Texas power prices briefly soar 1,600% as a spring heat wave is expected to drive record demand for energy
For about one hour late Friday, day-ahead prices on ERCOT's website jumped as high as $688 per MWh.
We’ve learned nothing from the 2021 winter storm that killed over 200 people.
They did change one thing. You used to be able to get electricity at wholesale prices from certain providers. When the rates went crazy during the 2021 storm and people's crazy bills for turning on the lamp blew up on the news, they shut down that option.
These rate surges do hurt customers, but now it's in the form of rate increases when their contract expires.
Thank you for the clarification.
Rationality is out of the window. Ideology is the new religion. They don't want to become "socialists" even though they don't know what it truly means.
It's almost scary to think of how bad it would have to get in order for voters to tick the boxes for Greens or Libertarians.
Like, how badly do these fuckers have to fail before you're willing to shed your partisan jersey and vote to your own benefit?
“Socialism is when capitalism.”
Instead of requiring weatherization, they allowed power plants to opt out.
Lawmakers on the Senate Business and Commerce Committee were frustrated that the new law allows natural gas companies to opt out of weatherization requirements if they don’t voluntarily declare themselves to be “critical infrastructure” with the state.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09/28/texas-power-grid-loophole/
It’s absolutely wild. The last time around, people died, and a lot more were put into financial hardship due to the shitty, hypercapitalist energy infrastructure. People were rightly ripshit angry about it.
And then nothing was done about any of it.
And then people keep voting for the politicians who created and perpetuated the situation.
It’s really hard to keep giving a shit about people who actively work and vote to make their own lives worse.
Desire for more money overrides literally every other thought for those who have the most
they almost learned nothing. The grid almost shutdown this time, instead of shutting down...
Sure we have: profits are worth more than 200 lives, and counting.
Welcome to your deregulated "free market", Texas. Don't want to be tied to government regulation? Guess you get to pay more or cook...or freeze. Your choice by season.
This is Enron-scale manipulation. Someone's ripping off the public and making a mint with the help of the regulators.
Jerry Jones, yeah same one that owns the Cowboys, made almost $1B off the price hikes durning the big freeze that almost crippled the grid.
The vast majority of Texans are on contracted plans and pay a consistent price per kilowatt.
That doesn’t mean prices won’t skyrocket when that contract renews though
It's not a coincidence that Texas is a hotbed of development for "microgrid" systems to cover for when ERCOT shits the bed -- and of course all those systems are made up of diesel and natural gas generator farms, because Texans don't want any of that communist solar power!
I've got family in Texas who love it there for some reason, but there's almost no amount of money you could pay me to move there. Bad enough when I have to work on projects in the state -- contrary to the popular narrative, in my personal opinion it's a worse place than California to try and build something, and that's entirely to do with the personalities that seem to gravitate to positions of power there. I'd much rather slog through the bureaucracy in Cali than tiptoe around a tinpot dictator in the planning department.
Not to mention their Governor, who seems to be in a race with FL's Governor for the "evil monster of the century award."
Governor hot wheels!
I am a power grid engineer and we are quoting multiple solar systems with BESS capabilities a month for Texas. It’s not all diesel.
I exaggerate -- but Magic Rock is doing booming business installing strings of natural gas generators at Buc-ee's across the state, and I'm currently dealing with an institutional client who wanted to provide backup power for a satellite campus, and didn't even stop to consider battery-backed PV on the way to asking for a natural gas generator farm.
At least we're trying to make reforms to our bureaucracy here in California, the problems mostly originate on the county and city levels. As for why the state is/was rather decentralized relatively speaking, well its cause we roughly the size of Great Britain (the island not the empire) and half the state is mountainous to some degree.
I live in Texas and have already received 2 notices this spring to conserve electricity. It has barely hit 90, and they aren't able to keep up with demand. They get the same weather reports we have access to, up to 14-21 days, yet they can't/won't anticipate demand?
It's almost like they have a financial incentive to pull this shit.
In 2000/2001 this same shit was being done in California, leading to rolling blackouts and record-high energy prices. One company was buying all the plants and shutting them down for "maintenance" specifically to increase energy prices.
There were going to be congressional hearings over it in early 2022, but that company was Enron, and at the end of 2001 they collapsed due to other bullshit they were pulling.
Fun fact, in case you weren't aware; Texas pays bitcoin mining companies to shut off their rigs during peak demand.
Miners love this; in effect they can just threaten to mine bitcoin and get paid as much as they would have made actually mining bitcoin, but without the wear and tear on their expensive hardware. It's a legalized extortion racket being enacted on the public purse.
Apologies if I just gave you even more reason to be angry.
Bookmarking this for the next time white supremacists here in good ole' South Africa peddles the "privatisation is the only thing that will fix our electricity problems!" bullcrap.
Thanks, Texas!
No no no, that's not true privatization. True privatization would fix all the problems
Privatisation can only work if the end consumers have genuine choice.
In the UK electricity is privatised and I can pick from dozens of companies. This honestly works pretty well, and you can pick the cheapest depending on when you use electricity and how much. It's the same infrastructure no matter who you pick, but that seems handled fairly well. Same with internet providers.
We also privatised water, and we just get given a company to rule over each area of the country. Unsurprisingly, given the consumer has no recourse other than "have no water" this is an absolute fucking shit-show. They've not invested in enough reservoirs, nor sewage handling, and instead lobby the government to make it legal to just put it in the rivers instead. It's the same story with trains.
Satire on point.
Pretty sure they are happy they don't have "communism" when they pay those bills.
I bet those businesses who relocated from Cali to Texas are loving those power prices.
Oh yeah, they already left Texas.
Besides that one time power goes out more often in California. In Texas you just have a temporary price surge you could treat like a blackout if you wanted to. The difference is it's less often and you have a choice.
Maybe power is more reliable in central Texas, my family still has no electricity from the derecho that hit Houston. And they lose power frequently from all the heavy storms or hurricanes that pummel the gulf coast.
Oh, Texas. Your power grid is an endless source of amusement (for people who don’t have to rely on it, of course).
The reason Texans hate government so much is because they have no idea what it looks like when it's run correctly.
What year in a row ia this?
I don't know but it started making international news during the pandemic, so at least 5th.
Enjoy the freedom!
Greed and incompetience. No wonder Texas has been resistant to federal regulation and interconnect its power network with the rest of the country.
Everything's bigger in Texas, even the power bill.
Everything is bigger in Texas
Except the paycheck
So I assume that ted cruz flees to ski somewhere this time? And does he still blame his daughters, or does that change as well?
Maybe he's not fleeing the states crumbling infrastructure, maybe he's taking his wife and/or daughter(s) for out of state abortions.
Better Sue him to be on the safe side.
Buttma taxes
Texas indeed has been blessed with much sunlight to make solar energy quite viable. This includes solar hot water heaters, and many trees to grow with vigour and bio-filtrate.
Gotta love capitalism.
particularly if you have lots of PVC cells to sell.
Gotta love unregulated capitalism.
The Enrons are Enroning the faces.
I guess they'll have to shut down their bootstrap-pulling engines for awhile.
WINNING! /s
shitty cruel systems texas likes to inflict on its citizens, the gun-totingest murican motherfuckers there are. kinda surprised they just bend over and take it. guess gun toting losers really are just losers
nothing but steers and queers in texas
my favourite scene of that movie is when that drill instructor got shot.
uh oh, somebody did a capitalism
The weather has absolutely nothing to do with that
Texas has also become a hotbed for bitcoin mining, adding to electricity demand, as the state’s deregulated power market and abundance of cheap natural gas became attractive to the energy-intensive sector.
Hmm.
That actually might make a lot of sense.
So, if Texas has inexpensive electricity most of the time, but also has occasional high price spikes...bitcoin mining is something where you do not need power now. Sure, you're losing money on your hardware and space if it's not running, but my guess is that bitcoin miners probably can do just fine shutting their systems down when prices rise above a certain point. That would tend to smooth out electricity prices.
I'd been trying to think of electricity users that could defer usage and use a lot of electricity, which are something that you want if you have wildly-varying demand and want to smooth it out, and I suppose that coin mining is actually probably a pretty good example.
There is a lot of work happening in thermal mass storage for industrial heat demand (currently most industrial processes use Natural Gas to supply heat) .
Almost all Data Centre activity could be priced relative to electricity price allowing dynamic scaling.
Click bait story that doesn't paint the complete picture.
Seriously, what are we missing?
They cropped the edges from the article photo.
The entire background. The article is vague and is designed to get people upset. They don't give any more information other than some crazy sounding percentages.
good thing you're only possibly linux. If you were fully linux i'd be retiring from life.