Rolling Blackouts in Central Texas

It was a very surreal feeling this morning driving Dixi into the office. From just south of Braker Lane all the way down to just south of Rundberg Lane was suffering from the effects of no electricity. For those of you not from the Austin area and not familiar with north Lamar Boulevard, the road is filled with both businesses and apartment buildings with lighted signs, street lights and traffic signals. A typical city street. Except for this morning.

But this morning, with no lights on, Lamar held an almost scary feel to it. According to the Austin Energy website this is due to rolling blackouts. The first report I heard on the radio said that the outages should last only about 7 minutes per area. However, now they're saying they could last up to an hour in places.

According to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, "the move follows a predesigned plan that distributes outages throughout the service area."

From Stuff

*Screenshot taken from Austin Energy's Storm Center Customer Outage Portal.

According to KXAN, all of Burnett was without power due to the weather yesterday.

Entire town of Burnet was without power: kxan.com