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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

#251

Post by kurthr »

8note wrote: post #148
kurthr wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, it's about optimizing profits by lowering cost, and not lowering price. A "free" market doesn't mean a competitive or efficient market.

And not by raising price* You already have all the customers you're going to get

If you can't raise prices, you can't optimize profits!?! Hospitals, "have all the customers" they're going to get, but prices go up (faster than inflation) every year anyway. Note that insurance companies are often regulated on their cost percentages, but if their payouts keep going up... they're profits can too! Ultimately, that may even lower their number of customers to only those who are most profitable. Win-Win!

I think it's kind of funny that some people think that "deregulated" markets are somehow magically efficient or competitive. Collusion and monopoly are inherently higher profit margin businesses and so incentivized by unregulated markets. Monopolies can be supply, transport, territorial, or temporal, but all optimize ROI.

Note that regulatory capture is yet another method of stifling competition and creating monopoly pricing power.

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

#252

Post by vorpalhex »

freeone3000 wrote: post #240
vorpalhex wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Eastern Ontario gets wind and ice and cold EVERY SINGLE YEAR. Every one. If you don't winterize, you don't work. It is a cost. In Texas, basically up until last year with that blackout, there was no downside to not winterizing. Why? Most of our pipes aren't even deep enough to handle a hard freeze - because we don't usually get hard freezes.

There's been a deep freeze every year for two years now. It might be worth considering there's going to be another one next year.

We did, which is why we had no blackouts this year.

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

#253

Post by defaultprimate »

cloudfifty wrote: post #249
defaultprimate wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30275285

Quoted post unavailable.

Cool, what does that have to do with the verifiable facts about who he was as a person and the role they played in his writings and philosophy?

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

#256

Post by philipkglass »

PaulHoule wrote: post #146
7thaccount wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read all the books covering the history of the deregulation of the regulated electric industry in the US, their reasoning was clear. Many years ago, under regulation (and still for those areas of the US that aren't in a market), it was the job of planners to determine the load growth and to build enough supply to meet demand and get a steady ROR. We did really bad at this in (I think it was the 80s), so there…

"Made possible" also meant that coal burning plants were obsolete and we needed to restructure the generating system so they could go out of business without making the utilities go under. So much in the energy literature looks like a clock that stopped. For instance you still see cost estimates of advanced combustion systems from the 1970s that have been carried into the future without adjusting for inflation and ch…

People still compare nuclear power to coal but they quit building coal plants circa 1980 for the same reason they quit building nuclear plants

You can see a graph of coal capacity added by year here: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30812

The US built coal plants in the 1990s and even in the 2010s. These last ones started construction in roughly the years 2003-2008, when US natural gas prices were elevated and (many thought) due to go up even more:

https://www.macrotrends.net/2478/natural-gas-prices-historic...

Coal's brief renaissance was halted by a triple-whammy of lower gas costs (from shale), lower wind costs, and lower solar costs. It's soon to face another whammy: falling grid scale battery costs. I don't think that the continental US will ever build another coal generating station. But that happened more recently than 1980.

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

#257

Post by croon »

defaultprimate wrote: post #244
croon wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, they did it because they viewed "others" as less than human, or less deserving of dignity and respect, no different than a beast of burden. Slavery predates capitalism by millennia, so viewing others this way clearly doesn't share a causative relationship with capitalism. To contend that capitalism caused slavery is absurd. It's the only economic system in history that resulted in the enduring abolition of slav…

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

#258

Post by croon »

defaultprimate wrote: post #245
croon wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

> Both of these are explicit examples of regulatory capture.

> The FAA is heavily dependent on aircraft manufacturers to self certify. EU members met in Brussels to discuss the exact metrics VW was spoofing, but failed to implement a measurement strategy that would have easily detected this manipulation due to pressure from companies regarding the expense and time of tests.

Furthering this line of thought, are you suggesting that these companies complaining about expense and time of tests would volunteer into a trade organization (and pay for it no less, which is how they exist), that of course would still require the same tests to be effective? Otherwise the end result would just be another certification that consumers would want before buying, but wouldn't mean anything unless they entail stringent tests.

> You cannot substantiate this assertion. If the state did not have easily captured, monopolistic, and absolute authority over the certification and other confidence-instilling industries, then it's highly likely trustworthy, neutral third parties would exist and compete to assess and verify the safety and other metrics of various industry. In the restaurant industry, ServSafe and its competitors are a great example.

Not to knock the service industry, but airplanes and cars are a bit more complicated to evaluate.

> There's also tons of nongovernmental safety and quality certifications in plenty of other fields with the potential for catastrophic failure and loss of human life.

I would be much more interested in examples here.

> Please actually read some of the foundational literature. Pretty much everything you've said is explicitly addressed.

So please address it using your already obtained knowledge instead of dodging.

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

#259

Post by bcrl »

mardifoufs wrote: post #100
bcrl wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The 1998 ice storm was something that had not happened before. Montreal was in particularly bad shape because numerous towers for something like 2 of the 3 transmission lines going into the city collapsed under the weight of the ice (please forgive my foggy memory for the exact numbers and details).

My family in eastern Ontario was without power for 8 days in 1998, and another friend was without power for 17 days. Ontario had failed to enforce proper engineering standards for pole lines, and as a direct result of the review of standards after the '98 ice storm, ESA regulation 22/04 significantly improved standards for these systems. Regulation 22/04 wasn't fully implemented by Hydro One and Bell until 2007-2008, and one consequence of 22/04 is that the cost of installing new fibre on old pole lines increased massively at that time as permitting process went from being handshake deals to requiring detailed engineering work.

Those of us trying to deploy broadband in some areas simply cannot afford to replace every single pole in some areas as is required by modern engineering standards. I have personally encountered quite a number of class 5 - 35 foot poles with 3 phases of power on them that were installed in 1948! Survey work in the past month even found a couple of poles from 1929!!! Those poles are effectively toothpicks at this point in their lifecycle. Granted, the older poles that were treated with creosote last a heck of a lot longer than the more modern "environmentally friendly" CCA-PEG treated poles, but they're pretty small and often have glass insulators that you really don't want to be anywhere near when that pole starts swaying due to the movement of a cable lasher.

Learning about all of this telecom and electrical domain knowlegde has been kinda fun in its own way. =-)

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