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?
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The answer is that it’s more important to Texans to adhere to its principals of independence and free market than it is to solve problems.
A lot of the problems of peak energy uses could be alleviated by connecting to the larger US grid to draw from regions whom don’t have as big spikes during those times, but that violates independence principals.
Texas’s laissez-faire approach to to the market reduces incentive to power companies to build for spikes. Basically, the grid is normally not at capacity. Building more capacity for spikes of demand isn’t profitable when you can’t sell that capacity most of the time (though note that a more connected grid would allow selling it over state lines). The spikes during peak demand allow operators to add usage charges and just profit from the scarcity. There’s no penalty for price gouging, and no incentive for companies to better.
There’s many different factors contributing to Texas’ terrible grid, as these comments show. I’ll add another.
Power plants around the country get paid just for being available, even when they’re not producing power. That way, when there’s a spike in demand, the grid has enough capacity to meet it. It costs extra to maintain power plants that are only needed for a few days out of the year, but it increases the reliability of the grid.
In Texas, market efficiency is prioritized over reliabilty. Power plants only get paid for the electricity that is being consumed. So there is no incentive to build extra power plants that will only be necessary for a few days out of the year. When the weather gets extreme and demand for electricity is high, there isn’t enough generation capacity and the grid is stretched to its limit.
Texas is not having a grid issue right now. Some specific cities that have been growing in population this year faster than they have been able to increase infrastructure are having some issues, and even then it is not the entire city that is having problems. Just parts with the oldest infrastructure.
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.
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
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
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.
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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.
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