Texas power plants have no responsibility to provide electricity in emergencies
kut.org
kut.org
Texas has a great system under normal conditions that has incentivized a ton of solar and Panhandle wind, but it is not built for severe conditions.
Public utilities are essential services. “Great when times are good” literally is the worst type of arrangement. Having a public entity that exits to drive private profit is disgusting and a great example of the insanity of modern political thought.
I don’t know that it’s “great” for anyone except the guys in the energy market who see the upside from volatility. The rates I see right now are higher than what my local utility charges, about on par with our all-renewable option, and we have no downside scenario where the prices skyrocket or the power goes out with no accountability. I do appreciate the amount of wind power (and hope the politicians don’t stymie that industry) but it doesn’t appear to be especially unique in that growth.
Name 10 other states with faster adoption of renewable energy in the past 20 years.
California and...?
Doesn't seem like it's that common to me.
If you want per capita renewables, Iowa and Kansas beat both Texas and California.
> Iowa reached an impressive clean energy milestone in 2020, according to data recently released from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Iowa produced the highest percentage of electricity by wind of any state, at 59.6%. This figure represents a sharp increase from 2019, which had the state at 42% electricity from wind.
> Although Texas has the greatest installed wind turbine capacity of any state, it provided just under 20% of the state’s electricity in 2020. Iowa’s wind generation capacity of 11,660 megawatts in 2020 provided just shy of 60% of the state’s electricity. [1]
Iowa's grid is almost done changing. Texas is playing catch up.
[1] https://www.iaenvironment.org/newsroom/energy-news/iowa-near...
If it's common there should be dozens of examples. There's 50 states, there should be plenty of examples.
There's literally several states with >80% renewables and one with 99.7%. More than a dozen way ahead of Texas. All you had to do was look up a single Wikipedia page to check your argument. Good luck with your goalposts.
The challenge was "Name 10 other states with faster adoption of renewable energy in the past 20 years." Please point to where you've answered that.
In any case, my point was simply that if we’re seeing a system with recurring widespread life-threatening outages described as great, I think it’d need to be almost free or 100% non-polluting to balance that out. The 2021 outage alone was responsible for hundreds of deaths and damages in the hundreds of billions range, so I kinda expect better than “a top competitor to CAISO”.
You can play here https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...
> The biggest winners were companies with access to supplies, including leading energy trader Vitol, gas suppliers Kinder Morgan (KMI.N), Enterprise Products Partners (EPD.N) and Energy Transfer (ET.N), oil giant BP plc (BP.L), and banks Goldman Sachs (GS.N), Bank of America (BofA) (BAC.N) and Macquarie Group (MQG.AX).
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/results-tally-up-bil...
My argument is that splitting the market up like that has been better to traders than Texas consumers.
Thought renewables were cheaper than fossil fuels?
No. It's not winter proof, it's not interconnected with it's neighbors.
It absolutely is not a "great system". It's a controlled system for its own greed.
It's downright shocking the difference in frequency between power losses I experienced on the regular in Texas vs. what my out of state family experience. I started keeping track of it a couple years ago. My family can have dozens of sporadic outages in a span of time with 100% uptime for me in TX. Smaller, less interconnected networks can be a godsend. Hell, it's a lesson that's immortalized in our interstate highway system.
...Then again, I suppose that there's the case to be made that more frequent outages keep your response teams sharp. There is a drop off among Operations people whereby knowledge tends to end up getting forgotten when too much time passes between completion of repeated periodic tasks.
In my family while growing up we kept flashlights and candles handy, and us kids were (very lightly) drilled on where to find them when the power went out. And again, this was in the middle of the metro, not out in any rural parts.
Interestingly, I've found most problems seem to be metro-centric in Texas. Austin, for instance, in patticular has a horribly architected power network, where much of downtown's skyscrapers and what not share a circuit that is never load shed, leaving only the residentials to be. This escalated to tragic consequences during the Winter storms of a few years ago when everyone was told to stay home (and freeze due to lack of power), while all of the buildings downtown where they'd have ostensibly worked kept their lights and heat on.
Families would have unironically been better off braving the streets to park themselves in a heated office downtown rather than trying to make due in their own homes. The landlords, lawyers, insurers, and sadly the fire departments, however, would have had a meltdown trying to figure out who should be culpable for anything that ended up happening as a result of the terrible decisionmaking when building the trunk. Cutting everyone loose on their own recognizance was a brilliant stroke of legal culpability shedding there.
Gg Austin Power on that one. Friends over in Dallas were also reporting a similar situation there during the hullaballo. If it's taught me anything, it's that urban planning of power networks seriously needs some rearchitecting in those locales.
The miss here is what about PUCT who governs ERCOT. ERCOT did everything in their set of rules. We probably need to change the rules for emergencies, that’s up to the legislature and the appointees of PUCT.
I suspect the answer is far more mundane: the consumers purchased something like 98% availability, and this is what they got.
Is there like just a form you fill out to get this?
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/the-year-the-texa...
And NERC is basically the same structure as ERCOT.
In the case of ERCOT I am less interested in lawsuits but how we change the rules going forward. Do we want to introduce language about emergency power. Have we worked out a fix for not killing power to the natural gas wells? The governor appoints member to the org that ERCOT reports to. I don’t like him but enough voters do that we won’t get change there.
Access to basic utilities is provided, but uptime is not 100% and never will be. And nobody can expect them to be, if you have a life threatening issue which requires 24/7 power, you should have a backup like a generator that automatically kicks on for your life providing machine, and maybe even a third backup. Same as if you host something that needs 3 9s of uptime, you have a primary host and a backup host or region or what ever.
But the US is also a very big place with big empty spaces filled with very small communities. Along with strong devolution in governance, there are "some" very remote communities where the population cannot support a permanent local fire service and relies on locally organized volunteers. They can choose to fund that in a variety of ways, by taxes/subs combination. And of course you may live so remotely that even that is not realistic.
I very much doubt the US is unique on this point.
Can you link a source?
Most countries that I'm aware of with large wilderness areas don't provide any meaningful fire fighting service past the first dozen or two miles.
Most Americans could never afford that.
If you are driving a relatively modern car and have no small $350 gas generator at home for emergencies I absolutely question your priorities in life.
Nearly everyone in the nation could come up with $500 over a few years. They simply choose to spend it elsewhere.
Home owners have utterly zero excuses. It should be the first thing you buy after your home.
> Nearly everyone in the nation could come up with $500 over a few years. They simply choose to spend it elsewhere.
How out of touch this is depends on what exactly you mean by “nearly everyone.”
Now, lithium backup packs are a thing. However, for any extended needs you will probably also want solar panels or some other way to recharge, and you may need a second battery so that you can recharge one while using the other (the units I purchased do not allow discharge while charging)
Now, consider who tends to have the greatest problems when the power goes out for an extended period of time: the elderly, poor, and disabled people who have the most challenges doing that. Saying that everyone should maintain their own personal auxiliary power supply so the energy providers can be more profitable is the same as saying that it’s okay for those people to die because they aren’t rich enough.
It's bad, but not quite that bad. The person who suggested a generator was talking about the case of people who have some life threatening condition that they need electricity to survive.
In most cases that will mean they only have to use the generator to power a small number of things. In that case they don't need to modify their electrical system. They can power their things from the generator's normal household outlets. They just need long enough extension cords to get from wherever they have to put the generator to their life saving devices.
They'd probably only need a small generator, maybe a couple thousand watts. Those are light enough (20ish kg) and small enough (small suitcase sized) that it should be easy to store indoors when not actually in use. That should get rid of most of the hassle of winterizing.
Go for a propane generator instead of a gasoline generator. They produce much less dangerous emissions than gasoline generators so should be easier to find someplace safe to operate. Also stored propane does not go bad over time, like stored gasoline, so you don't need to rotate your fuel. Propane tanks are also safer than gasoline tanks so propane is easier to store safely.
But wait, it’s not a viable solution for everyone. So we build organizations which formalize this commitment in the form of a monthly payment.
After a while this becomes predatory and sharp, and the need emerges for this to be formally socialized as a part of living in society.
I understand your sentiment of investing in some life saving gear that is cheap for its great value. But I would encourage you to widen your perspective and understand that when faced with the decision to pay for groceries and car insurance to ensure one can keep working, or put back money for a gas generator for something used every 4 years, they're going to pick no interruption to groceries and car insurance. And rightly so.
If you're of the type that promotes larger government, you need to write to your government to encourage them to provide this equipment out of their taxes. If you're of the type that promotes less government, you need to write to your government to encourage them to tax less and/or provide tangible tax breaks for this equipment a la solar.
Millions of Texans lost power, only a few hundred died. For most people losing power really isn't a big deal they need to be super concerned about. They get more blankets out of the closet and carry on just fine. People vulnerable to freezing to death in a few days without power are a small minority; it's pretty much just very elderly people without much sense living alone and infants with very neglectful parents.
The issue in Texas isn't that power was out for a few hours, the issue is it was out for several days. This should be unacceptable and it is absolutely reasonable to expect a rich, developed nation to guarantee this does not happen. Especially in freak weather events that are going to increase in frequency in the future due to climate change.
Even within a neoliberal country it's entirely within the realms of the government to force corporations that maintain infrastructure to comply with basic service guarantees or at least threaten to nationalize the business, you can privatize it later again. This is critical infrastructure. I know people dying doesn't matter to libs, but this cost other corporations in Texas a lot of money too. How can you have a free market where the basic infrastructure is this unreliable.
I believe the issue is because Texas thinks it does not snow so they avoid any emergency procedures for snow. Well it does now, so they should prepare for that, as unlikely as it is.
Same as insurance, credit cards, real estate, investing, the justice system, health, education, pretty much everything. Also, every one of these potential pitfalls has a zillion dollar budget hyper focused on tricking you through advertising.
We somehow still have an obligation to pay their salaries, though.
Maybe on point: as someone living in a country with relative big government and reaping the huge quality of life reward from it, I just can’t understand why people would want to create a society where you risk losing basic facilities such as electricity.
What happened in Texas is such a string of failures to actually govern and force companies to adhere to regulations, it’s crazy to me.
The temperature in Texas reliably doesn't go below freezing, except in freak weather events such as these. That's why they had water pipes exploding everywhere.
So I think this is analogous to the Netherlands having a week of >40°C weather (>105°F).
Sure, you could blame the government for some of the resulting chaos, but it's also partly the freak event itself.
Most of the people that died in that event in Texas would be alive if they had sufficiently warm clothing. Is that entirely the fault of the government?
“If they had sufficiently warm clothes”… sufficient is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Besides, if freezing is such a freak event, why do you expect people to prepare and not the government to prepare.
The temperatures in many homes were below freezing for several days. There are normal citizens who cannot survive such an event.
In The Netherlands the worst you’ll typically see is some delays with trains, perhaps a couple of trains (of the many per hour) being cancelled.
In my 30+ years in the Netherlands I’ve never experienced a brownout, much less a blackout. Hell I haven’t even experienced a modest outage. Only once have I heard of a blackout, and that was when a helicopter flew into power lines.
And that’s not even touching on how ridiculous it is that you’re trying to equate being able to stay warm and alive at home with being able to travel, while at the same time trying to blame people for not being prepared for something you claim is rare.
They have made sure it’s a heads they win, tails you lose situation.
On the back feeding side, I am not sure. While in many areas it’s not as financially lucrative to add back to the grid, it also is a much more realistic number. For too long areas like CA had models that meant homes were not contributing to the transmission they could access and were being paid closer to retail rates instead of generation rates.
So I don’t think it’s quite as one sided as you paint it.
Or more likely you will end up governed by monopoly corporations.
And yes, a common trope of their complaints is a kafkaesque system where it seemingly exists exclusively to be underfunded, under performing and practically intended to breed more resentment from the general population so that they're more amenable to just completely dismantling the civilian system altogether since they now see no incentive or convincing argument for it.
It's genuinely scary. Especially since you get to pretend like you're trying and the system just doesn't work, so we need to get rid of it to "save money".
--The other Frank Wilhoit
The good parts are mainly surrounded by the separation of concerns. There are two main grid operators, their only concern is maintaining and expanding the transmission. They get a flat fee for this work. Generators are purely in the business of generation. Of course they are there to make a profit but the beauty of this part is we can move a lot quicker than other states to build out new generation, lots of clean. While other states are still struggling, Texas is leading the front in new plants. Sometimes at night the wind capacity is so large it dips close to negative prices.
ERCOT in my opinion gets a lot of attention and too much of the blame. ERCOT from all the prior readings I have done, did their best given their operating rules. PUCT Who governs them and is comprised of appointed staff from the governor iirc has gotten little to no attention.
This article was a lot of fluff and could have really been summed up with the ending. Providing emergency power was never in the original rule set.
It’s easy for us to just say oh Texas sucks, it’s filled with a bunch of conservatives, this is what they want. I think that’s a weak argument though that is a little childish. Don’t get me wrong, I am not happy with many parts of the government, but in this scenario I don’t believe this was an evil conspiracy by design. Unsure if there is enough want in the people to change it.
Ideally this would require some type of emergency clause on generation but I am not sure what that would look like. Someone has to be on the hook for paying the generation.
With all that said, I am still overall happy with the structure. We generate a lot of clean power and we have the incentives to build more and more of it out. We should not force generators to produce outside of the energy market so we need to figure out how and who pays for this emergency power.
There's absolutely reasons ERCOT and Texas are blamed steadily, and it's because they refuse to interconnect with other systems and refuse to winterize.
I don't see news of people dying around here because of predictable winter storms.
Winterizing is not predictable and the poster said he is concerned in the summer which can be just as deadly as the winter. So yes, I want a further elaboration.
Im paying >$0.50/kwh which is something like 4x the price in Texas, and I still need a backup generator because outages >24hours are common, even in the bay area
If elderly dies from cold weather in a blackout, the community and neighbours do not care for them. I guess most do however, but knowing many elderly, that stubbornly refuse to ask for help, it is probably hard to know if some neighbours are freezing to death.
The power company is way too far up the chain to check in on weak elderly.
I also find it odd we don't utilize the postal service more. They already visit every house 6 times a week.
They use something called a clusterbox. This is only applicable to the US but my understanding is that the postal service has strict limits when it comes to hiring full time workers. Something about having to account for full benefits or some act of Congress that I don't understand. But the net effect is your postman/post woman likely doesn't know you besides your name.
You don't send people with guns drawn to someone if you suspect they might kill themselves by hanging themselves in their own home.
We can't rely on informal / social structures though. Maybe the old person is like that old man from the Disney Pixar movie up who refused to sell his house. If your neighbors resent you, it doesn't mean you must die.
I didn't mean it necessarily has to be a citizen run initiative.
Being old, poor, disabled, etc, is no excuse for not being able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.