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I'm curious why ERCOT has become so politicized. It seems to stem from the 2021 ice storm outage, but that wasn't even close to the worst power outages seen in

I'm curious why ERCOT has become so politicized. It seems to stem from the 2021 ice storm outage, but that wasn't even close to the worst power outages seen in other parts of the US that are part of larger interconnects, so I don't see why it's special other than it's hip to hate on Texas by coastal elites like us.

atkailash 3y ago
[dead]
wilg 3y ago
Well a lot of people were annoyed Texas tried to blame the issue on renewable energy. Also people saw the private management of the grid or whatever being arguably attributable to the failures (outages, people freezing, people being overcharged) as a case study for why Republican strategies are less than ideal. Also, just everything is politicized because it’s easy to do so when you’re constantly on Twitter reacting to other people’s reactions.
- StillBored 3y ago
  Well I'm not an fan of the Texas republicans but, in the grand scheme of things Abbott wasn't entirely wrong. So, the wind was blowing at a tiny fraction of its installed capacity. Had it been producing at anything near its nameplate capacity then we wouldn't be talking about this now. But of course this isn't entirely unexpected, it was the predicted behavior. OTOH, the reliable sources of power in TX has been getting squeezed for decades now. Many of them are only making money when the wind stops blowing. The rest of the time they are starving, so its no wonder they cut weatherization efforts (and lots of other things) because it costs money for something which may/may not happen. And you have to pay the NG suppliers to maintain a couple extra orders of magnitude in capacity and storage which sits unused most of the time, which again they didn't do. So the wind didn't blow, and the NG plants and producers simply failed to make up the loss because they didn't have the cash to assure their own reliability. So, its basically what many people (including myself on this board) have been saying for a long time. What you have now is a game of weather predictions statistics dictating the reliability of the power grid. Its possible to win for years on end, and then boom perfect alignment of the stars and you fall back to non renewable sources which have been underfunded and not built out sufficiently to carry the full grid load. So you can play games with the statistics but solving the problem is an exponential cost problem unless you willing to just go build and maintain 100% of the grid requirements using carbon sources as backup.
analog31 3y ago
Part of it is that the rest of the country is being told that Texas (and Florida) are economic miracles, so their influence could extend beyond their borders.
aaronbrethorst 3y ago
Because the Texas state government has politicized it: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/03/texas-power-grid-operator-legislature/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/03/texas-power-grid-ope...
eightysixfour 3y ago
Probably because they are literally overseen by political entities and their leadership is partially selected by the legislature. They are a political entity.
Accujack 3y ago
I'm annoyed because I'm being forced to pay for the inflated energy prices caused by the Texas outage. My incumbent utilities got permission from the PUC to charge us.
fragmede 3y ago
It's not about the outage in 2021, but the bills that were produced during that ice storm. During the ice storm, the utilities charged the max, $9,000/kwh, leading to people having five-figure bills just to keep the heat on for nine days so they didn't freeze to death. The NYT headline is of someone who owes $16,752. Most Americans can't pay a surprise $500 bill, never mind a sixteen thousand dollar one. It's become political because there's a question of if the government should step in and do something about those unaffordable bills. The matter is currently tied up in court so we'll just have to wait and see where this goes. The other bit of politics is that this is a proxy fight for "can government regulation be good"? Government regulation would have prevented the prices from skyrocketing, but the thesis of Texas is that government regulation is bad.
- vel0city 3y ago
  > leading to people having five-figure bills Those people purposely signed contracts exposing them to the spot prices. They got exactly what they signed up for. Those people were few overall as well, by the way. Most people are on fixed contracts.
  - to11mtm 3y ago
    Didn't a few of the companies who provided fixed contracts go under as a result too though?
    - vel0city 3y ago
      Yes, that definitely happened. My retail electric provider (REP) closed up and sold my contract to another company who honored it until the end of the contract (which is actually only just now expiring). My costs went up a bit because my delivery fees are subject to change based on regulatory approval. But otherwise I, and many others, didn't experience absurdly high electric bills from this.
- khuey 3y ago
  The people who got absurd bills are the ones who explicitly opted in to paying the wholesale prices on the grid. In the good times that could mean paying very low (or even negative) prices[0]. But that was a gamble, and in the ice storm they lost hard. Now perhaps retail customers shouldn't be allowed to be directly exposed to the wholesale grid prices for their own protection, but it's not like these were people buying a perfectly normal electric plan who then got wacked over the head with a $16k bill. [0] https://www.facebook.com/GoGriddy/posts/2740589872846248/ https://www.facebook.com/GoGriddy/posts/2740589872846248/
chaxor 3y ago
Texas wasn't really set up for being so cold, so it caused deaths and considerable damage because the infrastructure was simply not good enough to handle it (despite being very new/modern in most cases). It got politicized because it was so difficult for people there to handle it. When other places have power outages, the infrastructure and building designs make living through it much easier.
- STM32F030R8 3y ago
  I’m pretty sure much more damage is done yearly by fires started by PG&E but no one seems to constantly bash California’s power company. The focus on ERCOT is most certainly because of politics at least on Reddit and WaPo etc where we see the most noise.
  - nawgz 3y ago
    > no one bashes PG&E your head is out of the sand for the first time in years and you use your first breath to espouse things you have no clue about lmao
  - throwaway173738 3y ago
    I’ve seen tons of PG&E bashing for the fires on this very forum, not to mention in the news media. Just because you haven’t witnessed it don’t assume it isn’t happening. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
They were minutes away from a total meltdown that would’ve knocked out their grid for months, according to the heads of ERCOT at the time. Had they not issued an emergency rolling blackout and destroyed the grid, it would’ve undoubtedly been one of the largest humanitarian disasters in American history. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-ercot/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-...
hedora 3y ago
It wasn’t just the 2021 outage. Ercot fails the same way every decade or so. Also, that outage knocked out something like 25% of global PVC production for about a year, which interfered with basic infrastructure projects globally. You can’t build modern drainage or plumbing without PVC. Without drainage or plumbing, you can’t build buildings or repair roads. Also, it was totally predictable, totally avoidable, a bunch of people died as a direct result, and the last N times this happened, they did nothing to fix it. (Fixing it would involve winterizing their production facilities, which over half the planet has done every year for over a century.)
- roenxi 3y ago
  But ERCOT energy is also cheaper than the US national average. The reason that 25% of global PVC production was ultimately sourced from Texas was probably linked to those power costs. I'd rather my regulators copied ERCOT than what they are actually doing; I pay a lot for power because of serial gold-plating of infrastructure. Then maybe Australia'd be able to afford to manufacture something in globally significant quantities. Not "fixing" things can lead to better outcomes for most people.
  - viraptor 3y ago
    Just to double check, you actually do mean you're happy for some people to die from cold in exchange for lower energy bill for yourself, and ignoring the required infrastructure maintenance? (hoping outages won't affect you too much)
    - roenxi 3y ago
      No, that would be stupid. The idea would be to save ~25% on power bills, let the grid fail once a decade and build up alternative things for dealing with disasters, like some sort of well stocked and warm community hall. That would be much cheaper, and has the added benefits like prepares the community for all sorts of disasters.
      - 3y ago
shagie 3y ago
It goes back a ways to when power companies couldn't offer power in adjacent states. NPR's podcast: The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1004840920/the-disconnect-power-politics-and-the-texas-blackout https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1004840920/the-disconnect-power... ... and the files for that appear to be missing... (if you have Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-disconnect-power-politics-and-the-texas-blackout/id1571508315 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-disconnect-power-p... ; Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2l3VBG6RfEGehHm7Y7HfF4 https://open.spotify.com/show/2l3VBG6RfEGehHm7Y7HfF4 ; Amazon music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/5d4dd6d6-bcbd-41a7-b418-7d4cec98acb1/the-disconnect-power-politics-and-the-texas-blackout https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/5d4dd6d6-bcbd-41a7-b418-7d... ). I especially suggest listening to the episode "The Fallout" Texas set up an energy market that was to eliminate waste and in doing so set up their grid so that it was constantly almost at load shedding (as that has the least waste). The problem is there were minutes away from a black start in which Texas would have been without power for an extended period of time - not days but weeks or months (and that the black start generators were also failing). Practical Engineering: * What Is A Black Start Of The Power Grid? https://youtu.be/uOSnQM1Zu4w https://youtu.be/uOSnQM1Zu4w * What Really Happened During the Texas Power Grid Outage? https://youtu.be/08mwXICY4JM https://youtu.be/08mwXICY4JM And that when that happens, given the way that the Texas grid is set up, the rest of the country would be unable to help. And as that "hip to hate on Texas by costal elites"... utilities were trying to charge Minnesota for the part of the cost of the Texas outage ( https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/houston-based-utility-wants-minnesotans-to-pay-for-texas-deep-freeze-problems/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/houston-based-ut... --- https://minnesotareformer.com/2022/08/11/utility-regulators-say-minnesotans-cant-be-charged-for-entire-cost-of-2021-winter-storm-price-surge/ https://minnesotareformer.com/2022/08/11/utility-regulators-... ).

atkailash 3y ago

[dead]

wilg 3y ago

Well a lot of people were annoyed Texas tried to blame the issue on renewable energy. Also people saw the private management of the grid or whatever being arguably attributable to the failures (outages, people freezing, people being overcharged) as a case study for why Republican strategies are less than ideal. Also, just everything is politicized because it’s easy to do so when you’re constantly on Twitter reacting to other people’s reactions.

StillBored 3y ago
Well I'm not an fan of the Texas republicans but, in the grand scheme of things Abbott wasn't entirely wrong. So, the wind was blowing at a tiny fraction of its installed capacity. Had it been producing at anything near its nameplate capacity then we wouldn't be talking about this now. But of course this isn't entirely unexpected, it was the predicted behavior. OTOH, the reliable sources of power in TX has been getting squeezed for decades now. Many of them are only making money when the wind stops blowing. The rest of the time they are starving, so its no wonder they cut weatherization efforts (and lots of other things) because it costs money for something which may/may not happen. And you have to pay the NG suppliers to maintain a couple extra orders of magnitude in capacity and storage which sits unused most of the time, which again they didn't do. So the wind didn't blow, and the NG plants and producers simply failed to make up the loss because they didn't have the cash to assure their own reliability. So, its basically what many people (including myself on this board) have been saying for a long time. What you have now is a game of weather predictions statistics dictating the reliability of the power grid. Its possible to win for years on end, and then boom perfect alignment of the stars and you fall back to non renewable sources which have been underfunded and not built out sufficiently to carry the full grid load. So you can play games with the statistics but solving the problem is an exponential cost problem unless you willing to just go build and maintain 100% of the grid requirements using carbon sources as backup.

analog31 3y ago

Part of it is that the rest of the country is being told that Texas (and Florida) are economic miracles, so their influence could extend beyond their borders.

aaronbrethorst 3y ago

Because the Texas state government has politicized it: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/03/texas-power-grid-operator-legislature/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/03/texas-power-grid-ope...

eightysixfour 3y ago

Probably because they are literally overseen by political entities and their leadership is partially selected by the legislature. They are a political entity.

Accujack 3y ago

I'm annoyed because I'm being forced to pay for the inflated energy prices caused by the Texas outage. My incumbent utilities got permission from the PUC to charge us.

fragmede 3y ago

It's not about the outage in 2021, but the bills that were produced during that ice storm. During the ice storm, the utilities charged the max, $9,000/kwh, leading to people having five-figure bills just to keep the heat on for nine days so they didn't freeze to death. The NYT headline is of someone who owes $16,752. Most Americans can't pay a surprise $500 bill, never mind a sixteen thousand dollar one. It's become political because there's a question of if the government should step in and do something about those unaffordable bills. The matter is currently tied up in court so we'll just have to wait and see where this goes. The other bit of politics is that this is a proxy fight for "can government regulation be good"? Government regulation would have prevented the prices from skyrocketing, but the thesis of Texas is that government regulation is bad.

vel0city 3y ago
> leading to people having five-figure bills Those people purposely signed contracts exposing them to the spot prices. They got exactly what they signed up for. Those people were few overall as well, by the way. Most people are on fixed contracts.
- to11mtm 3y ago
  Didn't a few of the companies who provided fixed contracts go under as a result too though?
  - vel0city 3y ago
    Yes, that definitely happened. My retail electric provider (REP) closed up and sold my contract to another company who honored it until the end of the contract (which is actually only just now expiring). My costs went up a bit because my delivery fees are subject to change based on regulatory approval. But otherwise I, and many others, didn't experience absurdly high electric bills from this.
khuey 3y ago
The people who got absurd bills are the ones who explicitly opted in to paying the wholesale prices on the grid. In the good times that could mean paying very low (or even negative) prices[0]. But that was a gamble, and in the ice storm they lost hard. Now perhaps retail customers shouldn't be allowed to be directly exposed to the wholesale grid prices for their own protection, but it's not like these were people buying a perfectly normal electric plan who then got wacked over the head with a $16k bill. [0] https://www.facebook.com/GoGriddy/posts/2740589872846248/ https://www.facebook.com/GoGriddy/posts/2740589872846248/

chaxor 3y ago

Texas wasn't really set up for being so cold, so it caused deaths and considerable damage because the infrastructure was simply not good enough to handle it (despite being very new/modern in most cases). It got politicized because it was so difficult for people there to handle it. When other places have power outages, the infrastructure and building designs make living through it much easier.

STM32F030R8 3y ago
I’m pretty sure much more damage is done yearly by fires started by PG&E but no one seems to constantly bash California’s power company. The focus on ERCOT is most certainly because of politics at least on Reddit and WaPo etc where we see the most noise.
- nawgz 3y ago
  > no one bashes PG&E your head is out of the sand for the first time in years and you use your first breath to espouse things you have no clue about lmao
- throwaway173738 3y ago
  I’ve seen tons of PG&E bashing for the fires on this very forum, not to mention in the news media. Just because you haven’t witnessed it don’t assume it isn’t happening. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

LapsangGuzzler 3y ago

They were minutes away from a total meltdown that would’ve knocked out their grid for months, according to the heads of ERCOT at the time. Had they not issued an emergency rolling blackout and destroyed the grid, it would’ve undoubtedly been one of the largest humanitarian disasters in American history. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-ercot/ https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-...

hedora 3y ago

It wasn’t just the 2021 outage. Ercot fails the same way every decade or so. Also, that outage knocked out something like 25% of global PVC production for about a year, which interfered with basic infrastructure projects globally. You can’t build modern drainage or plumbing without PVC. Without drainage or plumbing, you can’t build buildings or repair roads. Also, it was totally predictable, totally avoidable, a bunch of people died as a direct result, and the last N times this happened, they did nothing to fix it. (Fixing it would involve winterizing their production facilities, which over half the planet has done every year for over a century.)

roenxi 3y ago
But ERCOT energy is also cheaper than the US national average. The reason that 25% of global PVC production was ultimately sourced from Texas was probably linked to those power costs. I'd rather my regulators copied ERCOT than what they are actually doing; I pay a lot for power because of serial gold-plating of infrastructure. Then maybe Australia'd be able to afford to manufacture something in globally significant quantities. Not "fixing" things can lead to better outcomes for most people.
- viraptor 3y ago
  Just to double check, you actually do mean you're happy for some people to die from cold in exchange for lower energy bill for yourself, and ignoring the required infrastructure maintenance? (hoping outages won't affect you too much)
  - roenxi 3y ago
    No, that would be stupid. The idea would be to save ~25% on power bills, let the grid fail once a decade and build up alternative things for dealing with disasters, like some sort of well stocked and warm community hall. That would be much cheaper, and has the added benefits like prepares the community for all sorts of disasters.
    - 3y ago

shagie 3y ago

It goes back a ways to when power companies couldn't offer power in adjacent states. NPR's podcast: The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1004840920/the-disconnect-power-politics-and-the-texas-blackout https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1004840920/the-disconnect-power... ... and the files for that appear to be missing... (if you have Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-disconnect-power-politics-and-the-texas-blackout/id1571508315 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-disconnect-power-p... ; Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2l3VBG6RfEGehHm7Y7HfF4 https://open.spotify.com/show/2l3VBG6RfEGehHm7Y7HfF4 ; Amazon music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/5d4dd6d6-bcbd-41a7-b418-7d4cec98acb1/the-disconnect-power-politics-and-the-texas-blackout https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/5d4dd6d6-bcbd-41a7-b418-7d... ). I especially suggest listening to the episode "The Fallout" Texas set up an energy market that was to eliminate waste and in doing so set up their grid so that it was constantly almost at load shedding (as that has the least waste). The problem is there were minutes away from a black start in which Texas would have been without power for an extended period of time - not days but weeks or months (and that the black start generators were also failing). Practical Engineering: * What Is A Black Start Of The Power Grid? https://youtu.be/uOSnQM1Zu4w https://youtu.be/uOSnQM1Zu4w * What Really Happened During the Texas Power Grid Outage? https://youtu.be/08mwXICY4JM https://youtu.be/08mwXICY4JM And that when that happens, given the way that the Texas grid is set up, the rest of the country would be unable to help. And as that "hip to hate on Texas by costal elites"... utilities were trying to charge Minnesota for the part of the cost of the Texas outage ( https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/houston-based-utility-wants-minnesotans-to-pay-for-texas-deep-freeze-problems/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/houston-based-ut... --- https://minnesotareformer.com/2022/08/11/utility-regulators-say-minnesotans-cant-be-charged-for-entire-cost-of-2021-winter-storm-price-surge/ https://minnesotareformer.com/2022/08/11/utility-regulators-... ).