3 ms·

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...
  - acdha 3y ago
    That would mean that California is producing more renewable power since its grid is considerably larger, and again my point was simply that Texas is not doing enough better to justify their failures. If they were much higher, maybe we could debate something like the number of lives saved from not polluting versus the unreliability, but the state still has huge pollution issues and isn’t far ahead of the competition. As it is, it looks like the primary beneficiaries are the finance guys getting a chunk of those wild surge prices.
    - TradingPlaces 3y ago
      Are you under the impression that the utility business is wildly profitable? I’d like to disabuse you of that notion. Not everything is a reinforcement of your priors.
      - acdha 3y ago
        It’s a guaranteed profit on a very large amount, which isn’t anything to sneeze at, but if you read my comment note that I specifically referred to the financialization. The way the market is structured means that suppliers see very large upsides during high demand. Going back to that 2021 crisis: > The biggest winners were companies with access to supplies, including leading energy trader Vitol, gas suppliers Kinder Morgan (KMI.N), Enterprise Products Partners (EPD.N) and Energy Transfer (ET.N), oil giant BP plc (BP.L), and banks Goldman Sachs (GS.N), Bank of America (BofA) (BAC.N) and Macquarie Group (MQG.AX). https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/results-tally-up-billions-profit-texas-freeze-gas-power-sellers-2021-05-06/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/results-tally-up-bil... My argument is that splitting the market up like that has been better to traders than Texas consumers.

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...
- acdha 3y ago
  That would mean that California is producing more renewable power since its grid is considerably larger, and again my point was simply that Texas is not doing enough better to justify their failures. If they were much higher, maybe we could debate something like the number of lives saved from not polluting versus the unreliability, but the state still has huge pollution issues and isn’t far ahead of the competition. As it is, it looks like the primary beneficiaries are the finance guys getting a chunk of those wild surge prices.
  - TradingPlaces 3y ago
    Are you under the impression that the utility business is wildly profitable? I’d like to disabuse you of that notion. Not everything is a reinforcement of your priors.
    - acdha 3y ago
      It’s a guaranteed profit on a very large amount, which isn’t anything to sneeze at, but if you read my comment note that I specifically referred to the financialization. The way the market is structured means that suppliers see very large upsides during high demand. Going back to that 2021 crisis: > The biggest winners were companies with access to supplies, including leading energy trader Vitol, gas suppliers Kinder Morgan (KMI.N), Enterprise Products Partners (EPD.N) and Energy Transfer (ET.N), oil giant BP plc (BP.L), and banks Goldman Sachs (GS.N), Bank of America (BofA) (BAC.N) and Macquarie Group (MQG.AX). https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/results-tally-up-billions-profit-texas-freeze-gas-power-sellers-2021-05-06/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/results-tally-up-bil... My argument is that splitting the market up like that has been better to traders than Texas consumers.