Rolling blackouts re-discussed

(Revised) In my previous post on rolling blackouts, I wondered if Centerpointe were perhaps on the same electrical circuit as the nearby police station and, therefore, would escape having the power cut.  Obviously law enforcement services are vital to the public and can be cut only as a last resort.

There's not enough publicly-available information at this point to answer that question definitively, but the current evidence suggests that it may turn out to be generally true that we will escape blackouts in the future, as we appear to have done this time. 

CenterPoint (the utility conglomerate, not the neighborhood... and I bet I am not alone in counting the days until that company goes through their next merger or sale, such that they change their unfortunate name!!)... CenterPoint released a map showing where the rolling blackouts were, and why. 

Not all of the colored territory belongs to CenterPoint, but the map suggests that, for emergency management purposes, they are acting as if it does.

The popular local blog Fuel Fix followed with a somewhat feebly-attempted explanation of what the map contains.  None of this info necessarily makes much sense to our neighborhood residents until you consider where we are in relation to everything:

Screengrabbed and excerpted from
http://www.scribd.com/doc/48176709/CNP-RollingBlackOuts-Feb2-2011-Final
The resolution of this map is crummy, making it more subject to errors and uncertainties.  The red areas reportedly lost power one or more times this past Wednesday.

We appear to be within a "yellow" area and Fuel Fix describes "yellow" as follows:

In another group are customers served directly by high-voltage transmission lines, such as the large industrial customers along the Houston Ship Channel. They’re off the hook because suddenly cutting power to a chemical plant or refinery can create other serious problems, such as hazardous chemical releases. On the [map, those] are the yellow areas.

Well, heck, I haven't noticed too many refineries in our vicinity, but perhaps their explanation is oversimplified and/or the geographic coverage for each referenced circuit is large.  But here's the odd thing: despite the level of local detail provided on CenterPoint's map, we're technically not within their service area - we are serviced by Texas New Mexico Power (TNMP).  There's some question about that in Fuel Fix's comment section, and some question in MY mind as to what really constitutes meaningful "yellow" in the map above.

At any rate, it looks like we might possibly get lucky on this issue, unlike my buddies in north Clear Lake, who were quick to tell me about their powerless unhappiness on such a cold, cold morning last week.  Not that any of us expect a significant number of rolling blackouts in the future but, hey, it's potentially useful to have a basic awareness of these things to the extent that the power companies will allow one.