A rolling blackout warning issued yesterday afternoon to Farmersville residents on city social media pages was a result of a miscommunication between the city and its transmission provider, Garland Power & Light.
The warning created an immediate buzz across social media, including The Farmersville Times’ Facebook page.
According to city manager Ben White, a communication from GP&L was interpreted by the city as a request to reduce the city’s power consumption.
White said that given the heightened awareness to conserve energy because of the high temperatures, the city immediately began to implement a plan to reduce consumption by approximately 3%.
As the plan was put in place, he said he began receiving calls from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), Oncor and Texas-New Mexico representatives, indicating no blackouts were planned for the area.
ERCOT issued a statement that it had not ordered any rotating outages on its Twitter account at 6:01 p.m.
White said when he became aware of the communication error, city staff began to reverse measures to shed load and communicate to residents about the false alarm.
“As soon as we realized we did not have to implement a conservation plan we began shift back to normal operations,” said White. “No one lost residential power.”
Shortly before 7 p.m. White issued a statement terminating the rolling blackouts, as well as an apology for the error, on both the police and fire department’s social media pages.
He also said that ERCOT was doing a really good job communicating with the city daily regarding power resources.
By Chad Engbrock • [email protected]
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