Hurricane Irma thread

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Commie
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Re: Hurricane Irma thread

Post by Commie » Fri Sep 15, 2017 2:03 pm

Still no power. For the past 48 hours we have been a no power island where all surrounding properties have electric and we do not. We have been told the reason we had power through the storm but lost it later was because Duke needed to re-route power to other places. Eta for our property is the 23rd.

And it's so frustrating to just be the only ones w/o power in your area. Lights are on in all the surrounding buildings.

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Re: Hurricane Irma thread

Post by WhiskeyGuy » Fri Sep 15, 2017 2:29 pm

Duke told you that?

Duke also said everyone in Pinellas will have power by the 17th.

80% of Pinellas lost power from Irma. As of yesterday, all but 20% have it back. I know it sucks to not have power but, that's a lot of work they accomplished in just a few days.

Here's to hoping what you heard is wrong, and you get it back today.

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Re: Hurricane Irma thread

Post by Commie » Fri Sep 15, 2017 6:18 pm

We'll see. Still waiting on trees to get removed. Still no power. The complex is handing out FEMA relief info now.

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Re: Hurricane Irma thread

Post by Ebonstar » Fri Sep 15, 2017 6:32 pm

Power back in full in broward home and office, now catching up on work before can do more than the pop in touch base IG.
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Re: Hurricane Irma thread

Post by Commie » Fri Sep 15, 2017 9:15 pm

Duke just argued with me for 30 minutes telling me my power was on. (it's not, whole complex is out still)

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Re: Hurricane Irma thread

Post by Commie » Sat Sep 16, 2017 4:02 pm

Duke, a day later, still insists my area has power. It does not.

At some point today their phone system changed over to automated only and im no longer able to get to a person, nor are my neighbors.

Oh well. They say 96% of the coverage area is up. I guess if they just want to lie about it I can see why that number would be so high when so many have no power.

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Re: Hurricane Irma thread

Post by Commie » Sat Sep 16, 2017 7:14 pm

Power company, Duke energy, one of the guys sponsoring the hyper misleading solar energy fee proposition last election, has simply lost the ability to tell who has power and who does not. You can find this out yourself by calling them or wait until they robo call your phone to ask if you have electric.

https://mobile.twitter.com/DukeEnergy/s ... 9221370880

Their Twitter is exploding. Again they maintain 96% of the county is restored. (spoilers it's not anywhere near that they just can't track outages anymore.)

As an aside, if you call and talk to a representative now, they tell you to check their social media accounts. So that's what people have started doing.

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Commie
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Re: Hurricane Irma thread

Post by Commie » Sun Sep 17, 2017 2:50 pm

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/miami ... ma-9666311
Hurricane Wilma, the last 'cane to hit South Florida, tore through the area in 2005 and killed power to 3.24 million of FPL's then-4.3 million customers (75 percent of the grid). Many of those customers had to wait up to two weeks for power to return. Since then, the company has spent more than $2 billion supposedly girding itself against the next storm, according to a Sun Sentinel piece published before Irma hit.

But after Irma — which by most reports brought only Category 1-strength winds to South Florida — by some measures the company did even worse. Despite all of those upgrades, an even larger percentage of FPL's customer base — 4.4 of 4.9 million customers, almost 90 percent — lost electricity this past weekend.

But many Floridians wonder if the large number of residents without power and flubbed website are just the latest signs that the company has spent way too much on lobbying and government affairs and not nearly enough on hurricane-proofing the power grids it maintains in some of the most storm-prone areas of the world.

FPL and its parent company, NextEra Energy, have for years heavily influenced state and local politics through donations, making billions in profits each year ($1.7 billion alone in 2016) thanks to favorable state laws that are sometimes literally written by the power company's own lobbyists.

FPL's lobbying wing has fought hard against letting Floridians power their own homes with solar panels. Thanks to power-company rules, it's impossible across Florida to simply buy a solar panel and power your individual home with it. You are instead legally mandated to connect your panels to your local electric grid.

More egregious, FPL mandates that if the power goes out, your solar-power system must power down along with the rest of the grid, robbing potentially needy people of power during major outages.

"Renewable generator systems connected to the grid without batteries are not a standby power source during an FPL outage," the company's solar-connection rules state. "The system must shut down when FPL's grid shuts down in order to prevent dangerous back feed on FPL's grid. This is required to protect FPL employees who may be working on the grid."

Astoundingly, state rules also mandate that solar customers include a switch that cleanly disconnects their panels from FPL's system while keeping the rest of a home's power lines connected. But during a disaster like the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, FPL customers aren't allowed to simply flip that switch and keep their panels going. (But FPL is, however, allowed to disconnect your panels from the grid without warning you. The company can even put a padlock on it.)
tl;dr even if you have solar panels you can't use them during the outage due to Florida Power companies lobbying.

(millions still w/o power)

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Re: Hurricane Irma thread

Post by Aelryn Bloodmoon » Mon Sep 18, 2017 2:48 am

Roommate confirmed our power back on at 7:24 PM tonight, 7 days and 4 hours after initial outage. They guaranteed power in my area would be back by 11:59 PM tonight.

Not happy to have been last in my area (my street one block over had power days ago) but I can't really blame FPL for the tree that fell on the transformer, either.

Now I can start hoping that Maria and Lee don't get hitched and become one.
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Re: Hurricane Irma thread

Post by Commie » Mon Sep 18, 2017 7:52 pm

Some people in my area still do not have power.

Whats sad is that this was just a wind event, basically. It didn't hit with hardly any force, and our infrastructure was this Snuggle a Bugbear.

I know FPL and Duke raised rates recently with the stated intent of fixing and improving that infrastructure. What happened?

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