Several Friends of Unfair Park have asked about reports of a rolling blackout, courtesy Oncor at the behest of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Sure enough: Says ERCOT spokesperson Dottie Roark on her outgoing message, "We are doing rotating outages or rolling blackouts. We don't know how long those will last at this time. It's due to loss of several units over the night because of the extreme weather conditions. We sent a news release to the media asking public for conservation." (That release is after the jump.)

Yeah, but how long will this temporary outage last?

"We don't know how long this will last."

Oncor spokesperson Jeamy Molina tells Unfair Park this morning that the request "kinda came very rapidly, and we had to comply with what ERCOT wants." But she doesn't call it a rolling blackout. Rather, says Molina, "It's called load shedding, and it's a very structured manner where we carefully select feeders to go out for 15 minutes." Problem is, she says, there's no way for Oncor to tell customers when and where those outages will occur till it's too late.

Oncor earlier had promised to get all the power turned on by this morning. Molina says folks experiencing longer-than-15-minute outages may be having weather-related problems not caused by the temporary outage. "We still had some outages [unrelated to the ERCOT demand] this morning," she says.

All I can say is: Better get that coffee maker on now.