"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

-Jonas Salk

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

I Try to Sympathize

I try to sympathize with the dyed-in-the-cotton southerners, but then somebody manages to say something like this.
Texas’ grid operator declared a Level 1 Energy Emergency Tuesday afternoon as record heat across the state led to the second consecutive day of record power use.
...
“We are requesting that consumers and businesses reduce their electricity use during peak electricity hours from 3 to 7 p.m. today, particularly between 4 and 5 p.m. when we expect to hit another peak demand record,” said Kent Saathoff, ERCOT’s vice president of system planning and operations. “We do not know at this time if additional emergency steps will be needed.”
...

“NO!” shouted ‘Ed C.’ “What part of that do you not understand? I will now go cut my thermostat down and run my dryer just because you told me not too. Fix the PROBLEM liberal democrats! Get off your rear and do something about it!”

We aren't all like that, really. But I'm afraid some of us are like that. I don't really want the rest of the world bombing us back to the stone age but I can understand the temptation, too.

13 comments:

ScruffyDan said...

Reminds me of a Trudeau are joke: An Albertan farmer surveys his wheat crop that was just devastated by a massive hail storm. Look up at the sky, shakes his fist and yells "damn you Liberals!!!"

Of course that was a joke...

guthrie said...

Maybe you need to build houses which work with the local temperature conditions rather than requiring electric cooling in summer?

Michael Tobis said...

They used to build with high ceilings in Texas, but then A/C came in and now they build with low ceilings. Both quite rational. Most of the infrastructure is post-A/C.

Now that it is 107 F every day this week I am not eager to go back to ceiling fans anyway. It takes less energy to cool a house in Texas summer than to warm on in Canadian or Wisconsin winter so I consider myself ahead on the deal anyway.

But I'm not going to run my dryer just for the sheer cussedness of it.

Steve Bloom said...

Er, "back"? :)

Steve Bloom said...

Just to add that Ed C. is quite perceptive about who's more likely to solve the problem.

Robert Grumbine said...

IF many Texans follow EdC, the world will have no need for bombing. The infrastructure implosion will take care of Texas without any outside interference.

Somnolent Aphid said...

I think it takes a lot of faith to think like Ed C.

James Annan said...

Just for giggles:

TEPCO (owner of Fukushima power plant inter alia) serves 44 million including the whole Greater Tokyo area. Current power capacity 50MW, demand is just under 40.

Texas has a population of 25m. That linked article talks of a power demand of about 68MW, about three times as much per head as the Japanese are currently using...

I realise it's hotter over there right now - summer here too, but a fairly mild one so far. The Texas figure is more than twice as much as the Japanese used in a heatwave last year.

Oale said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Oale said...

I guess the heat wave is pretty severe.

Oale said...

Sorry, another one:
Q: Why are Texans so different from the rest of the Americans?
A: As the rest of the Americans go to party to warm things up the Texans go parties to chill out.

Pangolin said...

Rooftop solar panels cool the house by five percent without being connected. Imagine what a benefit all those Texans could get if they were truly independent and produced the majority of their own power on their own roofs.

C'mon Texans; quit being slaves to the power company and produce your own.

Pangolin said...

I go to Google Maps, zoom into Houston and the roofs are...... black. Zoom over to Dallas and the roofs are all black there too except for a few commercial buildings.

That's going to really hurt them when the transformers finally overload after a month of 100º+ weather and start popping.

Whitewash your roofs Texas.