a 15-minute electrical blackout yesterday.
Hundreds of thousands of Texans went without power for brief periods Monday afternoon as unseasonably warm weather and both planned and unplanned power plant outages led officials to call for rolling blackouts.Shortly after 4 p.m. Monday, officials with the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas, the organization that monitors the power network for about 85 percent of the state, declared an emergency and asked power distributors to turn off about 1,000 megawatts of power.
The cuts were spread throughout the state, with Houston-based CenterPoint Energy cutting power for 15-minute intervals on the power lines it operates to as many as 78,000 customers, according to spokeswoman Leticia Lowe.
With more warm weather expected today there could be a repeat performance when power use peaks sometime between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m.
It was hot Monday, but the need for blackouts in April is a big surprise. This could be an ugly precursor of the long summer that's about to really begin.
Related:
Posted by Alan at April 18, 2006 06:36 AM