Entergy Begins Rolling Blackouts

About 485,000 customers in Southeast Texas still have no electricity today, and Entergy began rolling blackouts north of Houston because of heavy demand on its damaged system.

Of the 700,000 CenterPoint Energy customers who lost electricity, mostly in the Houston area, all but 180,000 had power restored by midday, said Leticia Lowe, company spokeswoman. She said all are expected to be back on line by Friday.

Entergy, which serves the parts of East Texas that bore the brunt of the hurricane, had about 255,000 customers without power in Texas this morning, compared with 270, 000 right after the storm hit, company spokesman Morgan Stewart said.

Early this afternoon, Entergy began interrupting service north of Houston to avoid a broader blackout that could affect the area for a longer period.

The rolling outages, which will occur in 60-minute intervals, will affect more than 142,000 homes and businesses in Montgomery, Walker, Grimes, and Liberty counties.

"Hurricane Rita has devastated our electrical system," said Joe Domino, president of Entergy Texas, whose company earlier asked customers in the affected area to voluntarily reduce their usage electricity.

"By taking this highly unusual step of interrupting power to some of our customers, we are ensuring that our grid doesn't suffer more damage from increased electrical demand due to high temperatures," he said. "We sincerely appreciate everyone's patience and understanding as we work to get their lives back to normal."

Preliminary damage assessments show 271 lines and 275 substations out of service. Also damaged are wooden and steel structures which will impact service restoration until they are repaired.

The rolling outages should not affect electricity to customers who provide public safety or public health services, the company said.

About 7,000 Entergy crew members were working to restore power, but Stewart said some were having a difficult time getting to some areas because of flooding.

Less than 50,000 of TXU Electric Delivery customers were without electricity today, said company spokesman John Hardesty. The company serves Dallas and many towns and cities in East Texas. Hardesty said at the peak of the outage about 130,000 customers were without service.

Aggravating the situation was the heat — which reached 99 in Houston, one degree above the record. Today's forecast calls for a high of 98 in Houston.

Meanwhile, Lowe said CenterPoint's customers in Harris, Chambers, Montgomery, Liberty and Galveston counties made up the majority of the outages. She said people in the northeast part of Harris County in heavily wooded areas were particularly hard hit by the storm.

Lowe said about 70 percent of CenterPoint's service area was hit by either hurricane or tropical storm winds.

The utility companies are giving priority to essential customers such as hospitals, water plants and police and fire stations.

Repair crews numbering about 4,000 — some from other states such as Florida, Kentucky and California — are working 16-hour shifts to repair the damage.

Lowe said things could have been worse, noting that only one of the company's 225 substations was damaged.

Hardesty said TXU customers in Dallas, Paris and Commerce should have service restored by now.

He said customers in Lufkin and Nacogdoches will have power some time after Tuesday.

Telephone service has suffered only minor outages because of the storm, said SBC spokeswoman Amanda Ray.

Ray said most damage was limited to facilities along the coast and in the path of the hurricane. He said the Sabine Pass central office was lost to the storm, while 44 others are running on emergency generators or batteries.

Any Nukes will require a couple of days of red tape to get permission to restart on a good day.

It's not just a matter of red tape. Nukes are best used as "base load" capacity, they don't take kindly to having their power level set up and down, especially down. Has to do with daughter products poising the reaction. I forget the specifics from my Nuclear Engineering course, it's been a long time and I never used the stuff, but I do remember that much, partly because my master's thesis adviser had another grad student working on "optimum dispatch", which means figuring out which generators to use for any given set of conditions of load and generator availability.

I wasn't referring to loading characteristics of nukes so much as the difficulty in dealing with restarts after a shutdown due to an "unusual event". A controlled shutdown for a pending hurricane is classified as such by the government and there is a series of permissions that are required to get back on line.

You're right about baseloading - It isn't just that the units can't be regulated up and down, but they are at their most efficient at full output. Essentially, the fuel rods give up the same amount of useful life whether the unit is generating at full output or half-load (probably due to the "poisoning effect" that you mention). It used to nearly take an act of congress to get a nuke to reduce load on a cool, mild weekend when we had minimum load problems. Often, the choice was to remove some coal units from service on Fridays and return them on Monday morning. Of course, the heating/cooling cycle isn't good for boiler tubes in fossil units either, but it's the lesser of evils.

Optimum dispatch is right up my alley, though things have changed a bit in the last few years. It used to be a lot simpler and a bit less critical, but deregulation has brought out the need for greater precision in order to squeeze every bit of economy out of the available generation that can possibly be had (within the constraints of transmission contingencies and such). It's still part art and part science, but the tools available offer much better cost data with which to work.

In the situation that is the basis of this thread, it isn't clear as to the exact reason of the rolling blackouts, but I suspect it is very localized. Obviously, available power is insufficient to meet the area's requirements, but the exact reason isn't mentioned. Could be a transmission shortage, a generation shortage, a lack of voltage support, or any combination thereof in the area affected.

I did a little more looking, at the Entergy web site. They haven't said much about nuclear operations, but it's very possible that they shut down Waterford and River Bend in anticipation of Rita (as they did for Katrina). It's a precautionary move, but a necessary one. While a direct hit isn't likely to damage the vital parts of the plant, the switchyard and lines leading out of the plant are vulnerable as is offsite power.

Anyway, as to the rolling blackouts, the are local in nature and are probably based on the fact that many, many transmission lines have been damaged in the area. It would seem that the power simply cannot get to the area north of Houston in adequate quantities so the rolling blackout serves to ration power equally until things can be repaired.

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