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The split between retail and wholesale puts the retail arms at the mercy of wholesale. This went all the way up the line to gas providers, who just decided to d

The split between retail and wholesale puts the retail arms at the mercy of wholesale. This went all the way up the line to gas providers, who just decided to declare force majeure and closed up shop. Vistra tried desperately to keep the power on, and wound up losing over $1 billion for their troubles. Texas has a great system under normal conditions that has incentivized a ton of solar and Panhandle wind, but it is not built for severe conditions.

Spooky23 3y ago
It has a great system for the various entities that own the state legislature. Public utilities are essential services. “Great when times are good” literally is the worst type of arrangement. Having a public entity that exits to drive private profit is disgusting and a great example of the insanity of modern political thought.
- TradingPlaces 3y ago
  Agreed, but you should also acknowledge that the system has produced the largest buildout of renewables. In the past 30 days, 33% of generation in ERCOT was wind or solar (mostly wind). For comparison, CAISO in California was 23% (mostly solar).
  - infecto 3y ago
    Thanks for raising these points. I think Texas has many challenges but the energy market is actually quite elegant and brilliant. It could definitely use improvements around emergency conditions but we have had incredible rollout of new clean generation both on the renewable front and natural gas.
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    I did. It’s great for the landowners and producers, who in turn are kind to the legislators.
acdha 3y ago
> Texas has a great system under normal conditions that has incentivized a ton of solar and Panhandle wind, but it is not built for severe conditions. I don’t know that it’s “great” for anyone except the guys in the energy market who see the upside from volatility. The rates I see right now are higher than what my local utility charges, about on par with our all-renewable option, and we have no downside scenario where the prices skyrocket or the power goes out with no accountability. I do appreciate the amount of wind power (and hope the politicians don’t stymie that industry) but it doesn’t appear to be especially unique in that growth.
- TradingPlaces 3y ago
  In the past 30 days, 33% of generation in ERCOT was wind or solar (mostly wind). For comparison, CAISO in California was 23% (mostly solar).
  - acdha 3y ago
    You’d want to look over a longer period of time since those figures have big seasonal variations, and we can’t forget that California has a considerably larger economy and population – there are around a hundred countries with populations smaller than the difference between California and Texas - so it would probably be better to make that comparison per-capita or per-gigawatt. Since we’re talking about renewables, greenhouse emissions would also be a good point and it looks like California’s grid is substantially cleaner than Texas’ by that metric according to the EPA, but that’s complicated by California having the option to buy power from outside the state. In any case, my point was simply that if we’re seeing a system with recurring widespread life-threatening outages described as great, I think it’d need to be almost free or 100% non-polluting to balance that out. The 2021 outage alone was responsible for hundreds of deaths and damages in the hundreds of billions range, so I kinda expect better than “a top competitor to CAISO”.
    - TradingPlaces 3y ago
      OK, last 365 days, 31% for Texas, 29% for Cali. You can play here https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/US48/US48 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...
cyanydeez 3y ago
>Texas has a great system under normal conditions that has incentivized a ton of solar and Panhandle wind, but it is not built for severe conditions. No. It's not winter proof, it's not interconnected with it's neighbors. It absolutely is not a "great system". It's a controlled system for its own greed.
- salawat 3y ago
  The not interconnected with neighbors was an intentional decision driven by previous degradations of QoS way back in the 50's/60's era when they were intercinnected with the coastal grids. It's downright shocking the difference in frequency between power losses I experienced on the regular in Texas vs. what my out of state family experience. I started keeping track of it a couple years ago. My family can have dozens of sporadic outages in a span of time with 100% uptime for me in TX. Smaller, less interconnected networks can be a godsend. Hell, it's a lesson that's immortalized in our interstate highway system. ...Then again, I suppose that there's the case to be made that more frequent outages keep your response teams sharp. There is a drop off among Operations people whereby knowledge tends to end up getting forgotten when too much time passes between completion of repeated periodic tasks.
  - dfinninger 3y ago
    Which is interesting because, anecdotally, I’ve had the exact opposite experience. I’ve lived in Dallas and Austin for a collective 27 years. And the number of outages I’ve had bewilders friends and family that are out of state. Since I’ve moved out of Texas a few years ago I haven’t had a single power outage. In my family while growing up we kept flashlights and candles handy, and us kids were (very lightly) drilled on where to find them when the power went out. And again, this was in the middle of the metro, not out in any rural parts.
    - salawat 3y ago
      I was in an area serviced by the Bluebonnet power cooperative, which executed one of the smoothest time based multiplexes I've ever seen. Interestingly, I've found most problems seem to be metro-centric in Texas. Austin, for instance, in patticular has a horribly architected power network, where much of downtown's skyscrapers and what not share a circuit that is never load shed, leaving only the residentials to be. This escalated to tragic consequences during the Winter storms of a few years ago when everyone was told to stay home (and freeze due to lack of power), while all of the buildings downtown where they'd have ostensibly worked kept their lights and heat on. Families would have unironically been better off braving the streets to park themselves in a heated office downtown rather than trying to make due in their own homes. The landlords, lawyers, insurers, and sadly the fire departments, however, would have had a meltdown trying to figure out who should be culpable for anything that ended up happening as a result of the terrible decisionmaking when building the trunk. Cutting everyone loose on their own recognizance was a brilliant stroke of legal culpability shedding there. Gg Austin Power on that one. Friends over in Dallas were also reporting a similar situation there during the hullaballo. If it's taught me anything, it's that urban planning of power networks seriously needs some rearchitecting in those locales.

Spooky23 3y ago

It has a great system for the various entities that own the state legislature. Public utilities are essential services. “Great when times are good” literally is the worst type of arrangement. Having a public entity that exits to drive private profit is disgusting and a great example of the insanity of modern political thought.

TradingPlaces 3y ago
Agreed, but you should also acknowledge that the system has produced the largest buildout of renewables. In the past 30 days, 33% of generation in ERCOT was wind or solar (mostly wind). For comparison, CAISO in California was 23% (mostly solar).
- infecto 3y ago
  Thanks for raising these points. I think Texas has many challenges but the energy market is actually quite elegant and brilliant. It could definitely use improvements around emergency conditions but we have had incredible rollout of new clean generation both on the renewable front and natural gas.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  I did. It’s great for the landowners and producers, who in turn are kind to the legislators.

acdha 3y ago

> Texas has a great system under normal conditions that has incentivized a ton of solar and Panhandle wind, but it is not built for severe conditions. I don’t know that it’s “great” for anyone except the guys in the energy market who see the upside from volatility. The rates I see right now are higher than what my local utility charges, about on par with our all-renewable option, and we have no downside scenario where the prices skyrocket or the power goes out with no accountability. I do appreciate the amount of wind power (and hope the politicians don’t stymie that industry) but it doesn’t appear to be especially unique in that growth.

TradingPlaces 3y ago
In the past 30 days, 33% of generation in ERCOT was wind or solar (mostly wind). For comparison, CAISO in California was 23% (mostly solar).
- acdha 3y ago
  You’d want to look over a longer period of time since those figures have big seasonal variations, and we can’t forget that California has a considerably larger economy and population – there are around a hundred countries with populations smaller than the difference between California and Texas - so it would probably be better to make that comparison per-capita or per-gigawatt. Since we’re talking about renewables, greenhouse emissions would also be a good point and it looks like California’s grid is substantially cleaner than Texas’ by that metric according to the EPA, but that’s complicated by California having the option to buy power from outside the state. In any case, my point was simply that if we’re seeing a system with recurring widespread life-threatening outages described as great, I think it’d need to be almost free or 100% non-polluting to balance that out. The 2021 outage alone was responsible for hundreds of deaths and damages in the hundreds of billions range, so I kinda expect better than “a top competitor to CAISO”.
  - TradingPlaces 3y ago
    OK, last 365 days, 31% for Texas, 29% for Cali. You can play here https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/US48/US48 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...

cyanydeez 3y ago

>Texas has a great system under normal conditions that has incentivized a ton of solar and Panhandle wind, but it is not built for severe conditions. No. It's not winter proof, it's not interconnected with it's neighbors. It absolutely is not a "great system". It's a controlled system for its own greed.

salawat 3y ago
The not interconnected with neighbors was an intentional decision driven by previous degradations of QoS way back in the 50's/60's era when they were intercinnected with the coastal grids. It's downright shocking the difference in frequency between power losses I experienced on the regular in Texas vs. what my out of state family experience. I started keeping track of it a couple years ago. My family can have dozens of sporadic outages in a span of time with 100% uptime for me in TX. Smaller, less interconnected networks can be a godsend. Hell, it's a lesson that's immortalized in our interstate highway system. ...Then again, I suppose that there's the case to be made that more frequent outages keep your response teams sharp. There is a drop off among Operations people whereby knowledge tends to end up getting forgotten when too much time passes between completion of repeated periodic tasks.
- dfinninger 3y ago
  Which is interesting because, anecdotally, I’ve had the exact opposite experience. I’ve lived in Dallas and Austin for a collective 27 years. And the number of outages I’ve had bewilders friends and family that are out of state. Since I’ve moved out of Texas a few years ago I haven’t had a single power outage. In my family while growing up we kept flashlights and candles handy, and us kids were (very lightly) drilled on where to find them when the power went out. And again, this was in the middle of the metro, not out in any rural parts.
  - salawat 3y ago
    I was in an area serviced by the Bluebonnet power cooperative, which executed one of the smoothest time based multiplexes I've ever seen. Interestingly, I've found most problems seem to be metro-centric in Texas. Austin, for instance, in patticular has a horribly architected power network, where much of downtown's skyscrapers and what not share a circuit that is never load shed, leaving only the residentials to be. This escalated to tragic consequences during the Winter storms of a few years ago when everyone was told to stay home (and freeze due to lack of power), while all of the buildings downtown where they'd have ostensibly worked kept their lights and heat on. Families would have unironically been better off braving the streets to park themselves in a heated office downtown rather than trying to make due in their own homes. The landlords, lawyers, insurers, and sadly the fire departments, however, would have had a meltdown trying to figure out who should be culpable for anything that ended up happening as a result of the terrible decisionmaking when building the trunk. Cutting everyone loose on their own recognizance was a brilliant stroke of legal culpability shedding there. Gg Austin Power on that one. Friends over in Dallas were also reporting a similar situation there during the hullaballo. If it's taught me anything, it's that urban planning of power networks seriously needs some rearchitecting in those locales.