Amid temperatures in the teens and single digits across the state on Friday, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced that power demand in Tennessee hit an “all-time December peak.”
TVA announced Friday that it and local power company employees were “actively working to maintain a stable power grid for everyone amid unprecedented demand,” by “temporarily reducing power supplies to localized areas.”
“We apologize for the disruption that we know these actions may cause, especially during the holidays. They are difficult but necessary steps to prevent the potential of far greater power disruptions to the broader region,” TVA wrote in a press release.
Today's been unprecedented, with historic cold temperatures affecting the entire country and driving power demand to record levels in the region.
Money and energy saving tips 👉 https://t.co/ypUlsWFs7e pic.twitter.com/QguCsB8Fqo
— Tennessee Valley Authority (@TVAnews) December 23, 2022
TVA lifted the mandate on rolling blackouts Friday shortly before noon; however, it urged Tennessee businesses and residents to “reduce electric power use as much as possible without sacrificing safety.”
The top ten ways Tennesseans can reduce power usage, according to TVA, are:
- Keep curtains open on the south side of the house and closed on the north during the day to trap the warming sunlight.
- Install an ENERGY STAR-certified programmable thermostat and program the temperature to go down at night and when you are away from home.
- Turn off lights in rooms and turn down the heat when you’re out of the house.
- Use a TVA Quality Contractor to insulate heating and cooling ducts and repair any air leaks, as well as add insulation to your attic, crawlspaces and any accessible exterior walls.
- Set your water heater to 120 degrees.
- Make sure the fireplace damper is closed when not in use.
- Use area rugs if you have hardwood or tile floors to keep your feet warm.
- Keep weeds and debris away from the outdoor unit of your heating system.
- Use layered clothing to keep the warmth in.
- Set ceiling fans to run counterclockwise.
TVA added that Tennessee will experience “slightly warmer temperatures” this weekend that “should help minimize additional strain on the power system.”
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network.
Photo “Person Turning Off Light Switch” by Marco Verch Professional Photographer. CC BY 2.0.
How many “rolling blackouts” will there be when we add powering all the cars on our roads to our electric grid?
Do you for one minute think the political elite class will be without power? Don’t believe so.
This is NOT my TVA! A blackout of any sort was intolerable in the old days! It was the “Prime Directive”. How sad the liberal wackos on the board have shut down reliable generation and not replaced it or are replacing it with solar panels on an old ash pond and wind contracts from the Midwest where the wind is blowing too hard for the wind mills to run!!!
Why does the TVA still exist?
It’s already been shown that if the government TVA was sold of to private companies power rates would go down
The TN Republican supermajority that brags on increasing TN population 9% and giving away our money to electric car and battery manufacturing should get a clue. Their corporate welfare policies mean more rolling blackouts are on the way.
As I type this on battery power while we are in a “power blackout” I wanted to share the following. Now that the TVA is controlled by a majority of Biden appointees (read that yesterday or the day before) we can expect these blackouts to become more common. The population of the South is increasing and the clown show that is in control of our government is only focused on “green energy”. You can bet the farm that there will be NO new nuclear or gas fired generating stations built in the foreseeable future. It’s all solar farms and wind turbines. The fact that solar doesn’t generate unless it’s daytime, and turbines don’t generate unless the wind is blowing makes no difference to the ecotopians. And they are also the most expensive forms of power generation.
What drives this is the blatant lie about global warming. The earth has been warming since the end of the last ice age, and will continue to do so. Humanities existence has no effect on the climate, It’s all BS. And the sad part is that the Left has so infiltrated the education system that young people now believe the crap. If you get your news from other sources than the MSM, you know that it’s not possible to build enough electric cars to support the global population, nor is it possible to generate enough electricity via “green energy” to charge all of these cars. European countries are already struggling with this problem. The determent to the earth from the mining and manufacturing of all the batteries that would be needed is far more damaging than the current usage of fossil fuel. If you don’t believe the global warming fairy tale (and there is so much scientific evidence to prove the it’s nothing more than a fairy tale), then you have to ask the question, what is the real reason for this blind obedience to the religion of climate change?
Why isn’t TVA telling us what they have been doing to avoid rolling blackouts and the progress they are making to avoid this in the future???
Thank you, Mike!! Our electricity was off for over six hours yesterday. There is NO reason this should be happening. TVA has the monopoly and a captive audience. They can apparently do whatever they want. Pretty soon they will make other excuses for why we need our electricity intermittently turned off – just like China.
Mike – The only thing that they can claim is that they are putting up more solar panels and windmills. Poor electricity producing devices that freeze up and won’t spin when frozen and cannot make a watt of power when the sun is nowhere to be found.
Ask Texas how that worked out for them last winter.