why this is a clear issue and why it hasn’t been resolved? Texas was doomed last year during the snow and now this year with the heat. I don’t understand. Am I supposed to freeze and get a heat stroke?
In: 3
They decided it’s cheaper for them to allow our energy infrastructure to crash 3-5 days a year than to fix it.
I’m from Texas and a lot of people are scared of the word “socialism” and so politicians smartly linked the word “socialism” with “when the government does anything to help people” like energy regulations.
So there isn’t enough political pressure to force politicians to do anything about it.
There are a couple reasons.
First off, there’s no incentive for power generation companies to have the kind of capacity they need to deal with extreme conditions. They would be spending a lot to add that capacity only to use it very infrequently. It’s a bad business move in a purely market-driven system that Texas has.
Second, even if a company does want to do it, it takes time to design and build. It would take several years to add those kinds of capabilities.
You do not fix massive infrastructure problems overnight, it takes many years to set up power plants and related infrastructure even if there is no political BS in the way (and there always is).
In today’s case, the problem is both on the supply and demand side. Demand because there’s a heat wave so air conditioning and other usage is very high, supply because it was predicted to be a very still, low-wind day so power from wind turbines was expected to be way below normal levels.
I see commenters are assuming the months of January and February and the period between July and September are in actual fact very few days during the year. Five of 12 months is a particularly long time to go in persistent brownout conditions, compared to the rest of the North American continent.
This result is the object of the exercise.
ERCOT and the subsequent “deregulation” of the artificially created electricity market are designed to keep the price of electricity high while reducing revenues for electricity producers. Deregulation in 2002 created, by design, an artificial market of middleman “suppliers” of electricity. Outside of the rural electric co-ops (which includes Austin Energy because the model is so old) you are billed by a third party whose purpose is to skim dollars from the system while providing the impression competition is occurring in a marketplace.
These persistent shortages keep a “marketplace” rate high while not effecting the actual costs by generators, or the groups who provide billing.
[removed]
[removed]
Oh, also- Texas is having something of a population boom right now. A ton of people are moving there from out of state, particularly over the past couple of years, which is a shorter time horizon than this kind of infrastructure planning operates on.
We’re hanging in there:
https://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_conditions.html
The problems are:
Massive population growth
No investment in dispatchable generation(intermittent sources without storage and without interconnection will eventually leave you hanging)
No interconnection
It’s an unregulated system that relies on market forces. This is what you get
ERCOT is the ISO for Texas, which basically monitors the energy market, makes the rules of the market, forecasts the amount of energy needed, and other things. Note that not every single place is under an ISO; places like Florida are “contract-based” meaning there’s no big free market and power is delivered based on private agreements. There’s lots of ISOs around the country like California ISO, the Midwest ISO, and NYISO, and PJM, but ERCOT is unique in how disconnected it is. The connections between the Texas power grid and the rest of the country are few, and I think a lot of them involve converting power from AC to DC and then back to AC. Why this is is a pretty complicated story that I’m not familiar with.
So it’s not as easy to fix Texas’ energy issues when they’re in trouble. Now you might be wondering about the issue with why the weather matters so much. Well, basically, power grid companies and infrastructure officials hired a bunch of statisticians to compute the probability of certain events happening, and decided that it wasn’t worth the cost. This happens all over the world. It’s why Florida doesn’t have fire hydrants built to handle cold weather, and why Alaska doesn’t plan on making hurricane proof houses. It would be expensive to make your electrical grid ready for such extreme events, and the expected value of that cost is higher than the expected loss if one of those events were to happen, multiplied by the probability of it happening.
Now, climate change and global warming are starting to force a revision of those calculations. The frequency of such failures will cause statisticians to revise their calculations, and we might well see companies declare that the costs of weatherproofing the grid are less than the expected costs due to crises like these after the probabilities have been adjusted. But it’s pretty much up to the calculations of statisticians and weather experts to determine what’s going to happen now.
Source: Parents are power system engineers
Being anti-government is more important in Texas than the well-being of it’s citizens. They sold the lie that regulation is the same thing as socialism and these poor folks believe it.
Latest Answers