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PG&E rolling blackouts during heatwave (Aug 14 2020 —> ?)
- Thread starter 180r
- Start date
Interesting because this very recently updated articles says Cal ISO said they can do without requesting any rolling blackouts. From SFGate @ 7:22pm PDT:
Authority says it's unlikely to order power outages tonight
Authority says it's unlikely to order power outages tonight
This is from my house. tl;dr: Voltage sags under high electrical load.
I've been having UPSs trip off at various times, and my solar inverter (Fronius IG Plus) is intermittently shutting down with an error code that indicates under-voltage. A UPS and a Kill-a-Watt are showing voltages in the house of around 107V (the standard should be 120V +/- 5% according to one source I looked up). Here's the line voltage going into my house for the last 30 days. It's generally within spec, but notice the huge sags the last few days! Fortunately most things in the house seem to be working fine (aside from what I mentioned at the start of this post and some lights flickering).
The data comes from a data logger I wrote that polls the Powerwall TEG every 10 seconds and shoves all of the meter data structures, plus some other stuff, into InfluxDB...graphing is with Grafana. This is the instant_average_voltage field from the site meter. Glad I decided to just save "everything"...I've been scraping all this data for over a year and it didn't dawn upon me until 30 minutes ago to graph the voltage.
Bruce.
I've been having UPSs trip off at various times, and my solar inverter (Fronius IG Plus) is intermittently shutting down with an error code that indicates under-voltage. A UPS and a Kill-a-Watt are showing voltages in the house of around 107V (the standard should be 120V +/- 5% according to one source I looked up). Here's the line voltage going into my house for the last 30 days. It's generally within spec, but notice the huge sags the last few days! Fortunately most things in the house seem to be working fine (aside from what I mentioned at the start of this post and some lights flickering).
The data comes from a data logger I wrote that polls the Powerwall TEG every 10 seconds and shoves all of the meter data structures, plus some other stuff, into InfluxDB...graphing is with Grafana. This is the instant_average_voltage field from the site meter. Glad I decided to just save "everything"...I've been scraping all this data for over a year and it didn't dawn upon me until 30 minutes ago to graph the voltage.
Bruce.
Now as of 8:08pm PDT the SFGate updated article says power has been cut to 200,000 users. Just wow. What a rollercoaster and no real advanced warning for many. Article I assume is referring to PG&E as the northern service provider.
New rolling blackout hits at least 200,000 customers
just looked at @Janus post above from a Cal ISO tweet from 2 hrs ago which stated they declared Stage 3 due to more usage, power plant down, and drop in wind generation. 20 minutes later with winds picking up they cancelled it.
Curious if you were in a PG&E rolling outage how long your power was out.
New rolling blackout hits at least 200,000 customers
just looked at @Janus post above from a Cal ISO tweet from 2 hrs ago which stated they declared Stage 3 due to more usage, power plant down, and drop in wind generation. 20 minutes later with winds picking up they cancelled it.
Curious if you were in a PG&E rolling outage how long your power was out.
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PG&E has an online outage map if you didn’t know about it.
Pacific Gas and Electric Company
From the map right now looks like the areas around Santa Cruz and Monterey each have more than 5K customers down and are the worst outage numbers.
Pacific Gas and Electric Company
From the map right now looks like the areas around Santa Cruz and Monterey each have more than 5K customers down and are the worst outage numbers.
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Wow, looks like a great case to buy a couple of PW for the house. Or even better, allowing V2H for Tesla cars.
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Guess Central Coast was the target of most of the 270,000 rolling blackouts tonight.
PG&E: Rotating power outages impacting the Central Coast
PG&E: Rotating power outages impacting the Central Coast
woferry
Member
Unsurprisingly given the number of outages that were shown on PG&E's site last night and today, they didn't get my specific outage (listed as 38 customers) fixed from ~6:15pm last night until around 5 or 6 this evening. And then around 9:30pm the power failed again, it's still out now at 1am. Interestingly the outage page shows the same details as yesterday (still lists the start time as 8/14 6:20), so perhaps even though power was restored they didn't consider the real issue resolved or something. No estimate on when it will be restored.
I learned some stuff working with my system today since this was the first outage of more than a few seconds since I did simulated testing May of last year. Working on a post for another thread with my findings.
I learned some stuff working with my system today since this was the first outage of more than a few seconds since I did simulated testing May of last year. Working on a post for another thread with my findings.
I know. I see the tweet from CAISO (https://twitter.com/California_ISO/status/1294776357096796160?s=20) then I saw https://twitter.com/PGE4Me/status/1294813406311124998?s=20 from PG&E contradicting.
I'm in the South Bay and mine went out from about 8:34 pm until about 10:46 pm but went out then came back around 10:55 pm.
I left home before the outage and was away until sometime after it returned so my return times might be off by a few minutes due to UPSes running my networking equipment possibly being drained by the outage. There were reports and photos of aan underground transformer fire a few miles away on Nextdoor but I'm unclear if that was related.
From PG&E's web site, during the outage, there was no ETA for my area, so I think mine wasn't intended to be that long an outage.
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A significant cloud cover for this time of the year is moving into parts of NorCal for the next 2-3 days while the high temperatures remain. It will be interesting to see how the reduced solar power generated will play into this.
Question: With rolling outages, once you had an outage administered, you go back in the line and most likely won’t see another outage this time around?
Question: With rolling outages, once you had an outage administered, you go back in the line and most likely won’t see another outage this time around?
aesculus
Still Trying to Figure This All Out
I am not sure what rules they are running under for this event. In the old days I would have said yes but with this event they seemed to throw away the rule book. For example El Dorado County on the first day was completely turned off. No rotating outage blocks were used, which would be how they would cycle through the areas as you stated.
If I were PG&E, I would not turn off areas with significant rooftop solar until after sun down. It could actually result in higher stress to the grid to lose those generation.
aesculus
Still Trying to Figure This All Out
They did not turn us off until 6:30 PM. With my paltry 3.5 kW of real solar I was only producing about 600 watts at the time, so no loss to them. It did keep my fridge running for the next 30 minutes or so (actually offsetting that load in my PWs).
mkspeedr
Member
I have been waiting for 11 months for a panel upgrade from PG&E preventing me from installing 3 power walls. According to my Tesla tech - PG&E is holding up hundreds of installs in the bay area.
I am sure hundreds would make a big impact to the grid load.
I am sure hundreds would make a big impact to the grid load.
And if everyone in your local grid had PV, PG&E would be seeing zero grid use before and after shutting you off at 6:30pm...
We've been on Storm Watch over the weekend but now are going to be heading out of town tomorrow for a week. How can I get off of SW so that "Cost Savings" routines are active? When I make the changes now, nothing changes.
Your panel upgrade is happening thru PG&E? Is this because they have to bring additional service to your house?
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