The State of the Aaron (19 Feb 2021)

4 min readFeb 19, 2021

Here is your update for the morning of Friday, February 19, 2021.

✅ Electricity

The City of Austin has restored power to over 90% of its customers. This seems to match a lot of what I’ve been hearing from my friends, though the electricity isn’t necessarily reliable. That said, we’ll definitely take some electricity over no electricity. Personally, I never experienced any power outages.

❌ Heat

What I learned from my brother and my uncle is that I have an HVAC system which is fairly common in the region for being efficient and inexpensive. The downside, though, is that it stops heating effectively when the temperatures drop below 40℉. There are, of course, mitigation options available so I’ll be looking into that. For now, though, I’ll continue using my space heater and eating warm foods.

❓ Water

My understanding is that water pressure is largely returning to the city, but there are two caveats. First, we’re still under a city-wide boil water notice as a precautionary measure but it is currently indefinite. Second, when things begin to thaw on Saturday we’re going to discover many more pipe breaks so that may have an impact.

❓ Natural Gas

I’ve not heard anything new about this, so I presume that we still need to limit our use of natural gas to prevent outages.

✅ Food

I’m still good on food. More stores are open but there are still supply chain issues, so shelves are still empty. Again, this is a situation which I expect will rapidly improve once the big thaw accelerates the clearing of Texas roadways and, in particular, our many overpasses.

❓ Travel

I’m upgrading this one from yesterday. I actually had an opportunity to get out of the house and do some driving in order to help a friend obtain desperately-needed medication. I’ve driven in worse conditions up in New York. The quality of the roads is, however, highly variable. Some roads basically had two lanes (out of three or four) completely clear. Some roads were dangerous, impassable, and I turned around and found another route. I’m optimistic that things will continue to improve as things thaw.

✅ Gasoline

Unchanged. I still have plenty in my tank. Supply chain issues mean that there is still an ongoing supply shortage.

✅ Bills

You might not have heard that, uh, there’s been some legalized price gouging going on in Texas.

Making matters even more dire, on Tuesday, Texas’s Power Utility Commission, which regulates the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), ordered the nonprofit grid operator to raise prices, arguing it wasn’t accurately reflecting the high demand in the market.
“Energy prices should reflect scarcity of the supply,” the order said.
Fred Anders, who runs the site texaspowerguide.com, said customers could be paying hundreds of dollars a day.
“For the average home in Texas, it translates to roughly $450 a day if they didn’t curtail their usage at all,” he told KHOU.

Source: Texans hit with thousands in energy bills as storms ravage power supply

Luckily, I’m in a two-year energy contract with a fixed rate so I’m not impacted. But this is still super gross.

✅ H-E-B

For those of you who are unaware, we have a legendary supermarket chain called H-E-B (named after its founder’s son, Howard Edward Butt). Anyhow, the short version is that I would totally understand the desire for a society controlled by corporations if all corporations were just like H-E-B.

To give you an idea:

In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in 2017, H-E-B donated $100,000 toward relief efforts. Its campaign drive for customer contributions totaled $1,000,000. In addition, H-E-B’s Mobile Kitchen and Disaster Relief Units distributed 10,000 hot meals to volunteers and victims in the affected areas in Texas.

Anyhow, they’re reportedly stepping up to the plate like they normally do: