Is it time lag? By the time someone thinks to build more power, it is winter again and everyone is like 'man, kind of chilly, nah-we're good'.
It could well be that even with these price spikes the energy retailers still have enough arb during the normal times to cover these wild times. If so it seems like markets are working insofar as consumers are paying lower average prices.
It might be that occasional price spikes are more economic than building new generation capacity.
Also 0.12 is cheap but not the cheapest, see for example how much people pay in Quebec
There's a simple trick they used with making canals for barges back in the day. You dig a 3foot hole and line the sides with a 3foot wall and you get a 6foot deep canal.
I suspect the bigger issue with the parent's comment is that just because you know Texas has surge pricing doesn't mean that the surge will be high/long enough to cover the opportunity cost of energy storage. I bet spending say 1 billion on a new oil rig will pay back more money than 1 billion on a pumped storage.
Yep, deregulation is better for SOMEONE. I wonder who that might be.
For the next 600Kwh it goes to $.10, and then the next tier I used 882KWh at $0.12.
I find the rates reasonable. Texas is also leading the way on both solar and wind adoption. This is keeping the power supply at peak much more stable.
So the market is working exactly as it's supposed to? It's also really friggin hot right now.
Is there strong reason to not accept this as the new summer norm?
Could it be that someone is being taken advantage of? Say, perhaps, people that were mislead?
You see this everywhere frankly. Reliability is only valuable to business customers. Customers will not pay for reliable appliances, reliable airlines, etc.
Because no one has the money for that any more. Almost all of our problems, in the end, boil down to decades of wage stagnation correlated with cost-of-living explosion. Like 58% of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck [1]... they are living the Boots Theory [2] and left to deal with the fallout when disaster (inevitably) strikes.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/11/58percent-of-americans-are-l...
A second individual option would be to use a gas generator if the electric rates are too high, and install solar for longer term savings. Individual gas generators would be a horrible option for climate change, but may be a short term solution while waiting to install solar.
"Except for a couple of failures, we don't have failures".
https://www.sacurrent.com/news/texas-experienced-more-power-...
> Of the 1,542 weather-related outages documented in the U.S. over the study's 20-year analysis, 180 were in Texas. Michigan ranked second with 132 and California third with 129.
I took from the study that, the rate of outages is going up for the entire country. The total is trending up.
But we can't really pile on Texas for being worse. Its just that Texas is also increasing, but at same rate as everyone else.
We can't pile on Texas for getting worse faster, they are getting worse in line with everyone else.
Texas population: 29.53 million
Michigan population: 10.05 million
California population: 39.24 million
180 / 29.53 = 6.09 events per million people
132 / 10.05 = 13.1 events per million people
129 / 39.24 = 3.29 events per million people
It could be worse for other states, but I'm not going to dig for the numbers on my phone. If you do, please post your calculations.
You could achieve something similar by using a flat rate, but subsidizing the solar some other way, perhaps with direct handout, and raising taxes to pay for that. In some ways, that would be more direct and easy to understand. However, this does at least have the advantage of most incentivizing the capacity which is available when it is most needed.
Not that Austin was very conservative before COVID, well, you probably knew that.
But all of that takes time. Some of it has come online and is helping, and proce jumps like this will continue to attract more of those projects.
There’s little like politicians who haven’t done anything in business making decisions in economy like they have.
We get the leaders we deserve.. is the saying?
A few outlier events don't change that unless your being hyperbolic.
https://www.sacurrent.com/news/texas-experienced-more-power-...
I think you are thinking in terms of there were 'only two state wide catastrophic failures that took down entire grid and became national news so I remember them'.
But really, isn't that a pretty low bar? 'we've only had 2 complete state wide grid collapses, what's the problem'.
Of course we are going to have power outages that are localized!
You said "2". There should be more than 2 before we worry.
Sorry, if you were very narrowly defining this to only 2 "Major Winter Outages". I was saying, how many problems do we need before we can say something without being considered 'hyperbolic'. There are a lot more outages.
People just remember the big ones, and forget the rest. It's trying to argue when people only have short term memory. Yeah, there were 2 big ones that people remember, that isn't all of them. Things aren't normal if there is an increasing rate.
We were discussing grid failures, of in which there have been two in 50 years, both caused by an extreme period of low temps.
We can talk about weather events and localized incidents. It's really boring the moment we adjust for size or even per capita.
I mixed up a few different threads to this post, between purely 'winter outages', 'total demand', 'general climate'.
I also didn't check if the article I cited was per-capita or not, or even per-Total Area, or something. If it wasn't, and since Texas is bigger, then that un-fairly tilts the numbers.
And of course, with any numbers this year, almost all replies are 'it's el-nino'. And that is true. So guess we step back and wait another few years for a more compelling trend? See if everything really does average out next year.
You're mad, we get it. But you're trying too hard to be right.
>"We have significant surplus of electricity in Winter" Unless it's >"too cold"