There's a crazy detail in here that I don't get. A big part of this article is about the price gouging which led to a windfall for gas companies and huge debts for Texans.
> In the hours after the blackouts, ERCOT tried to shore up electricity reserves to stabilize the grid. The computer system that runs the market, though, interpreted this as an oversupply (in the middle of blackouts!) and dropped prices. When ERCOT and the PUC realized what was happening, officials decided to bypass the market and, on Monday evening, manually set prices at the maximum of $9,000 per megawatt hour. (By comparison, the average hourly price in 2020 was $25.73.)
So, ERCOT officials decided to basically input a fake number to short-circuit the broken market, and now everybody is on the hook to pay that price for real? Am I understanding this correctly? It sounds completely insane.
So, it's bogus, and I (as a Texan) didn't like it, but there is a rationale. The market incentive for having excess capacity (that isn't always needed), is that you will get paid windfall profits when you are needed. Some power sources, if not needed most of the time, would not be profitable to build. The market system is supposed to reward building excess capacity (needed for occasions like this one) by providing occasional windfall profits.
The alternative, non-market way would be to guarantee revenue even in times when the excess capacity isn't needed (most of the time), by paying more than the spot market price would normally provide. Personally, I prefer that way. But, if you're using a market system for electricity, you need an incentive to build excess capacity. Then, when a non-market mechanism (the order to impose blackouts) interferes with that, you need to make up for that somehow.
Again, I'm not saying I totally buy this, but there is the rationale.
The integral of occasional short intervals of extremely high prices is not a predictable value. Thus this market dynamic is not one capable of providing appropriate investment.
The alternative market based way is to a have an additional "capacity market" for which providers offer bids for committing to provide future capacity. Thus providers who can guarantee they will provide a certain capacity are compensated for it, without needing to have a shortage of electricity to make the dynamic pay out. This is how it is done for the rest of the US.
Texas uniquely forewent the capacity market as a subsidy for wind, since wind providers are unable to supply guaranteed capacity and thus unable to bid in the capacity market. This creates a much more raw dynamic where grid capacity is fine right up until it is not.
While Texas' method was not the standard, I believe California did something similar (with similar results in the late 90's, leading to the decline of Gray Davis' political fortunes). I agree it's not the best way.
Thanks for this explanation. There should be incentive for providing excess capacity but there are issues with the approach being taken.
If I'm not mistaken, customers have little idea that a price surge is in effect and what the rate is until they get billed. It's not like going to a gas station, seeing a price, and being able to opt in to the transaction, seek alternatives, or plan to self ration your consumption, as you're prepaying for the energy. The way the Texas model works it seems to assume that customers have a financial buffer that they're able to tap into to pay the higher rates. Everyone should plan for such a buffer but for those that don't have one it places hardship on them. It's also a risk for the provider that they won't get paid their windfall. You can't send huge surprise bills and expect people to pay them.
A sensible approach is to charge a bit extra under normal conditions to build a communal buffer that is used to pay for emergency power production. As long as there's good governance, this derisks the system. Another alternative might be energy bill insurance, if such a thing exists. It's easier to plan for a fixed monthly premium than a surprise payment in an emergency.
The great majority of end customers (like me) did not pay the spot price, it was the company between you and the producer that did. Some of them were making noises that they would have to declare bankruptcy as a result of the surge pricing, although I don't know if any of them actually did. There was at least one company that offered a "you get cheaper power normally" service, and the customers apparently didn't fully realize how bad it could get when it's not "normal".
I agree with your "sensible approach". On a side note, this issue is much like the reason conventionally taxis normally charged more than Uber did, but Uber had surge pricing. If you want enough capacity for the peak times, you need to overcharge at all other times.
Consumers do not buy the power on the market, they buy it from their utility at the rate they've negotiated beforehand. E.g. I've paid ~$0.05/KWh in February 2021 as same as I pay at any other time. It's the utility's problem to acquire power on the wholesale market and make arrangements for the price spikes. It's charging more than the wholesale on average, just as you suggested.
The consumers who had been hit by this were the ones who opted in to receive power at the market rate from a handful of shady businesses. They explicitly had to change their service to this model because the TikTok ads told them that the current market rate is $0.02/KWh so they are "overpaying" if they are buying at the utility's price.
> Consumers do not buy the power on the market, they buy it from their utility at the rate they've negotiated beforehand.
The utility rate was not always fixed/negotiated: there's at least one utility company (Griddy) had an arrangement to pass-through market rate + small premium. Before the storm, this mostly meant getting rates modestly lower than the competition. The same customers were exposed to the power market spikes and received bills over $10,000. IIRC, Griddy has since filed for bankruptcy as the Texas legislature was generally supportive of individual customers not paying their bills. Paradoxically, Texas's political leadership allowed the utility companies to recover their losses by billing customers over years, which seems mostly performative/hiding expense from customers, but still decoupled from market forces.
Yeah, that is one of the shady companies I've mentioned. If, for the sake of argument, we call that a "utility" then in that case every single customer had a choice to go with a capped rate of a regular utility anyways.
For one thing, the DOE emergency market waiver to temporarily exceed emissions limits set a market floor price of $1500. [0] So that's your starting price before buyers ever bid/compete for those MW.
(Emissions limits are especially difficult in cold weather due to a less complete burn off and less atmospheric mixing. But this isn't to spinup new dirty power, so much as to run existing plants at full capacity without having to reduce output to more ideal levels for emissions purposes.)
To dispel a few other points that get repeated without much thought:
Texas' grid isolation didn't contribute. Surrounding grids including in Louisiana and Oklahoma were also undersupplied and operating under emergency conditions with requests for voluntary reduced consumption, and were also dangerously close to blackouts. Connections to grids without surplus power doesn't solve anything.
Wind power was frozen in and decreased over 97% over the previous 2 weeks as blades iced over or wind speed exceeded allowable limits. Solar was also iced over. Which led to a premature demand for gas peaker plants to offset this loss via a 450%+ increase in generation. So peakers were needed to offset intermittent renewables instead of as a buffer to meeting peak demand.
"Winterizing" NG plants, wells and lines is complex. What's simple and mostly ignored, is an overloaded NG system causes pressure drops, and pressure drops contribute disproportionately to condensate (both water and methane hydrates) freezing and reducing flow, which is a runaway condition. Pressure drops affects this much greater than temperature (even propane tanks in summer ice up when used at a high rate for an extended time). An increase in NG supply (more wells and pipes) would have greatly improved things without any "winterizing".
Coal and nuclear plants don't suffer from this fuel supply limitation since they have on-site fuel supplies, and the recent closure of 20%+ of the states coal capacity surely contributed, as do the remaining closures going back a decade+ of increased EPA regulation.
I guess the follow up question would be: How do our more northern areas go about winterizing -- do they do the extra NG system as you suggest? Or do they also freeze and nobody does it any better than Texas? I had thought the winterization claims stemmed from areas that experience this weather more frequently having solved it, or at least improved it, so it would be more interesting to compare to how they handle it. Esp if the cited mandates are federal and e.g. affect them as well?
It's more about expected supply and demand under certain constraints than any particular winterizing technology. Cold weather spikes (or stretches) are expected in the north.
It's sort of like asking why Northern or Western coastal cities don't have better hurricane protection or levees. It's not needed or worth the investment, even if New England does get an occasional hurricane. Despite federal flood protection mandates.
Asking what Southern and Gulf Coast cities do to prepare is a valid question, but doesn't justify taking the same precautions.
A better comparison is perhaps a windless summertime high pressure system causing rolling blackouts in California or Chicago. When was the last time you heard the spot price publicized during a summertime blackout?
Was it blamed on the equipment not being sufficiently designed for operation during an infrequent heat wave? Or on lack of planning? Or just blamed on the "freak" heat and possibly global warming?
The Texas event is a bit more complex due to underlying and transitioning infrastructure buildout where NG plays a much larger role, but its roughly the same as far as expectations go.
And the bigger takeaway should be that overdemand/undersupply of NG in cold weather is a runaway condition, but mainly due to pressure drops at the wells, not lack of insulation. Expected spikes don't cause pressure drops.
The price dropped because load on the grid dropped after ERCOT ordered blackouts. This was the correct thing to do as despite lower load there was still clearly insufficient supply, and as long as there is insufficient supply you don't want expensive peaker plants to stop getting paid.
Let's say there's not enough supply. People are asking for X, and peaker plants can offer it at Y. They would also be willing to offer it at 10% of Y. At 1% of Y!
What sort of societal good is being offered by making it so that people are on the hook for a much higher price than what is needed for guaranteeing supply? What sort of value is added? The point of all this stuff is so that people produce electricity, and others can purchase it at a reasonable price. It's not to find some hypothetical equilibrium using a model that assumes atomicity of actors and some sort of instant feedback loop that didn't actually exist during the blackouts.
The rational profit-maximizing strategy is to minimize spending on routine maintenance and winterization, which predictably results in supply that will occasionally fail catastrophically, and then pocket billions in windfall profits during each catastrophe.
If the state's objective is to maximize corporate profits at the expense of ratepayers, they have succeeded.
But if the objective is to reduce the frequency of catastrophes, the state might consider reducing the incentive to produce catastrophes.
Unless all of your company's generators go down and you have to buy from another company to supply your fixed-rate customers, then you'll lose your shirt. Or if you tried to cheap out and always buy at market rate.
Are you sure about that? Because people often come up with theories about how the capitalists are about to abandon everyone to their fate and then it turns out capitalism leads to Waffle House [0]. It makes capitalist sense to do disaster planning.
There needs to be evidence that the incentives point to scrimping on maintenance. Usually the incentives for capitalists is to preserve their capital and keep it is great repair. The is a strong, rational incentive to solve problems like winterisation because the revenue is higher than normal if someone can (and potential profits are much higher). Capitalism will just try to do it cheaply and to a standard that customers are happy with rather than in a politically showy fashion with gold plated "see I've thrown the kitchen sink at this!" style. But it will nevertheless do it if there is any money at all to be had.
No one gets a bonus because no disaster has happened in decades. Squeezing a percent or two out of a maintenance budget is exactly the kind of behavior that regularly is incentivized.
> Squeezing a percent or two out of a maintenance budget is exactly the kind of behavior that regularly is incentivized.
We're not talking a percent or two here. We've got people claiming that a company whose sole tactical purpose is to get energy to consumers failed sorta-on-purpose. That claim is more wild than some people in this thread realise. It amounts to giving up free money.
If they'd charged outrageous prices that would be one thing. But failure to supply power, by a company that makes money supplying power? This isn't an incentives problem, they were genuinely caught by surprise.
Arguing incompetence is one thing, but people are calling out incentives here without having good evidence of an incentives problem.
You're going to need to spell your point out a little more than just a link. If I manage to get in a position where I'm the only person in Texas selling power in a snowstorm I'm going to die filthy rich.
That is the opposite of the collective action problem. There are enormous rewards for an actor the less other people act. Which is one of the reasons bigger corporations do disaster planning, it lets them scoop up profits when prices are higher.
Capitalists don't give up easily if there is a person willing to spend money on something. They have flaws, but motivation to provide goods and services isn't one of them.
My point was that simple a-priori logic of the kind you offered regularly fails. A fast-food restaurant who wants to keeps its machines running has profit-driven feedback loops of a radically different nature than those of an energy market (esp. when such a market has natural monopolies).
And likewise, markets are amoral. If the "market" opts for a failure every decade over a higher-priced day-to-day run... this isnt "rational" or "correct" or "ethical" or whatever. The way a market happens to function is amoral.
You can make the argument that over fairly short time horizons in non-critical areas "meeting consumer demand" in most cases has a certain consequentialist justification. This doesnt carry over, a-priori to all possible cases.
Ie., it is quite reasonable for a society via a democratic expression of ethical judgement to say "the market is not here considering the long-term impact in the right ethical manner"... ie., that being without power when it's -20 outside & affecting the whole population in ways not priced in by the market is a *moral failure*.
It is the prerogative of the collective to say at once "here's how it should be", rather than via iterated interactions "here's how its happened to be".
Serious question, did you read any of the above comments, or TFA? My immediate reactions are "restaurants and power companies are sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiightly different in their ownership, provision of services, capital costs, financing, profit-margins, regulatory structure, and whether-they're-a-natural-monopoly" and, perhaps more importantly, "we're in a comment section about utility-company capitalists abandoning everyone to their fates, and making billions doing it".
We're not in a comments section about a theorycrafted threat of that happening, or a comments section about twiddling incentives to encourage WH-like behaviour, we're in a comments section discussing the consequences of capitalist abandonment: namely, they made billions doing it.
> officials decided to bypass the market and, on Monday evening, manually set prices at the maximum of $9,000 per megawatt hour
You're trying to argue that this quote + greedy heartless capitalism -> give up and let the energy grid go dark.
That needs strong evidence. Occam's razor suggests they were genuinely caught off guard and they'll be better prepared next time. $9k/MWh is a very tempting price for someone who can have a generator set up on standby. Some people like making insane revenue. Possibly even some Texans. The price of electricity was basically infinity here.
What actually happened is insufficient for you? Let me know when sweeping changes are made to prepare the gri--
>$9k/MWh is a very tempting price for someone who can have a generator set up on standby
Oh, I see -- the solution is to let the market "solve" it. The physical-world issues that led to that tempting price will wreak their havoc on the physical-world infrastructure the next time that tempting price is set, but the kind of physical-world prophylactics that could have prevented that tempting price are "too expensive" to implement. Rather than prevent the catastrophe, instead ensure that someone is poised to swoop in and profit from stabilizing some preventable chaos.
>Some people like making insane revenue
If the grid didn't go down, why, no one would be able to make $9k/MWh!
Yeah. Duh. That is why I'm arguing that they were genuinely caught off guard and they'll be better prepared next time - because I don't think what happened is reflective of the incentives here.
> Rather than prevent the catastrophe, instead ensure that someone is poised to swoop in and profit from stabilizing some preventable chaos.
That doesn't make a lost of sense. If someone swoops in at the last minute and prevents the chaos it will still be prevented. And I'm not saying that the Texans are going to do that, just that it is one option. The existing operators might learn from this and harden their infrastructure.
As far as I can read this section, you seem to be hypothesising that there are two options:
1. Overengineer the average case.
2. Have a contingency plan.
And then asserting that 1 is the solution that is acceptable to you and that 2 would somehow be a bad outcome. I don't really understand your position if so - if having a contingency plan for emergencies is the preferred method of the market then that is cool. Good enough, probably cheap. Overengineering solutions is exactly the sort of thing that the free market is set up to avoid - it is wasteful. If it doesn't make economic sense to overengineer then it is much better to have a contingency plan - the average case is cheaper and there are plans and supplies on hand to deal with a crisis when one occurs.
>That doesn't make a lost of sense. If someone swoops in at the last minute and prevents the chaos it will still be prevented. And I'm not saying that the Texans are going to do that, just that it is one option. The existing operators might learn from this and harden their infrastructure.
No, I said that someone would "swoop in and *profit from stabilizing some preventable chaos*". You even fucking quoted me saying it! The comment is right above us! You even encouraged this outcome ("Some people like making insane revenue. Possibly even some Texans.")! That incredible misapprehension certainly doesn't make any sense to me, unless--
>I don't really understand your position if so
It's pretty clear you're doing ideological battle here. You're unwilling to face the recorded facts of the situation, let alone what your conversational interlocutor is actually saying, so you replace that with your own imagination. Indeed, you make an argument that you imagine me making, and then admit that you don't understand it -- isn't this definitionally a strawman? Why bother with this?
No matter your position on my position, it's pretty clear we're only ever going to talk past one another: your axiomatic assumption that the free market is the correct way to run a natural monopoly like a utility is IMO as wrong as your position on how the free market should have responded. It's only "overengineering the average case" if your instrumental goal is to "make money by providing power" -- if your instrumental goal is to "provide power, in exchange for money", the calculation changes entirely. Suddenly, it's not about winnowing another few percentage points out of a maintenence budget so some MBA can get a new car -- it's about securing the provision of a necessity of life, for a dollar or two added to the end-user's bill.
If you're still interesting in prosecuting our "discussion", I suggest you go answer this guy's question instead [0] -- if you do genuinely think that they were caught off guard, and that they'll improve the (proven to be fabulously profitable!!) situation in future, go explain it to him. It's not about what should happen or what might happen now, it's about what's already happened and what's just transpired.
> No, I said that someone would "swoop in and profit from stabilizing some preventable chaos". You even fucking quoted me saying it!
If someone has stabilised the crisis then it isn't really a problem for the consumers. In this case, stabilising the crisis involves keeping the grid up and running in an emergency situation. There isn't any point sitting around thumbtwiddling watching a brownout happen, electricity grids often operate at speeds measured in either Hertz or 15 minute windows.
> isn't this definitionally a strawman? Why bother with this?
It'll help you explain yourself if you have some hints about how I am reading your comment. If I just say "explain further" to someone then it is unclear what they need to expand upon. Plus it makes my position clearer and I enjoy typing.
And the dude's comment isn't something I feel a need to answer. I'm not arguing in favour of the Texas electricity providers, I'm arguing that "they've got an incentive to give up and let the grid go dark" is a pretty extreme guess, is probably wrong and at a minimum needs real evidence to support it. Maximum profit probably isn't achieved if the grid goes down. It is much more likely that the incentives align to keep the grid running 24-7-365 with a high tolerance for outlier events and this outage was just run of the mill incompetence in the face of change.
>It makes capitalist sense to do disaster planning.
Until a yet another black swan event happens that requires the government to step in and help them with the eventuality they didn't plan for. Like COVID. If there are two companies competing and only one of them pays to be resilient against disaster, they won't be able to compete on price and will lose market share.
There are lots of people who buy direct from the grid who would happily change behaviour when Y gets big...
For example, at $500/MWh, I'll shut down my glassworks and pottery factory. At $5,000/MWh, I'll shut down the datacenter. At $50,000 I'll hook up a diesel generator from my shed. At $500,000 I'll personally get on a treadmill and start running, because the 100 watts I can generate that way gives me a better hourly wage than I can find elsewhere.
In fact, the reason for grid failure when prices aren't capped is entirely people on 'fixed price' schemes who do not modify their behaviour when faced with extreme prices.
The future is electric meters which have a knob on the front for "max price I'm willing to pay" and shut off if prices exceed that. If someone is happy to pay more, they can set their max price higher.
I understand that people will adjust their consumption based on price, and I think that there are generally some interesting ideas with trying to fight the general logistical challenges of non-static demand through pricing.
I think the core issue here (which is honestly my problem with surge pricing as well) is that there are limits in these systems. People in the cold need some heating, so no matter how high the price is there's going to be a floor of how much energy will be consumed. Peaker plants might exist, but there are only so many of those, so no matter how much demand there is supply can only vary by so much.
Given those factors, it feels like the reasonable thing to do is to set price floors and ceilings that are "reasonable". If there needs to be exceptional pricing, honestly this is where the State can step in (and it can buy insurance or whatever for this) to help. But $9000/mwh isn't helping to relieve problems (especially when people don't even know!).
Even in your cutoff knob, it's like... OK you are going to set a max price, and cut off your thing. Are you setting a max price for your fridge or your heating in winter? Or rather, would most people? Hell, what commercial enterprise is "shutting down the datacenter"?
If we are going to say that pricing is a signal for controlling consumption, you need a feedback loop. That implies communicating price changes and giving people time to adjust for that. Generally this has been solved through the easy-to-understand "at these times it's cheaper" and "at these times it's more expensive". You can also have fun with seasonal variations as well. It's not 1-to-1 but hell, just charge more or less right and seasonally it should all average out nicely, and it doesn't require nearly as much futzing around.
Market rate feedback could be done purely at the grid level, without exposing that to customers in real time, and mostly work. It removes arbitrage opportunities for energy providers, but that's a feature in my book.
> People in the cold need some heating, so no matter how high the price is there's going to be a floor of how much energy will be consumed.
Not really... If the price were too high, people could decide to move in with a friend for a bit, or live from their car.
This is far better than rolling blackouts, because each individual person can decide if they want to spend $$$$$'s on heating, or to make big quality of life sacrifices. In the rolling blackout case, there is the same amount of electricity distributed, yet users don't get the choice anymore.
The ERCOT maket is stupidly designed - it excluded demand from shed load from pricing calculations. This caused the price of electricity to drop to a point where it was uneconomical for many gas power plants to operate (because of the high spot price of gas)
The immediate ramp to the $9000 cap was designed to alleviate this. Yes, it's boneheaded, but I imagine any other manual override of the algorithm would have taken longer to get people to agree to.
The conclusion I keep coming to is that so many free market maximalists are absolutely terrible at designing markets.
You want redundancy in the system, you have to pay the piper. What is the point for me to run a redundant but operationally more expensive system than my competition - when at the time my redundant infra is the only option, I do not get to cash out.
You can see as whatever way you want, but Price is signal and it is better overall for the system to let Price to spike to certain insane levels. Should there be some kind of common-sense regulation for curtailing bad behavior perhaps.
If you need people or companies to build in redundancy - you have to pay the price or just run the efficient but fragile system and enjoy the black outs.
A large portion of capacity was prohibited by DOE and EPA rules from coming online unless the floor price was $1500/MWh. There's your absurdity.
This isn't a greedy capitalism problem, it's a govt manifested price hike and long term reduction in capacity, as part of the attempt to kill fossil fuels with no mature, viable, reliable, and affordable alternatives.
The fact checkers clouded this issue by claiming it "false", not because the $1500 floor price isn't true, but based on a manufactured straw-man argument that Abbot requested the DOE waiver instead of ERCOT. And a few other equally ridiculous (but expected) "fact checks".
Ignoring the rest of your argument, 9000 is six tomes 1500 and there are nine million values in between (assuming costs have a resolution of tenths-of-a-cent). There was a bug, and the decision to feed the maximum value into the computer system to keep the lights on makes sense. But to think that should be the real cost doesn't.
Even that "excess" capacity was capped by what capacity still exists, so economic truths and results where demand exceeds supply still applies. And regulations basically mandate that power distributors/wholesalers must buy it if they need it and are able, no matter the cost.
They aren't allowed to make a judgment call that $7k is affordable but $8k is too costly, and just shut off power to their customers.
There were still govt effects limiting supply and mandating purchases, even at those prices.
And that's not an accident of policy; that's the intent, in artificially manipulating markets in support of agendas they can't outright mandate.
ERCOT does not have a capacity market. So you can’t get paid merely to have a functioning plant that will never run.
It is the only market not to have one. So you get to set the price when you do run. The price limit is 9999.99 which is the DB column size for price AFAIK.
Capacity markets are kind of controversial these days even in countries which do have them, because by design they're subsidies for inefficient fossil fuel power plants that wouldn't be viable if they had to compete to sell power on the open market, and especially for coal power plants which are meant to go away ASAP due to global warming. Texas in particular would have had to subsidize coal power for a capacity market to make a difference in the recent grid failure. The current trend for new fossil fuel plants is natural gas but that wouldn't have done any good since a major cause of the blackouts was that even the existing power generators couldn't get enough natural gas to continue operating. Coal plants don't have this problem because they can store large quanties of fuel on site, but they've been closing down in Texas and throughout the US and the rest of the developed world.
As long as renewable energy advocates refuse to subsidize sufficient reliable backup capacity as part of the cost accounting in pricing renewables, events like Texas will become even more common, and in places that can't just blame it on "because Texas".
> wouldn't be viable if they had to compete to sell power on the open market
Capacity markets are "the open market". They're a market for a different product - the option to request power during a later period. And when we're discussing power shortages with catastrophic results, that lack of capacity is a lot more important than specific resulting spot price.
Environmentally it's better to keep an extra coal plant operational than to have everyone install their own backup generators (and ad-hoc fuel storage!) to mitigate the problems with "best effort" grid supply.
IT's the only US market that doesn't have one. No European country has a capacity market except for the UK (and that one was preposterously held up in court for a period of time).
>> you don't want expensive peaker plants to stop getting paid
It never ceases to amaze me just how absurd capitalism can be. It's the best system we know of so far but it falls massively short of good enough in its current form.
What you've said follows perfect capitalist logic. And yet, what you've said incentivises those plant operators to ensure there's more outages. Nothing they can do - whether that be to make their operation leaner or make their generation more efficient or whatever else, nothing can compare to a 350x increase in pay per megawatt hour produced for $0 investment.
Best by what measure? I know many people who disagree that a social system that objectively benefits those with capital (it's even in the name) is best.
The issue is we don't have anything useful to compare those results against. Any other system in place over the same period in history could have just as easily yielded the same net result.
I get your point, but I think a true reckoning of capitalism is going to have to include a longer time frame. Specifically, our utter inability to adapt to climate change due to the demands of the market to be ever-growing is doing to have to be factored in, not to mention it's built-in wealth-concentrating tendencies.
It's hard to look at the trajectory of society and the world right now and expect the prosperity boom of capitalism to continue. A lot of people just don't see that boom at all. They're living objectively miserable lives under capitalism, and there's no capitalist incentive to change that.
>utter inability to adapt to climate change due to the demands of the market to be ever-growing is doing to have to be factored in
Market based capitalism can handle the negative effects of climate change if producers are forced to pay for the negative impacts they produce.
>it's built-in wealth-concentrating tendencies.
Which economic system doesn't have this?
>A lot of people just don't see that boom at all. They're living objectively miserable lives under capitalism, and there's no capitalist incentive to change that.
> Market based capitalism can handle the negative effects of climate change if producers are forced to pay for the negative impacts they produce.
Market-based capitalism could have handled climate change if we had perfect advance information about the infinite horizon adverse effects before it started, and had priced that into actions by pigovian taxes from the beginning of the industrial revolution.
We don't have that information now, and the people against whom such costs would be assessed have incentive to (and actively expend resources) preventing consensus based on the information we do have to prevent the information we do have from being applied that way.
I mean, there are many branches of socialism devoted quite strongly to this. You could call them a core tenet.
> Who do you have in mind here?
You have to have a serious failure of imagination to believe that everyone's just having a party under capitalism. To pick just one example out of thousands, have you heard of the homeless?
Your incredulity is painfully inauthentic and detracts from whatever argument you think you're making.
I don't really understand the point you are making here. Peaker plants do not get paid in the Texas grid for standing by idle. They only get paid for supplying power.
> manually set prices at the maximum of $9,000 per megawatt hour.
$9,000 was a cap. If it wasn't for the cap, I'm sure prices would have gone up much higher under market rules. (ie: It's not like the market operators pushed prices up to that point, the operators capped it at that point.)
> (By comparison, the average hourly price in 2020 was $25.73
Commodities markets are notoriously volatile when there is mismatch between demand and supply. (There are also cases where power prices go negative, when there is more supply than demand. What's happening there is that generators are paying for the right to say online, on the premise that a shutdown is more costly. For large baseload units, this can absolutely be the case.)
> (ie: It's not like the market operators pushed prices up to that point, the operators capped it at that point.)
That's exactly what the article says happened. They brought on extra power generation which dropped the market price, which they then overrode manually.
For example, The Railroad Commission regulates oil and gas production, but not railroads, while insane is not the word I would use, some things about Texas are extra quirky.
The utility (electricity) rates during part of the crisis are rational if eye watering.
The price going up during power shortages, even to that level, is reasonable. Making people pay that rate without warning them they're about to do the equivalent of running their oven on champagne is what's nonsensical bordering on evil. Even without the use of smart meters or some alert system, a page on their signup paperwork that says "Energy prices may increase drastically during overload conditions. Please indicate the maximum rate you are willing to pay" with a few checkboxes at 2x, 5x, 10x, 25x, 100x, etc would be fine.
+1 You just need a circuit breaker here. It's a classic case of resource exhaustion. At some point your system's production is just too far from its consumption and the queue will not drain.
Spare the people their money and protect your own service. Win win.
Are there any smart metres which can do this? I'm not familiar with Texas, but every place I lived at was basically always connected and the gas/electricity would have to be turned off manually. I know pre-paid metres exist, but that's slightly different.
I'm not sure any consumers ended up paying those rates in the end.
That said, the pay-go market rate plans do make (it's in the electricity facts statement) it abundantly clear that you'll pay more, potentially a lot more, during extraordinary times.
I think the word "corrupt" would be a better choice than "quirky" in this instance. The kind of corruption that occurs in capitalist, communist, and mixed markets alike because of the the commonality that they are run by humans.
Any time someone comments on Texas or California you can be assured state based nationalism will show it's ass. I live in California and was raised in Texas. I love both states and am extra tired of people's edgy comments about either.
I live in California and am an enthusiastic proponent of dissolving the states entirely, devolving their powers to the municipal level. I have no loyalty to any state, they are the middle management of government.
It was interesting. Good to see the sources cited :) Then I got to this:
> there is compelling evidence [1] that such extreme weather phenomena are becoming more common [0].
The links looked interesting, so I followed them. The second one was an abstract [0] saying, basically: "the last 50 years have seen more of these types of events", fair enough. The first one [1], though, had a paragraph that stuck out to me (apologies for the long quote):
> “It’s tough, though,” Butler continues, “because we don’t have a very long record of observations of the stratosphere. We’ve only been observing it directly since the 1950s. That’s not very long to understand what kind of natural variability the polar vortex might be capable of. One researcher did a historical reconstruction by correlating the overlapping portions of the North Atlantic Oscillation index—which goes back much farther—and the polar vortex record, and then extrapolating the polar vortex record farther back in time using the NAO index. It showed no long-term trend, and no big differences in recent decades compared to previous decades.”
and then near the end, as the conclusion:
> Still, by most of the metrics experts use to describe winter climate, Overland agrees the big picture is clear: on average, winters are warmer and cold extremes are less likely than they were a century ago.
How is this article cited as evidence that extreme weather phenomena are becoming more common? How is the science.org article able to claim that there have been more in the last 50 years when we've only been observing them for ~70 years?
If you want to limit yourself to the polar vortex phenomenon, then you really just need to look at historical weather data. To claim that it is happening more frequently, you don't have to completely understand it, just observe the occurrence.
In the central US, winter temperature is highly dependent on wind direction and strength. We've been measuring that for a very long time. The polar vortex is very distinct. Strong winds from the north cause a temperature drop of 30+ degrees basically overnight. It stays like that for a few days to a week, and then goes away. The day/night temperature differential is much smaller.
Anecdotally, people in the upper midwest will tell you this happens more frequently than it used to. Perhaps 3 out of every 5 years, maybe? Honestly, do we need to get more scientific than that? No, seriously - do we?
This is why it matters: here in the northern parts of the US, we can handle it pretty well. It's within the operating range of our infrastructure. We have modern clothing. We have modern forecasting. When it happens, it doesn't last that long, and we move on.
What doesn't seem to get talked about is this: if you consider distance from the arctic circle, the polar vortex that froze Texas only went a few percent further south than the ones now happen almost every year. A few percent. To my dear friends in Texas: just spend the money to winterize and then get on with your lives. It's not that much money - you can afford it.
Honestly, this just reminds me of the mindset differences between the chemical companies and gas companies in Texas. All those chemical plants that surround Houston are giant rats nests of pipes because the chemical companies won't waste a drop of anything they can sell. They pull in chemical engineers from all over the country to come find ways to turn a waste product into a revenue stream. The gas companies, however, have their heads so far up their rear ends that they'd rather flare off their waste from gas pumps than bring an outsider in to help make money off it. You practically need to have been born into a gas family to work in that industry. Whatever, what I really mean is that winterization has a positive ROI, but good luck getting a gas person to see that.
> To my dear friends in Texas: just spend the money to winterize and then get on with your lives
But what exactly would this entail? My home was fine in sub 30F temps. It is fine in sub 20F temps as well. It's coming up on 40 years old and has never had any significant improvements since it was construction. It was a cheaply built home then and still is today.
The issue is, the entirety of the energy system here failed in Austin. City of Austin deliberately turned off power when commanded to by ERCOT. Natural gas supplies were not always sufficient. When those are out, my house is going to freeze. Again, this doesn't really do anything but make me uncomfortable. I can just run a bucket of water then shut off the main to make sure the pipes don't burst.
So what would I do to "winterize"?
After the first day, there was no infrastructure to clear the roads of snow and ice. So you couldn't even go buy food, water, or even a blanket from the store in many cases. It didn't really matter if your vehicle was capable of driving in the snow (mine is fine) because there were so many accidents it was basically roadblocks everywhere. Also, when some of the stores lost power they told everyone they could not make any purchases.
So what would we as citizens do to prepare? I can keep food, water, and other supplies but that is basically it.
They were not speaking to home owners as much as utility and energy infrastructure owners. There is a great deal that could be done to make the system overall more able to withstand winter.
Here are a couple concrete suggestions:
* Wind turbines are available with an optional 'cold weather package' that lets them run more reliably in the sort of weather that Texas experienced last February. Texas wind generators often don't pay for this package on the basis of perceived risk, but maybe that decision needs to be revisited.
* The gas pipeline companies that own electrical pumping stations could file the paperwork that notes these stations as critical infrastructure that should not be cut off from power. (A lot of this paperwork was missing in February.)
* Nat gas well heads could be retrofitted with equipment that keeps them freezing due to water production from the well.
* Long term planning could be put in place to connect ERCOT into neighboring power grids to allow for better risk sharing. (Southwest Power Pool in Arkansas is part of the Eastern Interconnect that covers the entire eastern half of the country. Even though SPP had had the same weather as TX, they were able to import power generation from as far away as the PA area to help support their load.)
* The South Texas Nuclear Project lost a generator due to a frozen pressure sensor line. Large coal plants went offline due to frozen coal piles. I'm sure there are remediations that could be put in place for that sort of thing too.
* The state could make an ernest effort to bring in political leadership that does not try to boil down all of the above to "Green New Deal Bad".
>gas pipeline companies that own electrical pumping stations
Only a problem because EPA no longer permits self sufficient gas turbine compressor stations.
>Nat gas well heads could be retrofitted with equipment that keeps them freezing due to water production from the well.
Pressure drop is a bigger factor than ambient temp and insulation. Increasing capacity by increasing # of wells and pipe size does more than defrosting equipment. Being overly reliant on NG to pick up the slack when renewables go offline causes avoidable pressure drops.
>Long term planning could be put in place to connect ERCOT into neighboring power grids.
The neighboring grids were also under emergency reductions and had no surplus power. OK and LA were extremely close to also implementing blackouts. LA was able to use its peaker plants and reduce industry demand to avoid this, in part due to a lower reliance on renewables (and not needing to waste peaker plant or transmission capacity to make up for wind turbines shut-in and solar panels covered in snow). A connected grid just would have further spread a cascading grid failure.
>Wind turbines are available with an optional 'cold weather package' that lets them run more reliably in the sort of weather that Texas experienced last February.
Wind turbines shutting off caused Texas to use peaker power prematurely to replace renewable power instead of in its proper role as a buffer for surges in demand. Once the front passed through, there was little to no wind for the remaining ~week of cold weather (high pressure system).
>Large coal plants went offline due to frozen coal piles.
The state just lost over 20% of its coal capacity due to increased EPA regulations. But I have not heard of any plant in Texas shutting down due to "frozen coal piles".
>The state could make an ernest effort to bring in political leadership that does not try to boil down all of the above to "Green New Deal Bad".
$1500/MWh DOE floor "market" prices to generate under conditions permissible 10 years ago is bad policy. Over reliance on intermittent renewables without sufficient backup is bad policy. Regulations reducing the number of NG wells is bad policy. Regulations reducing coal capacity by 20% without on-demand replacement capacity is bad policy.
None of those are state leadership. They're federal "green" friendly regulations and mandates.
> Wind turbines shutting off caused Texas to use peaker power prematurely to replace renewable power instead of in its proper role as a buffer for surges in demand.
Blaming wind for the problems seems a bit disingenuous, when wind outages were 3,000MW and thermal outages were over 30,000MW. I don't deny that wind failed too, but this was a holistic failure.
> The neighboring grids were also under emergency reductions and had no surplus power. OK and LA were extremely close to also implementing blackouts.
You missed a chance here to point out that SPP actually did have blackouts, although only for a few hours. They did better outside of Texas because they had more options and better preparedness.
> But I have not heard of any plant in Texas shutting down due to "frozen coal piles".
I heard about it at the time through connections in the industry, but it's gotten some press too.
> Over reliance on intermittent renewables without sufficient backup i
In 1989, I sat in a cold dark house in Houston, due to power shortages and forced blackouts much like those in 2021. You're concerned about an overeliance on wind power in 2021? There was 'no' wind power in 1989. You're concerned about shut down coal plants in 2021? They were running in 1989. You're concerned about electrical NG pipeline pumps in 2021? They were self-powered in 1989.
Most of my suggestions are really about ensuring sufficient backup and addressing problems that range far beyond just the number of wind turbines and solar panels in the state. What are your suggestions?
> Regulations reducing coal capacity by 20% without on-demand replacement capacity is bad policy.
Why didn't they have this excess capacity before the 20% reduction rule went into effect? When will they have it now that is has gone in to effect? I get the gist, although if the goal is to encourage green alternatives and planning, a policy that requires a reduction is simpler than one that requires reduction and a plan. I would rather have the latter, but if the alternative to the former is no green policy, then that's not a real option. So what could that policy have been to improve the situation?
There's a huge amount of uncertainty, mainly. The EPA is trying to act on its own, and despite losing lawsuits, cost of regulatory compliance and lawsuits goes up.
Investors don't want to risk entering the "new market" in case the "old market" isn't actually shut down or run out of town and remains competitive. Uncertain indirect subsidies via govt driving up your competitors costs is less enticing than guaranteed subsidies for building more wind and solar.
The best solution is not allowing arbitraty administrative agencies to take the place of legislative certainty. But that's been deemed unacceptable by those demanding change at all costs despite lacking popular or legislative support.
Once you've lived in Texas for a while, you start to understand the government mostly has a "let them eat cake" attitude towards the population. This applies at all levels, but particularly at the state level.
There really is no reason for the energy industry to bother winterizing. They don't really loose much by just idling capacity for a few days, especially if they don't have to worry about the cold weather preparations.
The government is not going to require any industry to do something it does not want to unless it is filled up with their buddies that can get rich in the process through government subsidized programs.
I'm sure this is going to be followed up with "but you could vote in politicians that cared!". There have been some definite attempts at voter disenfrachisement in recent history, although the most prominent one has failed. Texas is a representative democracy. It's representative of the districts, not the populace. The districts do not want politicians who are going to prioritize such things. The general population may in fact want it, but that isn't how our government is structured. So when you say "vote in other politicans", what you really mean is "replace the state government entirely". I doubt that is going to happen.
> I can just run a bucket of water then shut off the main to make sure the pipes don't burst.
Don't do this... please don't do this. Just set all your taps (internal and external) to drip slowly. That's all you need to do. Shutting off the main could actually make it worse because it creates an area without expansion.
> So what would I do to "winterize"?
Consider putting in more insulation in your attic, R30 should do it. It will help with energy bills in the summer too. Fixing walls is nice but not worth it unless you're doing a whole house reno.
Also next time you get your AC replaced, consider swapping it for a unit that also functions as a heat pump. Get one rated to 5-10F, that means it will be within rated efficiency range until that point. It will still function and operate below that but will be more like the electric heat you have now below that. But still generally more efficient overall. That reduces load, less load overall means less chance of things going out. It may seem small but those two things can have an effect.
Dripping worked fairly well for us during the last freeze (Austin), although I still had a few frozen pipes (that did not result in a leak). The insulation is sufficiently poor that our indoor bathroom faucets will freeze after ~12 hours of <30 or so. There's pipes that run along the exterior of the home that have literally no insulation whatsoever. We'd have to do some targeted insulation in those exposed areas as well, unfortunately.
> Don't do this... please don't do this. Just set all your taps (internal and external) to drip slowly. That's all you need to do. Shutting off the main could actually make it worse because it creates an area without expansion.
Can you please elaborate on this? Why wouldn't shutting off the water supply to my house and then completely draining the pipes by running the lowest faucet in the house be the safest way to protect against burst pipes? Or am I misunderstanding your recommendation?
You're misunderstanding. I was responding to the idea that simply shutting of the mains will protect from burst pipes. It wouldn't; all it would do is trap the water inside the existing pipes with no outlet. Completely draining (and potentially backfilling antifreeze into sumps) will protect pipes however but that was not what was being suggested by my reading. That said homeowners in this sort of situation may not have pipes built to completely drain anyway; nor would they necessarily want to as that would have a negative impact on sanitation.
I have over one meter of insulation in my attic. But realize that way this home was constructed, a good portion of the roofline is directly against the ceiling. You can't add insulation to that area. It is very poorly insulated by design. The snow on my roof always melts in this area and make some nice ice dams as it runs off. There is no fixing that without a major change to the home.
The only thing that could freeze when I shut off my water main is the water main in the street. If that freezes, that isn't my problem. Nor is it anything I can do something about.
Fix the parts that are likely to cause the most damage in a hard freeze:
- Insulate your walls at the areas you have exposed pipes using something like closed-cell foam or rockwool.
- Know how to evacuate your sprinkler/pool water lines.
- Know where the water main comes in and how to turn it off.
- Flush your water heater regularly to that it retains max capacity/efficiency when the power is cut.
If you know the freeze is coming and have bathtub(s). Fill them up ahead of time, you may need them for water for flushing.
Spend money to properly insulate the windows/doors. This helps for the awful TX summers too.
Get an IR therm gun and find the leaky spots in the house and get them fixed.
Insulate the garage and garage door. If the water heater is in a closet in the garage, insulate the closet.
Spare propane tank(s) for the grill if you have electric cooktops in the house.
Get a powerwall/generac like unit for the house that'll give you a longer runway if power is lost.
Have an electrician wire in a tap on your main to allow cutover from city to a plugin generator.
Keep sleeping bags on hand.
For clothing; mitts, wool socks/hats, down jacket, over jacket/pants or shell.
Keep a set of chains for your car, no one in TX has winter tires. (chains are illegal in TX, but I'd still use them in an emergency)
A couple water filtration units like a Brita. If you lose water and run out of bottled water you may need to drink the bathtub water.
You can buy standard bathtub sized bladders that sit in the tub and store about 100 gallons of water. I have two here in SE Florida. They roll up small and are easy to store. I also have a small two burner Coleman stove and 3 20 pound propane tanks plus 4 cases of assorted MREs. My sister lived in Homestead during hurricane Andrew and I learned a lot about prep from her experience.
> I can just run a bucket of water then shut off the main to make sure the pipes don't burst.
FYI for warm-weather dwellers: that is not adequate preparation to prevent pipes from freezing and bursting!
Required prep depends on insulation and interior temperature, but in the extreme you want to drain the supply pipes and put antifreeze in the drain traps (which can also burst, though less catastrophically than supply lines!).
An alternative that works in medium-cold temperatures is to leave all terminal taps dripping slowly.
Can you please elaborate on this? Why wouldn't shutting off the water supply to my house and then completely draining the pipes by running the lowest faucet in the house be the safest way to protect against burst pipes? Or am I misunderstanding your recommendation?
It doesn't matter if the pipes burst when there is no water pressure. The repair cost in that case is like $10. The only time a burst pipe is a real problem is when the water is on and it runs 10000 gallons of water into your home.
A burst pipe will leak water when the pressure is restored. This can leak inside a wall cavity causing a great deal of damage in a short amount of time, including follow-on problems like mold and rot if not fully dried.
A frozen/burst pipe (even with pressure) will rarely leak while still frozen. The leak begins when it thaws, and yes that can be catastrophic if everyone is asleep (rare, due to nighttime temperature) or if no one is home to notice.
If the pressure is OFF when the burst pipe thaws, unless the system is drained in advance, you'll still have many gallons of water in the system that could leak, depending on location of burst. Again if you are not aware when the leak begins, you can drain a large quantity/most of the system contents.
Even a few minutes of leaking can require replacement of a lot of drywall, wallpaper, etc.
It is not possible to check all possible locations for a leak. And in many locations, a leak will not be detectable until pressure is restored. An inrush of water at the main cutoff is ambiguous if there are any depleted tanks to refill.
This may be non-intuitive if you haven't lived through it.
None of what you are saying makes any sense. My water meter reads down to tenths of a gallon. That is a tiny amount of water. If I open the valve and it starts spinning like a clock, I've got a leak. Do you think I'd just walk away and think "Oh well, I guess it just takes 500 gallons to fill the toilet!". I'd have to be blindfolded to not notice this.
Nope, if it starts spinning it means you have a tank to fill (toilets, water heater, etc), or a system to pressurize (hundreds of feet of pipe). In the minutes required to do this, you could be leaking gallons into a wall.
Why do you think a burst pipe will flow at or above the rate of a single toilet fill? Sometimes it might, but some frozen pipe bursts create very small breaches in the pipe wall. A tiny, steady stream inside a wall will barely if at all register on the spinner, and might not be audible at the valve. But it could cause a lot of damage.
Obviously it varies. But having plumbed entire houses, I can tell you that it adds up.
Supply line in the basement, a run to the water heater(s), then forking into two parallel lines (hot and cold) to supply kitchen(s) and bathroom(s), verticals to get to higher floors, sometimes horizontal runs if the bathrooms are not stacked, etc. Cold supply to the outdoor spigots.
Even small single-story houses with perfectly located utilities will have several dozen feet of potable water lines. Add stories or less-convenient utility locations and you can be well into the hundreds.
Vote in politicians that will force the winterization of the energy grid. That's the only way.
On a side note if I lived in Texas with all of that sun, I would be installing a solar roof and tesla power wall. I don't think this issue is going to be resolved for a long time.
Fortunately, there are a bunch of papers investigating this. The polar vortex is connected to a high pressure ridge off the west coast which, in warmer climates, is more likely to persist through the winter. This forces air up over the poles and then back down over the midwest and central US. Modeling is hard, but scientists do make compelling scientific claims about the relative frequency of these events in worlds with and without rising temperatures.
I get that. But the article that this article quotes, (the climate.gov one) makes the specific statement that there is no trend in the data.
It also discusses how the models break both ways: half the models predict stronger polar vortices, half less.
I'm firmly of the opinion that if the measurements and the models disagree, then the models are wrong. But that's probably me just being old-fashioned ;)
So if the anecdata and (half) the models say that these events are more common, but the actual measured data says there's no change, then surely we can agree that The Science says there's no change?
We do have lots of surface-level temperature and wind data. We just don't have a ton of high altitude data.
And ultimately, it's the surface-level data that impacts us day-to-day - which indicates that yes, the surface becomes cold AF more frequently than before.
Oh, and as an aside, recorded anecdotes are perfectly valid for use in science. Hence why we can even have science for psychology.
At first glance it seems like you are trying to compare the season average temperature to short lived extreme cold events. Both could be increasing at the same time.
I'm surprised that Texas Monthly says nothing has changed. The major issue was due to gas generators (the companies that produce natural gas) not being able to operate in winter conditions. 321 of 324 facilities have winterized since, with 304 inspected by ERCOT: https://news.yahoo.com/texas-power-plants-ready-winter-16330...
To be clear - the generators didn't winterize, they "passed" the new ERCOT winterization rules. Texas Monthly briefly addresses this, but the new rules are mostly a checklist of readiness actions designed to ensure that generators can perform in what they consider a 'normal' winter.
Phase 1 at least includes such amazing winterization requirements as, "Attest that you repaired everything that broke last February" and "Inspect your insulation". There are more useful requirements like adding temperature monitoring, wind breaks around components, etc, but there is literally no enforcement mechanism yet so it's all basically on the honor-system for now.
A friend of mine is an engineering manager overseeing winterization of gas generators for a utility company in a southern state. His utility hired a company from Texas to do the winterization. My friend commented to his counterpart at the winterization company that they must be getting a ton of business close to home after what happened last year.
His counterpart said nope—the Texas utility companies are very much treating it as a one-off event, and the winterization company is not seeing an increase in business there.
If you notice the ERCOT press release, "321/324 facilities" passed inspection. Last February over 1,000 generating units failed, and over 600 of these were gas generators. So 320ish generators passed inspection -- it's unclear how many of those were in the 600 that failed last year or how many total there are in the state (e.g. the 320 that passed could have already been winterized?).
And the daily fines are for "repeat offenders" who don't "remedy within a reasonable period of time" deficiencies that are reported to the commission. It's basically toothless because "reasonable" isn't defined anywhere and it's all at the discretion of the PUC.
Obviously things will be directionally better now, and likely even more so in the future, I just wouldn't want to be in Texas during a cold streak in the next couple years.
A $100,000 daily fine is a pittance compared to the $9000/MWh prices of electricity during the grid failures. Even a small generator could have been making millions during that time.
Perhaps a tiny stick is more motivation than a much larger carrot for operators that were so unsophisticated as to miss that initial carrot, however.
TFA explains at length that the power generating facilities are only half the problem. The other half are the gas wells and pipelines themselves. Fully winterized gas plants still can't make electricity if they can't get any gas. But the gas industry profited handsomely from the crisis, and it's very powerful in Texas. They successfully fought back a winterizing requirement for themselves.
TFC applies to the gas wells/pipelines, as explained in detail. "Gas generators" in ERCOT terminology are not "generators run by gas", they are "producers of gas".
> Nearly all of Texas' electric generation units and transmission facilities have passed the state's new winterization rules
That is very slippery language and the rest of the Yahoo/Reuters article reads like a puff piece.
According to Texas Monthly's investigation, sounds like there's fuckery afoot:
> When Schwertner sent his bill to the House, the legislation also created a committee to map the gas-electric supply chain and determine which gas facilities were critical to the operation of power plants. It authorized the Railroad Commission to use its hundred new employees to inspect and, if necessary, fine gas companies. When the bill returned from the House, though, the language had been revised: only companies “prepared to operate during a weather emergency” were considered critical. This created a troubling loophole. Once the bill had passed, the Railroad Commission was responsible for implementing it, and the agency proposed a rule allowing gas companies to exempt themselves from winterizing simply by paying a $150 filing fee and claiming that a facility wasn’t prepared to stay operational—a dizzying bit of circular reasoning.
Good to know that you can just say you're ineligible to get fined for breaking rules because you weren't going to follow them anyway. Like at least create a government incentive program for being prepared for winter weather other than lost profits during downtime. Why would I, as a power company, want to spend any money on hardening systems against the cold when the only downside is a potential small financial hit? It's like a consumer product recall, how much does it cost to do nothing versus how much does it cost to fix the problem?
They didn't do it after 2011. I don't see why 2021 would be different. These once-a-decade events cost very little compared to winterizing. TX is on year 23 of a deregulated essential utility experiment.
I’ve lived in both places and if you think not having power during a week of sub 20 degree temps compares to not having power when it is 40-60 degress outside then I guess we have different ideas of what is better.
There's 48 other states who all have their electricity infrastructure more or less together.
Here in Maine we experience the weather Texas had basically bi-weekly in normal winters (it's been very mild the past few years) and IF your power goes out, it's back on in 4 hours, 20 if it's a particularly bad storm and you are a low priority area. Meanwhile the wind turbines up north will happily keep spinning, and at no point has generation failed.
I wonder how many were considered “winterized” before last year? This article doesn’t tell us what the delta is.
The “cold snap” terminology is also confusing to me. Is Texas expected to have one this year, and if so, at what point does a “cold snap” become part of normal climate?
(I am a Texas native and never experienced anything like last year’s “cold snap”. I was living in California last year, and now I’m worried about another “cold snap” this year)
Having grown up in a place where cold is normal, we still use the term "cold snap" to refer to a sudden drop in the temperature. So, even if it is a somewhat normal occurrence, it can still be called a "cold snap."
I live in Dallas, weather is notoriously hard to predict. However, the big freeze last year gave plenty of warning as a big blob of cold air moving south out of Canada. It was exceptionally severe and long lasting. I’ve lived here through other extreme (for Texas) winter events but that affected a larger portion of the state and longer than any other one I have experienced.
I expect hard freezes and occasional ice during winters in Texas but consecutive days of single digit highs I do not.
The 2021 Feb cold was very tramatic but rare. I live in Austin. Since 1927 we has only gotten into single digits in 5 years: 2021, 1989, 1951, 1949 and 1930. 1949 was coldest at -2 F.
And it wasn't just the cold that was the problem -- it was the cold over 5 days and unprecedented amount of snow. It is rare for Austin to ever see snow.
> One year after the deadly blackout, officials have done little to prevent the next one—which could be far worse.
Why would they:
> During the February freeze, the gas industry failed to deliver critically needed fuel, and while Texans of all stripes suffered, the gas industry scored windfall profits of about $11 billion—creating debts that residents and businesses will pay for at least the next decade.
> A black start would have required carefully rebooting a few power plants at a time and using them to jump-start others, thereby restoring the grid piece by piece. It’s not a matter of flipping switches. The steps required for a black start are numerous, complex, and delicate. No one knows how long that process would take, because no one has ever needed to do it. Magness said it would have been weeks at least.
I understand that it's a challenge to maintain 60-hertz frequency throughout the grid-restart process. But I'd like to know why exactly it'd take weeks instead of hours to restart the grid.
The startup sequence first depends on manually switching circuits across the region because no power can be assumed, so trucks are rolling to hundreds of substations and generator switchyards. Then, coordinating with emergency phones and radios as available, manually switching in loads and self-startable generators into electrical islands in a careful balance to not re-trip everything again due to voltage collapse or frequency excursions.
When a single generator synchronizes to a normally operating wide area grid, the relative power balance is so huge that if the generator is not close enough to matching the phasors it will get pulled into sync as long as it's close enough to not trip offline again to avoid damage. With only a few generators on line, and very narrow extra capacity and loads, the margin of error is much smaller. This must be done methodically and carefully for every generator in the black start plan, and it must be done with the majority of the region not having power so transportation, communication, possibly fuel services for the generators, and basic services like food and water and toilets are also impacted. Everything is going to be slow.
Some plants also have ramp up and startup cycles that can take most of a day to produce close to their nameplate capacity, and most of them require a significant external power source to run. Coal plants require lots of moving machines that load and process and pulverize the coal and complex steam pressure control systems that don't go from 0 to 100 at a whim; Nuclear plant cooldowns after a trip can be days, and startup again may require another day or two as well. Modern combined cycle gas plants are relatively easy by comparison but still require several hundred KW of available station servicing external power to start the unit and usually take a few hours of careful checks to go from cold to ready to sync.
It would probably only take a few days to get most of the ERCOT region back on line, but a full restoration would definitely take weeks as much of the work can't even begin until the big generators in key locations are all up and stable, and most of the efforts can't realistically proceed until the cause of the blackout has been resolved, e.g. no pumps for the gas lines, those generators can't start anyway.
You can take a look at this article [1], I think it does a good job of explaining why black-starting a power grid is risky and time consuming, especially when not maintained well.
"It’s a large stepwise process to build up load, build up generation, build up more load, build up more generation until they’ve got enough reliability to go to the next element of the system..."
There are added challenges in a distributed system. Black-starting a hydroelectric plant is easy but I doubt if Texas has any.
That article is not wrong. It doesn’t go in to much technical detail.
Black starting a plant is one thing which can basically be solved by having a working and large enough diesel generator on site to power the plant auxiliary systems such as oil and water pumps required for start up.
Reenergizing all of the loads in a large system from zero is another thing. Energizing transmission lines with no load are essentially giant capacitors that initially appear as a dead short, energizing transformers that are essentially giant inductors that initially appear as a dead short, energizing resistive loads requires all of the sudden opening whatever the throttle on the power plant is - water flow, steam flow which itself requires gas/coal/feed water/etc in to a boiler, or natural gas, that is as rough on equipment as flooring the engine in your car except you have to make sure the power plants connected are as large as the loads being connected. And the inertia in the rotating masses in the system has to be enough to supply the energy to the load until those throttles open and generate the additional energy - time delays here are measured in seconds. How do the fish in the river or the people camping on the river bank like it when the river goes from 5% to 100% all of the sudden? More restrictions and considerations there.
The whole process is a bunch of step responses to systems at unusual operating points. Operators of many facilities that normally just run at constant load points won’t be familiar with the unusual demands placed on the equipment. Equipment will be operating both at minimum and maximum limits in very short time spans. It’s a recipe for equipment failures unless it is practiced regularly.
Solar and wind unless supplanted by batteries are no help here either.
> Solar and wind unless supplanted by batteries are no help here either.
Solar systems are on inverters, so capable of very fast response - unless the controller decides it doesn't like what it's seeing and trips out again. A bad inverter trip was the cause of this UK outage: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/orsted-and-rwe-... (missing a software update from Siemens!)
Grid batteries would definitely help a lot here as they're similarly capable of fast response, and providing artificial "inertia" to the system.
a solar system should be able to ramp to as much power is instantaneously available instantaneously, thereby decreasing the magnitude of the load step by the amount of solar power available
Inverters don’t like to energize lines though since they normally follow the system waveform. The inverters would have to be connected with a low load set point and frequency regulation eg droop enabled and then they certainly could help with the system response.
Cold starts on industrial equipment, turbo machinery, etc is not as simple as just turning the power back on. There are checklists and physical inspections that usually need to take place before re-instating. That's just on a single unit/plant, I have no idea how they coordinate across an entire power grid.
They basically can't. You run into the same problem that caused the blackout to begin with -- you need to turn on the generators one-by-one, but you also need to find an outlet for the power to exactly match the supply that's being generated. If you run a power plant without sufficient load, the frequency will flip in the other direction, and if you attach too much demand to a single generator that can't handle it, the frequency will drop again.
So you need to do this slow 'titration' of turning on power assets, connecting demand to them, balancing that load and then moving on to the next thing. Texas has something like 11 designated 'black start' generators that are meant to be bulletproof but more than half of them failed in some way last February.
In black start conditions, you probably aren't going to have reliable network or power to position the switches in startup position, or to reset breakers, possibly even to power the sensors necessary to bring back a single substation.
If a lot of the power companies aren't willing to spend money on things like insulation and temperature sensors they are even less likely to spend what is necessary to automate a black start.
There is a lot of remote equipment that can't be remotely powered on or reconfigured after a full shutdown.
Imagine a Y junction switch that can take switch between the power from 2 plants into a local city grid. The switch's control circuits might only having a power supply on the side of one plant. (Dumb cost saving measure, which I heard is falling out of practice.)
officials decided to bypass the market and, on Monday evening, manually set prices at the maximum of $9,000 per megawatt hour. (By comparison, the average hourly price in 2020 was $25.73.)
I don't understand why the max price is so exorbitantly high -- if they capped it at, say, 10X the 30 day rolling average, then they'd still incentivize everyone with energy to sell to bring it online, but without bankrupting utilities and customers who have to pay over 300 times the normal cost of energy.
A family that normally pays $20 for a day of electricity in cold weather can probably manage to pay $200/day for a couple days, but probably not $7000/day.
With renewable energy, there is an amount of storage or peaker capacity you need to handle a typical day. The sun shines during the day, people want to use a lot of electricity at dusk, you have to be able to deal with that.
Then there is the atypical amount of capacity you need for when something goes sideways. There is no wind for a week or it's cloudy and hot so there is less solar even though everybody wants to run their air conditioner.
The capacity to handle that rarely gets used, but you still want to have it. So the price you have to pay to the person who can provide it is really, really high, but (and because) it's only paid for a short period of time. Or nobody will bother to build that capacity and when that situation happens there won't be enough power at any price.
> The capacity to handle that rarely gets used, but you still want to have it. So the price you have to pay to the person who can provide it is really, really high, but (and because) it's only paid for a short period of time. Or nobody will bother to build that capacity and when that situation happens there won't be enough power at any price.
There's a lot of economic theory pointing to the economic efficiency of marginal cost pricing. But the wholesale electricity market is a pretty "synthetic" design, and combined with the technical limitation demand must match supply exactly every second, marginal cost pricing leads to huge volatility.
I'm not really sure what the solution would be, though. I'm not aware of any workable alternative (competitive) market model. There's of course ye olde regulated utility model, but, yeah, maybe we don't want to go back to that.
One way to do it is insurance. The customer pays premiums so they never have to pay more than e.g. ten times the ordinary price no matter what the true market price is, or buys from a retailer who charges somewhat more in order to do the same.
The cheapest insurance provider should then be a company that can provide emergency capacity to the grid, because the time they have to pay out claims is the same time they're making bank by selling power for >$100/kWh. The money from the premiums goes to providing the emergency capacity and then when the event happens the claims and the revenues cancel out.
Another alternative is to give customers a price threshold at which they don't want electricity. If the price exceeds $2/kWh, just immediately shut off my service. For someone with their own generator this could be a good deal (they get to pay a lower rate by not buying the price insurance), and then it drops demand out of the grid when there isn't enough supply.
> One way to do it is insurance. The customer pays premiums so they never have to pay more than e.g. ten times the ordinary price no matter what the true market price is, or buys from a retailer who charges somewhat more in order to do the same.
Sure, that's one way, ultimately all the way to the end user paying a flat fee, which I guess is what a majority of residential customers are in fact doing.
But I wonder, if all the producers and consumers are hedged in one way or other against too low/too high prices, why have that wholesale price in the first place if it's just a fantasy number that affects nobody?
> Another alternative is to give customers a price threshold at which they don't want electricity. If the price exceeds $2/kWh, just immediately shut off my service.
This is in essence what RTO's are doing today, just for the whole region they are serving and not each customer separately. That is, there is a roof price, and instead of the price going over that limit in order to incentivize more generation to come online or customers to reduce demand, there will be rolling blackouts.
Seems like it would work fine to pay like 200% of their highest sale price in the last year or whatever (if cold weather operation is more expensive, then benchmark to that, etc).
It wouldn't create the hypothetical incentive to invest in capacity only used in black swan disasters, but I bet there's ~nobody doing that anyway.
Problem with this arrangement was evident in Australia, where the utilities were incentivized to arrange shortages and blackouts so they can get the sweet high tariffs.
That is not even the stupidest part. Texas grid is entirely isolated and large parts of its generating capacity had simply failed, as had say gas wells supplying them - they weren't incentivizing anyone to produce at that price point that wouldn't be already.
The article explained why - even with the forced blackouts, demand kept rising regardless. They were this close to needing to shut down the entire grid to avoid catastrophic damage that would've taken weeks or months to recover from. Increasing costs exponentially is basically a form of exponential backoff [1].
As horrible as $7,000/day electricity is, it would be worse if the whole grid was down for a month to recover from catastrophic failure.
While I appreciate the free trade view, could you point to the part where they say setting the price high helped in a considerable way?
ERCOT has authority to load-shed, regardless of price. From the article:
> For the entirety of 2020, Texans paid $9.8 billion to keep the juice flowing. On February 16 alone, they spent roughly $10.3 billion. Costs for the month of February totaled more than $50 billion.
The price reaction time is generally too slow, and judging by the bills incurred, ineffective as a control mechanism - hence the massive outrage on incurred costs. Do the costs seem appropriate?
While I haven't read the whole article, blackouts mentioned were the effect of load shedding and the principal action that prevented grid failure. The price was fixed only after the critical period, by an unknown criteria and questionable need. Yes, you don't want price to drop too low after a load-shed, but do you need it maxed and do you need it for days?
> Yes, you don't want price to drop too low after a load-shed, but do you need it maxed and do you need it for days?
Look, the simple answer to your question is no, of course. But, given that we understand the reason why controllers acted the way they did, these criticisms are taking advantage of hindsight, and hindsight is 20/20. The controllers needed to not just shed load, but to keep demand down until the storm passed. They weren't thinking about price/demand elasticity and how much Grandma's electric bill was likely to be. And furthermore, it's not correct to expect every public operator to second-guess every move they make, because it slows down the public sector, increases public sector bloat, increases cover-your-ass behavior, etc.
If you're going to apply hindsight to arrive at a moral judgement, then it's better to apply that hindsight not at the people who were time-stressed to prevent complete grid collapse, but to the gas industry that refused cold-weatherization for short-term profit.
I'm not unsympathetic to the people who got screwed with five figure electric bills. If a state employee screwed up on the pricing, the state should pay the bills. But I wouldn't throw the controller under the bus for it.
>> do you need it maxed and do you need it for days?
> the simple answer to your question is no
The answer is no and no. IMO, if they did only one of those things, it wouldn't be a big deal. When you set a fixed price at 100-200x normal price and hold it like that for days, you'd better have a very, very good reason and think through the consequences.
What you're saying does make sense, but I wouldn't give them a free pass, unless they can explain their reasoning. I don't know - maybe they did. If you're doing things with such implications, you'd better be able to explain your choices and reasoning. Not just to cover you ass, but to really consider the implications and possible alternatives. And we're not talking about a few critical minutes or hours, they kept the price for days.
But regular consumers weren't aware of the increased astronomical prices. Joe plumber wasn't aware that running his lights would cost so much money. The prices weren't dissuading or decreasing demand.
The free market only works when everyone has full information and a realistic alternative. When the alternative is "freeze to death" and the information is "you'll get a bill next month between $500 and $500,000", it doesn't work, and something needs to step in and protect people.
I feel like this thread is brigaded to death. The fact of the failure is clear. But the one constant in all of these arguments is to introduce uncertainty and attempt to shift blame.
I think it is an odd choice to blame the consumer in this scenario since customers just one state over did just fine throughout this ordeal.
Joe Plumber didn't have to pay any more... and the fact people continue to not understand this makes /every/ thread about the Texas incident last February pointless.
The very article you link is talking about exactly one small provider that has an entire business focused on consumers signing up to pay wholesale rates live (which are generally much lower than the contract rates) called Griddy. Griddy customers are the ONLY individuals in the entire state who had their power bill go up last February during the storm. According to Griddy they had around 29000 customers in Texas last year and there are roughly 29 Million people in Texas, so that means less than 1/10th of 1% (0.001) of the Texas population had to pay an increased power bill last February.
There are different systems in different municipalities. Houston and Dallas both have systems where multiple providers can offer service which are distinct from the providers responsible for the actual utility infrastructure (power lines to your house). Austin and San Antonio both have municipally owned utilities (CPS Energy in San Antonio, Austin Energy in Austin). For the majority of households they either have a contracted rate based on their agreement when they signed up for service (just like a cell phone contract), or they have a legally set rate which requires a ballot issue.
This is WELL established. There's no dispute here, and if you can't "tell who's telling the truth", it just means you haven't bothered doing any research before deciding. The national media used the snowstorm in February as a political tool to kick Texas while it was down because they see it as a Republican bastion (even though the majority of the population lives in reliably blue cities in national elections and Texas is purple now), and used something truthful for less than 1/10th of 1% of the population to act like it was that way for everyone to make the issue seem larger than it was.
Also from your article "Despite the astronomical prices, Scott-Amos is considered one of the lucky ones, as millions of people across Texas are still without power while temperatures remain perilously low." Griddy customers pay the live wholesale price, they were also immune from forced load-shedding meaning they didn't go without power during freezing weather like most other Texans did, so true to their contract they paid the live wholesale price and in return received guaranteed service. Sounds like they got exactly what they signed up for at the risk they decided to take which 99.999% of Texans opted not to take for the safer (but generally more expensive) financial bet.
Thank you and thank you for the information/numbers.
In regards to "The national media used the snowstorm in February as a political tool to kick Texas while it was down because they see it as a Republican bastion" I agree. However, it didn't help that this problem was spun around by the opposite side and used to blame solar and wind energy sources as the reason for the problem.
From what I gather(ed) the root problem was the lack of winterization to [all] energy infrastructure. But perhaps I'm misinformed on this too. Do you have additional insight?
> From what I gather(ed) the root problem was the lack of winterization to [all] energy infrastructure.
This is mostly the case. The primary issue wasn't that generation infrastructure wasn't weatherized, it's that wind turbines were not properly weatherized and failed, and the NG peaker infrastructure /was/ weatherized and took over, but was having issues meeting demands because the NG well infrastructure was not weatherized, meaning the peaker plants couldn't draw enough gas to meet demands.
Another major confounding factor during the snowstorm was that grid didn't have enough high voltage pathways to support the amount of power that had to be shifted between generation locations and the generation locations were too spread out regionally (Texas is a large and mostly empty state) to maintain grid stability, so there was forced load shedding to prevent phase shifting out of spec or grid islanding.
Also, while we're at it, it's bullshit when people say that "Republicans deregulated power in Texas, which is why it has an independent grid." Texas has ALWAYS had an independent grid. When the national grid started forming in response to New Deal legislation in 1935 states could avoid being affected by federal regulations by not transmitting power across state lines, so Texas chose to not connect its existing grid to the national grid as it was forming. Originally Texas had two independent grids, but they joined during that time, choosing to remain disconnected from the national grid but sharing with each other. ERCOT was actually formed to begin internal regulations of power in Texas in response to a huge national power disaster in 1965 that didn't affect Texas, but made the state realize it needed /some/ regulation.
I don't make any judgements as to whether this situation is better or worse, and it was certainly politically motivated, but it's not new and it's not recent, so most of the things written about it are simply untrue.
I agree with your objective points. But one thing your narrative leaves out is that there were power shortages creating long outages causing substantial damage, regardless of what end users ended up paying. The media latched onto the spot price and Griddy customers because they love red herring sensationalism, but regardless of the media's disinformative narrative there still was a massive market failure here. It was just felt mainly through infrastructure collapse rather than price gouging.
> But one thing your narrative leaves out is that there were power shortages creating long outages causing substantial damage,
Sure, this is true. That was never in dispute though, so I didn't address it. I don't think I have a "narrative". I'm just tired of every single thread about what happened last February in Texas turning into an opportunity for everybody to get their political kicks in on the basis of lies and twists. That behavior does exactly nothing to solve any of the problems identified, and it stokes feelings of undeserved self-righteousness.
The power shortages could have been avoided had wind generation been properly weatherized and had we had properly weatherized gas wells to supply the peaker plants. Neither of those things were true, and therefore this situation occurred. So far, we seem to have improved generation weatherization since, but the wells are still not weatherized, so it's possible this situation (or something similar) could occur again. It remains to be seen.
I just meant 'narrative' as a tying together of facts and corresponding synthesis - an inherent thing rather than a bad thing.
I do think the market failure here is a bit political, in that it's market fundamentalism to rely solely on spot prices, falling back to wishful thinking that short periods of extremely high prices will somehow incentivize new investment into the market. That decision to not have a capacity market is definitely a political one.
Agreed on the physical things that need to happen to prevent this from reoccurring, but the question is how to get those things implemented. A strong regulated market would just declare that they need to be done, and ignore the protests of how burdensome they are. Whereas a deregulated market dynamic really needs a forward capacity market or some other incentive for plants to do the preparation for staying online. And this applies to both the electricity and natural gas markets.
Unfortunately reality is more complex than we would like it to be. You're correct that a proper capacity market would likely have mitigated much of this issue, on the flip side capacity markets in other regions/grids are a major driver behind continued coal power generation as coal is the lowest cost type of generation for capacity markets. The lack of a capacity market in Texas is not motivated by environmental concerns, but nonetheless if such a capacity market were created in Texas it would likely be detrimental to the environment given the current overall incentive structure.
The bigger issue is that ERCOT /has/ made a regulation saying generators need to weatherize, which they have done so and been inspected and verified. But ERCOT can't control the natural gas producers, and they have thus far mostly refused to weatherize their wellheads, and therefore we may once again find that we can't drive peaker generation high enough to meet demand due to inadequate natural gas supply pressure. The oil & gas industry and electrical utilities are regulated independently in Texas, although they are often considered to be the same as "the energy sector", and so there is definitely more that can/should be done here.
I guess we'll see how it pans out. With better weatherized renewables, it's likely we won't see this situation re-occur. There was plenty of wind blowing during the crisis, so had the wind turbines been properly weatherized we wouldn't have needed as much peaker capacity anyway.
It feels like "capacity" is a straightforward measure of what was missing here, but maybe there is a better definition of "capacity" that would favor coal plants less? Off the top of my head, perhaps some statistical modeling that would let a distributed combination of wind/solar count as "capacity", with well-defined pricey penalties if they renege on their commitment?
It's only a form of exponential backoff if the end-users are aware of the prices and can adjust behavior according to the prices. Otherwise it's just another way to stiff the consumer.
The article said that their automated systems priced power too low since it thought there was an oversupply, but it doesn't say that any providers came online at $9000/MWh that wouldn't have also come online at $2000/MWh. There's an artificial pollution cap that loosens supply at $1500/Mwh.
No family was paying this price, this is a wholesale price that utility providers paid. Individual rate-payers have various types of contractual structures that set what price they pay. In many Texas cities, the local utility is owned by the municipality and rate increases require a ballot issue, such as here in San Antonio where CPS is currently trying to get a 3.65% rate increase approved on the ballot.
My utility bill didn't go up at all during last February, nor did the bills of the vast vast majority of Texans. The only individuals who had an increase to pay were customers of a company called Griddy that charges wholesale live pricing to customers, which is generally a discount, but it's customers taking a risk that a price spike may occur. Those customers entered into that agreement with a full understanding they were paying the live wholesale rate at all times for power and consequently Griddy had a very small number of customers compared to other utility offerings that use contractual set rates.
It's a tiny fraction of truth blown out of proportion in the national media that Texan individuals had to pay $9k/kWh. That simply didn't happen for nearly anyone.
That doesn't resolve the problem at all; it just shifts money around. If the wholesale price of electricity was set to $9000/MWh but utilities continue to charge lower prices do you expect them to just absorb the difference? Of course not.
From the article:
> The Legislature approved the issuance of what will likely end up being about $5 to $6 billion in bonds to pay back some of these costs. That form of borrowing creates an obligation of about $200 for every adult and child in Texas.
No, most families didn't pay $9000/MWh during the event. But they will pay for it in the form of future taxes or fees charged by the utility.
True, but they will be paying for it any way you slice it. A thing happened, it had a cost, and the cost was paid by shifting money around using government power, fundamentally that power is derived from taxation. There's a ballot issue locally to increase electrical rates by 3.65% to cover the bond payback, if it's rejected the utility (which is government owned) /still/ has to pay the bonds back, it just does so by cutting budget elsewhere or shifting money and increasing taxes elsewhere. Any way you slice it, the cost must be paid.
What's your alternative proposal? A hindsight 20/20 review would have obviously said to not have such a crisis happen in the first place through proper preparation. That didn't happen, and here we are. How do you pay for it?
A key piece is that due to load-shedding, the actual cost to most Texans is significantly lower than had they "kept the lights on" at $9k. Instead, we all lost power and the price was paid only to maintain the necessary generation to recover the grid without a black start that would have been a much larger disaster. Electrical power is common infrastructure, and the cost to sustain it is a common cost, raising that in such a way seems the most reasonable path forward. I'm not happy about my rates going up or my taxes increasing, but I also understanding reality. The net effect on me as a rate payer is still far far far less than had I agreed to pay live wholesale like the tiny fraction of people on Griddy.
Why? These customers made a choice in a setup specifically designed to allow them to make a choice. Rather than take any of a number of other providers that offer contractual rates they specifically chose a provider that charges live wholesale rate. During most of the time that saves them money, but it also means during these events it costs more money. The flip side is these customers kept their power on while millions of Texans went without power for up to a week which resulted in hundreds dying. They and their families got to get through a weather crisis with power service many others didn't have, but they had to pay the going wholesale rate to do so, just as they agreed to in their contract. Considering that 99.999% [0] of Texans didn't take this deal, it seems unfair to act as if this is a "trick", it was a calculated bet this small number of consumers made and they ended up losing the bet.
[0]: Lest you think I'm being sensational, here's the formula: ([1]/[2] = ~0.001, or .1%).
Just curious, what industry specifically do you work in? I find it odd that you spend this much time trying to convince me it's a customer's fault their $150 monthly bill is suddenly $20,000.
I don't understand this question? Seems in bad faith, like a subtle dig you think I'm a shill.
Taken at face value: I work in the tech industry, have never had any association to the energy sector. I believe in basic personal accountability and the bounds of reality, which unfortunately makes me a rare individual in the current era.
One thing I don't understand about these kinds of articles is that contrasting statements are often kept paragraphs apart, severely reducing their impact.
This is going easy on the people directly responsible.
> “We’re going to get to the bottom of this and find out what the hell happened, and we’re going to fix it.”
There's no "going to the bottom of this". It was known what would happen a decade before it did, and most of the people responsible were in office for nearly that time. They were warned. They chose to do nothing.
A failure cannot become more complete, yet people still place trust in these individuals?
Between 2015 and 2019, Texas didn't even make it into the top 10 list of power outages; and they're in #10 spot for outage hours per outage. In a state with extreme temperatures and large, unpopulated areas, this strikes me as extremely good.
I have no doubt that their power grid isn't perfect. No power grid is perfect. I just like basing my opinions on the facts and, currently, Texas isn't doing badly.
Read the full blogpost. Texas is in the top 10 for most electrical downtown and this doesn't include 2020 or 2021.
Also, realize that all outages aren't the same. Thousands of homes scattered throughout Maine losing their power because an ice storm brings down power lines isn't that big a deal. Houses there have oil or gas heating, and town centers have more robust electric lines so people can wait it out there and still get supplies.
In Texas, the issue was the the whole grid went down and for two weeks. Hospitals, fire stations, grocery stores, ... were affected. There food and water shortages, and 250-700 people died because of it.
nit: Gas-fired steam is the only central heat that is capable of running without electricity, and steam is generally being phased out due to inefficiency. Oil requires pump/blower/spark, hydronic requires the circulator pump, forced air (furnace) requires the blower motor.
Most likely your backup heat is wood and/or a petrol generator. But you definitely have a backup plan to stay warm, as it being cold for months at a time means the question of outages isn't "if" but rather "when".
This is generally true. And I assume the reliably liberal Texas Monthly spares no opportunity to gore conservative oxen, so I expect this article does so with bias and glee. But Texas politicians have spent a decade laughing at the power woes of California and other over-regulated hellscapes, so the 2021 winter storm and subsequent outage was a bit of a comeuppance.
It turns out that power grids don't really care much about your political philosophy. They still require competent engineering and maintenance and planning and accountability. And that requires smart people doing their jobs with adequate resources, which isn't guaranteed whether you've voted for the deepest blue or the brightest red government you can get.
It's also worth pointing out that, if you scroll to the bottom of the article and look at the state-by-state data, Texas does worse than California on most of the power outage metrics.
I'm not a statistician, but if we're trying to collapse to numbers, a couple that come to mind are deaths due to power outage and total dollar cost of outage.
> but the data is not nearly as grim as the media seems to imply
1. That's not "data"
2. What you need to make a judgment on is whether Texas is positioned well to handle a tail event, not how it handles the odds and ends of unexceptional power outages that dominate graphs like that. The families of the hundreds who died last winter probably have some opinions about how well Texas handled the last event, handling which was extremely bad and closer than anyone would have liked to power grid "Mad Max." It's a question of how much they've improved.
It might also be interesting to add 2011 and 2021 to the data. 2011 was the last time a major winter storm caused widespread outages in Texas and spawned the recommendations to winterize that were ignored and resulted in the 2021 catastrophe.
> It is hard to fathom the devastation a total shutdown would have wreaked. […] “What my team and the folks at the utilities in Texas would be doing is an exercise called ‘black start,’ ” he said. A black start would have required carefully rebooting a few power plants at a time and using them to jump-start others, thereby restoring the grid piece by piece. […] No one knows how long that process would take, because no one has ever needed to do it. Magness said it would have been weeks at least.
Why weeks? I “survived” the “great” northeast blackout and most areas were back up in 16-48 hours. And that involved a bigger network across multiple jurisdictions.
Significant parts of the eastern interconnect successfully islanded the blackout areas during the cascade failure in 2003, while the blackout was huge the interconnect itself was still up and running for (geographically) most of it, so thousands of generators worth of power were available to feed in via dozens of major transmission paths to re-energize the faulted areas.
In a real "black start" none of that external capability and coordination exists. Imagine the entire US and Canada east of roughly Kansas being dark.
> Imagine the entire US and Canada east of roughly Kansas being dark.
For weeks? Without ATMs, gas pumps, grocery stores, etc? It all runs on electricity. It would get pretty grim. According to risk assessments of EMP risk, 90% of Americans of die after 1 year of not having electricity.
solar flares are predictable with enough notice. If it’s an h bomb, we will have enough problems with or without the empl. So, please stop writing old fashioned fairy tales here.
This is why we don't try to test it, yeah. Black starts take forever in part because there's no solidified procedure for it, but producing such a procedure would require causing the disaster we're trying to avoid.
So far nothing quite as bad as a real black start has yet happened, and here's hoping it never will.
> But the situation was only growing more dire. At the precise time of the third call, the frequency reached a critical threshold: 59.4 hertz.
> Automated turbines across the state began spinning even faster to produce more electricity, but when the frequency dips below 59.4 hertz, the turbines reach speeds and pressures that can cause catastrophic damage to them, requiring that they be repaired or replaced.
Is this actually a way to bump up power generation capacity - by getting the turbines to "spin faster" rather than spinning up more turbines? Also, if the turbines are spinning faster, why does the frequency of the generated AC drop?
There is not enough information in the article to actually understand what they mean. Spinning the generator a bit faster or slower is not the problem. They should always be operated within their limits, so that is not the problem. The problem is that when one region is overloaded it loses synchronization with the rest of the grid and that causes issues. Before that happens some regions are shut off (local controlled blackout), the grid is split up and some power plants even go offline.
In general it's like this:
* Generators in the whole grid need to be synced up (frequency identical and phase difference small).
* If the generators in one area cannot keep up with the load in that area the frequency drops a bit (phase is shifted back).
* Powerlines transmit power from areas with more generation capacity (where phase is ahead) to areas lacking capacity (phase in the lacking area is pushed ahead and frequencies remain identical).
* Powerlines have limited capacity.
* If the transmitted power is not enough to satisfy demand in that area the generators slow down more (phase gets further behind).
* If one area gets out of phase too much it would lose frequency completely and there would be catastrophic failure in powerlines, transformers, generators, switches etc..
* To prevent catastrophic failure all areas agree on a small band of frequency variation inside which the regulation mechanisms work.
* If the frequency falls below that the grid disconnects into islands.
* The islands will either go dark completely (and power plants in those areas shut off) or they will have an oversupply of electricity (with these power plants reducing production).
* Regions with an oversupply go back to nominal frequency, sync up and reconnect. Then bit by bit the other areas are connected.
> Is this actually a way to bump up power generation capacity - by getting the turbines to "spin faster" rather than spinning up more turbines? Also, if the turbines are spinning faster, why does the frequency of the generated AC drop?
The article might be explaining it wrong.
They want the turbines to spin faster because they're generating at 59.4 Hz when they should be at 60. Keeping at 60 is a balancing act. When there is more load, the turbines want to slow down and to maintain speed you need more pressure.
You can have a 50 MW turbine generate 25 MW of electricity. It still spins at the same speed, but because there is only 25 MW of load, it needs less steam pressure to maintain speed. When the load increases, they increase the pressure and it generates more power while spinning at the same speed.
But if you take a bunch of generation capacity out of the grid, you now have a 50 MW turbine with 65 MW of load. Putting enough steam pressure to generate 65 MW of power into a 50 MW turbine is out of spec and could damage it, but put less than that in and the frequency falls.
My understanding is that the author is not a technologist and that these aren't literal physical descriptions of what happened with the turbines. The simplest generators maintain a steady angular velocity that (when normalized for the number of poles) corresponds to the frequency of the output signal.
To give the benefit of the doubt to the author, it is also true that a turbine shaft can be connected to a generator via a gearbox, in which configuration a faster turbine would correspond to more power delivered to the generator at the same generator RPM.
Deviation from 60 hz is a measure of overloaded or oversupplied grid.
They were "dialing up" the turbines to compensate for overload but it was insufficient and causing the turbines to redline/exceed operating allowances.
This is a hypothetical explanation because I don’t know how grids work in practice. The faster turbines turn, the more voltage they generate because the rate of change in flux with respect to time increases as per Faraday’s law. This means they can compensate for the voltage drops across the network due to increased current as per P=I*V.
I think frequency dropped because there was too much load on the grid. More load produces more impedance in the grid, this means that, without additional power on the turbines, they respond by turning slower. Like having to bike up hill.
If grid scale equipment works like 80kw generators, the voltage is electronically controlled by changing the excitation voltage. An overload condition manifests as a decrease in frequency with the voltage still fine.
Here in our corner of Austin we had 100+ hours without electricity and 60+ hours without water followed by multiple days of having to boil it to make it potable. We had zero notion that the grid was that fragile. We also have zero confidence that fragility will be effectively addressed. OPEC, after all, was modeled on the Texas Railroad Commission. So we are stocking paper plates and bowls, excess (and rotated} canned goods, a weather radio with a hand crank generator, a folding tin camp stove with a flat of sterno, plenty of oil and wicks for our hurricane lamps, etc. We're too old for this shit...
I'm shocked that nobody has mentioned Enron in the context of grid collapse and insane spot market prices. Granted, Enron specifically manipulated markets to create scarcity of supply, but the effect was the same: prices skyrocketed when electricity producers were unable to meet demand.
In my view, electricity shouldn't count as a commodity. Virtually any other commodity in the world has some amount of buffer in the supply chain. Oil can be stored in tankers, grain in silos, etc. Electricity doesn't work like that. Production and consumption must always be in perfect balance. Sure, it's possible to address that by implementing grid scale batteries, but very few electricity grids in the world have done so. Australia is an exception, and the Telsa batteries are able to blunt a lot of the price gouging caused during periods of increased demand.
I can't see Texas investing in batteries to create a diversity of supply given how hydrocarbon-centric the state is, especially if they can't even mandate the easy/cheap fixes to their existing infrastructure.
Markets are great when they work, but governance matters when they fail.
> The overwhelming majority of Texas homes are outfitted with electric heaters that are the technological equivalent of a toaster oven. During the most severe cold fronts, residents crank up those inefficient units[..]
What does this mean? I thought all electric heaters were essentially 100% efficient, due to conservation of energy.
Gas furnaces are about 95% efficient. Burning gas at a power plant, transmitting to your home, and then producing heat with an electric heater is nowhere near that.
What is striking to me, is that roughly 50% of Texas have gas furnaces and most of the rest have electric resistance heating. Nearly everyone has an AC. There was more demand for electricity from those using electric heaters during the cold snap than in the summer from AC's when the state has an average temperature near a hundred. It would probably be worth it to subsidize a heat pump for anyone stuck with resistance heating.
When the temperature is at 100 and you want your house at 70 there is a 30 degree difference. When the temperature is 30 and you want your house at 70 there is a 40 degree difference. Even with heat pumps (which are a good idea) you need more power to handle larger temperature differentials.
Yes, but the comparison is not between the AC and a heat pump, but between an electric resistance heater and a heat pump. Heat pump's COP is greater than 100% as it takes less energy to heat the air inside than the energy of the heated air while a resistance heater is 100% so is less efficient. In other words: a 10K Watt resistance heater will consume 10 KWh in an hour, a 10K Watt heat pump will consume 2-5 KWh over the same time depending on the temperatures and construction.
I think it's the root of the problem: when you are running your 10K Watt resistance heater full blast it's very likely that every neighbor is doing the same at the same time (both because it's also cold for them and they also have electric heat as the whole neighborhood probably does not have a gas line).
> I thought all electric heaters were essentially 100% efficient, due to conservation of energy.
Well, gas heaters are a lot more than 100% efficient in terms of heating per unit of electricity consumed, so better for the grid.
(Before anyone else points it out, yes, electric heat pumps are usually more than 100% efficient, too, but that's not relevant here because in severe cold, they are less efficient than direct heating.)
Cold-weather residential heat pumps have gotten a lot better in the last 10 years or so.
Mitsubishi's residential air-source ductless mini-split heat pumps that have their "Hyper-heating inverter" technology are greater than 100% down to at least -13℉ (-25℃), although their capacity starts dropping fairly linearly from 100% at 23℉ (-5℃) to 76% at -13℉ (-25℃), so unless you oversized your system a bit you might have to put up with your house being a few degrees cooler when it gets very cold outside for a long time.
Their efficiency remains above 180% down to around -5℉ (-20℃).
In most of the major cities of Texas these would have worked fine and remained around 200% or higher efficiency and around 90% capacity. Only a small number of people would have had them get down to 100% efficiency.
Fujitsu and Daikon have similarly performing heat pumps.
That's interesting to know. I had this heat pump in Florida that couldn't keep up with an external temperature of 49 F. That kind of made decide they were useless. Maybe if at some point in the future I have to buy a unit I will reconsider it.
Recently the guy from Technology Connections on YouTube made a very good point:
Consider technology and tools as they are now, not as you last disliked them.
Air source heat pumps aren't efficient in extremely cold outside air, and so you're back to resistive heating - but for ground source you should see very little change, because the temperature of the rock under you doesn't change suddenly on a cold day. If we have a century of cold weather the rock will cool down, but one particularly icy week won't do it. The ground effectively is your heat battery, pump heat into it in summer (removing it from your home), pump heat back out in winter (to heat your home up).
Depends how you generate the electricity that powers the heaters. If it's coming from fossil fuels (as most of it does), it's obviously inefficient: you're burning fuel to generate heat, then using the heat to generate electricity, then using electricity to generate heat again. Far simpler to just burn the fossil fuel for heat directly.
It's not any more efficient, but there is actually a technology that has been around for a while which lets you store heat energy during off-peak hours and use it during peak hours: electric storage heaters.
They look like large baseboard heaters, and inside have a bunch of ceramic bricks which can store a lot energy. During off peak periods the heaters can 'charge', i.e. heat up the bricks, then after that the heat is slowly released over time. Modern versions have a small fan to assist releasing heat, controlled by a thermostat or other smarts.
The thing is though, these can store a lot of energy. My parents had a new one installed last year which stores 24 kWh of heat:
100% is not a hard cap on the efficiency of a heater.
For example, geothermal electric heat pumps typically achieve greater than 300% efficiency in terms of thermal energy delivered per electric energy consumed.
which details steps taken by the author to mitigate any future outages like what they experienced in the past. really thorough and interesting to think through what grid independence takes, plus any related costs/maintenance.
The article mentions they have the same automatic loadshedding, but also implies it doesn't have enough authority to shed necessary load in a situation as bad as this one.
You need to make an argument beyond just observing that things went wrong and the market is deregulated. The real world is messy and there will always be emergencies and crisis. Just because an emergency happened somewhere that believes in laissez faire principles doesn't mean that those principles caused the problem.
On net, people would much rather move to Texas than away from Texas. The mobile people think it is better than the alternatives. The historic approach to policy by the Texans is a major contributing factor to that.
While true, there was a huge amount of Texas swagger about how ERCOT was so much better than everyone else under the thumb of freedom hating FERC. And that the nanny state was not needed to protect consumers from the wisdom of the market. And that power outages in California were a direct result of their godless Communism.
> In the hours after the blackouts, ERCOT tried to shore up electricity reserves to stabilize the grid. The computer system that runs the market, though, interpreted this as an oversupply (in the middle of blackouts!) and dropped prices. When ERCOT and the PUC realized what was happening, officials decided to bypass the market and, on Monday evening, manually set prices at the maximum of $9,000 per megawatt hour. (By comparison, the average hourly price in 2020 was $25.73.)
So, ERCOT officials decided to basically input a fake number to short-circuit the broken market, and now everybody is on the hook to pay that price for real? Am I understanding this correctly? It sounds completely insane.