As of 7:30pm, update to members of FM 343, 1638, 698 and the County Roads within this area of Nacogdoches County:
DETEC has just received word that these blackouts are now scheduled for every other hour instead of the previous communication of every 6-7 hours. Power will be dropped for 1 hour, then on a hour throughout the night. Like you all, we too are frustrated with this situation.
Beyond these blackouts, outages reported throughout the night will be recorded and a crew will be assigned as soon as they safely can in the morning. Unfortunately road conditions are becoming extremely hazardous to travel.
February 15, 2021 - As of 5 PM, DETEC is reporting approximately 300 outages. All outages are currently due to mandated rotating power outages as issued by ERCOT. At this time, only our members in North and West Nacogdoches will be affected by these blackouts, as they are within the ERCOT grid. All other members served by DETEC are within the SPP and MISO grid. SPP and MISO have not issued any mandatory outages as of yet.
Overnight, we will continue to have these rotating power outages affecting north and west Nacogdoches. These outages are scheduled to occur in 1 hour increments across six different circuits in this area. With that, if you are on the DETEC system and live in North and West Nacogdoches, your outages should last 1 hour every 6-7 hours. We know that this is an inconvenience and frustrating. DETEC is continuing to do all possible to mitigate additional outages.
On Sunday, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) asked consumers and businesses to reduce their electricity use as much as possible to avoid rolling blackouts. On Monday, ERCOT began issuing rolling blackout mandates. ERCOT determines how much is necessary to reduce the demand on the system, and then they tell the entities that own the transmission and distribution wires that they need to reduce the overall demand on the system by that number of megawatts.
It is important to note, that DETEC has no control over these rotating power outages. This is an unprecedented event in which the entire state and beyond is experiencing below freezing temperatures causing massive energy loads.
If you are in west or north Nacogdoches and lose power, we ask that you wait approximately 1.5 hours after your power goes out to report your outage. If you power is restored within 1.5 hours, your outage was likely a rotating power outage.
If you do experience an outage, we ask that you switch off your heating units and wait 10-15 minutes after power is restored to turn them back on. This will help reduce high loads impacting the system as we reenergize.
It is expected that eventually all will experience these rotating power outages. Please make all efforts now to reduce load.
Recommended measures include:
• Reducing heaters to 68 degrees
• Turning off or unplugging nonessential appliances
• Avoiding the use of large appliances
• Minimizing the use of electric lights
• Closing shades or blinds to better insulate windows
