71–80 of 187 posts
Well Texas seems to be planing to put in regulation on the electricity market. Seems like the current administration is out to completely gut any kind of cost savings for american businesses. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-markets/texas-bi...
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This is very true, and I think an underappreciated point specifically for utilities, so I hope you don't mind if I expand quite a bit on your excellent point. What "deregulation" means in Texas is that there's a competitive market for electricity generation, and that those who invest in the cheapest methods of production can make profits, and those who made poor investments can lose money. This "deregulation" is mere…
I can't believe people are using Texas as a positive example of deregulation after they demonstrated quite enthusiastically how broken their system is. A competent electrical system can handle sustained freezing temperatures without massive blackouts. Texas can't. (No, I can't believe they'll do any better next time. There were no market consequences for incompetence.)
Texas is an energy-only market right now (payments only for kWh delivered), but adding a capacity market could help (payments for ensuring the ability to deliver electricity), and capacity markets are common in other energy markets around the US. And another thing that would have helped even more clearly is cleaning house at the ISO that didn't follow any of the guidelines from the massive outage from nuclear and gas that happened more than a decade ago. But the ISO failing to do what it's supposed to do is the regulators not doing their job. Regulators regulating what they have the power to do is clearly important in any system.
Deregulating a basic human need and leaving it to the 'market' to solve this. This sounds a lot like other privatization efforts of the past decades. In my country healthcare, child support, energy, national railway, postal services, public housing, banking and more have all been privatized. I worry about this. Not for now, but for 20 years in the future, where all energy is managed by companies and the government ca…
It just takes way longer to reach market equilibrium than free-market advocates claim. And by way longer, I mean years or even decades rather than months or weeks, which means a lot of suffering or externalities during the transitional period.
Healthcare was once deregulated in the U.S. And it was fine. And it would be again if we deregulated healthcare, but it would take more than a decade and nobody has the stomach for that. (And nobody has yet made a compelling case to demonstrate that a deregulated healthcare system would be a sufficient improvement over what we have now to justify the suffering that the changeover would cause.)
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That's closer to the truth, but to say that all homes have basically zero insulation is just wrong.
Well sure drywall is technically an insulator, since it's not a thermal or electrical conductor. So is the single pane of glass found on most windows. Maybe there's some stuff between the drywall and stucco? I never checked because the lead paint on the walls (any of the walls I've lived among; the Bay Area has a lot of old, shit housing) made me wary of drilling holes.
It doesn't clearly tie the choice of business model to the way the businesses are regulated, so it fails to support the claim that regulation is the cause of the lack of solar adoption. The examples it uses to make its case, the TVA and the state of Texas, are also not great.
The TVA is owned by the government. So the question of their pivot to solar power is more of a political question than an economic one. Is there any political will to spend tax dollars pivoting the TVA away from nuclear and hydro sources to solar? Which politicians support/reject the policy and why?
Texas is also not a great example given the recent tragedies arguably resulting from their lack of regulation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
In-line with other comments, Enron is a classic case-study of the consequences of allowing free markets unfettered control over essential infrastructure.
The most significant US regulations in the area aren't even mentioned in this article: the prohibitively high tariffs on Chinese solar modules and electric vehicles, which at least double the cost of solar panels and EVs in the US compared to much of the rest of the world. Current US elites grew up in the energy crisis that started with the Arab oil embargo of 01973 cutting off US energy imports, and they seem determ…
Because we cannot afford, geopolitically, to have a hostile rival nation with whom we may in the next decade be at war control our energy. There is no if, and, or but about that. Of course, most of said solar and battery tech was originally developed by Americans; chinese bought old patents, bought companies out of bankruptcy, and threw obscene amounts of state capital at developing it further. and now we're stuck wi…
I strongly disagree with both your master-race theory of technical innovation and your imperialist rhetoric. Americans, and in particular people from the US, did contribute greatly to solar and battery technological innovation. But a great deal of it was carried out outside the US, or inside the US by non-Americans, and in particular by Chinese grad students at US universities. Technological and scientific progress is inherently an international effort on behalf of all of humanity.
In terms of bringing utility-scale battery storage and PV energy production to mass production, US elites have basically opted not to participate. Unfortunately I expect that situation to continue.
Withdrawing international intellectual-property monopolies en masse is an interesting suggestion; I think it would probably promote progress, in particular because it would free other countries around the world to do the same with US patents and copyrights, which have been among the most significant obstacles to progress and even simple preservation of knowledge.
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China burns more coal than the rest of the world combined.
Despite that I wouldn't be surprised if China ends up reaching 90% carbon-free electricity sooner than the US.
China's share of of electricity production from coal is at 60% as of 2023[1] compared to 16% for the US[2]. That's down from 80% in 2005. It currently generates 35% of its electricity from renewable sources as of 2023 compared to 41% in the US. The US has been replacing coal with gas - gas was 19% in 2005 and 42% in 2023.
China first exceeded the US's annual carbon emissions in 2006 with both outputting about 6 billion tons. Since then the US has declined to a bit under 5 billion tons in 2023 while China has doubled to a bit under 12 billion tons[3] making it by far the largest emitter in notional terms per year.
While the Western world's carbon emissions have been in decline for years (with the US still the highest ex-China), China and India's emissions continue to climb at significant rates. It's true that China is building enormous amounts of renewable energy, but that can be further generalized to China is building enormous amounts of energy production across all sources, dirty and clean.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun... [3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because we cannot afford, geopolitically, to have a hostile rival nation with whom we may in the next decade be at war control our energy. There is no if, and, or but about that. Of course, most of said solar and battery tech was originally developed by Americans; chinese bought old patents, bought companies out of bankruptcy, and threw obscene amounts of state capital at developing it further. and now we're stuck wi…
Is casually conflating allied nations with “subordinates” some sort of signal of political orientation now?
The most significant US regulations in the area aren't even mentioned in this article: the prohibitively high tariffs on Chinese solar modules and electric vehicles, which at least double the cost of solar panels and EVs in the US compared to much of the rest of the world. Current US elites grew up in the energy crisis that started with the Arab oil embargo of 01973 cutting off US energy imports, and they seem determ…
We shoudln't let China overproduce and dump excess solar productions in its own attempts to control the market. We're trying to not repeat the energy dependence on unfriendly foreign powers. We don't want the Chinese Solar Embargo of 2026.
CTRL+F 'Enron' 0 results. Don't really trust something advocating for deregulated energy markets to not mention the elephant in the room.
Enron was the result accounting fraud, not energy market regulation or lack of it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%932001_California...