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Wholesale electricity in Texas is often $50/MWh or less. Consumers are paying $0.12/kWh delivered at retail. It could well be that even with these price spikes
by msandford 3y ago
Wholesale electricity in Texas is often $50/MWh or less. Consumers are paying $0.12/kWh delivered at retail.
It could well be that even with these price spikes the energy retailers still have enough arb during the normal times to cover these wild times. If so it seems like markets are working insofar as consumers are paying lower average prices.
It might be that occasional price spikes are more economic than building new generation capacity.
- raverbashing 3y agoSounds like anyone with a modicum of foresight should have been investing in power storage for when the grid breaks Also 0.12 is cheap but not the cheapest, see for example how much people pay in Quebec
- 7e 3y agoQuebec has hydropower. Texas is flat.
- thefurdrake 3y agoTexas is windy.
- lesuorac 3y agoFlat is pretty easy to change. There's a simple trick they used with making canals for barges back in the day. You dig a 3foot hole and line the sides with a 3foot wall and you get a 6foot deep canal. I suspect the bigger issue with the parent's comment is that just because you know Texas has surge pricing doesn't mean that the surge will be high/long enough to cover the opportunity cost of energy storage. I bet spending say 1 billion on a new oil rig will pay back more money than 1 billion on a pumped storage.
- pierat 3y agoAnd here in continental 'not Texas shithole', I'm paying the "exorbitant" rate of $.10916/kWh , less than the Texas rates. And mine are stable. None of this funny stock market bill crap. Yep, deregulation is better for SOMEONE. I wonder who that might be.
- ericabiz 3y agoI live in Austin (well known for its high energy prices relative to the rest of the state.) I’m at $0.09 for the first 300KWh (I’m including all fees/markups/charges in this calculation.) For the next 600Kwh it goes to $.10, and then the next tier I used 882KWh at $0.12. I find the rates reasonable. Texas is also leading the way on both solar and wind adoption. This is keeping the power supply at peak much more stable.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoWe pay 13 cents/kWh here in Seattle and we don’t have prices ever spiking 50X. But then we don’t really need AC that much (the high today is 74F).