7 ms·

Power Outages in Texas: An email I sent my principles of economics students

27 points by brandonlc 6y ago

d_e_solomon 6y ago
I liked this analysis. The one item that is glossed over is that if the Texas power grid was connected to the rest of the United States, then additional supply could be purchased from outside Texas. That would keep the lights on as energy usage doesn't spike across the entire United States all at once. Since politicians in Texas chose to keep the electric grid separate, the wide spread outages are much more likely to happen. I thought the analysis on voters having wrong incentives was interesting, but also really lacked any type of solution.
- 7thaccount 6y ago
  I've answered this in other threads on here. Yes and No. There wasn't much power to give from other areas. So even if they had more transfer capability, nobody had much capacity to give.
- CamTin 6y ago
  This is the main lesson we've learned in Texas this week. Why go it alone? We're asking for help from the rest of the country anyway (Federal emergency funds, etc). If we'd just played nice to start with we wouldn't be in this kind of trouble at all.
- avs733 6y ago
  the analysis is bluntly false for several reasons, starting with really bad strawmen. I'm trying to coherently put together a post with links explaining just how bad it is because of the utter lack of technical knowledge the author displays.
alex_young 6y ago
> My friends on the left tend to blame deregulation. Sadly, not one of them is spelling out exactly what regulation they think would solve this problem. This is a little rich from an economic analysis which curiously fails to mention that Texas has a deregulated market based option which many consumers use: Griddy. Griddy is in the news [0] because they actually had to tell customers to stop using them in the middle of this crisis because they had to raise bills thousands of times higher overnight in many cases. Maybe, just maybe, deregulation is not the answer here. [0] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Texas-power-retailers-to-customers-in-face-of-15953843.php https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Tex...
- cduzz 6y ago
  How about severe penalties for breaching your SLAs? Can't deliver power? Give customers $X per minute of downtime. Now let's see you assess your risk when it comes to installing heaters and insulation.
  - rabidrat 6y ago
    Financial solutions like this have proven to perform poorly with 'black swan' events. Pressure from stakeholders and people who decry 'waste' (i.e. "slack in the system") when there hasn't been one of these rare events in recent memory leads to cutting 'unnecessary' costs. After all, people have reason to be wary if a power plant builder in Ecuador argues that they should spend millions of dollars preparing for subzero temperatures. At best they're viewed as a paranoid prepper, at worst a fearmongering profiteer. Then when one of these rare events happens, and now thousands of people are owed tons of money, either insurance pays out, or the government bails out the power company, or the power company goes bankrupt (or is forced to make cuts in other areas). In none of these outcomes has the SLA achieved its goal of ensuring that consumers have more-reliable access to power. Some of them may be richer for their suffering, but some of them are also dead.
- bitshiftfaced 6y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, as I don't have access to the article. The deregulated option allowed people to pay an extreme price for a scarce resource during a rare and extreme weather event. The regulated option forced blackouts on people, and they had no option even if they wanted to pay $10,000 for one night of power. This brings us back around to the original question: what regulation would have solved this problem?
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    > Correct me if I'm wrong, as I don't have access to the article. The deregulated option allowed people to pay an extreme price for a scarce resource during a rare and extreme weather event. The regulated option forced blackouts on people, and they had no option even if they wanted to pay $10,000 for one night of power. Well, except for the fact that the "free market" arrived at one year contracts with sticky prices.
cduzz 6y ago
I'm not sure where I put my pearls.... Perhaps we could also talk about the outsourcing of risk; those responsible for reliability of the infrastructure are also responsible to shareholders to maximize return, so heaters and insulation on natural gas pipes don't need to be installed because there's a very small chance the pipes will freeze. What's the value of the hundred people who will die from this vs the cost of losing all autonomy by not being interconnected to other grids? Heads I win, tails you lose. Let freedom reign!
- throwaway1777 6y ago
  You know they could winterize the pipes and still not connect to the other grids.
  - cduzz 6y ago
    Each mitigation against this sort of risk event has costs. An enterprise that enjoys all the profits of day-to-day success and no consequence of abject failure will minimize all expenses beyond those necessary to keep the lights on most of the time. The good sought by this company is clearly profits and more likely executive bonuses, not reliability.
    - throwaway1777 6y ago
      So what you’re saying is we need some regulations that they have to winterize the pipes.
pwinnski 6y ago
Mistakenly lays some blame on renewables, which are overperforming right now in Texas. Renewables are not in play here, we are having major problems with natural gas and coal plants not being prepared for cold weather. That preparation, previously recommended twice, is an example of the sort of regulation people would like to see: requirements, rather than recommendations. All in all, seems misguided a bit on both left and right when it comes to blame, but the economics of it are good.
- Pulcinella 6y ago
  Yeah I was going to say: > My friends on the right tend to send blame towards green energy. And they have a point! Renewables are temperamental – with too many clouds solar doesn’t do anything, and frozen blades can’t turn wind energy turbines. The impact of the storm is to shift energy supply curves to the left, and the more the grid relies on renewables, the bigger that shift is. The basic problem renewables have had is that it’s really difficult to STORE their energy for future use. If we could create really large energy reservoirs, we could store Texas’ abundant solar and wind energy for a literally-rainy day. Renewables were literally not the problem and it’s hard to take any kind of advice from this article when it gets the basic facts wrong.
  - bighitbiker3 6y ago
    Do you mind pointing me to some reliable links that do highlight the actual problem?
    - Pulcinella 6y ago
      The ArsTechnica article is a decent place to start. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/even-power-disasters-are-bigger-in-texas-heres-why/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/even-power-disasters... This is still an on-going event so the “history” is still being written. Also https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-frozen/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-...
  - chrismcb 6y ago
SuchAnonMuchWow 6y ago
It may be a unpopular opinion, but I think the issue with free-market capitalism is that it is a almost-perfect optimization engine which converge to the cheapest solution that is still barely acceptable. That why it is harder and harder to find good quality product, and that's why low-occurrence incidents are less and less provisioned for.
- junitguy 6y ago
  This is exactly where I think the debate around "socialism" needs to go. The key issue is reliability. I don't mind private healthcare or electrical grids. I appreciate the power of free markets. What I do mind is being stranded without power in freezing temperatures or a surprise bankruptcy due to a medical issue. That shit is ridiculous in a modern society.
- hahahahe 6y ago
  Free-market capitalism almost always leads to monopolies. That’s the whole game. Not really competitive is it?
egypturnash 6y ago
Here is a nice Twitter thread that succinctly explains the Texas grid's problems from a viewpoint that is not that of an economist with Libertarian axes to grind: https://twitter.com/DemSocialists/status/1362473071156879377 https://twitter.com/DemSocialists/status/1362473071156879377 tl,dr: the Texas grid is deregulated so it can avoid following Federal rules about making it able to deal with harsh weather; because of this, it also has very little interconnectivity with the rest of the country, and cannot act like every other state and purchase power from elsewhere when things go awry. So there's part of the "deregulation" that his liberal friends are talking about. If they were following the regulations then Texas would be able to get power from elsewhere. It'd still be newsworthy and a mess, there is a lot of knowledge and preparation for snowstorms that Southern states simply do not have, but it would not be as apocalyptic of a mess.
jtr1 6y ago
> Add in that governments generally do a bad job running businesses (wasteful) It's always strange to see this kind of statement presented as axiomatic. This sort of circular reasoning sounds like ideology on autopilot. Utilities should be run by businesses, not the government. Why? Because the government is bad at running businesses.
- jonny_eh 6y ago
  From the article: > My friends on the right tend to send blame towards green energy Plus he's pretending he's not on the right.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Whenever you find a blog called something like "Notes on Liberty" and it isn't written by Frederick Douglas you know it's just going to be a libertarian trash fire, and that's why this kind of statement passes as axiomatic. There are far too many examples of excellently-run government services to just let this slide. My favorites on the national level: air traffic control, and weather forecasting.
ashtonkem 6y ago
This article seems disconnected with what we currently know, to the point of being completely delusional. It seems the professor is so focused on price signals that they’ve begun to mistake them for reality. The core premise seems to be “we need all this excess capacity, who is going to pay to have all of this production that will sit idle?” The problem is that it’s not clear that we need more capacity. At the minimum we need to winterize our current capacity as is, so that it doesn’t fail when the weather gets cold. That’ll cost some money, of course, but it’ll cost a hell of a lot less than creating brand new extra power plants that’ll sit idle. It’s also not clear why extra capacity would help. If the grid has a bunch of new power plants sitting idle, why should we believe that they too won’t fail when cold weather is shutting down other power plants? Wouldn’t they be even more likely to fail than the plants that are already on and running? I guess we could winterize them, by why not just winterize the main grid so it doesn’t die when you need it most? It honestly seems like they started with their argument and began to work backwards towards to find some evidence to match, because they’ve totally ignored the simplest solution that already worked in places like El Paso: winterize your damn power plants.
monkpit 6y ago
> Bottom line: there isn’t an easy solution to weather events that happen once in a hundred years [...] I think it’s extremely misguided to characterize this storm in this way. We will probably be in for more of these types of events sooner than later.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  It’s not just a bad characterization; it’s a lie. Texas’ power grid had issues due to the cold in 2011, and the current temps were last experienced in 1989. That’s once in 31 or 10 years, depending on how you want to slice it. Not 100, nowhere close to it.
  - monkpit 6y ago
    Very true. I also (still) think the frequency of these events is not going to be constant, but increasing.
avs733 6y ago
> My friends on the left tend to blame deregulation. Sadly, not one of them is spelling out exactly what regulation they think would solve this problem. This is objectively false and highly misleading. What to do isn't going to be spelled out by 'friends on the left' because those friends know they do not have the technical expertise to make such suggestions. One typical characteristic of 'the left' is looking to experts for solutions not just their own knowledge. In 2011, there was a SIMILAR event in Texas. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) wrote a study and issued report - see link below. That is how this should work, I know engineering enough to read the thing and say 'this seems logical' but I don't know enough to write something like this. I'm what he would call 'the left'. The report has an EXTENSIVE list of regulatory recommendations. Most of them go to 'collecting documentation about power plants' and 'checking that power plants aren't lying'. Others are 'changing your thresholds for action to be more conservative'...that is regulation! People seem to have this idea that regulation is some massive thing...but really it is knowledge management. Example from the document: > 5. ERCOT should consider modifying its procedures to (i) allow it to significantly raise the 2300 MW responsive reserve requirement in extreme low temperatures, (ii) allow it to direct generating units to utilize preoperational warming prior to anticipated severe cold weather, and (iii) allow it to verify with each generating unit its preparedness for severe cold weather, including operating limits, potential fuel needs and fuel switching abilities. Translation, they want the texas energy regulators to: * (i) Raise the threshold for when you start getting more energy if the forecast says it will be cold. Your current threshold is basically running it to the empty light on your gastank and thats reckless * (ii) Authorize themselves to tell plants 'its going to get cold please start getting ready if your plant is off' * (iii) Actually check that what the plants are telling them about their cold weather preparedness is true. > 6. Transmission Operators, Balancing Authorities, and Generation Owner/Operators should consider developing mechanisms to verify that units that have fuel switching capabilities can periodically demonstrate those capabilities. Translation: If a plant says 'hey look at this cool thing I can do' the regulator should say 'show me' not 'cool I trust you' If you look at other professional codes and standards (e.g., ASME, NFPA) the way it typically works is 'here is a standard you should design to' and then you attest that it is designed to or that you ran the test. More important regulations might involve outside validated testing but really...most of this is just documentation. This isn't overly burdensome, it is basic good practices. This isn't 'the left' failing, this is them saying 'listen to experts' and people laughing. https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/ColdWeatherTrainingMaterials/FERC%20NERC%20Findings%20and%20Recommendations.pdf https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/ColdWeatherTrainingMaterials/...
kodah 6y ago
Something I've noticed about people that use words like regulation or deregulation are often fighting a very binary ideological proxy war that is incredibly boring. Instead, I'd like to propose an information based thread that purposely excludes the proxy war. Some facts based on the information we currently have: - looks like a series of cascading failures similar to an event in 2011 - a report outlined the failures in 2011, as well as causes and symptoms - temperatures are more extreme than in 2011 - increased population growth in the state since 2011 - Texas has an independent grid with connections which have limited throughput and high cost conversion
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
This should be taken as proof that economics is about defining a political world view, and not about explaining what actually happens. As such it's a closed loop of ideology, which makes it a predictably terrible source of bad policy. Texas isn't just a solvable problem, it should have been an avoidable problem. But when your premises are wrong, your ethics are questionable, and your biasses are brittle and never challenged - this awful utter state of Texas is what you get. Variations will keep happening until these beliefs are finally discredited and replaced with models that not only have genuine predictive power, but also a solid record of preventing problems instead of causing them.
1996 6y ago
Resiliency is incompatible with optimization: if you have spare capacity, you are leaving profits on the table. If you enforce the power plants must work at 0 or below, you are wasting money 99.9% of the time. The only solution is to displace the problem where it matters: to the clients: let them decide, one by one, if they want efficiency or resiliency. Assume the former by default as most people are cheap, so rent on-prem diesel generators to the chicken little, and everybody will be happy.

27 points by brandonlc 6y ago

I liked this analysis. The one item that is glossed over is that if the Texas power grid was connected to the rest of the United States, then additional supply could be purchased from outside Texas. That would keep the lights on as energy usage doesn't spike across the entire United States all at once. Since politicians in Texas chose to keep the electric grid separate, the wide spread outages are much more likely to happen. I thought the analysis on voters having wrong incentives was interesting, but also really lacked any type of solution.

7thaccount 6y ago
I've answered this in other threads on here. Yes and No. There wasn't much power to give from other areas. So even if they had more transfer capability, nobody had much capacity to give.
CamTin 6y ago
This is the main lesson we've learned in Texas this week. Why go it alone? We're asking for help from the rest of the country anyway (Federal emergency funds, etc). If we'd just played nice to start with we wouldn't be in this kind of trouble at all.
avs733 6y ago
the analysis is bluntly false for several reasons, starting with really bad strawmen. I'm trying to coherently put together a post with links explaining just how bad it is because of the utter lack of technical knowledge the author displays.

alex_young 6y ago

> My friends on the left tend to blame deregulation. Sadly, not one of them is spelling out exactly what regulation they think would solve this problem. This is a little rich from an economic analysis which curiously fails to mention that Texas has a deregulated market based option which many consumers use: Griddy. Griddy is in the news [0] because they actually had to tell customers to stop using them in the middle of this crisis because they had to raise bills thousands of times higher overnight in many cases. Maybe, just maybe, deregulation is not the answer here. [0] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Texas-power-retailers-to-customers-in-face-of-15953843.php https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Tex...

cduzz 6y ago
How about severe penalties for breaching your SLAs? Can't deliver power? Give customers $X per minute of downtime. Now let's see you assess your risk when it comes to installing heaters and insulation.
- rabidrat 6y ago
  Financial solutions like this have proven to perform poorly with 'black swan' events. Pressure from stakeholders and people who decry 'waste' (i.e. "slack in the system") when there hasn't been one of these rare events in recent memory leads to cutting 'unnecessary' costs. After all, people have reason to be wary if a power plant builder in Ecuador argues that they should spend millions of dollars preparing for subzero temperatures. At best they're viewed as a paranoid prepper, at worst a fearmongering profiteer. Then when one of these rare events happens, and now thousands of people are owed tons of money, either insurance pays out, or the government bails out the power company, or the power company goes bankrupt (or is forced to make cuts in other areas). In none of these outcomes has the SLA achieved its goal of ensuring that consumers have more-reliable access to power. Some of them may be richer for their suffering, but some of them are also dead.
bitshiftfaced 6y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, as I don't have access to the article. The deregulated option allowed people to pay an extreme price for a scarce resource during a rare and extreme weather event. The regulated option forced blackouts on people, and they had no option even if they wanted to pay $10,000 for one night of power. This brings us back around to the original question: what regulation would have solved this problem?
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > Correct me if I'm wrong, as I don't have access to the article. The deregulated option allowed people to pay an extreme price for a scarce resource during a rare and extreme weather event. The regulated option forced blackouts on people, and they had no option even if they wanted to pay $10,000 for one night of power. Well, except for the fact that the "free market" arrived at one year contracts with sticky prices.

cduzz 6y ago

I'm not sure where I put my pearls.... Perhaps we could also talk about the outsourcing of risk; those responsible for reliability of the infrastructure are also responsible to shareholders to maximize return, so heaters and insulation on natural gas pipes don't need to be installed because there's a very small chance the pipes will freeze. What's the value of the hundred people who will die from this vs the cost of losing all autonomy by not being interconnected to other grids? Heads I win, tails you lose. Let freedom reign!

throwaway1777 6y ago
You know they could winterize the pipes and still not connect to the other grids.
- cduzz 6y ago
  Each mitigation against this sort of risk event has costs. An enterprise that enjoys all the profits of day-to-day success and no consequence of abject failure will minimize all expenses beyond those necessary to keep the lights on most of the time. The good sought by this company is clearly profits and more likely executive bonuses, not reliability.
  - throwaway1777 6y ago
    So what you’re saying is we need some regulations that they have to winterize the pipes.

pwinnski 6y ago

Mistakenly lays some blame on renewables, which are overperforming right now in Texas. Renewables are not in play here, we are having major problems with natural gas and coal plants not being prepared for cold weather. That preparation, previously recommended twice, is an example of the sort of regulation people would like to see: requirements, rather than recommendations. All in all, seems misguided a bit on both left and right when it comes to blame, but the economics of it are good.

Pulcinella 6y ago
Yeah I was going to say: > My friends on the right tend to send blame towards green energy. And they have a point! Renewables are temperamental – with too many clouds solar doesn’t do anything, and frozen blades can’t turn wind energy turbines. The impact of the storm is to shift energy supply curves to the left, and the more the grid relies on renewables, the bigger that shift is. The basic problem renewables have had is that it’s really difficult to STORE their energy for future use. If we could create really large energy reservoirs, we could store Texas’ abundant solar and wind energy for a literally-rainy day. Renewables were literally not the problem and it’s hard to take any kind of advice from this article when it gets the basic facts wrong.
- bighitbiker3 6y ago
  Do you mind pointing me to some reliable links that do highlight the actual problem?
  - Pulcinella 6y ago
    The ArsTechnica article is a decent place to start. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/even-power-disasters-are-bigger-in-texas-heres-why/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/even-power-disasters... This is still an on-going event so the “history” is still being written. Also https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-frozen/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-...
- chrismcb 6y ago

SuchAnonMuchWow 6y ago

It may be a unpopular opinion, but I think the issue with free-market capitalism is that it is a almost-perfect optimization engine which converge to the cheapest solution that is still barely acceptable. That why it is harder and harder to find good quality product, and that's why low-occurrence incidents are less and less provisioned for.

junitguy 6y ago
This is exactly where I think the debate around "socialism" needs to go. The key issue is reliability. I don't mind private healthcare or electrical grids. I appreciate the power of free markets. What I do mind is being stranded without power in freezing temperatures or a surprise bankruptcy due to a medical issue. That shit is ridiculous in a modern society.
hahahahe 6y ago
Free-market capitalism almost always leads to monopolies. That’s the whole game. Not really competitive is it?

egypturnash 6y ago

Here is a nice Twitter thread that succinctly explains the Texas grid's problems from a viewpoint that is not that of an economist with Libertarian axes to grind: https://twitter.com/DemSocialists/status/1362473071156879377 https://twitter.com/DemSocialists/status/1362473071156879377 tl,dr: the Texas grid is deregulated so it can avoid following Federal rules about making it able to deal with harsh weather; because of this, it also has very little interconnectivity with the rest of the country, and cannot act like every other state and purchase power from elsewhere when things go awry. So there's part of the "deregulation" that his liberal friends are talking about. If they were following the regulations then Texas would be able to get power from elsewhere. It'd still be newsworthy and a mess, there is a lot of knowledge and preparation for snowstorms that Southern states simply do not have, but it would not be as apocalyptic of a mess.

jtr1 6y ago

> Add in that governments generally do a bad job running businesses (wasteful) It's always strange to see this kind of statement presented as axiomatic. This sort of circular reasoning sounds like ideology on autopilot. Utilities should be run by businesses, not the government. Why? Because the government is bad at running businesses.

jonny_eh 6y ago
From the article: > My friends on the right tend to send blame towards green energy Plus he's pretending he's not on the right.
jeffbee 6y ago
Whenever you find a blog called something like "Notes on Liberty" and it isn't written by Frederick Douglas you know it's just going to be a libertarian trash fire, and that's why this kind of statement passes as axiomatic. There are far too many examples of excellently-run government services to just let this slide. My favorites on the national level: air traffic control, and weather forecasting.

ashtonkem 6y ago

This article seems disconnected with what we currently know, to the point of being completely delusional. It seems the professor is so focused on price signals that they’ve begun to mistake them for reality. The core premise seems to be “we need all this excess capacity, who is going to pay to have all of this production that will sit idle?” The problem is that it’s not clear that we need more capacity. At the minimum we need to winterize our current capacity as is, so that it doesn’t fail when the weather gets cold. That’ll cost some money, of course, but it’ll cost a hell of a lot less than creating brand new extra power plants that’ll sit idle. It’s also not clear why extra capacity would help. If the grid has a bunch of new power plants sitting idle, why should we believe that they too won’t fail when cold weather is shutting down other power plants? Wouldn’t they be even more likely to fail than the plants that are already on and running? I guess we could winterize them, by why not just winterize the main grid so it doesn’t die when you need it most? It honestly seems like they started with their argument and began to work backwards towards to find some evidence to match, because they’ve totally ignored the simplest solution that already worked in places like El Paso: winterize your damn power plants.

monkpit 6y ago

> Bottom line: there isn’t an easy solution to weather events that happen once in a hundred years [...] I think it’s extremely misguided to characterize this storm in this way. We will probably be in for more of these types of events sooner than later.

ashtonkem 6y ago
It’s not just a bad characterization; it’s a lie. Texas’ power grid had issues due to the cold in 2011, and the current temps were last experienced in 1989. That’s once in 31 or 10 years, depending on how you want to slice it. Not 100, nowhere close to it.
- monkpit 6y ago
  Very true. I also (still) think the frequency of these events is not going to be constant, but increasing.

avs733 6y ago

> My friends on the left tend to blame deregulation. Sadly, not one of them is spelling out exactly what regulation they think would solve this problem. This is objectively false and highly misleading. What to do isn't going to be spelled out by 'friends on the left' because those friends know they do not have the technical expertise to make such suggestions. One typical characteristic of 'the left' is looking to experts for solutions not just their own knowledge. In 2011, there was a SIMILAR event in Texas. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) wrote a study and issued report - see link below. That is how this should work, I know engineering enough to read the thing and say 'this seems logical' but I don't know enough to write something like this. I'm what he would call 'the left'. The report has an EXTENSIVE list of regulatory recommendations. Most of them go to 'collecting documentation about power plants' and 'checking that power plants aren't lying'. Others are 'changing your thresholds for action to be more conservative'...that is regulation! People seem to have this idea that regulation is some massive thing...but really it is knowledge management. Example from the document: > 5. ERCOT should consider modifying its procedures to (i) allow it to significantly raise the 2300 MW responsive reserve requirement in extreme low temperatures, (ii) allow it to direct generating units to utilize preoperational warming prior to anticipated severe cold weather, and (iii) allow it to verify with each generating unit its preparedness for severe cold weather, including operating limits, potential fuel needs and fuel switching abilities. Translation, they want the texas energy regulators to: * (i) Raise the threshold for when you start getting more energy if the forecast says it will be cold. Your current threshold is basically running it to the empty light on your gastank and thats reckless * (ii) Authorize themselves to tell plants 'its going to get cold please start getting ready if your plant is off' * (iii) Actually check that what the plants are telling them about their cold weather preparedness is true. > 6. Transmission Operators, Balancing Authorities, and Generation Owner/Operators should consider developing mechanisms to verify that units that have fuel switching capabilities can periodically demonstrate those capabilities. Translation: If a plant says 'hey look at this cool thing I can do' the regulator should say 'show me' not 'cool I trust you' If you look at other professional codes and standards (e.g., ASME, NFPA) the way it typically works is 'here is a standard you should design to' and then you attest that it is designed to or that you ran the test. More important regulations might involve outside validated testing but really...most of this is just documentation. This isn't overly burdensome, it is basic good practices. This isn't 'the left' failing, this is them saying 'listen to experts' and people laughing. https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/ColdWeatherTrainingMaterials/FERC%20NERC%20Findings%20and%20Recommendations.pdf https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/ColdWeatherTrainingMaterials/...

kodah 6y ago

Something I've noticed about people that use words like regulation or deregulation are often fighting a very binary ideological proxy war that is incredibly boring. Instead, I'd like to propose an information based thread that purposely excludes the proxy war. Some facts based on the information we currently have: - looks like a series of cascading failures similar to an event in 2011 - a report outlined the failures in 2011, as well as causes and symptoms - temperatures are more extreme than in 2011 - increased population growth in the state since 2011 - Texas has an independent grid with connections which have limited throughput and high cost conversion

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

This should be taken as proof that economics is about defining a political world view, and not about explaining what actually happens. As such it's a closed loop of ideology, which makes it a predictably terrible source of bad policy. Texas isn't just a solvable problem, it should have been an avoidable problem. But when your premises are wrong, your ethics are questionable, and your biasses are brittle and never challenged - this awful utter state of Texas is what you get. Variations will keep happening until these beliefs are finally discredited and replaced with models that not only have genuine predictive power, but also a solid record of preventing problems instead of causing them.

1996 6y ago

Resiliency is incompatible with optimization: if you have spare capacity, you are leaving profits on the table. If you enforce the power plants must work at 0 or below, you are wasting money 99.9% of the time. The only solution is to displace the problem where it matters: to the clients: let them decide, one by one, if they want efficiency or resiliency. Assume the former by default as most people are cheap, so rent on-prem diesel generators to the chicken little, and everybody will be happy.