Posted on 02/03/2011 8:14:16 AM PST by bestintxas
As brief power outages rolled across the state on Wednesday, certain places were intended to be exempt from a temporary loss of electricity. That included hospitals, nursing homes, fire stations, police stations, other emergency response facilities… and Cowboys Stadium?
When officials with Oncor said that the Arlington site of Sunday’s Super Bowl XLV would not be a part of the rolling outages, many residents became furious. But this was not entirely a choice made by the local utility company.
With thousands of reporters huddled in North Texas hotels and thousands of rabid football fans attending the NFL Experience at the Dallas Convention Center, and two football teams preparing to do battle on the field of Cowboys Stadium this Sunday, the North Texas Super Bowl XLV Host Committee had a big request to make. “It is vitally important we don’t have blackouts,” said committee vice president Tony Fay.
Fay asked the City of Dallas, the City of Fort Worth and the City of Arlington to ensure that rolling blackouts did not prevent planned events from happening at Super Bowl venues. That news really steamed up some homeowners who were left without power for hours. “We’re not prioritizing,” said frustrated Plano resident Allen Hooser. “Hospitals and the grocery store, which is out. But for a PR stunt, where you can go throw a football, you have power and heat.”
“Not because of any preferential treatment. Not because we’re trying to protect VIPs or celebrities,” Fay explained. “It is a public safety issue.” According to Fay, if there was to be a blackout at an NFL venue, then there would be no way to screen for security.
(Excerpt) Read more at dfw.cbslocal.com ...
Do you realize the size of generators required to power that stadium? We have one at work that is 1.2 mega watt for a hospital size building. It is NOT on wheels, but rather inside a 20' X 36' enclosure.
“Why the heck doesn’t Texas have enough power to meet its needs?”
They depend on wind power, they deserve to be without power!
“Jorie Klein runs disaster management for Parkland Hospital, and is still upset that her hospital was included in the rotating outages. “We were not happy,” she said. “You can’t just go down for 15 minutes and come back up. It really does disrupt hospital care.”
Because of the sensitive life-saving equipment, hospitals are considered “critical care facilities,” and supposed to be exempt from rolling blackouts. That’s exactly what Presbyterian Dallas was led to believe. “We were of the understanding that hospitals and other critical-care providers were not supposed to be affected by planned outages,” said hospital spokesman Stephen O’Brien.
Oncor admits that a mistake was made. “We are sorry this happened. We are in a process of refining our processes, so in the unlikely event of future mandates for rotating outages, hospitals will be excluded,” said Oncor spokeswoman Catherine Cuellar.’
Apparently they are NOW exempted. . .but not when it began.
“No hospitals suffered under the rolling blackouts. Save your hand-wringing immorality passion play for the DU; here we embrace the truth.”
http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2011/02/02/blackouts-anger-dallas-hospitals/
Care to revise your statement?
I don't know why generators weren't used but that is the official explanation.
It would be, if that statement were true, except that the statement is a lie, and as such doesn't epitomize anything but a hysterical rant unsupported by fact.
Even as your other link showed, the hospitals which lost power lost power incorrectly, because of a failure of process -- NOT because they cut off power to the hospitals to give it to the stadium.
Further, your original link explains, and I assume you read the entire article, that the stadium would be highly unlikely to be affected by a rolling blackout because it gets multiple power feeds, which would have blackouts at different times.
So all the Stadium had to do was ask that the rolling blackouts be coordinated so that all their feeds were not out at the same time.
If the hospitals in question had also paid for multiple feeds, they might not have gone black even when the company screwed up. For the record, my company has a lot of sensitive electronics equipment, so we pay for dual feeds. Occasionally one is scheduled to be off, and we are informed ahead of time so we can shut down sensitive equipment or put it on an internal UPS for the duration.
But going back to the main point, there is absolutely NO evidence, because it simply is NOT TRUE, that anybody made any decision to take power from a hospital and give it to the stadium.
On the greater point -- I agree with making sure the stadium had power at all times. That's a major event that the city went to considerable trouble to obtain; you screw with that, nobody comes anymore and you lose whatever it was that you thought was important enough to get.
I would hope that even if you think the preliminaries aren't important, that you would understand the impossibility of your local utility doing a rolling blackout of the stadium during the superbowl when hundreds of millions of people are watching a game.
Yes, that stadium is more important than the few thousand people at a time that could otherwise get power if you had perfect ability to give out power and you took it from the stadium, which of course isn't the case anyway.
Because in fact a rolling blackout is a blunt instrument, not a finely tuned process. They aren't cutting off "just enough" people, they just shut down chunks of usage that they can manage. my guess is that you are probably running at under 98% capacity when doing the rolling blackouts, so the .05% capacity used by the stadium is dwarfed by the 2% that simply is going to waste because we can't control a blackout to the level of individual houses.
If we had a perfect, smart grid system, the "rolling blackout" would be replaced by a house-by-house power limitation, and houses would be programmed to provide power first to critical needs like heat and refrigeration, and homeowners would then be able to program what their priorities were for power.
In other words, instead of cutting a house to 0 for 15 minutes, and then they go back to full power for 45, you'd just cut everybody's house's total power avialability by 25%, and let them decide what things they want to blackout. The house could do their own rolling blackout of individual appliances if it wanted.
Bookmark
Residential demand for natural gas to heat homes competed with utility need for natural gas to generate electricity. That doesn't happen in summer. See the final bullet point of article below (it's a nice succinct article in any case):
“Do you realize the size of generators required to power that stadium? We have one at work that is 1.2 mega watt for a hospital size building. It is NOT on wheels, but rather inside a 20’ X 36’ enclosure.”
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Yes Arrowhead, I understand the power logistics, but the “excuse” from the Oncor mouthpiece was that they needed the power to ensure “security” at the stadium.
Run the metal detectors with generators and put the da#n reporters in a tent with a generator to power their wittle laptops. Then restrict to essential personnel only.
It could be done. There is obviously NO will to do it.
You would think a Conservative Republican state would "Man Up" and get more power plants built. We need more Nuclear power plants.
Where is there evidence of the hospitals being affected?
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Here ya go!
Blackouts Anger Dallas Hospitals
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2668082/posts?page=1
Texas should have enough backup power to handle this type of situation.
But, this occured in Calif. when generators were taken off line so prices would spike.
Stop building windmills and build real power plants!
I called my state Senator, representive and the Governor expressing exactly just that!
If this were California, Texans would be having a good laugh, while telling all they deserve it.....
((This event is classic))
Last heard, Texas was getting power from Mexico...
Morons.
It’s Jerry’s world here in Arlington. We just live in it. My business is less than a half mile from the stadium and we had a blackout yesterday.
Another thing that has not been mentioned is the spike getting the stadium back on line after the peak load get to normal. There were several larger buildings in Austin that were exempt from rolling blackouts for that very reason.
Also, they did have two large tents set up near the stadium and the 70 MPH+ winds took one down. The TX National Guard assigned to provide additional security was going to use them for the stupid bowl.
Stop believing everything the politicans tell you.
It is a disgrace that Texas had rolling blackouts because of the incompetency of the Government, but to add insult to injury, they make sure the elites aren't effected by them, just the 'little people'
The problem was caused by the Government, and it was the people who did the suffering.
When people accept the rolling blackouts, the Gov't can use any excuse to control our power.
So, it was an error of the process that the hospitals lost power, and it was an error in construction that led to pipes freezing and both errors were paid for by the people, not those making the errors.
In the real world, people are fired for these kind of errors.
I was told Pickens was a genius...
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