Report from Ft. Worth Station KTVT-TV.
Meanwhile, U of Texas’ Josh Rhodes likes what he sees with wind generation across the midsection.
Report from Ft. Worth Station KTVT-TV.
Meanwhile, U of Texas’ Josh Rhodes likes what he sees with wind generation across the midsection.
I appreciate that the grid overall has probably improved, but there was one issue that grid/utility expert Alison Silverstein brought up that I know was a big problem in Austin: sectorization. Sectorization, as she used it, is when a utility divides its electricity distribution areas into distinct sectors that are powered separately. Ideally, when a utility has to implement rolling blackouts at a local level, sectors with high-priority consumers like hospitals, pump stations, etc. are on separate circuits that are exempt from deliberate blackouts and the rest of us residential riff-raff are split into lower-priority sectors for power-saving rolling blackouts.
Austin’s electrical network was not partitioned evenly, so during the 2021 winter storm many neighborhoods that were in the same branch as hospitals never lost power while the rest of us had to handle a higher burden. (My own neighborhood had further issues with tree limbs but that has been addressed by aggressive tree pruning this past summer.)