Texas' Biggest Power Supplier Wants to Blame the EPA for Future Blackouts
On February 2, 2011, the lights in the operating rooms of Dallas' chief trauma center flickered briefly as diesel generators began to drone. Elective surgeries — even emergency transfers from other hospitals — were halted until further notice. All nonessential operations went dark. The walk-in clinics, even certain hallways, were cut off as Parkland Memorial Hospital braced for the worst. This was triage by electricity. Texas was in the teeth of a hard freeze as arctic winds swept down through the Rockies and dropped temperatures into the teens. Parkland was running a skeleton crew, its doctors and nurses fighting a losing battle against icy streets.
Meanwhile, the grid operator whose job is to keep electricity flowing through three-quarters of the state was about to order the most sweeping rolling blackouts the state had ever seen and plunge Dallas into darkness. Despite assurances from power line company Oncor that Parkland wouldn't lose electricity, the hospital took no chances. "Our understanding was that it wouldn't affect any hospitals," Parkland trauma program and disaster management director Jorie Klein said. "We have been reassured by them that that will be taken into consideration."
Even so, the rolling blackouts found a way into Parkland's aging electrical systems. With the generators up and running, managers wouldn't realize until later that parts of the hospital had, in fact, lost power.
In the aftermath, as furious and bewildered lawmakers demanded answers — "It is unacceptable to have a system that is unprepared," scolded state Senator Kirk Watson — grid officials from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) explained that the improbable had in fact occurred: One-third of the state's power plants were offline at the height of the crisis. Industry bigwigs such as the chief executive of Dallas-based Luminant, the biggest non-regulated generator of electricity in Texas, testified that frozen instrumentation had caused four of its huge coal-fired units to fail. To prevent the contagion of uncontrolled blackouts from spreading, its sister subsidiary, power transmission company Oncor, cut power to some 1.3 million North Texas customers.
More at http://www.dallasobserver.com/2012-03-08/news/blowing-smoke-luminant-says-epa-rules-could-turn-out-the-lights-in-dallas-don-t-believe-it/
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It's never the fault of the deregulated market. It's always regulation that makes the market unstable and more expensive. That's their mantra and they're sticking to it.
No matter that they've known they were in non-compliance with federal regulation for decades.
The hospital was right not to take any chances. If I were a critical needs electric client in Texas, I would be sure there were back up systems like generators. This deregulated electric industry in Texas is wild, wild, west. Each person for themselves!
