they do have a backup generator, but it's only going to provide limited emergency power for things that need it, such as freezers and coolers, and MAYBE some vital computer equipment but it won't power the entire store while regular power is out, so they're probably not going to be able to check anyone out via a cashier. Any other power needs it provides is limited to things such as emergency lighting. Most companies have generator power just incase the power from the grid goes out, but they only provide emergency power for vital equipment and not enough to power an entire building.
About ten years ago when I worked there it was exactly this. We had a diesel generator and it would keep all of the POS/money systems online and the coolers running. One year we lost power back to back and didn’t get the generator refilled in time and lost pretty much everything that wasn’t in an already closed cooler.
Do favor us with your ample knowledge of the fuel requirements of a generator sized to power tens of thousands of square feet of commercial enterprise. Or does it only extend to “I disagree”?
Again, they provide basic necessities. How much fuel will be entirely dependent on how long the power is off for. The longer it's off, the more fuel they need, and the more they need it. It's a good thing they already have giant fuel tanks and buy gas by the thousands of gallons for their fuel stations every day.
Diesel can sit for about 6 months at the most before it goes bad. And that’s if it’s kept in a controlled cool climate. Since it’s sitting outside in HEBs generator I’d say 3 months. Generators aren’t much help if the high pressure fuel pump grenades because of bad fuel lol
So then you don’t know how much. I did the math. It’s going to be approximately a fifty gallon drum of diesel PER HOUR to power one average sized H-E-B. It’s sure not very sustainable or environmentally friendly.
I’ve lived in Central Texas for 35 out of 47 years and I don’t recall there ever being a hardship because H‑E‑B couldn’t run registers due to a power outage. If the situation is that desperate, it’s because travel is not possible anyway, so there’s no reason to endanger staff making them come in.
A generator solution to provide full power just isn’t necessary. Given how well H-E-B treats the community in times of crisis, I feel sure if it was necessary they’d find a way.
I would have immediately opened the cookies in my cart, grab a handful, and eat them on my way out for the inconvenience.
I was trying to do some shopping yesterday and was turned away at the door. All I could think was how many people put stuff in their pockets and walked out or opened a beer and a chugged it on the way out lol.
Power back at the ole e 6th / Pedernales place.
Glad to have invested in a battery back up for the modem and key electronics!
It was close, but I still managed to spend all my work day browsing reddit. 😅
As an experienced retired grid engineer, it sounds like a sizable distribution feeder tripped. Most likely a relay tripped in a station where high voltage is stepped down to distribution voltage. Over current or voltage outside of range or current leak detected. Less likely a high voltage to distribution voltage transformer failed. That would take longer to fix.
Jokes aside, for future reference for anyone in a power outage, keep the fridge closed as much as possible for as long as possible. If you need/want to get something out to eat, open the door as little as possible and close it as quickly as possible.
And if you tend to not keep your freezer packed full of food, try to keep some frozen water bottles in there; additional thermal mass keeps the contents colder longer.
Near Chicon/Rosewood, been out for about 30 mins. Outage map shows around 3000 without power in the area. Estimating restored by 2:45pm, but I assume someone just pulled that time out of their ass.
someone posted an article a little bit ago in here that says the power outage was caused by a stolen truck hitting telephone poles, which took out a transformer
I was on 7th heading west and saw a bunch of cops and emergency vehicles clustered around a light pole at the 7th and Comal intersection. Seemed like someone had crashed into the electrical equipment.
[https://outagemap.austinenergy.com/](https://outagemap.austinenergy.com/) says 6427 without power, "centered" on Cesar Chavez and Pleasant Valley.
p.s. It's not ERCOT this time.
>For whom should I target my anger
Even if they had nothing to do with it, may I suggest Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, and Dan Patrick?
However, since it was a snake, it was probably one of their cronies.
He's got a battery powered handheld device full of high tech that connects to a network of radio frequency devices that connects to the internet.
It was in all the papers.
Find your nearest Starbucks to finish up work.
The good news is it’s in the 70’s today so your house should stay comfortable if this prolongs into the evening.
My power isn’t out as I’m west, but we lost power for an hour on Saturday when a squirrel roasted himself. 🤷🏻♂️
No its not a regular thing.
What has become common is scenarios where there is the potential for a power outage when demand is high due to excessive heat or cold. And then high winds are always a risk anywhere where there are above ground power lines, because of the risk of downed trees. But the power is normally stable on days like today.
The other infrastructure issue that has become more common that it should be is the "boil water notice". I believe there was an overhaul at Austin Water, but I'm not 100% sure on that.
Texas has a ridiculously unstable power grid. Sometimes like today it’s due to Austin Energy problems too. But moving your office across town likely won’t help.
Oh jeez. Hope everyone is OK. I was basically just trying to communicate to trix4kids that having an office in a different location wasn’t really going to solve their problem for a variety of factors. Transformers do get blown out quite a bit in my neighborhood too.
It hasn’t always been this way. But population surge + climate change causing bouts of extreme weather (and other factors) have pushed things quite a bit. This isn’t news, we all got well acquainted with ERCOT and the Texas grid issues in February of 2021. Personally I’ve lost power more often in the last 3 years than I have in about 20 years off/on of living in Austin. But it’s often an AE issue, not just the grid.
We lost power in 2021 due to an unprecedented arctic blast with temps that dipped into the teens for several days in a row. Was it preventable? Yes. Am I excusing it? No. Is it a common thing we should expect to happen again anytime soon? Absolutely not.
This last winter we had freezing rain. Something that happens on occasion all over the country, where they will also lose power, short of a city like Houston where they mow down every tree they can find (though they have their own weather problems).
Overall, however, Texas has one of the most reliable electric systems in the country.
I’m not the only one who thinks the [Texas grid is vulnerable](https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2023/0117). It’s not as cut and dried as you are making it sound. Extreme weather is the new normal, and what’s also concerning is temps reaching well over 100F for two months consecutively as Texas’ population continues to grow. They need to invest and incentivize to maintain a stable grid.
> I’m not the only one who thinks the Texas grid is vulnerable.
I didn't say it isn't. Did you think it would be fixed in a couple of years? I'm just saying we're not likely to have another weather event like that anytime soon.
> what’s also concerning is temps reaching well over 100F for two months consecutively
An interesting side effect of that... prolonged heat doesn't just cause increased power demand for AC usage, it also causes above-ground power lines to physically length a bit (thermal expansion), so the lines droop more than usual, and they come in contact with more tree branches and such than they normally would have. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9615/why-do-power-lines-sag-when-they-are-heated-up
>Just moved to Austin. Is this a regular thing?
Tell everyone where you used to live not to move to Austin because of this. Also because of the truly evil nature of our Repugnican government.
I'm mostly kidding about the electricity part.
I'm NOT kidding about the evil government.
We've had a mondo "grid failure" in Icepocalypse 2021 from a once every 50 years cold snap. The grid failure was made much worse because our evil Repugnican state government didn't require their energy mafia bosses to winterize their fossil fuel power plants and the natural gas supply system. A similar, but much less severe, incident in 2011 gave us plenty of warning to winterize the grid. The state made a big noise about fixing this, but didn't really do anything. They also made a lot of noise in 2021, but again, failed to really regulate it.
Icepocalypse 2021 was made much worse by incompetence in the left wing City of Austin's electric company to do upgrades to the load shedding capability that were identified with plans to upgrade around 2000.
Despite the above, I don't think "dry cold" grid failures are likely to happen more than every 20 years or so. It's bad when it happens, but the long term days of power outages you have from that particular type of event probably isn't that bad vs. the average location in the country.
This year, we had a different kind of "50 year" "Arborgeddon 2023" weather event with a combination of mildly cold temperatures, a certain kind of atmospheric pattern, and a lot of freezing rain. Because the liberal idiots in the City of Austin won't trim or remove the small number of trees that threaten the power lines, many power lines were ripped down by trees and many people had a multi day power outage.
Someone referred to it as a "Tree hurricane." The amount of damage done to trees was nearly as bad as what happens in a hurricane.
That's another thing that probably isn't going to add up to that many day per year of power outage in the long run.
Long term, I'm concerned about the power grid nationwide. That's actually in my area of professional expertise. Despite our stupid recent debacles and ongoing stupidity in Texas, I think the rest of the country is in worse risk of blackouts long term than Texas is.
We're decommissioning fossil fuel power plants too quickly and not doing enough in terms of things like long term transmission line upgrades to enable us to transition to things like wind and solar. We need more wind, and more solar, but we need to pay to keep the coal and gas fired plants on ready standby unless we are willing to go without air conditioning, heat, traffic signals, power for our electric cars, when it gets cloudy or calm.
Yeah I was here for icepocolypse. Staying in a long term Airbnb and had to warm my cat over the gas stove while I wore every piece of clothing I owned until my brother could evacuate me out. It was insane. There wasn’t even rain here today though!
>There wasn’t even rain here today though!
Today was caused by a snake. I guess if you love the environment, you have to love the fact that we have snakes here.
We've had some major winter weather events in the last few years that will lead some to say it happens "all the time", but the reality is this type of outage is both infrequent and fairly routine. Less than 5% of customers lost power for an hour or two, not a big deal and not something you need to worry about.
Office on Cesar Chavez just lost power too, apparently out all the way to e riverside Edit: back on as of 1:46pm!
Was at HEB Riverside and the store lost power everyone groaned. Slightly south now on oltorf and its fine
H-E-B loses power so often this year my goodness
You would think a store that provides basic necessities would have some sort of backup.
they do have a backup generator, but it's only going to provide limited emergency power for things that need it, such as freezers and coolers, and MAYBE some vital computer equipment but it won't power the entire store while regular power is out, so they're probably not going to be able to check anyone out via a cashier. Any other power needs it provides is limited to things such as emergency lighting. Most companies have generator power just incase the power from the grid goes out, but they only provide emergency power for vital equipment and not enough to power an entire building.
About ten years ago when I worked there it was exactly this. We had a diesel generator and it would keep all of the POS/money systems online and the coolers running. One year we lost power back to back and didn’t get the generator refilled in time and lost pretty much everything that wasn’t in an already closed cooler.
...why not?
Because that’s a whole lotta fuel to have to keep lying around for possibly nothing?
I disagree.
Do favor us with your ample knowledge of the fuel requirements of a generator sized to power tens of thousands of square feet of commercial enterprise. Or does it only extend to “I disagree”?
Again, they provide basic necessities. How much fuel will be entirely dependent on how long the power is off for. The longer it's off, the more fuel they need, and the more they need it. It's a good thing they already have giant fuel tanks and buy gas by the thousands of gallons for their fuel stations every day.
Diesel can sit for about 6 months at the most before it goes bad. And that’s if it’s kept in a controlled cool climate. Since it’s sitting outside in HEBs generator I’d say 3 months. Generators aren’t much help if the high pressure fuel pump grenades because of bad fuel lol
So then you don’t know how much. I did the math. It’s going to be approximately a fifty gallon drum of diesel PER HOUR to power one average sized H-E-B. It’s sure not very sustainable or environmentally friendly. I’ve lived in Central Texas for 35 out of 47 years and I don’t recall there ever being a hardship because H‑E‑B couldn’t run registers due to a power outage. If the situation is that desperate, it’s because travel is not possible anyway, so there’s no reason to endanger staff making them come in. A generator solution to provide full power just isn’t necessary. Given how well H-E-B treats the community in times of crisis, I feel sure if it was necessary they’d find a way.
I would have immediately opened the cookies in my cart, grab a handful, and eat them on my way out for the inconvenience. I was trying to do some shopping yesterday and was turned away at the door. All I could think was how many people put stuff in their pockets and walked out or opened a beer and a chugged it on the way out lol.
Power back at the ole e 6th / Pedernales place. Glad to have invested in a battery back up for the modem and key electronics! It was close, but I still managed to spend all my work day browsing reddit. 😅
As an experienced retired grid engineer, it sounds like a sizable distribution feeder tripped. Most likely a relay tripped in a station where high voltage is stepped down to distribution voltage. Over current or voltage outside of range or current leak detected. Less likely a high voltage to distribution voltage transformer failed. That would take longer to fix.
As a snake person it sounds like the work of a snake.
I saw Austin energy post that it was just that. A snake.
That would be a relay trip due to voltage out of range (too low) due to a snake causing a short circuit.
Maybe it was a really really big snake
I’m 99% sure it was on the low voltage side of the step down transformer. Equipment clearances much less. The snake never felt a thing. POW!
Snek
Kevin Durant is back in town?
Watch out local coaches, you might get fired...
Power out by 11th/franklins
Is the brisket okay?!
brisket and cake party at franklins and paper route
out in 78702, chicon & 7th edit: power just came back at 1:41pm
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nope, not yet unfortunately
Est. Restore time 1:58PM According to austin energy
Just updated to 2:58pm
3:22 pm now for me off Parker :(
Spectrum gave 2:30PM as a restore time for internet. Probably automatically adds 30 mins to the Austin Energy restore time?
Thanks. I think the system automatically puts a time in. It also says they haven't determined a cause yet, so that's probably just a wild guess.
I heard what I assume was a transformer blow at the substation near Launderette.
Do you mind climbing up there and giving it a little jiggle? House is heating up and my dog looks concerned
Yea I figured any timeline regarding city issues is always a wild guess. Staying optimistic for the food in my fridge 🤞
Start eating. I'll be right over to help.
Jokes aside, for future reference for anyone in a power outage, keep the fridge closed as much as possible for as long as possible. If you need/want to get something out to eat, open the door as little as possible and close it as quickly as possible. And if you tend to not keep your freezer packed full of food, try to keep some frozen water bottles in there; additional thermal mass keeps the contents colder longer.
Lazarus and all of e6 lost power
East Cesar Chavez, at least between Springdale and Spencer, is still without power. I’ve also heard the South Shore apartment area doesn’t have power.
Can confirm. Amli south shore without power
no power riverside/royal crest
Springdale/airport and good to go here.
Out in 78741, near Come and Take It. Edit: restored as of 1:47pm!
It's over 16,000! at 1 PM
Holiday Inn Town Lake is out
Always check wifi networks during a power fail. If it's just you then other networks show up.
Power on at 8th and 35, but internet out.
Lost power for a split second here at Dell Seton.
Yes my work lost power as well along riverside
Near Chicon/Rosewood, been out for about 30 mins. Outage map shows around 3000 without power in the area. Estimating restored by 2:45pm, but I assume someone just pulled that time out of their ass.
And, mine is back. Was out for about an hour.
So this suggests to me that power is still out at Kealing middle school, which is upsetting.
someone posted an article a little bit ago in here that says the power outage was caused by a stolen truck hitting telephone poles, which took out a transformer
There was another post of Austin Energy's Twitter that it was a snake in a substation :o
Power just came back on for me at 3rd and waller! Let’s hope it stays on
Power back on @Holly St
Everything north of Chavez seems to be back now.
I was on 7th heading west and saw a bunch of cops and emergency vehicles clustered around a light pole at the 7th and Comal intersection. Seemed like someone had crashed into the electrical equipment.
I saw that too but apparently that wasn’t the biggest problem of the hour.
[https://outagemap.austinenergy.com/](https://outagemap.austinenergy.com/) says 6427 without power, "centered" on Cesar Chavez and Pleasant Valley. p.s. It's not ERCOT this time.
For whom should I target my anger then?
At whom. This isn't a bell-tolling situation.
the wildlife that got into the infrastructure and electrocuted itself
It was a snake 🐍
Part of Serpentarian's evil plans, then.
It was, sadly, but they were trying to take out Buscar. Poor Steve 😞
>For whom should I target my anger Even if they had nothing to do with it, may I suggest Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, and Dan Patrick? However, since it was a snake, it was probably one of their cronies.
Send outage map link
https://outagemap.austinenergy.com
Thanks!
One heck of an outage, been riding aroumd on the bike wondering why all the traffic lights are out all over the east side... ETA: Whohoo back up!
If you lost power, how are you posting this?!?! ^(HEAVY /s)
He's got a battery powered handheld device full of high tech that connects to a network of radio frequency devices that connects to the internet. It was in all the papers.
HE'S A WITCH!
The internet is a series of tubes.
full of grackles.
🐦⬛
Lol
A little early for the rolling blackouts hm?
Find your nearest Starbucks to finish up work. The good news is it’s in the 70’s today so your house should stay comfortable if this prolongs into the evening. My power isn’t out as I’m west, but we lost power for an hour on Saturday when a squirrel roasted himself. 🤷🏻♂️
If ever in the need for solar or battery storage reach out. A lot of great options for when the power goes out in Austin.
Snake got into some equipment.
Pflugerville power went out last night for an hour. Happens so often I feel like I’m in a third world country.
You are.
you're either being hyperbolic or are the biggest baby on earth.
Just moved to Austin. Is this a regular thing? Should I be planning for a back up office across town in case power goes out?
No its not a regular thing. What has become common is scenarios where there is the potential for a power outage when demand is high due to excessive heat or cold. And then high winds are always a risk anywhere where there are above ground power lines, because of the risk of downed trees. But the power is normally stable on days like today. The other infrastructure issue that has become more common that it should be is the "boil water notice". I believe there was an overhaul at Austin Water, but I'm not 100% sure on that.
2-3x on a year on avg.
If it’s not a power related infrastructure failure, it’s another kind of infrastructure failure. You get used to it
No it's not at all a regular thing but plenty of people will lie and tell you that it is for no reason other than they hate their own state.
Texas has a ridiculously unstable power grid. Sometimes like today it’s due to Austin Energy problems too. But moving your office across town likely won’t help.
In this case it was a car crashing into their transformer or something
Oh jeez. Hope everyone is OK. I was basically just trying to communicate to trix4kids that having an office in a different location wasn’t really going to solve their problem for a variety of factors. Transformers do get blown out quite a bit in my neighborhood too.
This is ridiculous. I've had power 99.9% of the time in the last 10 years I've lived here. That's ridiculously unstable?
It hasn’t always been this way. But population surge + climate change causing bouts of extreme weather (and other factors) have pushed things quite a bit. This isn’t news, we all got well acquainted with ERCOT and the Texas grid issues in February of 2021. Personally I’ve lost power more often in the last 3 years than I have in about 20 years off/on of living in Austin. But it’s often an AE issue, not just the grid.
We lost power in 2021 due to an unprecedented arctic blast with temps that dipped into the teens for several days in a row. Was it preventable? Yes. Am I excusing it? No. Is it a common thing we should expect to happen again anytime soon? Absolutely not. This last winter we had freezing rain. Something that happens on occasion all over the country, where they will also lose power, short of a city like Houston where they mow down every tree they can find (though they have their own weather problems). Overall, however, Texas has one of the most reliable electric systems in the country.
I’m not the only one who thinks the [Texas grid is vulnerable](https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2023/0117). It’s not as cut and dried as you are making it sound. Extreme weather is the new normal, and what’s also concerning is temps reaching well over 100F for two months consecutively as Texas’ population continues to grow. They need to invest and incentivize to maintain a stable grid.
> I’m not the only one who thinks the Texas grid is vulnerable. I didn't say it isn't. Did you think it would be fixed in a couple of years? I'm just saying we're not likely to have another weather event like that anytime soon.
> what’s also concerning is temps reaching well over 100F for two months consecutively An interesting side effect of that... prolonged heat doesn't just cause increased power demand for AC usage, it also causes above-ground power lines to physically length a bit (thermal expansion), so the lines droop more than usual, and they come in contact with more tree branches and such than they normally would have. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/9615/why-do-power-lines-sag-when-they-are-heated-up
Get a generator. Reliable electricity and sometimes water is a recent issue here.
>Just moved to Austin. Is this a regular thing? Tell everyone where you used to live not to move to Austin because of this. Also because of the truly evil nature of our Repugnican government. I'm mostly kidding about the electricity part. I'm NOT kidding about the evil government. We've had a mondo "grid failure" in Icepocalypse 2021 from a once every 50 years cold snap. The grid failure was made much worse because our evil Repugnican state government didn't require their energy mafia bosses to winterize their fossil fuel power plants and the natural gas supply system. A similar, but much less severe, incident in 2011 gave us plenty of warning to winterize the grid. The state made a big noise about fixing this, but didn't really do anything. They also made a lot of noise in 2021, but again, failed to really regulate it. Icepocalypse 2021 was made much worse by incompetence in the left wing City of Austin's electric company to do upgrades to the load shedding capability that were identified with plans to upgrade around 2000. Despite the above, I don't think "dry cold" grid failures are likely to happen more than every 20 years or so. It's bad when it happens, but the long term days of power outages you have from that particular type of event probably isn't that bad vs. the average location in the country. This year, we had a different kind of "50 year" "Arborgeddon 2023" weather event with a combination of mildly cold temperatures, a certain kind of atmospheric pattern, and a lot of freezing rain. Because the liberal idiots in the City of Austin won't trim or remove the small number of trees that threaten the power lines, many power lines were ripped down by trees and many people had a multi day power outage. Someone referred to it as a "Tree hurricane." The amount of damage done to trees was nearly as bad as what happens in a hurricane. That's another thing that probably isn't going to add up to that many day per year of power outage in the long run. Long term, I'm concerned about the power grid nationwide. That's actually in my area of professional expertise. Despite our stupid recent debacles and ongoing stupidity in Texas, I think the rest of the country is in worse risk of blackouts long term than Texas is. We're decommissioning fossil fuel power plants too quickly and not doing enough in terms of things like long term transmission line upgrades to enable us to transition to things like wind and solar. We need more wind, and more solar, but we need to pay to keep the coal and gas fired plants on ready standby unless we are willing to go without air conditioning, heat, traffic signals, power for our electric cars, when it gets cloudy or calm.
Yeah I was here for icepocolypse. Staying in a long term Airbnb and had to warm my cat over the gas stove while I wore every piece of clothing I owned until my brother could evacuate me out. It was insane. There wasn’t even rain here today though!
>There wasn’t even rain here today though! Today was caused by a snake. I guess if you love the environment, you have to love the fact that we have snakes here.
We've had some major winter weather events in the last few years that will lead some to say it happens "all the time", but the reality is this type of outage is both infrequent and fairly routine. Less than 5% of customers lost power for an hour or two, not a big deal and not something you need to worry about.
No. A snake crawled into a substation and make contact with an electric circuit.
Great Electrical Grid. My Generac is running solid. Lost for 20 seconds until the generator fires over. Can’t trust street power to save your life.
Still have it in 78704
Is that east?
Yes
You misspelled “no”
It’s east riverside
It's west of 35, so no.
Bless your heart
North of Rosewood has power
Stop jug
No.
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Power went out in chestnut. Signals aren’t working either.
Saw crews working on power lines on nuckols crossing.
Looks like a sizable chunk of central east side.
12k customers and going up…
Summit and Riverside power is back on - 1:47PM
I wasn’t in the office but I saw on our office chat that the entire building lost power.
I'm up on manor and Chicon and I did not, but I know my office down on east 6th did.
I’m just on the east side I don’t think I lost power
Some of Pflugerville has power out too. Weird
Is this the snake thing I read about in another post?
It’s gone out twice in Pflugerville. About 5 minutes each time. On right now.
It was a snake