4 ms·
My question is why so many plants went down in such quick succession that such a quick reaction was necessary. From the graphs I’ve seen, it was 10GW in less t
by cameldrv 6y ago
My question is why so many plants went down in such quick succession that such a quick reaction was necessary. From the graphs I’ve seen, it was 10GW in less than an hour. That is dozens of power plants, presumably geographically distributed and not using the exact same gas supply or experiencing the exact same weather conditions.
This caused prices to increase by about 200x and caused electric generators in Texas to earn about an extra $10 billion per day.
This reminds me of Enron in California in 2000.
- panarky 6y agoMany of the plants are under common ownership. If you own 10 plants and shutting 3 of them can cause the remaining 7 to increase profits by 10,000%, it's not hard to see how that might influence your decisions. This is market failure. The incentives magnify minor events into catastrophes.
- cameldrv 6y agoYeah that's what I want to know. If it's a physical problem like low gas pressure or pipes freezing, I don't see why so many plants would shut down at the same time. If they were shut down for economic reasons, that suggests that there was a huge market failure, especially now, almost five days later and they're still not fully operational.