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This was absolutely not the problem during the 2021 winter storm. There was an absolute lack of power to be sold, at any price. Raising the spot MWH prices to 9

This was absolutely not the problem during the 2021 winter storm. There was an absolute lack of power to be sold, at any price. Raising the spot MWH prices to 9 billion USD would have made no difference in what could be brought on-line, only how badly load serving entities were getting screwed. Empty office buildings all over the state that were lucky enough to be on critical circuits were beaming out lights the whole time because no one wanted to be the manager that got a building service worker killed trying to navigate icy roads to turn them off. Industrial sites were still running the whole time, with the Samsung fab near Austin still running for days after the near-blackout event until the power company disconnected them after days of asking. Distribution providers could not even rotate planned circuit disconnections because ERCOT would not let them turn anything back due to how narrow the spare capacity margin was. Meanwhile rural electric cooperatives that didn't own generation went bankrupt and every generator that could be was already up and running. Any load serving entity that didn't also own generation is now going to be amortizing the costs of that through rate increases for probably the next decade.

gruez 5y ago
>Raising the spot MWH prices to 9 billion USD would have made no difference in what could be brought on-line, only how badly load serving entities were getting screwed. Why not? If it's expensive enough you'll get people flying in spare generators from out-of-state to supply the demand.
- reincarnate0x14 5y ago
  In the middle of a winter storm that has shut down nearly all transportation and frozen the well-heads for natural gas production? riiight. Unless the Navy happens to have a few nuclear vessels parked in the gulf ready to hook up, it is literally impossible to move hundreds of MW of generation in a week, much less the 20 GW that Texas needed at the time.
Dylan16807 5y ago
> There was an absolute lack of power to be sold, at any price. Raising the spot MWH prices to 9 billion USD would have made no difference in what could be brought on-line, only how badly load serving entities were getting screwed. Under the system Texas uses, it's the promise of those huge payments that encourages people to build excess peaker plants. If you remove them, and don't replace them with something better, then outages will become more common. The reason they exist isn't to hurt load serving entities. > amortizing the costs of that through rate increases for probably the next decade That's a good thing. That's the good outcome. The better alternative to giant peak fees, which is paying for capacity, has the same result: the base price is a little higher. The bad outcome is entities that can't just amortize over a decade or longer.

gruez 5y ago

>Raising the spot MWH prices to 9 billion USD would have made no difference in what could be brought on-line, only how badly load serving entities were getting screwed. Why not? If it's expensive enough you'll get people flying in spare generators from out-of-state to supply the demand.

reincarnate0x14 5y ago
In the middle of a winter storm that has shut down nearly all transportation and frozen the well-heads for natural gas production? riiight. Unless the Navy happens to have a few nuclear vessels parked in the gulf ready to hook up, it is literally impossible to move hundreds of MW of generation in a week, much less the 20 GW that Texas needed at the time.

Dylan16807 5y ago

> There was an absolute lack of power to be sold, at any price. Raising the spot MWH prices to 9 billion USD would have made no difference in what could be brought on-line, only how badly load serving entities were getting screwed. Under the system Texas uses, it's the promise of those huge payments that encourages people to build excess peaker plants. If you remove them, and don't replace them with something better, then outages will become more common. The reason they exist isn't to hurt load serving entities. > amortizing the costs of that through rate increases for probably the next decade That's a good thing. That's the good outcome. The better alternative to giant peak fees, which is paying for capacity, has the same result: the base price is a little higher. The bad outcome is entities that can't just amortize over a decade or longer.