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Texas power crisis revealed flaw in market’s design

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Re: Texas power crisis revealed flaw in market’s design

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. Some industrial customers like datacenters have strict availability agreements with customers and won't be able to accept prolonged cutoffs. Forcing non residential customers like these to curtail their use would likely end up driving the industry (and corresponding tax revenue) elsewhere. But what you're talking about does already exist, and it's called demand response, https://www.energy.gov/oe/activities/…

If people are freezing in their homes, then damn any availability agreement a datacenter has.

I'm inclined to agree, because I think our civilization should exist to serve humanity, not use humanity simply as another disposable cog in the machine.

But that's not the way our legal and political system actually works.

Re: Texas power crisis revealed flaw in market’s design

#62

This is classic “efficiency” vs “antifragility.” There are some things that are okay to ocassionally fail, and for those it’s often good to pursue efficiency. But for something critical like electricity, the market all decided - with good financial justification - that it would be more profitable to just let the system fail occasionally than to be hardened against long-tail events. In systems engineering if we want t…

Most of the market models have some means of pricing out spinning reserves or nearline capacity and other ancillary services that aren't necessarily spinning a meter. Unfortunately trying to determine the correct price incentives is complicated and it often only becomes apparent a serious mistake was made after an event. One element of this is that overall US power grid and associated infrastructure was hugely over-engineered from like 1940-1980 and some areas are only recently pushing the limits of 1960s era transmission and generation planning, in many cases because old nasty coal plants are closing and non-dispatchable renewables are cropping up at locations power plants wouldn't have made sense historically.

Other market operators in north America have different means of doing it. PJM's capacity market strategy ( https://pjm.com/markets-and-operations/rpm.aspx ) has been a reasonably successful, at least so far. CAISO has their resource adequacy planning but the changes in the western interconnect have been seriously straining both the market model and the reliability coordination in parts of California. Can't dig up a good link right now but there has been some discussion that one problem with ERCOT's forecasting was that it assumed demand stopped increasing once it reached a cold-weather ceiling, which may or may not have contributed to lack of early action in the 2021 storm. But they also have no good means of early opportunistic demand reduction, which might have trimmed several GW off peak demand during the storm as many empty buildings and industrial users were still up and running with no one able to safely go to the facilities and safely shut down unimportant loads.

I remain personally of the opinion that if it takes increasingly complicated rules and financial structures to get the desired results, that maybe the modern US concept of a deregulated power market isn't such a great idea to begin with, but it's not going away any time soon.

Re: Texas power crisis revealed flaw in market’s design

#64

Energy in Texas, like everywhere else in the US, is heavily regulated. They can't just raise rates or borrow money whenever they want. These decisions are regulated and political. So there is a set amount of income coming in to improve things and repair things and to pay off debt. They were required to build out wind power. Probably a good thing in the big scheme of things, but that takes money away from other priori…

You suggest that these problems would be faced everywhere. So why is Texas the only one experiencing them?

It’s not? We’ve had rolling black outs in the Bay Area few the past few years - not to mentioned a few massive fires started by crappy infrastructure.

Re: Texas power crisis revealed flaw in market’s design

#65

Energy in Texas, like everywhere else in the US, is heavily regulated. They can't just raise rates or borrow money whenever they want. These decisions are regulated and political. So there is a set amount of income coming in to improve things and repair things and to pay off debt. They were required to build out wind power. Probably a good thing in the big scheme of things, but that takes money away from other priori…

You suggest that these problems would be faced everywhere. So why is Texas the only one experiencing them?

[deleted]

Re: Texas power crisis revealed flaw in market’s design

#66
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Or a regulation that says all plants must be winterized to a certain degree thus the cost of electricity will just be higher for everyone to pay for mitigation of long tail risk The Southwest Power Pool has such regulations which is why they didn't have the same level of issues in the parts of Texas they serve.

But they would have similar issues in some more extreme situation. Why is it obvious that the big storm that SPP has anticipated and expended resources on is the right one? Or will there be a report like this when that storm arrives and SPP also has issues?

The SPP has taken steps to mitigate such risks. See their coverage area and other detail here https://spp.org/

Re: Texas power crisis revealed flaw in market’s design

#67

This is classic “efficiency” vs “antifragility.” There are some things that are okay to ocassionally fail, and for those it’s often good to pursue efficiency. But for something critical like electricity, the market all decided - with good financial justification - that it would be more profitable to just let the system fail occasionally than to be hardened against long-tail events. In systems engineering if we want t…

It'd be interesting what the effect might be if one day of the week only non-renewables are allowed on the market and the renewable energy is required to be used/transferred elsewhere or is only paid a marginal rate.

Re: Texas power crisis revealed flaw in market’s design

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people are freezing in their homes, then damn any availability agreement a datacenter has.

I'm inclined to agree, because I think our civilization should exist to serve humanity, not use humanity simply as another disposable cog in the machine. But that's not the way our legal and political system actually works.

I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying, but you’re confusing “what is” for “what ought to be”. It’s Hume’s classic “is-ought problem”.

Edit: I’ve interpreted the second part of your comment as an objection to the first part, but if that wasn’t the intended message it’s my bad :)

Re: Texas power crisis revealed flaw in market’s design

#69

This is classic “efficiency” vs “antifragility.” There are some things that are okay to ocassionally fail, and for those it’s often good to pursue efficiency. But for something critical like electricity, the market all decided - with good financial justification - that it would be more profitable to just let the system fail occasionally than to be hardened against long-tail events. In systems engineering if we want t…

What I don’t understand about the Texas electricity market is that, despite how “free” it is, price per kwh isn’t terribly competitive compared to more tightly regulated states - having the highest average residential rates in the West South Central region: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

It looks like Texas has higher residential, but lower commercial and industrial rates than others. It may be that other states apply policies which depress residential rates at the cost of increasing ‘business’ rates.

Re: Texas power crisis revealed flaw in market’s design

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just be transparent about that trade-off. It's a fair one to make. Putting batteries at mission-critical sites may be the better play than winterizing the entire grid, from hospitals to merry-go-rounds.

But this leaves for potentially unethical situations like vulnerable populations who cannot afford batteries or winterized electricity. Im thinking someone disabled living on disability probably can’t afford premium electricity bills even if they need to maintain their lifesaving and expensive equipment yknow?

That's not an argument for overpaying to winterize all the electricity, though - it's an argument to subsidise winterized electricity for those vulnerable populations, and the most efficient way to do that may well be to directly subsidise behind-the-meter or community-level batteries (it may instead be most efficient to subsidise or socialise winterizing of the grid as a whole, though).
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