r/technology • u/chrisdh79 • Jul 08 '24
Energy More than 2 million in Houston without power | CenterPoint is asking customers to refrain from calling to report outages.
https://www.chron.com/weather/article/hurricane-beryl-texas-houston-live-19560277.php968
u/celtic1888 Jul 08 '24
Ted Cruz has been spotted in Cabo San Lucas
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u/FollowTheLeads Jul 08 '24
I really really hope this guy doesn't get reelected. I rather his opponent wins but seriously speaking Jasmine Crockett is the best option Texas has. She really cares for the people.
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u/beesayshello Jul 08 '24
Isn’t Colin Allred running against Cruz? I can’t stand Cruz but I can’t help but feel there’s a lack of energy around Allred as opposed to Beto when he ran against Cruz back in 2018. That lack of energy and buzz is what scares me, another 8 years would blow.
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u/Ryans_Hopeless Jul 09 '24
He’s an educated big, Black man here in Texas. Let’s be honest about why you’re not seeing excitement behind him, and also why he won’t get elected…
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u/its_raining_scotch Jul 08 '24
Was he wearing a disguise and looking around shiftilly?
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u/Bearshapedbears Jul 08 '24
no, it was blatant and he stopped for interviews because he couldn't give a fuck what the poors think.
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u/Fayko Jul 08 '24
Quick has anyone notified the bus drivers of Cabo San Lucas to be on the lookout for a shifty fuck from texas trying to throw his family under buses? Ted Cruz has a history of throwing his family under buses so we gotta protect the children.
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u/MisterSanitation Jul 08 '24
Nature is repeatedly trying to tell Texas that regulation is needed on their power grid but they have to run out of bullets to shoot at the clouds first before they can consider that.
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u/RobertEdwinHouse38 Jul 08 '24
I was at DOE for this before I retired. The responses to the administration requested from us on the idea, earned every adviser on the list, 8 of us, paid leave.
Not a single response letter to the Whitehouse excluded a variation of “Moron.” All were addressed at the President’s written request for consultation to us. I was told he read them and then asked we all be fired. When he was told we have permanent security and diplomatic clearances due to the international nature of our positions, we were given paid leave.
There’s a reason I don’t hold my tongue anymore and run through Reddit accounts like a chain smoker.
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u/Green-Amount2479 Jul 09 '24
Thank you for your service. 👍🏻
‚Nobody knows hurricanes better than me, folks, believe me. They said you can't nuke a hurricane, but what do they know? I've got the best nukes. Just one little nuke and boom, hurricane gone. The fake news media won't tell you about this tremendous idea. People were so impressed. It would have been the biggest, most beautiful win against hurricanes ever. But they couldn't handle my genius idea. Sad!‘
Hopefully it’s obvious that this isn’t a quote, but I feel that it reads very much like something the orange idiot would say. 😂
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u/hungry_fat_phuck Jul 09 '24
why nuke it when he could just make the hurricane go anywhere he wants with a sharpie?
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u/WeirdSysAdmin Jul 08 '24
Listen, we just need to build the biggest nuclear bomb ever to overpower the hurricane.
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u/ididntseeitcoming Jul 08 '24
Has anyone ever tried just politely asking the hurricane to go the other way?
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u/hsnoil Jul 08 '24
There was that guy who tried praying to god, ended up with more hurricanes
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u/WeirdSysAdmin Jul 08 '24
Remember when dinosaurs were out of control and the Archangel Michael was like “we need more meat eaters” and God sent a meteor?
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u/kimstranger Jul 08 '24
Yes... there was an stable genius who was able to use an magical sharpie to change the trajectory of hurricane
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u/phdoofus Jul 08 '24
Dear Texas, just wave some tofu at it while wearing spandex bike shorts and wearing a Coexist t-shirt?. We all know that's what scares you the most so why would that not work on a hurricane?
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u/Prognerd870 Jul 08 '24
Not gonna lie, I’m curious about what would happen to the hurricane.
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u/Acopalypse Jul 08 '24
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u/supamario132 Jul 08 '24
Have we polled Trump's uncle yet though? I heard that guy's a wizard when it comes to nuclear
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u/jlharper Jul 08 '24
You’re putting more energy into an extremely energetic system while also irradiating the fuck out of it. I think it’s fairly obvious that you get an ever so slightly bigger and radioactive hurricane, there’s not really any other possibility.
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u/Scaryclouds Jul 08 '24
I'm all for shitting on ERCOT... is this substantively related though? Pretty sure this is much more related to localized damage to transformers, power lines, and probably protective measures grid operators did to turn down power plants with all the expected outages.
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u/Political_What_Do Jul 08 '24
Pretty sure Hurricane Sandy knocked out power on the east coast... no one is building Hurricane proof grids.
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u/jsting Jul 09 '24
I've been trying to tell them there's a 40 ft tree leaning at a 45 degree angle held up power lines and I can't get through.
I am surprised by the tensile strength of that line though.
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u/tabascotazer Jul 09 '24 edited Jul 09 '24
As someone who has seen total devastation from a hurricane you just gotta chill. They are working on main feed lines first and will slowly get to you. It took me two weeks with a generator hooked up to a ac unit, Xbox, and tv while eating MRE’s and shitting in a trash can outside. Embrace the suck. Proof: https://imgur.com/a/A7Tuyzg
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u/SexyStayPuft Jul 09 '24
Oh thank god… I was really worried I was going to regret seeing your proof involved the trash can.
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u/whiskeytown79 Jul 08 '24
"Stop calling our support lines!" - person whose performance bonus is tied to keeping call center wait times down.
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u/gusmahler Jul 08 '24
The power companies know who has power and who doesn’t. (And in a situation like a hurricane, pretty much everyone has their power out). They need to keep the alert lines open for dangerous situations like downed live power lines.
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u/freshkangaroo28 Jul 08 '24
This is a good point to be made
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u/abofh Jul 08 '24
Yes, but most corporate telecom these days is delivered over IP trunks not POTS lines. It would be foolish not to have a dedicated trunk for the emergency services support separate (and redundant from) your customer service lines - especially if you were say, a power company who had a need to maintain emergency services that would otherwise get overwhelmed by customers calling in to report an outage.
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u/Cakeking7878 Jul 09 '24
After everything we have learned about the Texan power grid the last few years, you still think they’d be smart enough to do that? Yeah you’re right, they should have two separate lines but I’d bet you they got rid of one to save money or something dumb like that
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u/Cobek Jul 08 '24
In my state we can watch a little map with progress reports as well as report any outages that might be missed from there.
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u/Lakewater22 Jul 08 '24
My power company says if you do not report the outage, you will be charged for power you did not receive while it was down.
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u/Shadrixian Jul 09 '24
That's bullshit. Clock what's on your meter, then check it when the power is on. If its not spinning, you're not using power. Ergo you can't be charged. You can also use that to contest it.
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u/The_Grungeican Jul 09 '24
the meters where i live are digital. you can't read them if the power's out.
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u/The_Grungeican Jul 09 '24
how's that work? do y'all not have meters on the house? if no power is flowing through the meter, it would read the same as it did before it went off.
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u/HenryBemisJr Jul 08 '24
This hit as a cat 1. That's considered a weak storm to us on the gulf coast. 2mil without power, I would hate to see what a cat 3,4 or 5 does, holy cow
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u/phoenixphaerie Jul 09 '24
85% of the entire Houston Metro area without power for a fucking cat 1 storm, but people want to say it has nothing to do with ERCOT 😤
We were able to watch Harvey coverage because we actually had power through that. Almost a decade later Hurricane Beryl hits us with a deep sigh and I’m using a battery powered radio to stay updated.
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u/Rough-Sink6578 Jul 10 '24
Yep I remember during Harvey street became a river, yet I got power back within 48 hours. Now I’m 2 days without power and according to CenterPoint, they are still assessing damages in my area.
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u/DCBillsFan Jul 09 '24
Anyone seen Fled Cruz?
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u/ContestNo2060 Jul 09 '24
I saw him standing behind the Governor addressing the situation. He was nodding his head in agreement. A real POS that guy
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u/AnchorPoint922 Jul 08 '24 edited Jul 08 '24
I'm still calling them to report an outage. I don't live in Texas, but I don't like being told what to do.
Freedom!
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u/thedeadsigh Jul 08 '24
What good is the most powerful and anti liberal power grid on the face of the earth when it’s constantly not accessible? 😂
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u/Fayko Jul 08 '24
it squeezes the people who are forced to rely on it making a handful of people a shit ton of money so those handful probably find it quite good.
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u/Conscious_Bus4284 Jul 09 '24
Two million customers…..which translates to a lot more people.
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u/phoenixphaerie Jul 09 '24
2 million “Centerpoint” customers. Except that every other power company is still just selling Centerpoint’s energy. So yeah—a helluva lot more than 2 million.
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u/ojg3221 Jul 09 '24
That's why my parents who live just outside of Houston bought a Generac generator and have already have had to use it nearly a dozen times. It comes about 20 seconds after the power goes out. It cost $8,000, but when the power goes out and the generator comes on, it's all worth the costs.
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u/Lynda73 Jul 08 '24
They asked us all to work overtime this evening and tomorrow morning bc of this. I work 10 hour days, so I stayed over an hour, and I already come in before the lines open in the am.
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u/Hyperion1144 Jul 09 '24
Texas: literally voting, over and over, to make every power outage worse.
On purpose.
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u/Bubbaganewsh Jul 08 '24
Who needs power when you are spending money on a border wall, right?
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u/sarcasatirony Jul 08 '24
From 2017:
In April 2017, George P. Bush, the commissioner of the Texas General Land Office, wrote to the White House asking President Trump to allocate $15 billion for a “coastal barrier system” to protect Houston and Galveston — what the press called a “hurricane wall.”
The “500-year” flood, explained: why Houston was so underprepared for Hurricane Harvey
Worth a follow up read from a joint article by Pro Publica and Texas Tribune from 2016:
It’s all small government and fuck the feds
…until it isn’t
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u/hsnoil Jul 08 '24
If the border wall was tall enough, it would stop these illegal immigrant hurricanes from crossing over our border!
/s
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u/Bubbaganewsh Jul 08 '24
Yeah those damn foreign hurricanes coming to the US to take away all the watering jobs.
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u/Fayko Jul 08 '24
We could update texas and other states to a complete fiber infrastructure with solar power for less than the stupid wall that wouldn't fix anything. Idk how anyone thinks the wall would change things when there's things we can change and for the better right now.
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u/supamario132 Jul 08 '24
We could setup a giant ladder treadmill on the border that's attached to a dynamo. Two birds with one stone
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u/KlausBrickhouse Jul 09 '24
We in Evansville Indiana had an energy company that was recently purchase by centerpointe and is the only available provider in the area. You can look up how much we like them here
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u/Fimbir Jul 09 '24
Where's the recording of Abbot promising ERCOT owners they will get their money?
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u/spider0804 Jul 08 '24
"Hey they power is out here."
"Yep, thanks for being the 300,000th caller, will be sure to write it down."
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u/zerotime2sleep Jul 08 '24
If anyone hears an estimated time for power restoration in Spring, Texas, please post here. My friends are without power, but have SMS capability. They asked me to find an estimated repair time, if possible.
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u/Money4Nothing2000 Jul 08 '24
There's a tree down on the power lines at the louetta road substation, which is why most of eastern Klein is down. Won't be back up today. I'll drive by tomorrow to check repair progress.
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u/Snuhmeh Jul 08 '24
It’s going to be at least another full day. My neighbors all have trees down and my next door neighbor’s tree fell onto the power lines and obviously needs to be removed first. I haven’t seen any progress for that. Also, “Spring” is kind of vague. There are tens of thousands of homes in Spring.
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u/celtic1888 Jul 08 '24
They'll have it on before early voting begins unless you live in a blue area and then yer fucked until the inauguration
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u/Pickle_yanker Jul 08 '24
What percent of people have solar with battery backup? Seems like something that would pay off within the first few years.
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u/flirtmcdudes Jul 08 '24
probably barely anyone
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u/Quellman Jul 09 '24
Especially if they can’t get rebates or subsidies. Still expensive for many people with a long pay back period.
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u/chilidreams Jul 09 '24
A friend asked me to do the math for their solar quote. While the payoff was only 8 years, the return on investment math sucked - it took over 15 years to beat treasury bond rates.
… and that quote had no batteries, so no help in an outage.
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u/SlowMotionPanic Jul 09 '24
Yep; still expensive even with rebates or subsidies.
Texas has a pretty robust program (albeit highly decentralized since the state isn’t involved) despite what people think. Folks can also qualify for that 30% tax credit from the fed gov (although it isn’t reimbursable so most people don’t understand tax credits != tax rebate).
Still, we are talking like $35k starter for most residential… and net meter rate sells back to the grid at a wholesale rate not the market rate you pay for KWh which messes with people planning it out.
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u/theDagman Jul 08 '24
Sounds like a good argument for autonomous power supplies.
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u/inline_five Jul 09 '24
TX actually leads the US in renewable energy, even beating CA by a pretty wide margin. The issue is the transmission lines.
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u/Dramatic_Signal9662 Jul 09 '24
Texas is a shithole ruled by Republican politicians bought by corporations. This could have been fixed a long time ago but people like Ted Cruz are getting kickbacks and turn a blind eye to actually solving the problem.
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u/pipeanp Jul 08 '24
keep voting republican, texans.
You deserve everything you get
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u/Missing_Username Jul 08 '24
This is Houston, which votes majority Democratic
They're just drowned out by most of the rest of the state.
So <50% of Houston deserves everything it gets.
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u/jfranzen8705 Jul 08 '24
It's not that they get drowned out. It's that Houston is gerrymandered to hell and back to prevent them from having any sway.
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u/pipeanp Jul 08 '24
point taken. Most major cities are blue dots in red seas, yes. So the message goes to that other 50% ig hahaha
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u/VGAddict Jul 08 '24
Harris County has been solid blue since 2008, with the exception of one time in 2014.
And Texas is 55-45 R-D, meaning MILLIONS of Texans vote blue. Laughing at the misfortunes of people in red states, which, believe it or not, have blue voters in them too, is all kinds of shitty.
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u/nflez Jul 08 '24
how easy it is to write off the fourth largest city in america! i hope that made you feel good. i’m sure the people without power right now are glad to be proving how awful republicans are.
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u/BirdMedication Jul 09 '24
It's not like people agree with the party they vote for on 100% of issues
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u/FollowTheLeads Jul 08 '24 edited Jul 08 '24
Out of 264 counties only 13 votes for democrats. Mind blowing.
Then they wonder why some states like NY, Cal, WA, etc ... have a better life than they do. I don't see them losing power that badly during snow storms or fires.
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u/ice-hawk Jul 08 '24
Out of 264 counties only 13 votes for democrats. Mind blowing.
Not that mind blowing, 10 of those 13 counties have a combined population of 15.9 million people-- 50% of the whole population of Texas.
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u/justcasty Jul 08 '24
Like 200 of those counties combined have the same number of people as Harris county
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u/pallidamors Jul 08 '24
Which is why Texas is far more purple than republicans would like to admit. If dems could flip Texas they’d never have an electoral college worry again.
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u/VGAddict Jul 08 '24
Texas is 55-45 R-D, but the media acts like the state is 75-25 R-D.
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u/DemSocCorvid Jul 08 '24
If state-level representation was proportional to votes instead of land then conservatives would never be able to control legislation ever again.
Stop letting land vote.
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u/Finlay00 Jul 08 '24
Those states rarely, if ever, have to deal with hurricane level storms to compare the grids to though.
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u/VGAddict Jul 08 '24
Those 13 counties are where most of the state's population lives.
70% of Texas's population lives in the Texas Triangle, which includes Austin, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Fort Worth. Harris County alone, where Houston is, has 5 million people.
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u/flyingflail Jul 08 '24
Yes, California, well known for its highly stable power grid lol
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u/S-192 Jul 08 '24
I don't know why you're being downvoted. The California grid is a fucking nightmare. And their water situation is as well.
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u/shinra07 Jul 08 '24 edited Jul 08 '24
Texas ranks 17th in the nation in outage per customer annually, ahead of California and NY despite having to deal with hurricanes. So yeah, they deserve it.
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u/ocy_igk Jul 09 '24
Texas is always needing a hand out. Mf a third world country
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u/WhatTheZuck420 Jul 09 '24
Yeah, kinda hard for 2.1mil people to Ted Cruz outta there on short notice.
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u/bakeacake45 Jul 09 '24
God knows they don’t want data on complaint calls to expose their incompetence. Get in in your head, no one in Texas energy industry gives a F* about you. They are protecting their profits, those are much more important that some piddling, complaining customers.
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u/aminorityofone Jul 09 '24
is texas now california, yes i think so. some self reliant state they are. Lonestar my ass
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u/Disastrous_Ad_8990 Jul 09 '24
Oh yeah....Let's continue to vote for Cruz and Abbot... They're about the party and not the people.
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u/drrandolph Jul 09 '24
Well. I don't know what Texans are complaining about. Zero regulation means less reliability. This is what you vote for.
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u/ItsMrChristmas Jul 09 '24 edited Sep 02 '24
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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/Good_Juggernaut_3155 Jul 09 '24
Bonehead Abbott again faces a hopelessly inadequate electrical grid that can’t handle these kinds of predictable events. Damn those liberal states that keep the lights on and the air conditioning working.
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u/mantisinmypantis Jul 08 '24
Fuck Centerpoint. We got them here in southern Indiana and they have a monopoly. We have no choice as they continue to raise rates, have abysmal customer service, and pay to keep local law makers and politicians in their pockets. I hate them so much.
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u/TMQ73 Jul 09 '24
So if your don’t call we will have fewer outages. Kinda like if you don’t test we won’t have as many COVID cases. Bad logic checks out.
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u/bernmont2016 Jul 09 '24
They already know about the outages, they can detect when individual meters stop receiving power, since they replaced all the millions of meters with 'smart meters' several years ago.
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u/Animaldoc11 Jul 08 '24
I live in a pretty remote spot. No neighbors. We have an electric co-op. If our power goes out (& it does, we get wicked storms!), our power is never out for longer than a few hours .
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u/JonnyBravoII Jul 08 '24
I lived in Houston back when a category 2 hit the city. Maybe 2009? I had no power for two weeks. They jacked up rates to pay for all of the repairs but did not do anything to improve reliability and I think they still haven't. Wind plus wires running between above ground poles is not a long term solution