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Texas power crisis revealed flaw in market’s design

news.cornell.edu

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

#191

Post by CJefferson »

refurb wrote: post #183
thomascgalvin wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, those are called "lies".

It’s amazing to see comments like this on a technology focused website - an industry that has moved leaps and bounds due to competition and free markets. I assume these commenters are either too young to have much life experience or young and idealistic without seeing how the world really works.

The problem is, in most countries, electricity sales aren't a free market full of competition.

No-one here is arguing if the free market helped improve CPUs, but I think it's an entirely different question if things like free electricity + gas markets are useful (the evidence from Texas exactly seems to suggest "no").

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

#192

Post by [deleted] »

roenxi wrote: post #170
thomascgalvin wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deregulation isn't about improving consumer outcomes, it's about improving profits. Expecting it to result in lower cost per kWh is a losing game.

What seems most remarkable to me is that we've got a fair amount of anti-free-market vitriol in the replies around here but nobody feels a need to provide any argument or evidence. The only person waving evidence around in this thread demonstrates that Texas has substantially lower electricity prices than the US average. And the article argues that there are edge cases where the market design could be improved. But I…

[deleted]

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

#193

Post by fake-name »

roenxi wrote: post #170
thomascgalvin wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deregulation isn't about improving consumer outcomes, it's about improving profits. Expecting it to result in lower cost per kWh is a losing game.

What seems most remarkable to me is that we've got a fair amount of anti-free-market vitriol in the replies around here but nobody feels a need to provide any argument or evidence. The only person waving evidence around in this thread demonstrates that Texas has substantially lower electricity prices than the US average. And the article argues that there are edge cases where the market design could be improved. But I…

What seems most remarkable to me is that we've got a fair amount of pro-free-market vitriol in the replies around here but nobody feels a need to provide any argument or evidence.

You need to provide evidence for the claims that the free market improves things, not the other way.

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

#194

Post by roenxi »

fake-name wrote: post #193
roenxi wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What seems most remarkable to me is that we've got a fair amount of anti-free-market vitriol in the replies around here but nobody feels a need to provide any argument or evidence. The only person waving evidence around in this thread demonstrates that Texas has substantially lower electricity prices than the US average. And the article argues that there are edge cases where the market design could be improved. But I…

What seems most remarkable to me is that we've got a fair amount of pro-free-market vitriol in the replies around here but nobody feels a need to provide any argument or evidence. You need to provide evidence for the claims that the free market improves things, not the other way.

Although I am certainly more than happy to make pro-free-market arguments (and have on occasion even in relation to the Texan power grid) I am stepping back from that for today.

If the plan is to decide what is good and bad by innuendo that is a lousy plan and we can all probably agree on that point. This is the perfect opportunity to debate using facts and evidence rather than all sitting in a circle and observing that none of us have any. These whingers should leave some space for people who intend to be guided by facts.

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

#195

Post by MomoXenosaga »

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…

Texas Republicans 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.

Fixed that for you. The Federal government will bail Texas out. Always has always will.

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

#196

Post by MomoXenosaga »

refurb wrote: post #189
p_l wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe some of us are aware of huge amounts of public grants that went into building up the foundations of that industry till it could operate without induced demand. And many of us also are aware of different constraints impacting monopoly creation and how capital intensive areas behave differently.

Sure, the military bootstrapped the semi-conductor industry, but we’re a long fucking way from the 8088 processor - thanks to capitalism. I mean for $1,000 I can have effectively a 1990’s supercomputer in my pocket. The government didn’t do that, greedy capitalists did.

Greedy capitalists use the roads, power, water, education system and political stability that government creates.

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

#197

Post by wavegeek »

I don't know much about the situation in Texas but where I live (Australia) the typical situation - it differs from one state to another - is that you have a semi-deregulated market but with ceilings on rates "to avoid price gouging".

This means that it is basically illegal to provide a capacity for backup power that is only used intermittently. This is because the backup power needs to be priced high to justify having it sitting there all year doing mostly nothing.

Having banned a market solution, governments then stepped in to overcome the "market failure" by running and funding their own backup power supplies.

Source a friend who trades electricity for a living.

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

#198

Post by makomk »

Johnny555 wrote: post #166
dane-pgp wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> inefficient electrical resistance heating. Inefficient in the sense that some of the electricity is turned into... waste heat?

In the sense that a good heat pump can be over 400% efficient but electrical resistance heat is 100% efficient. (ok, it's not scientifically correct to say that anything is over 100% efficient, and COP gets lower as the temperature decreases, but a good minisplit can still deliver a COP close to 2.0 down to 0 degrees F)

Arguably heat pumps would've made this worse, because although they decrease total power usage they increase the rate at which power usage goes up during cold spells, making the ratio of normal power usage to peak worst-case power usage even larger and harder for the grid to deal with. In systems that are well sized for the climate, this often means outright falling back to inefficient resisitive heating with all the resulting electricity demand from that.

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

#199

Post by makomk »

8note wrote: post #158
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

I don't think that'd help. There were a bunch of articles about how renewable power wasn't to blame and Texas politicians were lying by blaming it, but if you check the actual details the whole justification for that was that everyone knew solar and wind were fundamentally unable to keep the Texas grid supplied with electricty during winter due to low output and so the grid wasn't expecting to rely on them. That is, the argument isn't that they handled extreme winter weather well, it's that even in normal winters they're not useful.
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