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Re:Poll: Where do you live? by vel0city on Friday February 04, 2022 @03:44PM (#30212883)
ERCOT doesn't do power delivery, you wouldn't see how many people are without power by checking out ERCOT. You would want to look at one of the several power delivery companies, such as Oncor.

https://stormcenter.oncor.com/

They show 7,073 customers affected by outages out of 3,835,901 customers served. That's 0.18% of customers affected.

Texas-New Mexico Power is another power delivery company in Texas.

https://www.tnmp.com/power-outage-map

They are showing 1,195 customers affected. They serve ~400k customers. So ~0.3% of customers are without power for that company.

Austin Energy is another power company in Texas, they serve pretty much the entire city of Austin so ~1M customers. They are reporting 24 affected customers. So 0.0024% of customers affected.

https://outagemap.austinenergy.com/external/default.html

The above poster is not right, and neither are you for suggesting some massive amount of the state is without power.

Re:Poll: Where do you live? by capableweb on Friday February 04, 2022 @03:49PM (#30212975)
Thank you, that oncor website seems to be available to me. I was browsing around some news article that seemed to echo the same sentiment, tried to access the source data myself and couldn't, so made an assumption. That was an error on my part and I'm sorry for that. Thank you for providing a better source that seems accessible worldwide.
Re:Poll: Where do you live? by vel0city on Friday February 04, 2022 @03:54PM (#30213040)
> so made an assumption

You shared lies and slandered a state suggesting its a third world country based on false data.

Re:Poll: Where do you live? by runako on Friday February 04, 2022 @04:34PM (#30213600)
To be fair, our power grid does have a tendency to fail regularly across the US. Texas last year, California's rolling blackouts, NY blackouts, etc. There's a reason that upper-middle-class homeowners have been buying Generac generators en masse.
Re:Poll: Where do you live? by vel0city on Friday February 04, 2022 @04:43PM (#30213717)
Power grids tend to fail just about everywhere that experiences extreme weather. Its not necessarily a US-only thing. Its just that the US experiences a pretty large share of extreme weather compared to most of the developed world. Far more tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, etc. affect the US than say, Europe.
Re:Poll: Where do you live? by runako on Friday February 04, 2022 @08:03PM (#30215893)
California's rolling blackouts were not the result of any particularly extreme (for California!) weather. Similarly, hurricanes are not new to most of the hurricane-afflicted parts of the country. Wildfires have been a force in the US for a long time, and the West has experienced seasonal wildfires for decades.

The difference is the US doesn't generally build or maintain infrastructure in a fashion commensurate with the extant risks here (which are different than those of e.g. Germany). Obviously, it is possible to keep a grid running when it is extremely cold outside, see the Nordics and Russia, for example. The US just makes systematic choices not to build & maintain to that standard.

Re:Poll: Where do you live? by vel0city on Saturday February 05, 2022 @12:29PM (#30223419)
What kind of similar weather risks do the Nordic countries or Germany experience that would be an equivalent to the tornadoes, hurricanes, and wildfires the US experiences on a very regular basis? I truly don't know what kind of similar risks they face and would like to rectify my ignorance.