It his 92 degrees here today -- and topped 100 elsewhere int he state of Texas.

And for the first time in years, the state ordered rolling blackouts.

Hundreds of thousands of homes throughout Texas went without power for brief periods this afternoon as unseasonably warm weather and both planned and unplanned power plant outages led officials to call for rolling blackouts.

Shortly after 4 p.m. officials with the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas, the organization that monitors the grid for about 85 percent of the state, declared an emergency and asked power distributors to turn off about 1,000 megawatts of power.

The cuts were spread throughout the state, with Houston-based CenterPoint Energy cutting power for fifteen-minute intervals to about 78,000 customers using about 260,000 megawatts, according to a spokeswoman.

In Dallas about 80,000 TXU Electric Delivery customers using 380,000 megawatts saw their power go out for 15 minute intervals, according to a spokeswoman.

By 6 p.m. ERCOT declared the emergency over and rolling blackouts could stop.

My Darling Democrat, the Apolitical Pooch and I got hit with one of the blackouts in the first or second wave, right around 4:15. Our power was out no more than 20 minutes -- and I was fortunate that Gmail autosaved a very long email to a friend.

And it might not be over. It will be another hot one tomorrow -- and possibly through the week.

Here's hoping that power doesn't go out tomorrow during the school day, when the students are taking the TAKS test.

Posted by: Greg at 03:37 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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