Thunderstorms, some heavy during the morning hours, then skies turning partly cloudy during the afternoon. High around 85F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%. 1 to 2 inches of rain expected..
A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 68F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.
Updated: September 22, 2023 @ 4:47 am
It’s unnerving, to say the least, when the power company cuts you off. The fact that it had to do so exposes a real problem.
Hundreds of homes in the Manhattan area had to go without electrical power for an hour or so at a pop Monday and Tuesday. That’s not any sort of tragedy; the fact that the blackouts were controlled kept the problem from spiraling out of control. Had the entire system come down, people could have frozen to death.
The issue is that it was tremendously cold, and that the cold weather extended across a large swath of the country. That put a strain on the electricity grid. Although most homes here are heated by natural gas, the strain occurred because other areas in the country use electricity for heat, and because natural gas is used to fire some electricity power plants. Some plants were shuttered temporarily because of the conditions.
These are very unusual circumstances, and the fact that the system worked well enough to prevent disaster is encouraging. It doesn’t hit 10-below very often.
On the other hand, we are increasingly reliant on electricity to do much of anything, and so the system needs to learn from this episode to assure a consistent supply.
It’s tempting to try to score political points on one side or another of this issue: More coal! Drill! It’s climate change! It’s Biden’s fault! It’s Trump’s fault! You can see all of this on Facebook, if you’d like. You can also beat your head against a brick wall for entertainment, if you’re inclined.
We would urge caution here. It’s really an engineering problem: How to improve the availability of power at moments of strain like this?
What happens in Texas affects those of us in Kansas. What happens here affects folks there. And so on.
What makes rational sense is to pursue a variety of ways of generating power, of using power more efficiently, of conserving power, and of optimizing the way that power moves around throughout the grid.
How exactly to do those things? We don’t know. We just know there’s a problem to address.
Fortunately, we don’t have a crisis. We have a good system already.
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