Texas power prices soar 20k% as brutal heat wave sets off emergency | Hacker News Reader

Texas power prices soar 20k% as brutal heat wave sets off emergency

markets.businessinsider.com

22 pointsgrecy15 comments

Texas's power grid is amazing to me. If it's too hot it fails, if it's too cold it fails.

And it's in a state where it's basically always too hot or too cold.

Seems like a really bad deal for everyone.

It's a great deal for the rest of the country, who doesn't have to take Texas into account when managing the other two grids.

It's also a great deal for Texas not having to deal with the East or West's grids. That was, in fact, what prompted the disconnection in the first place.

One of my favorite things driving through West Texas is seeing fields of cattle out to the horizon, grazing under a sea of giant wind turbines, with oil derricks sprinkled across the fields for good measure. The ranchers out there squeeze every dollar out of their land, and they have no prejudice against setting up gratuitous wind (and, I'm told, solar) power like one might think.

The bottleneck is apparently transmission. There are already some transmission projects in progress, but they take time to build.

I wonder how much of it went to this bitcoin miner for reducing their usage.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-bitcoin-min...

They could have paid zero, and just let the bitcoin miners figure it out. Mining is definitively unprofitable at those prices.

The reason for paying them is to prevent blackouts. They also don’t pay market prices.

Maybe Texas should have some more natural gas plants.

Natural gas? I thought they drilled oil there ... They got lots to burn /s. Remember when Texas was saying how much better it is there than Cali or anywhere ... yeah, they didnt mention the fine print.

Even better, Texas is like #2 in GDP. Surely, Texas could cede and be a perfectly fine nation unto its own. Granted, it wont be under US protection ... and why would Mexico ever want it back?

Why would ceding help? Texas is already running their own electric grid, and they seem to be doing so incompetently. My local LDC (Hydro One) is ridiculously expensive, but we haven't had rolling blackouts anytime aside from the 2003 blackout in my memory.

The one thing that amazes me the most about Texas is just how large their GDP is compared to just how poorly they perform on any metric that improves lives.

These things are related.

Probably more money in price gouging during power shortages than building power plants that usually sit idle.

https://archive.is/IZtsM

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