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These are still problems that can largely be solved by applying the right economic incentives. For example, during the 2021 winter storm and outage, a huge pro
by hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
These are still problems that can largely be solved by applying the right economic incentives.
For example, during the 2021 winter storm and outage, a huge problem was that no power producers had any incentive to weatherize their systems, resulting in a huge chunk of them all going offline at the same time. It seems more than reasonable to require producers to have some minimal level of weatherization, and to provide incentives to producers that have better weatherization.
This is kinda my point - I'm not arguing for a totally deregulated free-for-all, as the unregulated free market is notoriously bad at dealing with "black swan" events. But that doesn't mean that sensible regulations can't be put in place that still use economic incentives to achieve their goals.
- warkdarrior 2y ago> These are still problems that can largely be solved by applying the right economic incentives. > > It seems more than reasonable to require producers to have some minimal level of weatherization Regulation on a minimal level of weatherization is not an economic incentive.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoThis is basically an "all Internet arguments are over semantics" response. I.e., if you want to participate in the electricity producer market in TX, you need to have X level of weatherization. Call that regulation, fine, but essentially every private, non-governmental-run market has a set of rules that all participants need to adhere to in order to participate in the market, and the penalty for non-compliance is getting kicked out of the market. That's basically what I'm arguing for here.