I look forward to witnessing more Texas-style deregulation nightmares. This will probably play out as the financial equivalent of their paroxysmal electrical grid. Sometimes your purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/infrastruct...
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Texas also recently announced a program to build a series of distributed small nuclear reactors around the state which is cool.
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/27/texas-small-nuclear-...
Minutes of Power Outages: The number of minutes of power outages the average customer experiences in a year, excluding major events. (U.S. Energy Information Administration; 2022).
No they aren’t. They’re often repeated, but they aren’t true.
Texas had a catastrophic “grid failure” in 2021. It hasn’t had any actual issues since. There have been no power outages due to “grid failure” since that one event. The past couple winters and summers have seen several situations where the grid operators have issued warnings, but these warnings are completely normal and are part of the process to inform power producers to not go offline, etc. In software terms, it’s basically the equivalent of “it’s going to be a busy day today, try to avoid doing any deployments to prod unless they’re really necessary”.
Just like the train derailments last year, and the airplane issues this year, the media loves to use the fervor around a single bad event to then create big headlines about every similar event.
Back to the software example, imagine if every big shopping holiday there was an CNN headline of “Amazon told its developers they cannot deploy to prod today. Amazon is worried about an outage!!” And because the layperson doesn’t know any better, they fall for it. But in reality, it was business as usual.
Do other states regularly have multi-day outages that impacts hundreds of thousands of people? I know California has at times with wildfires, but other than that? Are these issues below the line for being considered "systemic"? I'm actually asking, not refuting using question marks.
And yes, other states have this problem as well. See https://poweroutage.us/about/majorevents.
Yes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_Hurricane_Sandy_i...
Sandy was relatively weak when it hit the East Coast. Most Texans wouldn't blink an eye at a category 1 with 80 MPH winds. That's the same wind speeds as the storm that hit Texas a few weeks ago and knocked power out.
I've seen the headlines, I was asking for clarification on what made those different. I do think "storm preparedness" is not a category that should be excluded from consideration given their occurrence is also systemic (and may increase due to climate change), but I'm also open to how these outages differ from more systemic outages. The difference that makes sense to me is that federal regulations - the topic at play here - wouldn't have impacted these situations at all. Makes sense.
No, but perhaps you can have better plans for responding to such events, different staffing practices, temporary measures of some sort, etc.
The Texas grid is better compared to a third world country. It works great except when there is an emergency or any sort of edge case. Reliability numbers miss the context of a transmission line failing when it is 68 degrees and sunny vs a natural gas line freezing up when its -7 and everyone needs electricity to not die.
Pricing is handled exactly the same way: its $0.12/kWh when things are normal, but jumps to $7.00/kWh as soon as there is an emergency. Normal states split the difference and charge something like $0.14/kWh all the time so that when you're forced to run your heater 24/7 to stay alive you don't have to sell your car to pay your power bill.
In fact power in Texas is cheaper on average than many other places in the US (including NYC, where I live). This is partially because Texas is the energy center of the US, with abundant wind, solar, and oil/gas.
The Texas grid is the opposite of a third-world country. The engineering and operations groups at ERCOT are extremely competent, even if the PUCT sometimes forces them to make stupid decisions.
Yes, everything is fine if you have money and can choose. Other states explicitly ban these types of pricing models because they are predatory and can result in the people who are most price sensitive ending up in financial ruin.
I have no doubt that ERCOT has some good people working there. At the macro level however Texas makes isolationist decisions like not engaging in interstate energy sales agreements because they would subject the energy industry in the state to more federal regulation.
You might be interested in reading the final report of the 2011 incident, where ERCOT agreed that having appropriate capacity to the Eastern and Western interconnects would have mitigated most of the problems. https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-05/Reportonthe...
With fixed rate you are on a 6-36 month contract where your rate is fixed typically around the $0.12/kWh you mentioned above.
Variable rate plans change the rate month to month but has never been near the $7.00/kWh you're claiming https://shellenergy.com/Historical-Rates
Griddy was the company that hit the headlines who sold at live wholesale prices as you used electricity had 29k customers and is not how the typical electric company in Texas works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griddy_(company)
Yes, most sane well regulated places don't allow things like this to exist in the first place.
The pricing scheme you describe was true for a company that no longer exists, for a type of pricing that is no longer allowed. The number of customers were in the minority.
I’m curious what other companies you’re thinking of when you say “like many others”, because all of the ones I can think of have moved significant parts of their operations to Texas.
I just wish Texas cared about individual freedom as much as they do corporate freedom.
As in "Texas's future is bright because of past performance", which is just an assumption that doesn't take a lot into account, like harsh weather patterns, weak infrastructure, and living in texas.
In fact hundreds of thousands of Houstonians lost power for extended periods just last month.
What? I'm also a lifelong Texan and have experienced rolling blackouts once: during 2021.
> In fact hundreds of thousands of Houstonians lost power for extended periods just last month.
You mean after a massive storm with 100 mph winds destroyed infrastructure and flooded the city?
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/18/weather/houston-storms-power-...
To some degree, saying "As a life long Texan" then trying to generalize the "Texas Experience" to be your own is as incorrect as saying "As an American, there are mountains everywhere and it's green and beautiful".
Deregulation of power grids (which has been done throughout the US, not only in Texas) isn't the same as removing red tape in financial reporting. It's about removing oversight of large, vertically-integrated utilities by fostering competition of unintegrated market participants.
Deregulating power grids has been such a success for flexibility and renewable energy integration that the European Union codified it into law in 2019.
Is it working perfectly in Texas? Absolutely not. Is it an example of utter failure of "deregulation"? Absolutely not!
My issue is, "deregulation of electricity markets" means "unbundling vertically-integrated utilities", not "removing oversight". This Texas Stock Exchange is about removing oversight.
[0]: https://apnews.com/ferc-jpmorgan-owes-410m-for-price-manipul...