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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

#151

Post by 8note »

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/…

I don't think residential customers are any less strict with their minimum needs.

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

#152

Post by 8note »

anonporridge wrote: post #35
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There's still a dark balancing act going on. We don't have the collective power to save everyone, and if we overextend ourselves trying to do that, then there is a risk that the whole system collapses for everyone, or partially collapses and causes more pain than might have happened without spreading ourselves too thin. We obviously need to struggle to make a good world for everyone, but nature is fucking brutal and…

Saving everyone isn't even a consideration. Saving the wealthy's profits is, and we can't save all the wealthy people's profits, so we prioritize the richest's

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

#153

Post by ezzaf »

asdfaoeu wrote: post #96
ezzaf wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ERCOT has a price cap similar to the NEM, but as far as I am aware no equivalent to the Cumulative Price Threshold which limits how long the price can sit at market cap for. In the NEM roughly speaking after 7.5 hours the price gets dropped to back to $300 for 7 days.

This measure does get triggered occasionally, generally after transmission or generation failures combined with hot weather.

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

#155

Post by 8note »

deadmutex wrote: post #27
Warrenio wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Kids froze to death in their own beds. Wow, that sounds horrible. I tried googling this since I hadn't heard about this before. I came across one 11 year old who his parents claimed died of hypothermia. However, the autopsy revealed that his death was due to carbon monoxide. Source: https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/conroe-police-autops...

Carbon monoxide comes up when you use alternatives to electricity for heating no?

While the freeze to death isn't true, that death is still attributable to the electric grind being down

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

#156

Post by 8note »

rossdavidh wrote: post #110

So, isn't this problem basically the mirror image of insurance? You pay for insurance in a normal year, and every once in a while you get a big payout. The energy companies need to have an incentive to winterize for a once/decade or less event. So, if they sell (i.e. are paid in a normal year) severe winter insurance, and the buyer gets half their windfall profits in a year when there is a shortage, and there is an i…

its the same as insurance - you the customer are getting cheaper prices, and are expected to keep a fund to pay for that as a result.

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

#157

Post by [deleted] »

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...

[deleted]

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

#158

Post by 8note »

exabrial wrote: post #115

The design flaw is premature furloughing of generation sources that can survive extreme winter weather events, without sufficient replacements. I'm not advocating to keep coal, I'm advocating for an intelligent phase-out of these sources, which just happened to be resilient against extreme winter events. The failure is lack of diversity and planning, all of the technology exists to solve this problem.

More solar and wind would have been better in this - getting away from nat gas needs to be prioritized

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

#159

Post by philistine »

Spooky23 wrote: post #137
spamizbad wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Texas is uniquely dominated by energy interests. Most of the quacking about cheapness is just noise. I have a relative who moved from an “expensive” northeast state to South Carolina. His big bitch was about taxes, but he didn’t really do the math. He saved on property taxes, but between more regressive sales tax, HOA, etc it doesn’t really compute. Most significantly, he discovered the tyranny of local government is…

I live in a town next to a border. On the other side of the river, I would save 4K in taxes every year. But I would pay more in car insurance, car registration, city property tax, public transportation and other smaller things. All in all, I pay maybe 1K more to live on my side of the river. That's completely sidestepping the whole issue of housing being way more expensive on the other side, which means I couldn't own a house.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one of my peers who has actually sat down and counted the beans. Everybody else just looks at the 4K and thinks I'm crazy to live where I live.

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

#160

Post by 8note »

tomohawk wrote: post #29

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…

The wind mills did fine though. They didn't need to invest money in natural gas, and could have spent that on something weather proof
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