ERCOT, PUC, and deregulation got us here

[washparkhorn 9,967]

Do we have agreement on the bullet point (facts?) below?

Lignite (or brown coal)

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/strip-mining-coal-in-the-heart-of-texas/

According to the University of Texas Energy Institute’s Assistant Director Dr. Fred Beach:

• Lignite coal is essentially “brown dirt” and frequently referred to as “oil mud.”
• Because of its low energy-density and high moisture content, lignite coal is the least efficient type of coal to burn.
• All told, two-fifths of coal consumption is Texas is met using locally-mined lignite coal.
  • The rest of its demand is met using subbituminous coal brought in from Wyoming.
• Texas lignite coal is produced exclusively via surface strip mining (also called open-pit mining).
  • While Texas historically been produced its lignite using underground coal mining, producers began using strip mining techniques in the 1920s. According to the Texas Railroad Commission, by 1951, this method was the only one being used to produce lignite coal.

 

Edited February 24, 2021 by washparkhorn

[Beau Vine 55,823]

58 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

the 5 members that resigned today were making between $87 and $99k / year 

To be fair, that's not a lot... I guess if you assume they were actually doing their jobs, which they didn't seem to be.

[MoJames 8,258]

To be fair, that's not a lot... I guess if you assume they were actually doing their jobs, which they didn't seem to be.

[bad_teammate 13,479]

B_T for Governor 2022 wearing a nuclear-reactor-shaped hat and a t-shirt that says "ASK ME ABOUT THORIUM".

[TwiceHorn 31,987]

10 hours ago, Captainant said:

I thought gassification was the way to go with coal since it permits more filtering of contaminants before burning, and it can be more easily burned than coal dust

It is.  Just adds a lot of steps to the process and precludes use of local lignite, I believe.  Oh, I just realized my simplified description of gasification makes it seem like pulverized coal, which is old technology that is still burned in boilers.  That's not what I meant.  Technically it's more complicated than what I described 

 

9 hours ago, washparkhorn said:

Do we have agreement on the bullet point (facts?) below?

Lignite (or brown coal)

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/strip-mining-coal-in-the-heart-of-texas/

According to the University of Texas Energy Institute’s Assistant Director Dr. Fred Beach:

• Lignite coal is essentially “brown dirt” and frequently referred to as “oil mud.”
• Because of its low energy-density and high moisture content, lignite coal is the least efficient type of coal to burn.
• All told, two-fifths of coal consumption is Texas is met using locally-mined lignite coal.
  • The rest of its demand is met using subbituminous coal brought in from Wyoming.
• Texas lignite coal is produced exclusively via surface strip mining (also called open-pit mining).
  • While Texas historically been produced its lignite using underground coal mining, producers began using strip mining techniques in the 1920s. According to the Texas Railroad Commission, by 1951, this method was the only one being used to produce lignite coal.

 

Sounds right.  40% of coal sounds high for power purposes, maybe there's some other use for it.  Solid detailed information about Texas power plants is hard to find.  I think partly because it's ever changing, even within a single plant.

Edited February 24, 2021 by TwiceHorn

[Hagbard Celine 11,159]

23 hours ago, Bookman said:

Half of my law practice is representing utilities and pipeline companies and I’m not hearing anything regarding pipeline failures, certainly no transmission lines. Any failures must have been at the wells or the plants. But I certainly haven’t spoken to everyone.

If you know more can you name which transmission lines failed? I’d like to look into it.

this thread has devolved in to discussion of scenery.   people need to go to jail and they won't because this event was a fundamental breakdown of the entire commercial and regulatory construct around our profit-only texas-only grid.  i'm sure it's been posted somewhere upthread but in the chaos of the last week if i missed it my apologies, everyone needs to re-read this if they haven't already because the blame game is going to get real serious as everyone tries to duck the cost of this clusterfuck

+++++++++++

The Two Hours That Nearly Destroyed Texas’s Electric Grid

“Seconds and minutes” from total catastrophe, the state struggled to handle an extreme weather event, which led to the largest forced power outage in U.S. history.

February 20, 2021, 7:00 AM CST Corrected February 21, 2021, 1:54 PM CST

The control room of the Texas electric grid is dominated by a Cineplex-sized screen along one wall. As outdoor temperatures plunged to arctic levels around the low-slung building 30 miles from Austin last Sunday night, all eyes were on it. The news wasn’t good.

Electric demand for heat across the state was soaring, as expected, but green dots on the corner state map started flipping to red. Each was a regional power generator, and they were spontaneously shutting down — three coal plants followed quickly by a gas plant in Corpus Christi.

Then another metric began to flash: frequency, a measure of electricity flow on the grid. The 60 hertz needed for stability fell to 59.93.

Bill Magness, chief executive officer of the grid operator, was watching intently and understood instantly what was at stake. Below 59 and the state’s electrical system would face cascading blackouts that would take weeks or months to restore. In India in 2012, 700 million people were plunged into darkness in such a moment.

Texas was “seconds and minutes” from such a catastrophe, Magness recalled. It shouldn’t have been happening. After the winter blackouts of 2011, plants should have protected themselves against such low temperatures. The basis of the Texas system is the market — demand soars, you make money. Demand was soaring last Sunday, but the plants were shutting down.

If insufficient power came in, the grid wouldn’t be able to support the energy demand from customers and the other power plants that supply them, causing a cycle of dysfunction. So over the following hours, grid operators ordered the largest forced power outage in U.S. history.

More than 2,000 miles away in San Juan, Puerto Rico, power trader Adam Sinn had been sitting at his computer watching the frequency chart plummet in real time. He knew the dip would be enough to start forcing power plants offline, potentially causing more widespread blackouts. It was an unprecedented situation but, from his perspective, entirely avoidable.

In fact, it was a crisis years in the making. Texas’s power grid is famously independent — and insular. Its self-contained grid is powered almost entirely in-state with limited import ability, thereby allowing the system to avoid federal oversight. It’s also an energy-only market, meaning the grid relies on price signals from extreme power prices to spur investments in new power plants, batteries and other supplies.

There’s no way to contract power supply to meet the highest demand periods, something known as a capacity market on other grids. There are no mandates or penalties compelling generators to make supply available when it’s needed, or to cold-proof their equipment for storms like the one that slammed Texas last weekend.

So, as the cold began shutting in natural gas supplies, freezing instruments at power plants and icing over wind turbines, there wasn’t enough back-up generation available to meet demand. As many as 5 million homes and businesses were abruptly thrust into frigid darkness for nearly four straight days as the crisis continued, ensnaring more than a dozen other states as far as away as California and roiling commodity markets across the globe.

Now, as the snow across Texas melts and the lights come back on, answers remain hard to come by. What’s clear is that no one — neither the power plants that failed to cold-proof their equipment nor the grid operator charged with safeguarding the electric system — was prepared for such an extreme weather event. What happened in those two hours highlights just how vulnerable even the most sophisticated energy systems are to the vagaries of climate change, and how close it all came to crashing down.

The warning signs started well before the cold set in. Nearly a week before the blackouts began, the operator of a wind farm in Texas alerted the grid manager, known as Ercot, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, that ice from the impending storm could force it offline, an early signal that capacity on the system would likely be compromised.

On Thursday, a natural gas trader trying to secure supplies for his company’s power plants for the holiday weekend was surprised to see prices surging. The reason? There were concerns that gas production in West Texas was at risk of freezing off, which would crimp supplies for power generation. And Sinn, the owner of Aspire Commodities, noticed from his computer in San Juan that day-ahead power prices on Texas’s grid were climbing, a sign that the market was anticipating scarcity.

By Saturday, a considerable amount of capacity was already offline, some of it for routine maintenance and some of it due to weather. This is because in Texas peak demand is associated with summer heat so many plants do routine maintenance in winter.

Wind was the first to go, as dense fog settled over turbine fleets, freezing on contact. The slow build-up of moisture over several days caused some of the blades to ice over, while connection lines began to droop under the weight of the ice until power production from some wind farms completely ceased. But because the resource makes up a minor share of Texas’s wintertime power mix, grid operators didn’t view it as a big problem. Then gas generation began declining. That was inconvenient, but not unmanageable. There was still plenty of supply on the system.

On Sunday, the mood in the control room grew tense. As the cold deepened, demand climbed sharply, hitting and then exceeding the state’s all-time winter peak. But the lights stayed on. Magness and his director of system operations, Dan Woodfin, watched the monitors from an adjoining room, satisfied that they had made it through the worst of the crisis.

“We thought maybe we are OK for the rest of the night,” Magness said.

They weren’t.

At 11 p.m., the green dots on the monitor overlooking the control room turned red. Across the state, power plant owners started seeing instruments on their lines freezing and causing their plants to go down. In some cases, well shut-ins in West Texas caused gas supplies to dip, reducing pressure at gas plants and forcing them offline. At that point, virtually all of the generation falling off the grid came from coal or gas plants.

“Contrary to some early hot takes, gas and coal were actually the biggest culprits in the crisis,” said Eric Fell, director of North America gas at Wood MacKenzie.

Back in Taylor, the town northeast of Austin, where Ercot is based, orange and red emergency displays began flashing on the giant flat-screens that lined the operators’ workstations.

“It happened very fast — there were several that went off in a row,” Magness said.

In the span of 30 minutes, 2.6 gigawatts of capacity had disappeared from Texas’s power grid, enough to power half a million homes.

“The key operators realized, this has got to stop. This isn’t allowed to happen,” said Magness.

By that point, the temperature outside had fallen to 5 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 15 Celsius). Across the state, streets were icing over and snowbanks piling up. Demand kept climbing. And plants kept falling offline.

No one in the room had anticipated this. And it was about to get worse.

The generation outages were causing frequency to fall — as much as 0.5 hertz in a half-hour. “Then we started to see lots of generation come off,” Magness said.

To stem the plunge, operators would have to start “shedding load.” All at once, control room staff began calling transmission operators across the state, ordering them to start cutting power to their customers.

“As we shed load and the frequency continued to decline, we ordered another block of load shed and the frequency declined further, and we ordered another block of load shed,” said Woodfin, who slept in his office through the crisis.

Operators removed 10 gigawatts of demand from 1:30 a.m. until 2:30 a.m., essentially cutting power to 2 million homes in one fell swoop.

The utility that services San Antonio, CPS Energy, was one of those that got an order to cut power.

“We excluded anything critical, any circuit that had a hospital or police,” CPS chief executive Paula Gold-Williams said Friday. “We kept the airport up.”

Alton McCarver’s apartment in Austin was one of the homes that lost power. The IT worker woke shivering at 2:30 a.m., an hour after the blackouts began, and tried turning up the thermostat. “Even my dog, he was shaking in the house because he was so cold,” he said.

McCarver wanted to take his wife and 9-year-old daughter to shelter with a friend who still had power, but the steep hills around their home were coated in ice and he didn’t think they could make the drive safely. “You’re hungry, you’re frustrated, you’re definitely cold,” he said. “I was mostly worried about my family.”

The power cuts worked — at least in so far as Ercot managed to keep demand below rapidly falling supply.

But the grid operator shed load so rapidly that some generators and market watchers have wondered whether they exacerbated the problem.

What’s more, frequency continued to fluctuate through the early hours of the morning, potentially causing even more power plants to trip, according to Ercot market participants. The Sandy Creek coal plant near Waco was one them, falling offline at 1:56 a.m. in tandem with the frequency dip, according to data from the plant operator. 

Ercot, however, maintains that the frequency stayed above the level at which plants would trip.

And as blackouts spread across the state, power was cut not only to homes and businesses but to the compressor stations that power natural gas pipelines — further cutting off the flow of supplies to power plants.

Power supplies became so scarce that what were supposed to be “rolling” blackouts ended up lasting for days at a time, leaving millions of Texans without lights, heat and, eventually without water. Even the Ercot control center lost water, and had to bring in portable toilets for its staff. 

“It’s just catastrophic,” said Tony Clark, a former commissioner with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and a senior adviser at law firm Wilkinson Barker Knauer LLP. 

By Friday, when Ercot declared that the emergency had ended, 14.4 million people still lacked reliable access to public water supplies, and the crisis had already cost the state $50 billion in damages, according to Accuweather. Meanwhile, some generators made a windfall as energy prices soared to $9,000 a megawatt-hour during the crisis. In all, generators have earned more than $44.6 billion in electricity sales alone this year — more than 2018-2020 combined, according to Wood Mackenzie. Those earnings don’t take into account any hedges that may have been in place.

In the wake of the blackouts, the Public Utility Commission of Texas announced an investigation into the factors that led to the disaster.

But at least the lights were coming back on. In the afternoon, shell-shocked people trickled out of their homes to soak up the sun. “It feels crazy standing outside in the 40 degree sunlight,” said Cassie Moore, a 35-year-old writer and educator, who offered up her shower and washing machine to her boss and friends who were still without power or water. “In this same spot a few days ago I was worried that my dogs might freeze to death.”

++++

the responsibility for choosing winners and losers at the level of individual citizens was unavoidable for ERCOT.  the blame and culpability falls with those responsible for creating the macroeconomic environment, it's construction, and regulation, and they need to go to jail even if only for a symbolic day to pay their debt to society for the misery and catastrophic misfortune they have inflicted on the citizens they supposedly govern.

[SydneyCarton 49,325]

4 minutes ago, Hagbard Celine said:

this thread has devolved in to discussion of scenery.   people need to go to jail and they won't because this event was a fundamental breakdown of the entire commercial and regulatory construct around our profit-only texas-only grid.  i'm sure it's been posted somewhere upthread but in the chaos of the last week if i missed it my apologies, everyone needs to re-read this if they haven't already because the blame game is going to get real serious as everyone tries to duck the cost of this clusterfuck

+++++++++++

The Two Hours That Nearly Destroyed Texas’s Electric Grid

“Seconds and minutes” from total catastrophe, the state struggled to handle an extreme weather event, which led to the largest forced power outage in U.S. history.

February 20, 2021, 7:00 AM CST Corrected February 21, 2021, 1:54 PM CST

The control room of the Texas electric grid is dominated by a Cineplex-sized screen along one wall. As outdoor temperatures plunged to arctic levels around the low-slung building 30 miles from Austin last Sunday night, all eyes were on it. The news wasn’t good.

Electric demand for heat across the state was soaring, as expected, but green dots on the corner state map started flipping to red. Each was a regional power generator, and they were spontaneously shutting down — three coal plants followed quickly by a gas plant in Corpus Christi.

Then another metric began to flash: frequency, a measure of electricity flow on the grid. The 60 hertz needed for stability fell to 59.93.

Bill Magness, chief executive officer of the grid operator, was watching intently and understood instantly what was at stake. Below 59 and the state’s electrical system would face cascading blackouts that would take weeks or months to restore. In India in 2012, 700 million people were plunged into darkness in such a moment.

Texas was “seconds and minutes” from such a catastrophe, Magness recalled. It shouldn’t have been happening. After the winter blackouts of 2011, plants should have protected themselves against such low temperatures. The basis of the Texas system is the market — demand soars, you make money. Demand was soaring last Sunday, but the plants were shutting down.

If insufficient power came in, the grid wouldn’t be able to support the energy demand from customers and the other power plants that supply them, causing a cycle of dysfunction. So over the following hours, grid operators ordered the largest forced power outage in U.S. history.

More than 2,000 miles away in San Juan, Puerto Rico, power trader Adam Sinn had been sitting at his computer watching the frequency chart plummet in real time. He knew the dip would be enough to start forcing power plants offline, potentially causing more widespread blackouts. It was an unprecedented situation but, from his perspective, entirely avoidable.

In fact, it was a crisis years in the making. Texas’s power grid is famously independent — and insular. Its self-contained grid is powered almost entirely in-state with limited import ability, thereby allowing the system to avoid federal oversight. It’s also an energy-only market, meaning the grid relies on price signals from extreme power prices to spur investments in new power plants, batteries and other supplies.

There’s no way to contract power supply to meet the highest demand periods, something known as a capacity market on other grids. There are no mandates or penalties compelling generators to make supply available when it’s needed, or to cold-proof their equipment for storms like the one that slammed Texas last weekend.

So, as the cold began shutting in natural gas supplies, freezing instruments at power plants and icing over wind turbines, there wasn’t enough back-up generation available to meet demand. As many as 5 million homes and businesses were abruptly thrust into frigid darkness for nearly four straight days as the crisis continued, ensnaring more than a dozen other states as far as away as California and roiling commodity markets across the globe.

Now, as the snow across Texas melts and the lights come back on, answers remain hard to come by. What’s clear is that no one — neither the power plants that failed to cold-proof their equipment nor the grid operator charged with safeguarding the electric system — was prepared for such an extreme weather event. What happened in those two hours highlights just how vulnerable even the most sophisticated energy systems are to the vagaries of climate change, and how close it all came to crashing down.

The warning signs started well before the cold set in. Nearly a week before the blackouts began, the operator of a wind farm in Texas alerted the grid manager, known as Ercot, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, that ice from the impending storm could force it offline, an early signal that capacity on the system would likely be compromised.

On Thursday, a natural gas trader trying to secure supplies for his company’s power plants for the holiday weekend was surprised to see prices surging. The reason? There were concerns that gas production in West Texas was at risk of freezing off, which would crimp supplies for power generation. And Sinn, the owner of Aspire Commodities, noticed from his computer in San Juan that day-ahead power prices on Texas’s grid were climbing, a sign that the market was anticipating scarcity.

By Saturday, a considerable amount of capacity was already offline, some of it for routine maintenance and some of it due to weather. This is because in Texas peak demand is associated with summer heat so many plants do routine maintenance in winter.

Wind was the first to go, as dense fog settled over turbine fleets, freezing on contact. The slow build-up of moisture over several days caused some of the blades to ice over, while connection lines began to droop under the weight of the ice until power production from some wind farms completely ceased. But because the resource makes up a minor share of Texas’s wintertime power mix, grid operators didn’t view it as a big problem. Then gas generation began declining. That was inconvenient, but not unmanageable. There was still plenty of supply on the system.

On Sunday, the mood in the control room grew tense. As the cold deepened, demand climbed sharply, hitting and then exceeding the state’s all-time winter peak. But the lights stayed on. Magness and his director of system operations, Dan Woodfin, watched the monitors from an adjoining room, satisfied that they had made it through the worst of the crisis.

“We thought maybe we are OK for the rest of the night,” Magness said.

They weren’t.

At 11 p.m., the green dots on the monitor overlooking the control room turned red. Across the state, power plant owners started seeing instruments on their lines freezing and causing their plants to go down. In some cases, well shut-ins in West Texas caused gas supplies to dip, reducing pressure at gas plants and forcing them offline. At that point, virtually all of the generation falling off the grid came from coal or gas plants.

“Contrary to some early hot takes, gas and coal were actually the biggest culprits in the crisis,” said Eric Fell, director of North America gas at Wood MacKenzie.

Back in Taylor, the town northeast of Austin, where Ercot is based, orange and red emergency displays began flashing on the giant flat-screens that lined the operators’ workstations.

“It happened very fast — there were several that went off in a row,” Magness said.

In the span of 30 minutes, 2.6 gigawatts of capacity had disappeared from Texas’s power grid, enough to power half a million homes.

“The key operators realized, this has got to stop. This isn’t allowed to happen,” said Magness.

By that point, the temperature outside had fallen to 5 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 15 Celsius). Across the state, streets were icing over and snowbanks piling up. Demand kept climbing. And plants kept falling offline.

No one in the room had anticipated this. And it was about to get worse.

The generation outages were causing frequency to fall — as much as 0.5 hertz in a half-hour. “Then we started to see lots of generation come off,” Magness said.

To stem the plunge, operators would have to start “shedding load.” All at once, control room staff began calling transmission operators across the state, ordering them to start cutting power to their customers.

“As we shed load and the frequency continued to decline, we ordered another block of load shed and the frequency declined further, and we ordered another block of load shed,” said Woodfin, who slept in his office through the crisis.

Operators removed 10 gigawatts of demand from 1:30 a.m. until 2:30 a.m., essentially cutting power to 2 million homes in one fell swoop.

The utility that services San Antonio, CPS Energy, was one of those that got an order to cut power.

“We excluded anything critical, any circuit that had a hospital or police,” CPS chief executive Paula Gold-Williams said Friday. “We kept the airport up.”

Alton McCarver’s apartment in Austin was one of the homes that lost power. The IT worker woke shivering at 2:30 a.m., an hour after the blackouts began, and tried turning up the thermostat. “Even my dog, he was shaking in the house because he was so cold,” he said.

McCarver wanted to take his wife and 9-year-old daughter to shelter with a friend who still had power, but the steep hills around their home were coated in ice and he didn’t think they could make the drive safely. “You’re hungry, you’re frustrated, you’re definitely cold,” he said. “I was mostly worried about my family.”

The power cuts worked — at least in so far as Ercot managed to keep demand below rapidly falling supply.

But the grid operator shed load so rapidly that some generators and market watchers have wondered whether they exacerbated the problem.

What’s more, frequency continued to fluctuate through the early hours of the morning, potentially causing even more power plants to trip, according to Ercot market participants. The Sandy Creek coal plant near Waco was one them, falling offline at 1:56 a.m. in tandem with the frequency dip, according to data from the plant operator. 

Ercot, however, maintains that the frequency stayed above the level at which plants would trip.

And as blackouts spread across the state, power was cut not only to homes and businesses but to the compressor stations that power natural gas pipelines — further cutting off the flow of supplies to power plants.

Power supplies became so scarce that what were supposed to be “rolling” blackouts ended up lasting for days at a time, leaving millions of Texans without lights, heat and, eventually without water. Even the Ercot control center lost water, and had to bring in portable toilets for its staff. 

“It’s just catastrophic,” said Tony Clark, a former commissioner with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and a senior adviser at law firm Wilkinson Barker Knauer LLP. 

By Friday, when Ercot declared that the emergency had ended, 14.4 million people still lacked reliable access to public water supplies, and the crisis had already cost the state $50 billion in damages, according to Accuweather. Meanwhile, some generators made a windfall as energy prices soared to $9,000 a megawatt-hour during the crisis. In all, generators have earned more than $44.6 billion in electricity sales alone this year — more than 2018-2020 combined, according to Wood Mackenzie. Those earnings don’t take into account any hedges that may have been in place.

In the wake of the blackouts, the Public Utility Commission of Texas announced an investigation into the factors that led to the disaster.

But at least the lights were coming back on. In the afternoon, shell-shocked people trickled out of their homes to soak up the sun. “It feels crazy standing outside in the 40 degree sunlight,” said Cassie Moore, a 35-year-old writer and educator, who offered up her shower and washing machine to her boss and friends who were still without power or water. “In this same spot a few days ago I was worried that my dogs might freeze to death.”

++++

the responsibility for choosing winners and losers at the level of individual citizens was unavoidable for ERCOT.  the blame and culpability falls with those responsible for creating the macroeconomic environment, it's construction, and regulation, and they need to go to jail even if only for a symbolic day to pay their debt to society for the misery and catastrophic misfortune they have inflicted on the citizens they supposedly govern.

That is a fucking ERCOT spin piece to make them look heroic. It's bullshit, IMO. I flat out don't believe it. And neither do they, or they wouldn't be having guys resign en masse yesterday with more to come and the eventual firings. 

[Hagbard Celine 11,159]

another thing i've seen mentioned is pub quashing of dem bills to winterize over the past decade - is there a write-up on this that backs up the tweets?

[Hagbard Celine 11,159]

4 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

That is a fucking ERCOT spin piece to make them look heroic. It's bullshit, IMO. I flat out don't believe it. And neither do they, or they wouldn't be having guys resign en masse yesterday with more to come and the eventual firings. 

what do you not believe about it and/or what do you believe happened _at_a_high_level_ for those of us that don't speak energy jive?

what did they NOT do that they should have done or what COULD they have done that they didn't do that falls to ERCOT and not the regulatory profit-only texas-only construct?

[Captainant 28,383]

2 minutes ago, Hagbard Celine said:

another thing i've seen mentioned is pub quashing of dem bills to winterize over the past decade - is there a write-up on this that backs up the tweets?

surprisingly, it's hard to find articles written about failed infrastructure maintenance legislation - but there's articles from circa 2011 talking about how the GOP-passed legislation only generated "recommended practices" and no "requirements"

[Hagbard Celine 11,159]

1 minute ago, Captainant said:

surprisingly, it's hard to find articles written about failed infrastructure maintenance legislation - but there's articles from circa 2011 talking about how the GOP-passed legislation only generated "recommended practices" and no "requirements"

i'm specifically asking for a listing of bills requiring winterization in the lege over the past 10 years that were quashed by pubs

surly there's an article for that

it's a massive smoking gun

and it has to be in the public record if the bills were filed much less tabled in committee or if they did make it to the floor

[SydneyCarton 49,325]

2 minutes ago, Hagbard Celine said:

what do you not believe about it and/or what do you believe happened _at_a_high_level_ for those of us that don't speak energy jive?

what did they NOT do that they should have done or what COULD they have done that they didn't do that falls to ERCOT and not the regulatory profit-only texas-only construct?

I don't believe the base level drama about "2 more minutes and we'd have been in the Dark Ages for months." That feels like shit put out there to make these guys sound like Heroes when their grid management has been anything but. But this is my gut reaction, I can't prove shit. But a smart friend once said "If you're questioning whether something is a spin job/bullshit, it almost certainly is..."

What they could have done was fired up more plants days before and dictated the regulated entities do it in advance of the cold. Warm those plants up before they're needed. Rumor is a big, big name took a 750 million dollar haircut on this event, not only because they had to buy energy on the spot market, but by the time they tried to fire up their backup plants in Texas, they couldn't. So they couldn't even mitigate that by SELLING energy to REPs at the 9k rate. Because they waited too long. Now, not sure how that helps if the transmission pipes freeze, but as another article and post said, ERCOT met like a week before the storm and spent like 5 minutes talking about it in a 2.5 hour conference call. But yeah, they're heroes. 

[jimmyjazz 46,972]

The idea that power generation companies have already made more money in 2021 than they did from 2018-2020 is absolutely infuriating.  This is the black eye of wanton deregulation.  Fuck pure capitalism when it comes to the public greater good.  Fuck Republicans, fuck Texas, fuck Ercot, and fuck the power companies.  

People belong in prison.

[Dahobbs 18,185]

5 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

I don't believe the base level drama about "2 more minutes and we'd have been in the Dark Ages for months." That feels like shit put out there to make these guys sound like Heroes when their grid management has been anything but. But this is my gut reaction, I can't prove shit. But a smart friend once said "If you're questioning whether something is a spin job/bullshit, it almost certainly is..."

What they could have done was fired up more plants days before and dictated the regulated entities do it in advance of the cold. Warm those plants up before they're needed. Rumor is a big, big name took a 750 million dollar haircut on this event, not only because they had to buy energy on the spot market, but by the time they tried to fire up their backup plants in Texas, they couldn't. So they couldn't even mitigate that by SELLING energy to REPs at the 9k rate. Because they waited too long. Now, not sure how that helps if the transmission pipes freeze, but as another article and post said, ERCOT met like a week before the storm and spent like 5 minutes talking about it in a 2.5 hour conference call. But yeah, they're heroes. 

I actually believe the 2 more minutes thing. I think you have to separate actions pre-freeze and during the freeze. Pre-freeze was the fuck up. Things should have been ready and they weren't. During the freeze I believe ERCOT did whatever it could in an emergency situation to keep the grid from failing. 

[wildcat09 29,556]

4 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

I don't believe the base level drama about "2 more minutes and we'd have been in the Dark Ages for months." That feels like shit put out there to make these guys sound like Heroes when their grid management has been anything but. But this is my gut reaction, I can't prove shit. But a smart friend once said "If you're questioning whether something is a spin job/bullshit, it almost certainly is..."

What they could have done was fired up more plants days before and dictated the regulated entities do it in advance of the cold. Warm those plants up before they're needed. Rumor is a big, big name took a 750 million dollar haircut on this event, not only because they had to buy energy on the spot market, but by the time they tried to fire up their backup plants in Texas, they couldn't. So they couldn't even mitigate that by SELLING energy to REPs at the 9k rate. Because they waited too long. Now, not sure how that helps if the transmission pipes freeze, but as another article and post said, ERCOT met like a week before the storm and spent like 5 minutes talking about it in a 2.5 hour conference call. But yeah, they're heroes. 

Yeah, I think a lot of the blame falls on others because Ercot doesn't have the power to actually force generators to winterize or require them to supply power, but the fact that they so massively underestimated the amount of demand it itself a huge fuckup that falls right on them.

[Hagbard Celine 11,159]

another bloomberg piece from yesterday discusses who is going to "pay" to "fix" the problem going forward.

what i want to know is who is going to pay for the catastrophe that just occurred.

+++

Now that the lights are back on in Texas, the state has to figure out who’s going to pay for the energy crisis that plunged millions into darkness last week. It will likely be ordinary Texans.

The price tag so far: $50.6 billion, the cost of electricity sold from early Monday, when the blackouts began, to Friday morning, according to BloombergNEF estimates. That compares with $4.2 billion for the prior week.

Some of those costs have already fallen onto consumers as electricity customers exposed to wholesale prices wracked up power bills as high as $8,000 last week. Other customers won’t know what they’re in for until they receive their gas and power bills at the end of the month. Ultimately, the financial pain will probably be shared by ratepayers and taxpayers alike, said Michael Webber, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and chief science officer for French power company Engie SA.

If prior U.S. power market failures are any guide, Texans could be on the hook for decades. Californians, for example, have spent about 20 years paying for the 2000-2001 Enron-era power crisis, via surcharges on utility bills.

CPS Energy, which is owned and run by the city of San Antonio, said on Twitter it was looking into ways to spread costs for the last week over the next 10 years. That didn’t sit well with its customers, who railed against the company’s proposal during a board meeting on Monday.

“Spreading the cost of this event over a decade is unacceptable,” said Aaron Arguello, an organizer with Move Texas. “Customers are already in debt with student loans, mortgages and other payments.”

But companies that ran up huge losses as the cost of electricity skyrocketed last week will inevitably try to recoup those through their customers, taxpayers or bonds. How quickly Texans pay depends on who their provider is.

Gas utilities usually pass the costs onto customers at the end of the monthly billing cycle, said Toby Shea, a senior credit officer at Moody’s Investors Service. Municipal utilities, co-ops and regulated power providers have the ability to spread out costs over a longer time-frame. “It’s very easy for a government to spread this out for many years and even a few months,” he said.

CPS Chief Executive Officer Paula Gold-Williams said last week the company may also issue bonds to help pay for the natural gas it bought at inflated prices.

Some utilities are looking to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in liquidity to spread out costs for 10 to 20 years, said Scott Sagen, an associate director in U.S. public finance at S&P Global Ratings. Rayburn Country Electric Cooperative Inc., for example, has fully drawn its $250 million syndicated line of credit and has recently entered into a $300 million bilateral line of credit with National Rural Utilities Cooperative Finance Corp. for one year, according to an S&P report published Monday.

A number of utilities are in talks with their banks to get liquidity to pay off their current debts so they can then take out a bridge loan that they’ll convert to long-term bonds. “They’re trying to smooth out these costs as much as possible and provide cover for their customers,” Sagen said.

But small retailers who tend to be more thinly capitalized and less robustly hedged have limited options. One such company, Griddy, said last week it would challenge the prices set by the grid operator during the crisis, in an apparent bid to recoup losses for itself and its customers. Another company, Octopus Energy, said Monday it would forgive any energy bill in excess of the average price of electricity for the week, and eat the resulting losses which could be millions of dollars.

The state’s utility regulator on Sunday blocked power sellers from disconnecting customers for non-payment, saying the governor and lawmakers need time to come up with a plan to address sky-high bills, first. Texas lawmakers will likely take up the discussion of consumer relief as part of their committee hearings on the crisis which will begin this week, a spokesman for the Public Utility Commission of Texas said.

In theory, the legislature could pass an emergency bill that could cover the excessive costs charged by generators during the crisis, said Julie Cohn, an energy historian with affiliations at Rice University’s Center for Energy Studies and the University of Houston’s Center for Public History. “Another piece would be to say you can have a competitive power market that we have, but prohibit the provider from linking the price directly to the wholesale price, as Griddy does.”

That would be easier to do in a state that takes a more heavy-handed regulatory approach to its electricity market, according to Webber. But Texas decided to take a more hands off approach with its deregulated system, he said.

“The question is where is the money going to come from?” Shea said. “Will Texas go and bail out certain customers? That’s not their attitude toward how they manage their market or manage their economy.”

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/texans-pay-decades-crisis-tacks-231044071.html

[SydneyCarton 49,325]

3 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

I actually believe the 2 more minutes thing. I think you have to separate actions pre-freeze and during the freeze. Pre-freeze was the fuck up. Things should have been ready and they weren't. During the freeze I believe ERCOT did whatever it could in an emergency situation to keep the grid from failing. 

I'm not saying his description about what could happen is wrong. Listen, they fuck up and then the infrastructure can get severely screwed. That's not wrong.

I'm just cynical that all the bad press and then suddenly some of these dudes are heroes. Maybe it was that close. Maybe it wasn't. But I *think* it's likely a spin piece. And that's fine. 

[SydneyCarton 49,325]

4 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Yeah, I think a lot of the blame falls on others because Ercot doesn't have the power to actually force generators to winterize or require them to supply power, but the fact that they so massively underestimated the amount of demand it itself a huge fuckup that falls right on them.

This isn't wrong. Plenty of blame to go around. 

Just now, Hagbard Celine said:

another bloomberg piece from yesterday discusses who is going to "pay" to "fix" the problem going forward.

what i want to know is who is going to pay for the catastrophe that just occurred.

+++

Now that the lights are back on in Texas, the state has to figure out who’s going to pay for the energy crisis that plunged millions into darkness last week. It will likely be ordinary Texans.

The price tag so far: $50.6 billion, the cost of electricity sold from early Monday, when the blackouts began, to Friday morning, according to BloombergNEF estimates. That compares with $4.2 billion for the prior week.

Some of those costs have already fallen onto consumers as electricity customers exposed to wholesale prices wracked up power bills as high as $8,000 last week. Other customers won’t know what they’re in for until they receive their gas and power bills at the end of the month. Ultimately, the financial pain will probably be shared by ratepayers and taxpayers alike, said Michael Webber, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and chief science officer for French power company Engie SA.

If prior U.S. power market failures are any guide, Texans could be on the hook for decades. Californians, for example, have spent about 20 years paying for the 2000-2001 Enron-era power crisis, via surcharges on utility bills.

CPS Energy, which is owned and run by the city of San Antonio, said on Twitter it was looking into ways to spread costs for the last week over the next 10 years. That didn’t sit well with its customers, who railed against the company’s proposal during a board meeting on Monday.

“Spreading the cost of this event over a decade is unacceptable,” said Aaron Arguello, an organizer with Move Texas. “Customers are already in debt with student loans, mortgages and other payments.”

But companies that ran up huge losses as the cost of electricity skyrocketed last week will inevitably try to recoup those through their customers, taxpayers or bonds. How quickly Texans pay depends on who their provider is.

Gas utilities usually pass the costs onto customers at the end of the monthly billing cycle, said Toby Shea, a senior credit officer at Moody’s Investors Service. Municipal utilities, co-ops and regulated power providers have the ability to spread out costs over a longer time-frame. “It’s very easy for a government to spread this out for many years and even a few months,” he said.

CPS Chief Executive Officer Paula Gold-Williams said last week the company may also issue bonds to help pay for the natural gas it bought at inflated prices.

Some utilities are looking to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in liquidity to spread out costs for 10 to 20 years, said Scott Sagen, an associate director in U.S. public finance at S&P Global Ratings. Rayburn Country Electric Cooperative Inc., for example, has fully drawn its $250 million syndicated line of credit and has recently entered into a $300 million bilateral line of credit with National Rural Utilities Cooperative Finance Corp. for one year, according to an S&P report published Monday.

A number of utilities are in talks with their banks to get liquidity to pay off their current debts so they can then take out a bridge loan that they’ll convert to long-term bonds. “They’re trying to smooth out these costs as much as possible and provide cover for their customers,” Sagen said.

But small retailers who tend to be more thinly capitalized and less robustly hedged have limited options. One such company, Griddy, said last week it would challenge the prices set by the grid operator during the crisis, in an apparent bid to recoup losses for itself and its customers. Another company, Octopus Energy, said Monday it would forgive any energy bill in excess of the average price of electricity for the week, and eat the resulting losses which could be millions of dollars.

The state’s utility regulator on Sunday blocked power sellers from disconnecting customers for non-payment, saying the governor and lawmakers need time to come up with a plan to address sky-high bills, first. Texas lawmakers will likely take up the discussion of consumer relief as part of their committee hearings on the crisis which will begin this week, a spokesman for the Public Utility Commission of Texas said.

In theory, the legislature could pass an emergency bill that could cover the excessive costs charged by generators during the crisis, said Julie Cohn, an energy historian with affiliations at Rice University’s Center for Energy Studies and the University of Houston’s Center for Public History. “Another piece would be to say you can have a competitive power market that we have, but prohibit the provider from linking the price directly to the wholesale price, as Griddy does.”

That would be easier to do in a state that takes a more heavy-handed regulatory approach to its electricity market, according to Webber. But Texas decided to take a more hands off approach with its deregulated system, he said.

“The question is where is the money going to come from?” Shea said. “Will Texas go and bail out certain customers? That’s not their attitude toward how they manage their market or manage their economy.”

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/texans-pay-decades-crisis-tacks-231044071.html

Not even going to bother reading this. I'll tell you how it needs to end. The Generators and PUC need to be held accountable. Period. Anything other than that is bullshit. At this point, honestly, I'm quite open to the idea of re-regulating the generation aspect of our energy grid. Fix the cap, make them play by rules, fine them, punish them. Leave the deregulated aspects alone for REPs. REPs literally did NOTHING wrong here. 

[Hagbard Celine 11,159]

1 minute ago, SydneyCarton said:

I'm not saying his description about what could happen is wrong. Listen, they fuck up and then the infrastructure can get severely screwed. That's not wrong.

I'm just cynical that all the bad press and then suddenly some of these dudes are heroes. Maybe it was that close. Maybe it wasn't. But I *think* it's likely a spin piece. And that's fine. 

welp, it's not fine if it's not the truth and you and a few others are in a position to see the smoke

[Hagbard Celine 11,159]

Just now, SydneyCarton said:

This isn't wrong. Plenty of blame to go around. 

Not even going to bother reading this. I'll tell you how it needs to end. The Generators and PUC need to be held accountable. Period. Anything other than that is bullshit. At this point, honestly, I'm quite open to the idea of re-regulating the generation aspect of our energy grid. Fix the cap, make them play by rules, fine them, punish them. Leave the deregulated aspects alone for REPs. REPs literally did NOTHING wrong here. 

who is going to pay for the damage insurance doesn't cover for those that were randomly chosen by their previously-unknown location in or out of "non-sheddable grid"?

[SydneyCarton 49,325]

1 minute ago, Hagbard Celine said:

welp, it's not fine if it's not the truth and you and a few others are in a position to see the smoke

Let me be PERFECTLY clear, that's not the kind of smoke I can see. I wasn't in their control room watching shit go down in real time, or the days leading up to it. I do get Leonardo Dicaprio Inception Squint-Eyed when it got so catastrophic in those wee hours because even if it IS true, the clearly fucked up and didn't plan or prep or game these scenarios leading up to the storm. But again, I'm also cynical. It feels like positive PR from ERCOT highlighted some of the good they did. There's not much more really to read into it. 

[SydneyCarton 49,325]

1 minute ago, Hagbard Celine said:

who is going to pay for the damage insurance doesn't cover for those that were randomly chosen by their previously-unknown location in or out of "non-sheddable grid"?

Fuck if I know? The same people still paying for it from Harvey? My assumption is that people are going to eat that cost. That's an entirely political question, so I'm not the guy to ask. Does Biden write checks to Texans? Who knows.  I've seen several lawsuits this week suing ERCOT, etc. My eyebrows are going to raise when some of these aggrieved folks figure out that they need to be suing the Generators for negligence. 

[Hagbard Celine 11,159]

ERCOT is a 501, correct?   What purpose would it serve to sue a 501?

[SydneyCarton 49,325]

8 minutes ago, Hagbard Celine said:

ERCOT is a 501, correct?   What purpose would it serve to sue a 501?

It's definitely supposed to be a Non Profit. A non-profit where the CEO makes 800k. I don't know man, attorneys aren't always sharp. And they're just as unlikely to grasp how the electricity market works as every other average Joe in Texas. 

[Js1 86,938]

32 minutes ago, Hagbard Celine said:

i'm specifically asking for a listing of bills requiring winterization in the lege over the past 10 years that were quashed by pubs

surly there's an article for that

it's a massive smoking gun

and it has to be in the public record if the bills were filed much less tabled in committee or if they did make it to the floor

I can't find anything specific about weatherization, mostly related to capacity, energy storage to prevent blackouts, etc.

https://www.khou.com/article/news/investigations/texas-energy-reliability-bills/285-62596822-0a8d-403d-b7de-9b265aad53e7

HB1986 (2011) - never made it out of committee

HB3343 (2015) - never made it out of committee

SB661 (2011) - passed Senate, never made it out of House committee

HB3759 (2013) - never made it out of committee

SB1941 (2019) - passed Senate, never made it out of House committee

[Guest Lobo]

Texas Tribune has a trove of information on those bills of 2011 & 2013.  I ain't gonna link it because people won't trust the source.  So fuck 'em.  

[Bama Chick 28,596]

This seems bad.

[freyguy 4,364]

6 minutes ago, Bama Chick said:

This seems bad.
 

[Hagbard Celine 11,159]

oops... wheels and dana need to call orange man and get this article retracted stat.....

anyone with tweetskills needs to hashtag the fuck out of this to the austin/houston/metroplex/sanantonio msm

great one bamachick

anyone with paywall skills or a sub please post the rest of this

+++

Texas Electric Bills Were $28 Billion Higher Under Deregulation

Competition in the electricity-supply business promised reliable power at a more affordable cost

Texas’s deregulated electricity market, which was supposed to provide reliable power at a lower price, left millions in the dark last week. For two decades, its customers have paid more for electricity than state residents who are served by traditional utilities, a Wall Street Journal analysis has found.

Nearly 20 years ago, Texas shifted from using full-service regulated utilities to generate power and deliver it to consumers. The state deregulated power generation, creating the system that failed last week. And it required nearly 60% of consumers to buy their electricity from one of many retail power companies, rather than a local utility.

Those deregulated Texas residential consumers paid $28 billion more for their power since 2004 than they would have paid at the rates charged to the customers of the state’s traditional utilities, according to the Journal’s analysis of data from the federal Energy Information Administration.

The crisis last week was driven by the power producers. Now that power has largely been restored, attention has turned to retail electric companies, a few of which are hitting consumers with steep bills. Power prices surged to the market price cap of $9,000 a megawatt hour for several days during the crisis, a feature of the state’s system designed to incentivize power plants to supply more juice. Some consumers who chose variable rate power plans from retail power companies are seeing the big bills.

 

 

[Homercles 10,206]

Someone with effective communication skills or a mod tell Hagbard about the spoiler function?

[Kringelbert Fishtybuns 945]

2 hours ago, Hagbard Celine said:

No one in the room had anticipated this. And it was about to get worse

I would insert the Ray Liotta laughing gif if the fuckup didn’t cost so much to so many.  To suggest that the organization that requires annual updated design limits of the generation fleet statewide didn’t know that there was a strong probability of failure when operating so far outside the design is just fucking dumb.  

[SydneyCarton 49,325]

1 hour ago, Bama Chick said:

This seems bad.
 

I came here to literally debunk this POS. EIA data when it comes to Texas is fucking horrific. EIA data is based on the Utility Data and rates across the country. That means that when they evaluate rates in Texas, there's 2 ways it can go completely sideways to the point of uselessness, and they both fucking suck.

The first way it's worthless is they have no insight into the rates offered in the markets from REPs in deregulated areas. That means that there's an extremely tremendous chance they're literally making a blanket statement about all of Texas without having any rate date from any deregulated area, including Houston or the Metroplex, Corpus Christi, etc. So not only are they painting a picture for all of Texas with only 50% surveyed, they're shitting on the premise of deregulation without taking into account any data from actual deregulated areas of Texas. It's like painting everyone from Texas as an Aggy when you've never met a Longhorn. It's stupid.

Now, if they do actually find a "utility" in these areas to include, that would be Reliant and TXU, the two consistently highest priced REPs in Texas. Specifically, this POS formula from their article:

 

Quote

The Journal calculated separate annual statewide rates for utilities and retailers by adding up all of the revenue each type of provider received and dividing it by the kilowatt-hours of electricity it sold

Listen, retailers aren't giving the EIA their data. So if they mean Reliant and TXU, it's just horseshit. And that doesn't even BEGIN to take into account the people who've remained with a provider like Reliant and TXU for 20 years because they never bothered to learn any better. Those people have been paying 20 cents per kWh for a decade plus. So it doesn't even begin to examine the benefits that come from people who shop the market for good rates. 

Don't negotiate your cable bill for 5 years and see what it looks like compared to now. 

Bottom Line: EIA Data in Texas fucking sucks and is worthless. It's the Donkey Cigar/FakeBusiness kind of disingenuous. 

[TwiceHorn 31,987]

3 hours ago, Dahobbs said:

I actually believe the 2 more minutes thing. I think you have to separate actions pre-freeze and during the freeze. Pre-freeze was the fuck up. Things should have been ready and they weren't. During the freeze I believe ERCOT did whatever it could in an emergency situation to keep the grid from failing. 

Yep, same.  The guys behind the switches at 1AM Monday morning  and thereafter playing a real-time impedance matching game to get power to people without bringing the whole fucking thing down are pretty heroic. 

That's part of ERCOT, but not all of ERCOT, so I accept part  of that narrative.

[jimmyjazz 46,972]

12 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

I came here to literally debunk this POS. EIA data when it comes to Texas is fucking horrific.

Good stuff.  So . . . do you have a feel for whether then $ conclusion in that article is high or low?

[Eastwood 4,394]

There were heroes and heroic actions in the Chernobyl meltdown. Doesn't mean that those in charge of the disaster get to bask in the glory of those who cleaned up their mess.

[jimmyjazz 46,972]

7 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Yep, same.  The guys behind the switches at 1AM Monday morning  and thereafter playing a real-time impedance matching game to get power to people without bringing the whole fucking thing down are pretty heroic. 

Classic story.  Front line engineers and technicians tend to act in concert with the greater good, unless forced otherwise by bean-counting management.

[Hagbard Celine 11,159]

1 hour ago, Homercles said:

Someone with effective communication skills or a mod tell Hagbard about the spoiler function?

i'm quite good at using the spoiler function when i feel it is warranted

[Hagbard Celine 11,159]

19 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

I came here to literally debunk this POS

So not only are they painting a picture for all of Texas with only 50% surveyed, they're shitting on the premise of deregulation without taking into account any data from actual deregulated areas of Texas. It's like painting everyone from Texas as an Aggy aggy

it may be bunk, but the article is tearing through the fwd: fwd: tweetspace like wildfire

[wildcat09 29,556]

19 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

I came here to literally debunk this POS. EIA data when it comes to Texas is fucking horrific. EIA data is based on the Utility Data and rates across the country. That means that when they evaluate rates in Texas, there's 2 ways it can go completely sideways to the point of uselessness, and they both fucking suck.

The first way it's worthless is they have no insight into the rates offered in the markets from REPs in deregulated areas. That means that there's an extremely tremendous chance they're literally making a blanket statement about all of Texas without having any rate date from any deregulated area, including Houston or the Metroplex, Corpus Christi, etc. So not only are they painting a picture for all of Texas with only 50% surveyed, they're shitting on the premise of deregulation without taking into account any data from actual deregulated areas of Texas. It's like painting everyone from Texas as an Aggy when you've never met a Longhorn. It's stupid.

I don't know shit about any of this so I'll take your word for it, but is there seriously no way for them to get data on rates in Houston?

[SydneyCarton 49,325]

22 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Good stuff.  So . . . do you have a feel for whether then $ conclusion in that article is high or low?

Oh, it's fucking high. Extremely high. If it's situation B (where they're using Reliant and TXU solely for information about "deregulated" areas), which is sounds like might  be the case, you're talking about two companies consistently 30-40% higher than their competition. They've also absolutely banked on their brand recognition from before deregulation to keep a huge chunk of customers paying the upper limits of bill pricing (think all the old people who stick with "their guy" and don't look at bills. If that's their model for deregulated areas, then their data is flawed.

There are about 5-10 REPs who enter and exit the deregulated markets of Texas in a given year, from entering to being bought to selling their book, to going out of business. On top of the 60-100 or so operating at any one time. In the cbunk of time between 2005 and 2012 there were probably 100-130 at any given time in Texas. Their rates and their data aren't being monitored or reported to the EIA, so they're not part of the snapshot. And most of these are the guys with the lowest rates to compete with existing brands who can charge more, like any other industry. Which is the big flaw in that article, it shits on deregulation without any way to measure or credit the benefits for those who actually shopped the market for electricity. 

They made a comment about shopping for cell service in the article, but in their analogy they failed to measure in any way people who actually flex the benefits of a deregulated market and, you know, SHOP. So the picture they paint is also completely flawed from that perspective. If you're going to do an analysis, you average the rates of the cheapest 20 or 25% of retailers every month over the course of a year, and then you compare THAT to regulated data and pricing.
 

Bottom Line: I don't think folks who regularly shop for electricity in deregulated areas paid substantially more than anywhere else in Texas, much less in the rest of the US. Oh, and one more misleading thing. They compare Texas to other areas of the US without taking into account that other areas of the US in their measurement, the primary HOME energy and heating element for them is natural gas. So yeah, electricity can be cheaper in some of those places as well. Gas is also exorbitantly more expensive than what we pay for it in Texas. It's just bad data in a bad article. 

Edited February 24, 2021 by SydneyCarton

[SydneyCarton 49,325]

6 minutes ago, Hagbard Celine said:

it may be bunk, but the article is tearing through the fwd: fwd: tweetspace like wildfire

Of course it is. Because folks love shocking headlines. 

If Texas wants to regulate generation, sure I get it. But throwing the deregulated retail aspect is shitty. It works in 12 other states in Electricity and Natural Gas just fine. BUt you know, splash headline. 

[SydneyCarton 49,325]

2 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

I don't know shit about any of this so I'll take your word for it, but is there seriously no way for them to get data on rates in Houston?

I mean...they could get a greater picture of rates in Houston and Dallas, sure. They could go to PowerToChoose and download the XLS daily or even monthly and run an average. But they'd have had to have been doing that for years, because there's no repository for that information except what you build. That's a better but still not complete picture as retailers have different rates for different outlets. That would be close enough. But at the end of the day you're talking about a government agency that collects whatever data is given to them. They have no motivation to bust their ass, change practices and try to find an "accurate" picture of anything. Or tasking employees to do onerous data collection and reconciliation and normalization. The EIA is only intended to be a high level repository of data, not a resource for understanding much smaller trends. I wouldn't try to go to them to find data or paint a picture about gasoline prices in areas where competing stations are right across the street from one another versus a one station outpost in a small town. 

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12,301]

10 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

Bottom Line: I don't think folks who regularly shop for electricity in deregulated areas paid substantially more

ok. did they pay substantially less?

[Js1 86,938]

8 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

Of course it is. Because folks love shocking headlines. 

 

Should have done a "YOU WONT BELIEVE WHAT TEXANS HAVE PAID FOR ENERGY DUE TO DEREGULATION!" headline if you really wanted clicks! 

[Captainant 28,383]

18 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

Bottom Line: I don't think folks who regularly shop for electricity in deregulated areas paid substantially more than anywhere else in Texas, much less in the rest of the US.

I don't think this is an honest look at the customer base of utilities. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that >50% of electricity customers don't shop around for the lowest rates every month/quarter/whatever because it's a fucking hassle and nobody likes to put their homes power in jeopardy.

The electrical market, much like the healthcare/insurance market, is not a free market. There's only so many electrical poles available, and it's prohibitively difficult and expensive to create new infrastructure. Getting bad service isn't just an annoyance, it's potentially life threatening. It shouldn't be up to Joe Average to have to find the company that won't deep dick him just to give out bonuses to their execs.

Edited February 24, 2021 by Captainant

[SydneyCarton 49,325]

9 minutes ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

ok. did they pay substantially less?

I can't answer this for the same reason the EIA can't, not accurate. 

The last time I accurately looked at this, when I had an accurate snapshot of the data going back years, deregulated Texans as a whole were paying 20-25% less than counterparts in nearby states.

[SydneyCarton 49,325]

2 minutes ago, Captainant said:

I don't think this is an honest look at the customer base of utilities. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that >50% of electricity customers don't shop around for the lowest rates every month/quarter/whatever because it's a fucking hassle and nobody likes to put their homes power in jeopardy.

The electrical market, much like the healthcare/insurance market, is not a free market. There's only so many electrical poles available, and it's prohibitively difficult and expensive to create new infrastructure. Getting bad service isn't just an annoyance, it's potentially life threatening. It shouldn't be up to Joe Average to have to find the company that won't deep dick him just to give out bonuses to their execs.

I fundamentally disagree with this post.  For the first part, I'm sorry 50% of the people don't shop around and take advantage of the market. That is a choice. And yeah, it's not every month or quarter, plans also stretch from 1, 2, 3 and even 5 years. Do you shop for your cell phone provider every month or quarter? Is that such a hassle? Because I'd argue that in this day and age a mobile phone is a vital part of one's safety in emergency situations, and people have zero problem going with fucking Sprint or Mint Mobile. Should the government regulate who your cell provider is? Should the government force you to drive a Volvo because they're deemed "safer?"

The second part of your post is conflating the deregulated retail market with the energy generation and distribution systems of Texas. The distribution systems, by the way, like Oncor and Centerpoint are extremely regulated. And everyone regardless of provider PAYS for that upkeep and expansion in every bill. The electricity isn't any different regardless of your provider, and one can't "dick you over." Now, did the generation folks fuck up and allowed to fuck up by lack regulation and enforcement? 100%. But you're conflating 2 different things here. Bottom line, if there was no retail choice in Texas, just one guy for everyone, and the politicians and generators pushed back and decided not to winterize, this same fucking thing happens. 

[SydneyCarton 49,325]

25 minutes ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

ok. did they pay substantially less?

 

15 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

I can't answer this for the same reason the EIA can't, not accurate. 

The last time I accurately looked at this, when I had an accurate snapshot of the data going back years, deregulated Texans as a whole were paying 20-25% less than counterparts in nearby states.

To be completely clear the last time I took a hard look at this with the appropriate, accurate data was 2011 or 2012. 

[MonkeyDoughnut 10,762]

Working in a highly regulated industry I've found the regulators/judicial side either work to solve the problem and prevent it from happening again or fine and punish the offender(s) for their actions with hope of "fearing" people into compliance. It makes for great news and "feel good". I'm still waiting to see an example of the latter working to prevent or deter future issues.

In times like these with complex issues you need all involved parties with first hand knowledge coming to the table with what went wrong and what they could have done better to come up with the best plan to prevent or limit in the future.

Politicians and lawyers have done and will continue to make sure none of that happens and instead will come up with their own ideas of what needs to be done and push that into policy. Involved parties will then have their own lawyers figure out what the minimum level of compliance is and rinse/repeat. 

Are parties with responsibility going to get off, yeah probably will, but probably would have anyway.

[SydneyCarton 49,325]

7 minutes ago, MonkeyDoughnut said:

Working in a highly regulated industry I've found the regulators/judicial side either work to solve the problem and prevent it from happening again or fine and punish the offender(s) for their actions with hope of "fearing" people into compliance. It makes for great news and "feel good". I'm still waiting to see an example of the latter working to prevent or deter future issues.

In times like these with complex issues you need all involved parties with first hand knowledge coming to the table with what went wrong and what they could have done better to come up with the best plan to prevent or limit in the future.

Politicians and lawyers have done and will continue to make sure none of that happens and instead will come up with their own ideas of what needs to be done and push that into policy. Involved parties will then have their own lawyers figure out what the minimum level of compliance is and rinse/repeat. 

Are parties with responsibility going to get off, yeah probably will, but probably would have anyway.

Hard to argue with this, but we'll see. This is 100% on politicians funded by big energy in Texas deciding not to make mandatory requirements for equipment prep, and instead going with "Suggestions." And it has nothing to do with the deregulated retail side of things in Texas any more than the idea of picking your own long distance provider 25 years ago had on whether or not long distance calls on Ma Bell's phone lines worked.