I heard (from official sources) the strangest thing ever about our local grid.
There is a small-ish wind farm near here (by Hoffman) of 10 wind towers.
I am not a fan of wind power for various reasons-but I never dreamed that our local power was, in any way, tied to these towers. I assumed they fed into the grid and we draw from the grid and our specific power would be drawn from where needed.
The headquarters for our electric company is in Alexandria about 20 miles east of Hoffman
Now, I understand better than anyone that power blackouts are possible. Equipment breaks or whatever-especially at 20 below zero as it was the other night.
I have a large commercial generator where I live, but the other farm just has a portable tractor driven generator. I have been thinking about rectifying that-but that is for another day.
A couple of nights ago there was a major power outage at 3 AM with about 25 below temperatures and according to the outage maps these were all west and southwest of Alexandria (towards Hoffman). Other than noticing that, I didn't think anything beyond that.
Well, my generator started and I headed over to farm to start figuring out what to do. At those temps there are major problems starting tractors and so forth.
I remember thinking as I was driving over there sure isn't any solar (pitch black night) or wind( no wind) feeding power into the grid tonight.
Fortunately, the power came back on in an hour and we didn't have to get to far into working the problem from our end.
NOW, the odd thing. My son called the electric company and was told that they were having problems with the wind farm near Hoffman. As I said, I understand problems-but why in the world would power to us be tied (in any way) to that specific wind farm? I don't care if the towers all blow up at the same time-the grid should still be feeding us.
Other people were told the same thing about problems at the wind farm.