Wind gusts of up to 50mph knock out power in Shoreline
Sunday, March 10, 2024
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| 4pm outage map |
WeatherWatcher Carl Dinse reports that a line of thunderstorms around 2:40pm created locally gusty winds with a lot of tree damage in the area.
His Richmond Beach weather station recorded a southwest gust of 47mph. Close to 4,000 local customers lost power, with a King county total of 10,000.
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| Three of the outages are one customer only. |
New outages were reported from 6-7pm and occasional wind gusts continued into the early morning hours.
By 12:30am on Sunday, most of the north end outages has been cleared, including the one on the graphic with 30 customers.
--Diane Hettrick
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5 comments:
This is what our future looks like under the forced decarbonization plan that all three of our state legislators just voted for. People who have electricity as their only source of power were dead in the water during these outages, while those who have gas were still able to cook and take hot showers.
Yesterday, I received a notice from Seattle City Light that they're going to turn power off two days next week for system repairs in my neighborhood. Meanwhile, the one and only time my gas has ever been shut off during a decade in our house is when PSE replaced the meter several years back. They did it during warm weather and it was barely an inconvenience.
I recently moved here ftom South Carolina where Duke Power has a monopoly. They charge twice as much and take forever to fix outages. You guys have it made as far as this goes.
A poor argument as the PNW has always been a heavy electricity user because of its historically low price. While hydropower generates the bulk of our electricity, natural gas and (amazingly) coal generate significant amounts of power. The fact is that few people will go “full prepper” and install generators for the vanishingly few times our power goes out for short periods.
What power outages signal is the lack of resilience our power grid has as a consequence of perennial underfunding due to profit driven utilities. The infrastructure bill the administration passed has billions targeted to just such grid upgrades.
I get your opposition to this administration but you need a better argument to make a case for your views.
Power outages are an unavoidable aspect of a complicated grid structure. America has an aging and underfunded grid. The infrastructure plan has funds targeted for grid upgrades and resilience that have been sacrificed by utilities enhancing profits. Even municipal utilities cut corners to keep their customers happy.
Regardless of what powers our electrical generation, the grid needs upgrades to deliver power reliably.
Few will, or should be expected to, buy home generators for the few brief interruptions we have. Now if we were in un-woke Florida that can go weeks without power, that would be a different case.
To Anon #3, Seattle historically had low electricity prices, but over the past 20 years we have gone from one of the cheapest cities for power to a place just below the middle of the pack, and this is despite City Light having no fuel cost for the dams on the Skagit River. City Light has been raising rates recklessly for years -- at 3x the rate of inflation several months ago. City Light has managed to do a terrible job controlling their costs despite being municipally owned rather than privately owned. You have no elected representatives to hold accountable, you're captive to the monopoly, and you also pay a penalty rate about 2c/kWh higher in Shoreline than you would in Seattle. It's a rotten deal.
We have the most expensive municipal water in the nation, one of the most expensive sewer systems, and now our legislators are pushing us to consume ever more of our increasingly expensive electricity by tacking on fees to artificially boost the price of gas. After all, if it becomes just as expensive to run a gas furnace as it is to heat with an electric heat pump, they reason that nobody will choose to install gas. It's not about making electricity affordable, but gas unaffordable.
Resilience is not just about generators. Gas ranges and gas water heaters work even when the power is off. I'd suggest going without electricity for several weeks as I've seen happen just up the road in Woodinville, and then maybe you'll see the value of having an alternate energy utility when nights are frigid and the power's out.
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