Power crunches

A surge of demand for electricity and a strong winter storm that froze almost everything forced the power grid operator in Texas, USA to cut supply to millions of households

for days last week. Yet it took only a single person with a crazy idea to cause a discomforting blackout for thousands of homes in one Chinese city.

The winter storm that hit the US froze natural gas wells and blocked pipes as well as froze wind turbines and coal piles in Texas, causing an energy shortage. The normal approach under that circumstance was to avoid a statewide blackout by keeping supply checked to prevent power facilities from overloading and getting damaged.

But putting communities under rotational outage during freezing temperature endangered lives and enraged affected households. As a consequence to the apparent unpreparedness of grid managers and local energy officials, some of them resigned while lawmakers are seeking accountability.

In China, meanwhile, it didn’t take a winter storm for power consumers to experience a surprise outage. In the outskirts of the southwestern city of Chengdu, a local power company turned off electricity supply over the weekend due to an unusual emergency situation.

Tens of thousands of households were reportedly inconvenienced and emergency responders rushed to the location of the disruption.

When everyone learned that one man was responsible for the outage, he became the topic of 1.7 million users of Weibo, China’s version of the microblogging site Twitter. The discussion was filled with angry comments from people who suffered inconvenience. There were many amused and annoyed commenters as well.

The police also got involved as they had to arrest the man who triggered the emergency power shutdown by doing sit-ups on top of a 10-meter-high electricity pole.

The bizarre incident prompted China’s state media to warn the public against doing crunches on top of a utility post.