That’s impressive. And fairly green-friendly for a state that gets a bad rap for being in bed with oil/gas
By separating what you pay for transmission (monopoly) from generation (free market), it created a persistent demand for more/better/cheaper supply.
It is a much more flexible structure that allows municipalities to do cool stuff like this: https://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/News/detail.aspx?path=/sitec...
Texas will have great energy infrastructure because they let developers build it.
I consider myself someone with "liberal values", but I don't understand why so many liberals like to pretend that the reality of economic incentives don't exist. Sure, it would be nice if we could all sing kumbaya together and build things, but the real world largely doesn't work that way. And it's not just "big developers" - most people would choose the more polluting energy source if it saved them 5 cents.
Other similar situation: so many people in "liberal cities" like to rail against "big evil developers" when it comes to housing, and as a result they have a giant housing shortage that is responsible for tons of social ills. In Austin we've built a shit ton of housing, especially rental, by letting developers build, and surprise surprise housing and rental costs in Austin have fallen a ton since their (admittedly ridiculous) peak.
The Griddy incident wasn't quite "price gouging" if you want to read about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griddy_(company)#2021_Texas_po...
> Griddy advised customers to remove themselves from their system during the storm, and says that over 9,700 accounts did by February 15. On February 17, they asked for PUC approval to switch the remaining customers to a traditional energy provider, but the PUC, which was overwhelmed by the situation, was unable to discuss the matter.
Outages do cause deaths, that is for sure. PG&E has killed a lot of people by that metric and unfortunately PG&E's problems are a little harder to fix.
For example, during the 2021 winter storm and outage, a huge problem was that no power producers had any incentive to weatherize their systems, resulting in a huge chunk of them all going offline at the same time. It seems more than reasonable to require producers to have some minimal level of weatherization, and to provide incentives to producers that have better weatherization.
This is kinda my point - I'm not arguing for a totally deregulated free-for-all, as the unregulated free market is notoriously bad at dealing with "black swan" events. But that doesn't mean that sensible regulations can't be put in place that still use economic incentives to achieve their goals.
Regulation on a minimal level of weatherization is not an economic incentive.
I.e., if you want to participate in the electricity producer market in TX, you need to have X level of weatherization. Call that regulation, fine, but essentially every private, non-governmental-run market has a set of rules that all participants need to adhere to in order to participate in the market, and the penalty for non-compliance is getting kicked out of the market. That's basically what I'm arguing for here.
Texas has actually done a lot better at producing supposedly "liberal outcomes" by acknowledging the reality of economic incentives. We've built a ton of renewables. We've also built a ton of housing that have shown the stark contrast to the idiotic housing policies of California. I'll also give a shout-out to the "Sunset Commission" of the TX legislature, which reviews government/regulatory bodies every 12 years to ensure they're still fulfilling their original mission.
At the same time, we have idiotic laws that force women to leave the state to get healthcare that will save their lives. Our educational financing system is a disaster.
Point being I don't consider myself a "centrist", I just want to choose policies that actually work, regardless of tribalism.
Additionally every time I hear someone claim that companies running everything will be more efficient, when I dive into their beliefs I find out that they expect organizations they call “governments” are required to do many tasks that would not be required of organizations they call “corporations” and that is where all the “efficiency” comes from.
If this was supposedly so much more of an “efficiently system then why has Texas experienced years of outage causing problems in their electrical grid?
I'm not saying the government can't be efficient, but taxes represent a cash flow that is close to completely unbound to the results of their spending, so it's much easier for them to be used poorly depending on who's in charge.
Part of the point I’m trying to drive to is that many of the problems people have with governments are actually problems with organizations operating at scale
(And obviously that can be largely fixed with a carbon tax, but good luck getting that to happen.)
I would say I am progressive politically but the ostensibly progressive mindset that led to denying that housing supply could help with the cost of housing has been crazy harmful. Even with the newfound acknowledgement that housing production is necessary, it's going to be harder and more expensive to catch up - peakier demand for trades labor and materials also drives up prices!!
Another key point, look up net migration in Austin. During the pandemic and remote work, everyone and their brother wanted to move to Austin, it was super trendy and a lot of tech was moving there. Look it up now. In Q4 2023 not only did grow to slow but it reversed to net outflow. Thats a massive difference in demand for housing and a massive difference in supply of housing. [1]
Yes, more homes got built, but there were many other factors at play than something simple like “let them build houses”.
1. https://www.redfin.com/news/housing-migration-trends-q3-2023...
True but also doesn't explain the Austin housing market. Austin added more new apartments just east of downtown in 5 years than San Francisco built in the entire 1990s. The differences between pro-housing and deeply anti-housing local attitudes do not come down to geography.
Either way it seems like housing prices started to decline spring 2022, about 1 year after the massive spike in building permits started in earnest.
There are a lot of impediments to doing the same thing in say, the Northeast, where I am. Labor is insanely expensive. This land has been occupied by city for hundreds of years, and greenfield does not exist nearby, nor is there the appetite to Ctrl C Ctrl V build massive subdivisions, especially out of reach of transit here.
Austin proves a relationship between supply and housing prices, but it will always be incumbent upon cities and states to pave the way for massive construction of housing in times of need. I think that long term, that means working to develop the labor pool and participation in the trades, streamlining permitting and inspection (I just finished a gut reno and this was a fucking nightmare), and yes, changing zoning so the mass housing projects actually can get built.
Actually maybe I should build something - like a ratings site.
Texas has no income tax which is why they have high property taxes.
With property taxes you don't have that coupling between changes in income and changes in the tax. That can make a property tax way more painful.
That's exactly what should happen in a productive economy: big cash payments to give up underutilized land to somebody who can make better use of it.
People talk about taxing granny out of her house, but they conveniently forget to mention that granny is keeping half a dozen people homeless by hoarding an underutilized property.
That’s a distasteful and predatory way to speak of someone who rightfully bought her property, possibly a widow, and just wants to live in peace versus having someone (business or gov) try to break the rules to take her property.
It's far more distasteful to ignore the needs of everyone to give a very minor convenience to somebody with a lot of wealth.
Winston Churchill on this sort of old and wrong political argument about widows:
https://savingcommunities.org/docs/churchill.winston/budgetr...
Where are you getting that from?
In most cases when granny sells her house and moves due to high taxes the buyer will be a single family that will live in the house. In the vast majority of cases that family will have less than half a dozen people, and in the vast majority of cases they will not have been homeless before.
In a place like New York, Massachusetts, or California, you have alot of intellectual property driving the economy, so you need to tax income. New York's discretionary budget is essentially derived from income taxes on a few thousand people. New York/Mass vs. California shows why each thing is important -- NY and Mass are leaders for K-12, California is ranked like 35-40 among states.
Local control of property taxes mean that the former can fund education effectively, which they do outside of the hood. California schools are stuck with trying to extract dollars from the state legislature, as the boomers effectively pay no property tax.
CA, NY, and MA all have terrible problems with housing and land use in general, largely caused by poor allocation of land due to extremely poor taxation.
Land in Manhattan, Cambridge, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles is some of the most productive land in the world, but the extraction happens because of the network effects of bundling people together.
By taxing the land rents, poor uses could be replaced by far better ones, increasing the land value and economic output even further.
Property tax isn't quite as good as a land value tax, but it's at least getting towards taxing the right thing.
This was another California Republican idea, namely Reagan's, and I think he implemented it nationally when he was president too.
This means that in boom cycles with lots of IPOs and acquisitions, the California state coffers are bulging with money, but in a broad economic downturn there are a few news cycles of "California has a $XYZ billion state budget deficit" before the new budget is set since that deficit is how the new budget is set (no news articles on the balancing, though). There's a big appetite for anti-California news and I have little patience for the assholes who gobble up that misinformation...
Most people radically overestimate California income taxes because of propaganda by the narrow group of people paying top marginal rates directed at the broad group of people who pay closer to the median rate, because the former group wants the latter group to act against its own interests.
California did that for a few years. Auctions every half hour, everyone pays the spot price. It was too exploitable by energy traders and resulted in blackouts. Also, PG&E went bankrupt, after a century as a regulated utility. The current system trades energy mostly on a day-ahead basis, which is more stable.
Ask Houston about letting developers build with little oversight. Or, ask the home owners that bought some of that property.
Ask homeowners that live on wells that have become polluted because of Texas being in bed with oil and the little oversight applied. The rap is well deserved not unfortunate.
Land use isn't nearly as free-wheeling as people both here and elsewhere like to pretend. There's loads of restrictions, both good and bad, and permitting is not quite the nightmare as it is in (from what I hear) New York City, but it's still no walk in the park if you are trying to do anything unusual.
Entire countries [1]. (Hell, our nation's capital.)
If your house flooded in Allison, Harvey, or the Tax Day floods, I am sorry that you went through that, but I am curious: when was it built?
1) most years (with notable exceptions), peak electricity happens when the sun is shining 2) west Texas is very windy
One of the reasons that TX was caught flat-footed a few years ago in a cold snap, was that in a decade we went from oil-and-coal power generation to mostly natgas (which froze up), wind (which froze up, albeit not as much as the natgas), and solar (not working at night). It was the first very hard freeze under the new power mix. Not so long ago TX was talking about "clean coal"; now it is natgas, wind, and solar.
Just a note about how much wind froze up in Texas: wind outperformed projected supply for the cold snap.
[1] https://idc-online.com/technical_references/pdfs/electronic_...
There's no magic source of power that is immune from needing to prepare for exceptional weather conditions.
Edit: I want one so bad, something cool about being a farmer but farming photons instead of plants and animals.
Especially for grazing, raised photovoltaic allows the photons to be harvested along with allowing goats or cows to graze the landscape.
Crops can also be grown in between rows of solar.
This arrangement also mitigates the often destructive effect that large utility scale solar has on the landscape.
The landscape degradation is why having generation, and transmission, be as locally contained as possible is the best technical solution. But utilities often fight this, since they make money on large utility scale project, and loose money on building and neighborhood scale generation and distribution.
As always, the middle way is the best. Too bad nuance is not longer an allowed perspective...
You can already see this conflict in all the areas where the new factories have been built from Biden's IRA. These factories generally raise wages quite a bit, invigorate communities that feel like they have been forgotten, but that it's clean energy doing the good is kept on the down-low. To mix metaphors: don't poke the bear, lest the bear cuts off its nose to spite its face.
But today it is not "politically incorrect" to advocate for changes to the environmental regulations for California Democrats. And they are definitely pursuing changes to regulations!
So you are very correct that regulations are in the way, and that Democrats are in power, but you are wrong that it's politically incorrect to change the regulations.
In California politics, only Republicans pass things. Democrats always pursue and advocate.
Notably, by today's political standards, (gubernatorial-era) Reagan and Wilson would be characterized as moderate Democrats.
I would argue that it makes little more sense for a nation state to take on that economic risk, either. Risk can be priced, and the bill for many the risks of nuclear are already picked up by others due to the laws around nuclear. If, even with those massive subsidies, nuclear is too economically risky for utilities, I would argue that it's too costly overall for anyone. Or at least a poor decision.
Until there's some major innovation in nuclear construction, the risk should be reserved for those with no better options (e.g. Finland, maybe the UK, etc.)
I've yet to see anything solid in this latest talk of nuclear renaissance (which they talk about every year) that can't be put down to silicon valley nerds moving in weird political circles that are irrationally attracted to nuclear power.
Then you realise it costs multiple times more than renewables and batteries (ain't that the real revolution), takes over a decade to build and imposes large obligations on the owners.
Moving the solar supply chain to be domestic is a massive undertaking. First Solar, one of the stronger US companies, will be at at 50/50 manufacturing in the US versus not:
"We inaugurated our new $1.1 billion Alabama facility, which when, fully scaled, adds 3.5 gigawatts of vertically integrated nameplate solar manufacturing capacity. The start of commercial operation at the Alabama facility, along with our under construction Louisiana facility, which remains on track to begin operations in the second half of 2025, keeps us on course to achieve our projection of over 14 gigawatts of annual U.S. nameplate capacity and over 25 gigawatts of global nameplate capacity by 2026." https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2024/10/29/fi...
You are correct that it will take investment to continue to build factories here instead of Malaysia or India, but the factories will be built regardless.
The technology for a 100% renewable energy system for all of humanity is about 90%-95% there, the biggest impediment is political and not technical now. (Hard-to-decarbonize areas like industry is close but not there yet, and we can do all the other areas while new solutions are found for cement, chemicals, etc.)
As the solar and storage costs continue to plummet even if you can’t sell electricity to the grid we will increasingly see more and more homes with near zero electricity usage for much of the year.
No matter how much you attempt to force fossil fuels down these people throats there’s nothing you can do if people simply don’t pull energy from the grid. Then the expensive facilities sit unused.
Offloading these costs on the voters will quickly become politically untenable.
To block solar, some states are putting high fees on base connections, and low per kWh costs. If the grid-connection fees subsidize the per-kWh generation fees, it breaks the economics of lowering your consumption from the grid with your own generation.