The city of Dallas has requested that City Hall and the Convention Center be exempt from the rolling blackouts ordered by ERCOT early Wednesday morning.
The city feels that City Hall and the Convention Center, which are playing host to the Emergency Operations Center for the Super Bowl and the NFL Experience, respectively, are critical events and cannot be without electricity.
Hotels in downtown Dallas, where many fans are flocking in the run-up to the Super Bowl, were not affected by the controlled outages because they have a special hookup to the power grid, said Larry Auth, a spokesman for Omni hotels.
The hotels where the teams are staying have backup generators, and any power outages would be brief while the hotels switch to those generators, Auth said. The NFL said some of the hotels the league is using have had "brief but expected" outages that have caused no problems.
Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, home of Sunday's Super Bowl, was exempt from the outages, said Jeamy Molina, a spokeswoman for Oncor, which supplies electricity to 7 million consumers.
But the city of Arlington didn't request such an exemption, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.
The city's fire chief told the newspaper that the stadium and city facilities were "OK from a backup power perspective." The stadium's backup generator can run for up to a couple of days, M-E engineers of Dallas told the newspaper.
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Dallas' entire release, as sent by Dallas spokesman Frank Librio, is below.
The City has requested that, if possible, City Hall and the Dallas Convention Center (which is hosting the NFL Experience) be exempt from rotating power outages. City Hall is open today for the Dallas City Council Briefing and other public business and it is also where the Emergency Operations Center is located for Super Bowl week. The EOC is operational 24 hours a day during Super Bowl Week monitoring, and responding if needed, to public safety issues associated with hundreds of special events. These operations are critical. Some libraries and/or recreation centers and other City facilities may be impacted by the rotating power outages.
Also, there will be many dark traffic signals and subsequent malfunction issues associated with the rotating power outages. Please remind commuters that signals may be dark and to proceed with caution. State Law requires the drivers stop at a dark traffic signal. The City will be assigning extra staff to restore traffic signal operations through out the day.
Frank Librio - PIO
At 11 a.m., the city issued another release that said the Central Business District is not part of Oncor's load-shedding plan because of double-redundancy designed in the structure of the grid in the CBD.
In other words, the area may be hit by a rolling blackout, but due to the redundancy on the grid, the CBD shouldn't lose power.
Oncor has confirmed that the load shedding plan does not include 'network facilities' within the Central Business District (CBD). The City facilities downtown should not be impacted due to the design of the power grid in the CBD. The power grid in the CBD was designed with double redundancy - built in a two layer system to avoid such incidents downtown. Oncor uses the term 'network facility' to describe customer facilities that are in the CBD and part of this double redundancy power grid.
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