Posted on 02/01/2019 5:40:32 AM PST by finnsheep
"The brutal cold gripping Minnesota made itself felt in tens of thousands of living rooms Wednesday as Xcel Energy resorted to asking customers to turn their thermostats down to 63 degrees to conserve natural gas.
The request to Xcel’s more than 400,000 customers came as the utility strained in the sub-zero temperatures to keep up with heating demand.
And a few Minnesotans dealt with the nightmare of having no heat at all.
About 150 homes in the Princeton area, about an hour north of Minneapolis, lost natural gas service about 10:30 p.m. Tuesday. In response, Xcel asked about 12,000 customers in nearby Becker, Big Lake, Chisago City, Lindstrom, Princeton and Isanti to turn down their thermostats to 60."
(Excerpt) Read more at m.startribune.com ...
My little 20 dollar ceramic heater added something like 40% to my electric bill.
I gave it away...i miss it.
used to keep it right under my desk keeping me toasty warm.
We pay a lot for elec here in MA.
Same here, although I don’t splurge on air conditioning either, keeping the house temperature at 80 or above during the summer. I do have fans in places in the house and a room a/c for the bedroom so I can sleep. We have a 2600 square foot, two-story house and there is only two of us during the weekends and only me during most of the weekdays. It doesn’t make sense to cool a large house for just one or two people.
On a side note, when I was a freshman in college we had a prolonged cold snap where for two weeks the temperature never got above 0 degrees during the day. I had a roommate from Texas who loved snow for awhile and then got tired of it. She never really got the hang of walking on slick sidewalks and in January was really sick of the cold. One day she was morosely gazing out the window and asked me whether I thought it would snow that night. I replied that it was too cold to snow and she thought I had gone off the deep end. She ended up calling her Texas family to tell them it was too cold to snow here (in Utah). This was in the early seventies and women were not allowed to wear pants to classes. Those walks across campus meant frozen knees for most of us.
In another cold snap a few years later in Idaho, December was rather dry and cold but it warmed up enough to snow on New Year’s Eve so that we had snow berms about two feet high down the middle of the town’s roadways. Then the cold socked in again and the berms slowly dehydrated and eventually just blew away. Cold is nothing new.
I’ve never heard of them making such a request before. Lived there most of my life too. It was only one friggen week! We’ve had whole months of below zero weather and never been asked or advised to turn down the thermostat, especially as low as 60. WTF are they gonna do when more typical winters befall us?
NIMBY
Too bad they don’t consider that they could maybe get a cut of the action..
On a side note I LOVE NH, Exactly this time last year i was checking into the Woodstock Inn and Brewery in N. woodstock for some Superbowl action and enjoyed their nice restaurant and lounge.. serious snow the whole time and i loved it...(didn’t have to shovel it....actually i did).
This year i’m sitting in my kitchen....ugh
Which is why it is always a good idea to have a secondary heat source.
exactly correct, same for many utilities like water.
Global warming is still here, without it Chicago would be -43 right now.
The moonbats ignore that benefit though...
/s
I’m waiting for them to try to change the crisis to global cooling and pretend that was the issue all along.
I was wondering when Jimmy would show up in his cardigan.
Lol. And I wonder if the electronics that is embedded in them wont work too. Very likely no.
Mass has plenty of reserves.
Native Minniesodan here, with lots of family still htere.
In the house I grew up in, we had a coal furnace that we also burned wood in as another alternative energy source. We eventually went to an oil fired heater.. years later in a new house, a natural gas.. exclusively.
One of the problems of getting hitched to new technologies and energy sources is having a fallback if the energy source is gone.
It indeed does make you wonder how we got in this latest round of energy resource rich, domestic supply short.
How many agencies, how many companies, how many lobbyists, can we count on when it freezes and the gas runs low?
Apparently, few to any.
Forty years ago I worked at a Cement Plant in Pryor Oklahoma they used Natural Gas to fire their Kilns and were required to switch to coal. Go figure.
Tom,
I am not sure why Quebec Hydro would be asking that of their customers other than that the grid maybe can not handle the peak draw. They do not have a energy generating problem. Their dams on the Saint Lawrence have excess generating capacity. It may be a distribution issue. I am not an electrical engineer, so I am only guessing. Kind of like trying to plug to many items into one outlet or circuit. You overload the circuit and you trip the breaker.
Except the breaker is not 20 amp like in your house. It may be 2 million amps and everyone in Montreal is plugging in their blow dryers at the same time.
Quebec Hydro is not like the Hoover Dam in NV/AZ where only 4 out of 14 turbines are turning because if they opened all the gates it would drain Lake Mead. There is so much water running downhill all the way from Lake Superior that only a small portion of it ends up being consumed. There is plenty left to flow into the Atlantic Ocean. Look at the watershed of the Saint Lawrence River. It is not just the Great Lakes drainage. It is most of the province of Quebec and Ontario rivers flow into the St Lawrence.
It is similar to how much water flows into the Columbia River out west. Why do you think the Chinese spent so much time and money building the Three Gorges Dam. Hydro electric power is by far the cheapest way to generate electricity.
There was no shortage of gas. There was a shortage of line pressure that the power companies were not prepared for.
LOL!
I’ll bet the Democrats are the ones who couldn’t make a profit selling whiskey or running the whorehouse in Nevada the government confiscated a few years ago!
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