Amid news earlier this week about the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) issuing a conservation alert in Texas urging residents to reduce their electricity use during rising summer temperatures, memes aimed at Texas Senator Ted Cruz have once again become a trending topic online.

Reminiscent of “Cancun Cruz” jokes earlier this year after Senator Cruz fled the state to Mexico during the intense February weather that left millions in Texas without power and clean water, much of these ERCOT memes have been focused on criticizing Cruz or poking fun at ERCOT in general.

Monday’s conservation alert from ERCOT, which controls nearly 90 percent of the state’s power in Texas, asked residents to “turn thermostats 78 degrees or higher, turn off lights and avoid using large appliances like ovens and washing machines.”

Officials on the matter said the problem stems from “a significant number of forced generation outages combined with potential record electric use for the month of June.” Coincidentally, Monday was the year’s first heat advisory in the northern portion of the state.

“We will be conducting a thorough analysis with generation owners to determine why so many units are out of service. This is unusual for this early in the summer season,” ERCOT Vice President of Grid Planning and Operations Woody Rickerson said about the outages.

Judging from some of the reactions to this around the web, residents aren’t really taking the news too well.


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Comments 2 total

Timey16

"Indpendence of energy grid" is one of the dumbest "muh freedom" grandstanding things ever against any form of practicality and only serves a political voter class that doesn't understand jackshit about grid-balancing, but sure loves buzzwords.

Because the bigger an energy grid is, the more stable it becomes and the easier of a time it has to deal with irregularities. A small independent grid will always, and constantly, be barraged by black- and brown-outs.

There is a reason why all of Europe runs on the same grid, even if they are not part of the EU. It's just so much more convenient for energy management that way, if you can at a split second just import excess energy from elsewhere when your own supply is low, and export when you produce too much. Because any irregularities created by any individual power user will be more and more evened out by the average of hundreds of millions of other users, making the amount of total energy use relatively more of a straight line, rather than a jagged graph.

6

Uatu

You looked for it, you found it. Baby, you turned the cooler on, so I unpacked the stuff. Now you cry for a little aµal pain. You wanted it, you got it hard in your a$$.

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