Power went off

He must have heard how people reacted to his vacation.With this, and his involvement in Jan 06, perhaps we can hope that Cruz's political future is behind him.

Power back on at my house, most of Edinburg still off.

The power is finally back on at my sisters and just in time since they are calling for yet another hard freeze tonight and likely tomorrow night.

As of ~3:15 am in Two Harbors, MN, it's about +5 degrees F. Which is about at least 20 degrees warmer than it was a few days ago. Downright pleasant outside. My thermometer is exposed to the daytime sun, so I don't get accurate readings during the day, but I believe we went a few days with daytime highs being sub zero (F).I live more inland which is somewhat colder. My personal recorded low a few days back (when my electronic outdoor thermometer miraculously kept working) was - 29 degrees F. They were hitting -40's elsewhere in northern Minnesota.I live in a little well insulated single room building, off grid with solar panels and with wood and propane heat. When it was well sub zero I could tell that the propane wasn't vaporizing as well, but my draw from the tank is so low it didn't interrupt the heater.I talked to a friend earlier tonight, and he brought up the concept of all the northern snowbirds (people who go south (eg Texas) for the winter) must be wishing they were back in Minnesota where a little cold is no problem.I though of those who might have thought that hell will freeze over if the Democrats will take control of the Senate. As I see it, Texas is close enough.Moose

A while ago I had this converstion with a young fellow on another forum: With the wind chill, it's been in the minus 40 (Celsius) range for a few weeks now. Our power plants are winterized.We had a power outage a while back for an hour and a half. Usually, a power outage around here lasts twenty minutes.Our electric utility is government-run.

How is your water situation?

The Mission water supply is fine. We never lost pressure and the plant is winterized. Even when the power was out all over we never had a water issue. Edinburg (next town over) is under a boil alert still.

Spent most of my life in Southern California were we do pay attention to insulation and weatherstripping. But I was out of the area for six years while on active duty.First I was on the Gulf Coast of MS for tech school (Keesler AFB in Biloxi). I brought my wife out and we arrived at our apartment on New Year's Eve 1976. It was raining a bit. Next morning, 1977, I looked out and our car had icicles on the bumper. The apartment had no weatherstripping and apparently no insulation and was miserably cold.That was the year the US had a very bad winter. Our instructor called the break early when he heard that it was snowing. Yep, it was snowing on the Gulf Coast. Last about 20 minutes, but we got snow drifts upwards of a quarter inch tall. Locals had no idea how to drive in that stuff (kind of like Southern Californians when it rains). But what made the headlines was that while almost all of the lower 48 states (AKA CONUS) were suffering below-freezing temperatures, it was 45°F in Alaska.From that I was stationed for five years in North Dakota. It was interesting to see how everything was adapted for the cold weather. The houses were almost perfect cubes in order to maximize internal volume while minimizing surface area, thus preserving heat. Every business and most houses had two sets of doors to the outside, kind of like a spacecraft airlock except this was to keep heat from escaping and cold air from blowing in. One night there we watched "The Thing" (1951) on TV (the original with James Arness playing the Carrot Man -- I think he was the reason why they filmed the outdoor location shots just west of Fargo). We laughed at how ridiculous the early scenes were where the aircrew goes into the base CO's office and every time the office door opens snow and the cold wind blow in and sends the papers on his desk flying; nobody would ever build an office like that which we knew by having lived it.

You're only 15 miles from the southernmost border Texas has with Mexico. Kind of amazing that the cold reached that far south. Lack of winterization in your part of Texas seems justifiable. You're at roughly the same latitude as Miami.New England has to prepare for both ends of the weather spectrum. There's always a couple periods during summer when temperatures reach near or past 100 causing demand for electricity to skyrocket as all the air conditioners flip on. And there are usually several winter periods where temperatures drop near or below zero, causing furnaces across the region to blow through natural gas (which is cheap), oil (not so cheap but energy dense) and propane (expensive and not very energy dense but very clean and very portable, and it doesn't have the problem that oil has with the oil tank, which when you switch from oil is considered hazardous waste). Commercial buildings tend to use electricity for heat, but it's fairly efficient per square foot for large buildings because of their low surface to volume ratio.Articles about the Texas problems frequently mention the very low price of electricity. Ours just dropped a penny a few months ago and is now around $0.17/kWh. Electric cars here cost about 2/3 as much to run in terms of fuel as ICE vehicles, but in Texas it would be 1/3 as much. Our gas prices currently average around $2.50/gallon for regular.--Percy

The deep freeze this year reached even farther south to the other side of the river where many homes are even less prepared. The Valley (both sides of the river) is not really a valley at all but rather a vast flood plain and delta. There are remnants of the old river channels all over the area. But in Texas there has also been a strong belief that government, Federal, State, City, County should not interfere with freedom so our zoning and building codes are pretty much what existed back in the 1930s. Building new homes on concrete slabs in flood prone areas is general practice. It's funny in a way since the much older settler homes that still exist in many of those areas or did until they were torn down to build new expensive homes would have all been raised above flood level and most often irrigated by controlled canal flooding. In the flooding last year from summer storms quite a few of the most hard hit areas were new higher end communities.

So, err, who deregulated the energy market, Ted?

Kind of like when conservatives complain about US jobs going overseas and blame it on socialism and other things they don't understand, when in reality that's just capitalism in operation. If you, a bean-counting capitalist, can manufacture a product overseas and ship it here for even a few pennies less per item, then that is what you're going to do.Ironically, the only way we can keep those jobs here would be through some form of regulation, something which "conservatives" oppose because ... (wait for it ... wait for it) ... regulation cuts into a company's profits.

Well, not that I agree with the outrageous electric bills these people received, but they are also culpable as they knew that the price of electricity from Griddy was variable both up and down. In fact that was the lure of their service is that unlike fixed rate plans they could get electricity cheaper during off peak months. They've capped the rate at $9000 per megawatt hour and so they should have known that their electric bills in theory at least could get a little crazy.Edited by kjsimons, : No reason given.

The widespread lack of foresight is stunning. Griddy customers knew what was coming because Griddy warned them to switch to another plan before the bad weather hit. Most weren't able to switch in time, but they could have taken precautions against high electric bills. Most modern thermostats can go down to 40°. Those whose electricity didn't go out could have turned the thermostats way down and piled on the blankets.This is back of the envelope, but the retired guy with the $17,000 bill was using maybe around 300 kWh per day for maybe six days. That's an incredible consumption rate. It seems unlikely he turned his heat down, maybe a little.Those whose electricity did go out could have put their faucets on drip to keep their pipes from bursting. Alternatively they could have drained their pipes. Our electricity went out for 10 days after a 2008 ice storm, and when the temperature in the house got down to 37° (note to Texas: insulation!) I resolved to drain the pipes the next day. Fortunately the power came back on first.--Percy

Yeah I was amazed at their usage as well. I live in Orlando, FL in a 1700 sq.ft. house and I rarely exceed 800 kw in a month (less than $100). I'm not sure that it's possible to drain the water pipes in most newer houses in Texas or Florida as they tend to be built on slabs so you don't have any access to the pumping except where is comes out of a wall.