This is totally nuts. I saw a video clip on Facebook of water streaming down the steps of the Aquarium T station and it made my eyes go wide.
Itβs insane. A friend posted a picture from the Gloucester high parking lot, which is right next to the river. The cars look like they are frozen in the arctic, with giant blocks of ice floating everywhere.
I saw a photo of that! The people in Hull getting evacuated off the roof.... absolutely crazy. No way I am trekking to Boston tomorrow with everything such a mess.
So where the majority of people use electric heat, it is a higher load on the grid in the winter than the summer. In areas where gas heat is mostly used, the summer AC peak is worse than the summer. Gas furnaces are far more efficient but they are more expensive, and donβt make sense where people donβt use the furnaces much, or where electricity costs are lower.
Oddly, in Quebec, since electricity prices are very low, there is far more electric heat used than in Ontario, where gas heat is cheaper.
The grids are also probably being impacted by loss of power from suppliers due to the wind or general outages. So the utilities are stuck doing rolling outages or controlled brownouts.
I take back what I said about the winds being only slightly worse than usual. Tonight is SO much worse than yesterday. I've been lying awake for an hour cringing at the gusts and wondering if they might start breaking windows. It feels and sounds like an actual cyclone tonight, and like I said, we're not even close enough to the coast to have gotten any of the snow. UGH.