Wind is outpacing coal as a power source in Texas for the first time

I suspect that using outside electricity is a purely economic issue. That is, when the value of additional products produced is greater than the cost of extra electricity needed. So in that sense, oil refineries are like aluminum refineries, in that they can store surplus electricity.

The relevant comparison is arguably greenhouse gas emissions per km. For ICE, you clearly must include emissions during refining. But that could be ~zero, if all the process energy were wind, solar or nuclear electricity. Or it could be an additional 70%, if all the process energy were petroleum. So the range is 1.0-1.7 times nominal fuel emissions.

For BEV, total emissions could be ~zero, if all the electricity were wind, solar or nuclear. But if the electricity were generated from fossil fuels, you'd have nominal fuel emissions plus both refining process energy and generation loss.

Electricity from natural gas could be the clear winner, because you get additional energy from two H2 for C converted to CO2. Unless leakage were too great. And there's ~no conversion loss in the vehicle. So that's maybe 0.4-0.7 relative to gasoline/diesel fuel emissions.

Electricity from coal and petroleum would clearly be worse. For coal, because there's ~no H2, and because generation efficiency is lower than for natural gas. And for petroleum, because you have the 0%-70% process energy, less H2 per C, and somewhat lower generation efficiency. But there's ~no conversion loss in the vehicle for either. So overall that's maybe 0.8-1.4 relative to gasoline/diesel fuel emissions.

Bottom line, relative to nominal ICE fuel emissions:

    ICE  ~1 to ~1.7
    BEV  ~0 to ~1.4

Alternatively, if folks suddenly demand wind and the supply is not there, I'd think there should be some sort of way for the companies to earmark money to meet the wind demand. This is especially true if the company is charging an optional premium fee for "green energy".

I'll note two things, by the way

1. O&G companies also get tax subsidies.

2. The Republican led government of Texas approved giving electric cars the right to use the HOV lane with one person in the car, so you must thus acknowledge that they are at least as irrational

Sorry, how exactly do you balance that? On one side, you have government encouragement of renewable energy, low emmission vehicles, and solar power (though on that one they got scammed). I can see arguments that the first two are bad policy, and the third is a straight up mistake (and fraud on the part of a few individuals). None seem "irrational".

On the other, you have a whole political party that has simply "decided" to reject long-settled consensus science on the basis of what they "want" to be true philosophically.

Really?

Fossil fuels are subsidized by almost 5 trillion USD a year. How do you expect anything else to be able to compete?

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=42940.0

2) The supply chain is non-trivial to negotiate, particularly batteries, which will give their long time competitors an opportunity to eat them.

3) Autonomy is hard and it’s not clear there will be cheap good software that’s available to license

4) Car dealers don’t want to cannibalize their ICE inventory by marketing electrics. ICE makers are legally tied to the dealers.

All of these are solvable, but I don’t expect more than 1 or 2 will be able to solve all 4.

There will be a lot of consolidation.

The other parts of the US participate in either ERCOT, CAISO, MISO, SPP, ISO-NE, PJM, or NYISO which all do commitment and dispatch. ERCOT is a little unusual as they don't co-optimize reserves in their real-time 5-minute market. Each of these markets has an independent market monitor that looks for participant gaming and other market anomalies. FERC mandated this after some heavy abuse in the north east from a utility where the fine was divided up and went to funding the market monitoring groups. Either this group or sometimes the market software itself looks for instances of market power being demonstrated. For example, if you're unit is sitting right on top of a congested area and your offer jumps up a certain percent, the software pushes you back to the approved offer that the market monitor verified is your true marginal cost. So the market is deregulated, but there is still plenty of regulation of a sort.

In a perfect market, yes you would have uneconomical units shut down quickly, but this isn't the stock market and there are many reasons why this doesn't happen all the time. Maybe you need it for capacity reasons (markets have rules on how much you need to reliably serve load or they even have capacity markets) as wind and solar aren't as reliable as thermal generation.

In Chicago, my peers were promoted to the point of graduation still being functionally illiterate. In Northern Virginia, my 4th grader was barely a 1st grader by ability - math, reading, and general knowledge - but kept getting promoted.

So what if my 11th grade American History teacher gave a week-long seminar on the Civil War as "states rights", and explained to the class (nearly 1/3 of which was black) the lexicon of racial classifications--"now a _blue_ black was somebody who was really dark and because of the sun reflected on their skin...". I still learned 99% of the same American History as everybody else. Most of us were rolling our eyes in class, anyhow, and while these types of teachers are not uncommon, they're not exactly common, either. It's more like that they're tolerated because it's understood that they represent a persistent aspect of the local culture that isn't going anywhere. And for the most part for any particular subject you're learning from multiple different teachers at different times, so it's not like you don't learn the legitimate subject material. It's more like you're taught what today we call "alternative facts", and in practice they're really only taken in by the same segment of the population that's creating those facts. If a kid grows up steeped in this culture at home, the presence or absence of it at school is almost irrelevant. The important point is that they're at least exposed to the real facts--which they are, perhaps with the exception of sex education.

Combined with the fact that most people aren't particularly intellectually curious and don't retain much of the detail, it's sufficient that they're taught the proper material in broad strokes. And they are.

Plus, after having traveled the world some as an adult, most places around the world--even in places Americans look up to as more "civilized"--have similar issues where local biases and mythologies are taught as fact when they're glaringly, painfully wrong-headed to more objective observers. While most of the kids in my class were rolling their eyes, there are kids in similar classes in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and even Europe eagerly taking notes on some ridiculous and patently prejudiced narrative.

The weird thing about being American is that we've been having an intense, rancorous, open argument about ourselves and our prejudices for at least 50, if not 100, or even 200 years. Everybody else gets to watch it, too. You'd think Americans are the most racist, bigoted, backward people on the face of the earth. In reality, it's just that we were one of the first--and still one of the few--to recognize our bigotry and prejudices systematically. Not just by an intellectual, bourgeois elite. Even the most bigoted American won't take at face value a narrative that group A is intellectually, genetically, or morally inferior from group B. Every coal rolling white nationalist (not that these things always come together) have shockingly modern and sophisticated ideas about race and culture, even if cringe worthy. In most parts of the world people will treat claims that group A is worse than group B no more worthy of suspicion than claims that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Except for Americans--everybody knows how racist Americans are. Racism is an American problem. It's why they're talking about it so much.

To be clear, we are racist and we are biased. I don't want to say that we're any more or less these things than somewhere else; I'm not sure what value there is in that comparison.[1] But there's a level of self-reflection here that is absent or at least lesser in most of the rest of the world.

[1] I mean, we had slavery here. That's crucial. But so did most of the Americas. Slavery was at least as formative to Brazil as it was to the U.S., and any curious traveler to Venezuela, Columbia, and even Ecuador can see shadows of the same anti-black prejudices and ostracism we're familiar with in the U.S., entirely home grown and stemming from their native histories of slavery. It's just these shadows are often simply considered as the way things are supposed to be, though I think Brazil is more like the U.S. than other countries in how they've internalized a more sophisticated ability to reflect on these things.