Spot prices for wholesale power (normally below $50 per megawatt hour depending on location) topped $400 to $700 per MWh in New England this afternoon, while Texas could top $1000/MWh on Monday morning. Early Sunday morning outside of Washington DC prices topped $1800/MWh near data centers. (Some places have caps.) In the northeast, most of this was due to natural gas bottle necks and to some extent, cloudy conditions limiting solar output. Meanwhile, prices in Illinois went negative due to high wind power production and bottlenecks on transmission to the northeast.
I have complaints. Although I’ll keep them on the mild grumble side. (I live in Lexington.) I liked the idea of a bunch of snow. We got a couple inches of snow, followed by freezing rain, and warmed up to around freezing, which meant that clearing the driveway was hard– heavy slushy stuff with some crunchy snow mixed in. And now the temps have dropped again, so it’s probably all ice out there.
And no one has plowed in front of my house yet, as far as I know, so I don’t think I’m going to work today. (I’m both supposed to and not worried about it– if Louisville got hit as hard, there will be nothing much to do at work. Grocery store.)
Many utilities have websites and/or apps. Which, unlike phone lines, do not get jammed up when lots of people use them. You can probably report your outage that way very quickly instead of listening to busy signals or interminable hold music.
It helps to have set up your online account and installed the app before the problem occurs.
Many modern (post 2015-ish) power meters are able to self-report their own outage. Folks living in older construction probably don’t have that.
My shovel broke. I have another snow shovel, but I’ll have to do a pass with a metal spade shovel first to break up the crust on top. I have 48 hours from the end of the storm to do the sidewalk. I’ll sprinkle some salt around and do some more shoveling this evening and tomorrow morning.
We ended up getting about 5 inches here (east-central Indiana). The snow plows came by my house a couple of times yesterday, and I live on a small street which is usually not a high plowing priority. Being an older gentleman, I pay for a service to shovel my drive and walkway. They showed up at about 4:00 pm yesterday, before the snow had quite stopped, but as it was dying down. I was a bit surprised that they were able to get here so soon, but grateful for it. So I am shoveled out.
Not that I’m going anywhere. We are officially work from home today. Never lost power, and we’re keeping the faucets dripping to avoid freezing pipes.
Could have been much worse. My sympathies to those folk who are further south, in the areas that are having much greater difficulties.
All done! I think an old lady shoveling snow looks sympathetic.
We had done one full pass of the driveway and front walk (which has 2 flights of steps, and needs to be kept very clean to be safe) yesterday, and my husband did half the driveway last evening. I was out this morning doing the front walk, and a number of private snowplows were operating in the area. I walked towards the second one I saw, and he rolled down his window and asked if I’d like him to do my berm. I said, “yes, please! how much do you want?” He just smiled, rolled up his window, and cleared my neighbor’s driveway as I continued working on the front walk. Then he came back, and not only did the berm, but most of the rest of the driveway as well. I thanked him, and asked him again how much he wanted for the job. He said it was gratis. So I gave him what I had in my pocket ($30) and felt really cheap, but he seemed happy, and I was delighted. We could have done the driveway pretty easily in an hour or two, but the berm would have been another hour or two of backbreaking labor. (I use a regular earth shovel for that, not a snow shovel, so as to pace myself.)
Anyway, I finished shoveling the walk, took out my big broom and brushed off the rest of the snow from the walk, did most of the parts of the driveway he didn’t get to (easy) and went inside to warm up. I’ll want to widen the driveway on one side, and widen the break in the berm on the other (and probably clean up a new, smaller, berm from later municipal plowing, and probably another from the sidewalk plow.) But right now, we can get out. It’s not snowing, and they are only forecasting another couple of inches this evening.
I think we got more than a foot, but less than 18 inches. All light powdery stuff.
I was perversely hoping for a repeat of the disaster Lexington experienced after a snowstorm in the early '90s, when the city was caught unprepared and complaints poured in about unplowed roads. The mayor at the time memorably reassured citizens “Time is on our side” and that it was worse in Louisville.
The current mayor, Gorton, announced “all hands are on deck” for this storm, so maybe they actually de-iced some streets.
Mine broke this morning as well. Next time I’ll invest in a better one. I’m also using a metal spade, which works better for breaking the crust. It also keeps me from trying to shovel too much at once. Digging out the car will be the biggest pain in the butt; there’s no reason to start on that until I see where the snow pushed aside by the plows end up.
They apparently just changed my meter to one that does. I don’t know whether it works yet; this storm didn’t take out power here.
My neighbor just showed up with his bucket loader and moved a whole bunch of snow. I’ll only need to shovel a foot or so right next to the steps, and the front porch enough that I can get out that door and down those steps if I want to (this is an old farmhouse and works in that fashion, usual entry/exit is at the back.)
I haven’t put my boots on and gone out to measure last night’s snow yet. I suspect we topped out at under a foot.
Middle Tennessee… It’s basically ice on top of the grass (I work from home and haven’t gone out). The dog doesn’t enjoy outside time as much. I guess sniffing ice isn’t as interesting as grass.
Our power meter, water meter, and gas meter have all been updated recently. The gas meter gets replaced on a regular schedule, and has been replaced a few times since we bought the house.
I believe that all my meters can now “phone home” to some degree, although some might need proximity (driving a truck down the street.) i bet the power meter tells its source when it’s not functioning, or at least, stops shaking hands in a way the power company recognizes as meaning it’s off line.
Yeah. My supposition is the power company periodically pings every meter and when one doesn’t answer that means it might be defective or the power is out. When several in a row up and down a street all don’t answer, that’s evidence of a blackout.
Since they know the topology of their wiring, it’s pretty easy for a computer to assemble a map of live and dead areas and where supply lines penetrate from the live zone into a dead zone. That’s where the failure(s) are.
Even my dinky Co-op has electronic monitoring. Now.
We used to read our own meter every month. Write it on a post card and mail it to them. By the 6th of the month. They would estimate otherwise. I found them to be lacking in their math skills. So I read and mailed.
They still recommend calling or going on the APP for outages.
My inside/outside cat is too much of a pussy to go out when it’s this cold. Now he’s just going insane running around the house. Like walking to the bathroom wasn’t already a challenge.
About 15 inches here in my part of NY’s Hudson Valley. Friends a little more removed from the river reported more like 17-20. I took care of the shoveling by about noon today and all is well.