Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Texas power crisis revealed flaw in market’s design

news.cornell.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 296 posts

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

#91

Post by jorblumesea »

spamizbad wrote: post #58
burlesona wrote: post #4

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...

Deregulation is about privatizing any possible profits a system might make. The goal is almost never to improve consumer outcomes, but to line the pockets of wealth donors and benefactors. Whenever someone argues for privatization, just follow the money.

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

#92

Post by bsder »

obblekk wrote: post #2

I suppose we've come full circle and stopped trusting in free markets to fully solve all problems. Does anyone know of hybrid central planning / market approaches? Maybe a central planner with a market trying to predict whether the planner is making good decisions?

> free markets

You cannot "free market" infrastructure that is expensive to duplicate and uses up scarce resources.

A "second grid" that is 100% reliable, for example, would be terribly wasteful of the physical space required to run it.

In addition, "free market" didn't give us universal electrification to begin with. Why would you assume that it can run it?

At this point, we have run the "deregulation" experiments in California and Texas (and elsewhere). They have failed.

Critical infrastructure needs to be managed by a political process.

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

#93

Post by vel0city »

anonporridge wrote: post #45
nexuist wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is to cut off industrial and commercial sites first, which draw the most power anyways, and keep residential zoning online as much as possible. The economy can take a break for one day.

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/…

Datacenters should be able to stay online even with a full power cut. If your datacenter can't go days without mains power, you need to move datacenters.

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

#94

Post by freeone3000 »

bcrl wrote: post #47
jackson1442 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Eastern Ontario seems to do fine handling winter temperatures of -28C to -35C every year. Cold isn't the issue driving reliability problems here, wind and ice are.

Eastern Ontario also gets wind and ice. Every single year. And yet it has electricity.

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

#95

Post by ceejayoz »

cortesoft wrote: post #54
anonporridge wrote: post #45

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.

Agreed, but one hopes said datacenter isn't hosting, say, the utility company's dispatching systems...

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

#96

Post by asdfaoeu »

ezzaf wrote: post #86
caf wrote: post #63

Another electricity market of similar scale that is also an energy-only market is the Australian NEM. It hasn't had an event similar to the ERCOT disaster of last winter yet, but there have been discussions about adding a capacity market mechanism.

A few interesting points about the NEM that help explain why it's avoided a simple situation. 1: There are multiple price caps that set a maximum price on energy. 2: There's a commonly traded instrument that effectively acts as an insurance product for retailers against high prices. This means peaking generators get paid every quarter, even if they plants don't run at all. 3: The Australian government is spending bil…

For 1 doesn't ERCOT also have a maximum price or do you mean at a retail level?

I'd imagine our relatively milder climate also has a lot to do with it.

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

#97

Post by vel0city »

Warrenio wrote: post #23
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #14

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.

Every home that uses electricity for heat is a mission-critical site when it's 0 degrees F outside. Kids froze to death in their own beds.

Please cite your claim of "kids froze to death in their own beds".

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

#100

Post by mardifoufs »

bcrl wrote: post #38
maxerickson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your first paragraph about Texas specifically or something? Utilities in most places are pretty heavily regulated. In like that last 20 years we have had ~0 gas outages and probably less than 10 days of power outages here. The weather event in Texas had the problem of being rather extreme, but it sure wasn't unimaginable or anything like that.

10 days worth of power outages in 20 years is not something to brag about. I lived in Toronto where we had maybe 1 hour of power outages in 5 years (my Linux box had >485 days of uptime on wall power with no UPS until I had to move). Well, that was until the 2003 blackout hit and took out power for 24+ hours.

Even grids designed around winter can fail, hard. Quebec's grid is extremely important to the province, and it's actually a source of pride here yet it also failed in a catastrophic way in 1998. And I've had 3 outages this year in Montréal too.

I don't know why everyone seems to be judging the soundness of the Texas grid based on single event that happened last year. Yes it was catastrophic, but so was what happened in 1998 here in quebec or the outages that occured in 2004 in Ontario or even the perpetual mess that's California's grid.

Post reply on HN