ERCOT Twitter shows how out of control the situation got for them in only an hour's time Sunday night into Monday.
ERCOT has declared an EEA 1. Energy conservation is needed. There are no rotating outages at this time. 00:17:45 150221
ERCOT has declared an EEA 2. Consumers are urged to reduce electricity use. Rotating outages may be needed to protect the system. 01:12:06 150221
ERCOT has declared an EEA 3. Energy conservation is critical. Rotating outages are underway to reduce demand on the electric system. We urge Texans to put safety first during this time. Traffic lights and other infrastructure may be temporarily without power. 01:25:40 150221
I work for a large city government (10K employees), most of our non-first responders were just furloughed ranging from full-layoff (1K), 10% pay (1.5K), 80% pay (3K), 95% pay (100), and 100% (5.5K). I fall into the 80% category.
It works out great for me because I now qualify for state & federal unemployment benefits that will allow me to net more than I'm actually making at least through 7/31 while working only 4 days a week.
Municipal Government Employee here (from a top 15 US city).
Municipal & State IT systems (particularly around cyber-security) are atrocious (See Atlanta, Baltimore Ransomware). Many of our (and our peers') systems are a hodgepodge of paper, excel sheets, legacy systems, and new off the shelf systems.
At the end of the day, government maintains a strong role in the operations of cities, counties, and states. For example, our city manages the issuance of more than 250,000 permits annually, a road network of more than 10,000 lane miles, and an annual capital infrastructure budget of nearly $1 billion.
There is a very real need for better IT systems that can be customized to meet the needs of differing legacy systems and data structures by municipalities. If our city is any indication of the industry, there is an insane amount of waste and mismanagement that can be attributed to poor/legacy systems or data.
I've tried so many times to work with government entities. It's a complete mess. It seems the only people who want to fix the problems don't work there or are fine with the problems.
- Procurement rules that require RFP/RFQ to obtain software and limit departments' abilities to get low cost, easy-win solutions.
- Older, non-tech savvy workforce
- Administrations that focus on high visibility IT projects (to public) without thinking about the not sexy foundational issues that are needed. Also politics.
- Siloes between departments that result in many types of systems that don't talk to each other.
- There's so much to do within government and so much that can be improved that the people who get things done are often overburdened. We're both understaffed and overstaffed at the same time. (not enough project managers!)
- Startups try to sell us solutions on problems that are only a small part of a bigger issue
ERCOT has declared an EEA 1. Energy conservation is needed. There are no rotating outages at this time. 00:17:45 150221
ERCOT has declared an EEA 2. Consumers are urged to reduce electricity use. Rotating outages may be needed to protect the system. 01:12:06 150221
ERCOT has declared an EEA 3. Energy conservation is critical. Rotating outages are underway to reduce demand on the electric system. We urge Texans to put safety first during this time. Traffic lights and other infrastructure may be temporarily without power. 01:25:40 150221