72 hours without electricity

We got just over 6 inches of snow Sunday night and hit a 30+ year low of 5 degrees F last night here in the south Austin area. Texas is not equipped for this kind of weather for any extended period of time. We've had rolling blackouts for 2 days now and many folks have been without power the whole time. Fortunately we've got food and water and the power comes on often enough to keep pipes from freezing. Stay safe and warm out there folks!
Best of luck to you sir stay safe.
 
And to think that I’ll be moving back up to New England within the next year or two.....
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It’s nice here. :) I could skate on my driveway this morning!

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Ugh...I grew up in Maine but lived in NH and Mass for quite a while as well. I’m prone to bitch when the temp drops below 75, but ultimately, my friends and wife’s family are all up there and that stuff means more to me these days than it used to. The music scene in South Florida is dead, which is what brought me down here 2x in the past.

We’ll end up around the South Shore Mass area. Hopefully we can make a few bucks when we sell our house down here because my prerequisite for the next house is that it has a barn in the backyard I can build a studio inside of.
 
America has been dodging bullets for decades with its outdated, overtaxed and fragile power grid.
We need distributed micro grids ASAP.
Electric cars are going to be an important part of power storage.

Right now I’ve got my equipment truck rigged as an RV/survivalist rig.
800 watts of solar about a kilowatt of battery storage and a exhaust free propane heater with about a week of fuel.

Can stay warm, run a fridge, cook and have electricity enough to get by.
 
America has been dodging bullets for decades with its outdated, overtaxed and fragile power grid.
We need distributed micro grids ASAP.
Electric cars are going to be an important part of power storage.

Right now I’ve got my equipment truck rigged as an RV/survivalist rig.
800 watts of solar about a kilowatt of battery storage and a exhaust free propane heater with about a week of fuel.

Can stay warm, run a fridge, cook and have electricity enough to get by.
What we need is home level room temperature fusion power.
 
What we need is home level room temperature fusion power.
Can't have that, most likely; but, there's no reason every burgh couldn't start having it's own small Thorium (or similar) 4th gen mass-produced design, production starting around 2030 and filling most of the country by 2070.

From everything I hear, it not only solves most of any given country's contribution to climate concerns, but grid-wise, it's a ripe solution just waiting to fall off the tree.
 
I guess we do it differently on the ole Gulf Coast of Texas. We actually had power right up until it got above freezing, then zap... blackout. Looks like our grid can’t handle non-freezing temps. It’s better than the other way ‘round, I do grant.

Generator and solar backup running now. All good.
 
Energy storage is key. Current power plants have ample ability to provide more than enough power 99% of the time and are usually not operating at full capacity. If there's no extra demand, they won't produce. If we had power storage options, plants could build up an emergency reserve for times of abnormally high demand. That currently does not exist. As demand goes up, production ramps up until as some point demand exceeds production capability and you get rolling blackouts. That's what's happening here in Texas. Our grid is usually extremely stable. Homes in Texas are just not built with single digit weather in mind like they are up north. Your average electric HVAC system here consumes huge amounts of power trying to keep up. The net result on the grid is crazy high demand that our production simply cannot keep pace with. We also don't have fleets of snowplows at the ready or snow tires/chains. In my 40+ years here, I can count on 1 hand the number of times I've seen it ice and snow anywhere close to the amount we got this week. Right now It's up to the people to do their part. Everyone has to conserve power (turn off non critical stuff, lower thermostats, etc.) to reduce the overall demand so the grid can get caught up.
 
Can't have that, most likely; but, there's no reason every burgh couldn't start having it's own small Thorium (or similar) 4th gen mass-produced design, production starting around 2030 and filling most of the country by 2070.

From everything I hear, it not only solves most of any given country's contribution to climate concerns, but grid-wise, it's a ripe solution just waiting to fall off the tree.
My Father was an advocate for Thorium power plants. He had a patent for mass producing thorium for nuclear power plants. Can’t melt down, cheap nearly infinite supply of fuel and no radioactive waste. A thorium reactor can even burn waste from a uranium reactor.

He was shut down by the US government. They wanted the enriched plutonium from uranium reactors. They wanted the weapons, plain and simple.
We are all still paying the price for that decision.
 
My Father was an advocate for Thorium power plants. He had a patent for mass producing thorium for nuclear power plants. Can’t melt down, cheap nearly infinite supply of fuel and no radioactive waste. A thorium reactor can even burn waste from a uranium reactor.

He was shut down by the US government. They wanted the enriched plutonium from uranium reactors. They wanted the weapons, plain and simple.
We are all still paying the price for that decision.
Sorry to hear that, of course. At this point, though, I don't see why that dynamic should still be present. (I'm guessing that was at least a decade ago; maybe more?) The U.S. has sufficient breeder reactors to maintain the cores for sufficient nuclear deterrence for the whole next century. But why not additionally have the 4th-gen small (and as you note, safe and waste-eating) reactors, exclusively for power purposes? Breeder reactors for uranium and plutonium need to be extraordinarily well-secured (for obvious reasons!) and tend to be expensive one-off constructions. Even the latest designs are hard to maintain, hard to replace. The logical move, I think, is to keep those at places like Oak Ridge, put 'em behind lots of land buffers and soldiers, and treat energy output from them as an incidental benefit. The small, mass-produced Thorium (or whatever) reactors would be far more numerous, existing for a different mix of purposes: power generation, redundancy, local self-sufficiency, and maintenance/modularity.

But at this point I grant that I am...
(a.) talking way beyond my own technical literacy, and
(b.) concerned about hijacking the thread, which I didn't mean to do!

I only brought it up because (unless I've been totally misled) a few dozen cheap, mass-produced 4th gen reactors (such as I hope we'll have by 2050) could've, if we'd had them, sufficiently ramped-up production to make up for the issues Texas is currently having with supply from the wind farms and the frozen-over bits of natural gas infrastructure. So that would have been nice. And, as a plan for the future, it represents a lovely "don't put all your eggs in one basket" approach.

There. Hopefully that brings us back to Texas. ;)
 
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