The Texas Disaster Freezing Sacrifices At The Alter Of Wind And Solar Power
POSTED BY: JEWELSTAITEFAN
UPDATED: Sunday, September 14, 2025 08:00
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PAGE 12 of 18
Meanwhile in Texas: Privatize the Profits, Socialize the Losses
Under the guise of “protecting” citizens, the Texas legislature, instead of having the gas companies eat their losses from Winter Storm Uri last year, have floated a $3.4 billion bond package to have the taxpayers fund it.
. . . the gas companies get to have their cake and eat it too.
https://angrybearblog.com/2022/04/meanwhile-in-texas-privatize-the-pro
fits-socialize-the-losses
https://angrybearblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/3ECLU4SDIBHHLJTS5
DLMNP5NHY.webp
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Houston-based pipeline company Kinder Morgan on Wednesday said its profit was $667 million in the first three months of the year compared with $1.4 billion during the same period in 2021, when it made about $1 billion during the week of the February freeze. Revenue fell 18 percent to $4.3 billion from $5.2 billion in the first quarter of last year.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Kinder-Morgan
-s-profits-fell-in-Q1-compared-to-17108255.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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We are asking all of our customers to help their fellow Texans by curtailing their energy consumption on Friday, May 6th through Monday, May 9th between the hours of 4 PM and 9 PM.
https://www.ercot.com/services/comm/mkt_notices/opsmessages
Hot or cold weather, Texas is short on operating capacity because building capacity cuts into profits. Generating companies make the most money with the least investment when they operate at 100% capacity as many hours as possible. If you don't like that, you will have to vote for a Democratic governor to not select Republicans to the public utility commission. https://www.puc.texas.gov/agency/about/commissioners/Default.aspx
The price of electricity from new power plants
Electricity prices are expressed in ‘levelized costs of energy’ (LCOE). LCOE captures the cost of building the power plant itself as well as the ongoing costs for fuel and operating the power plant over its lifetime.
https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
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Natural gas companies are too powerful in Texas
On a February morning in 2021, a trader at the San Antonio electricity utility CPS Energy messaged his counterpart at the pipeline company Energy Transfer to get a price for natural gas to run CPS power plants over the coming weekend.
On a typical day, CPS might have expected to pay $2 or $3 per million British thermal units. But 90 minutes later, the Energy Transfer trader wrote back, “Ok, are you sitting down?” before quoting $150 per mmbtu — five times Texas’s previous record for gas, according to a court document filed by CPS in September.
Nine minutes later, before the CPS trader had even responded, Energy Transfer — Texas’s largest gas supplier — raised the price to $225. Three days later, with a frigid winter storm sweeping across Texas and leaving millions of Texans without electricity, Energy Transfer raised the price to $500 per mmbtu.
The massive increase in natural gas prices during last winter’s blackout has set off a wave of litigation in state and federal courts and prompted an investigation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, casting a spotlight on the workings of Texas’s complex, opaque and lightly regulated natural gas market. The Texas market, unlike any other in the United States, provides opportunities for pipeline companies such as Energy Transfer to exercise vast market — sometimes monopoly — power to demand whatever prices they want in times of gas shortages, resulting in soaring costs for customers and profits for the companies, according to experts and legal filings. (Personally, I love this system. Republican politicians want to preserve it. Democrats want to end it.)
In the 15 months since last February's winter storm, power companies such as CPS, Vistra Energy of Dallas and Brazos Electric Cooperative of Waco have accused pipeline firms of price gouging and other practices that contributed to billions of dollars in losses for Texas’s power sector, forcing some electricity providers into bankruptcy and others to raise rates on customers for years to come.
The skyrocketing prices also left Texas natural gas customers with a $3.6 billion bill that will take a decade to pay off. Coincidentally, Energy Transfer and the Houston pipeline company Kinder Morgan earned combined profits of $3.4 billion during the storm.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220504200556/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/article/Texas-gas-market-pipeline-companies-17145574.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
(Personally, I love this system. Republican politicians want to preserve it. Democrats want to end it.)
Nobody here believes that you have any money.
All you do when you repeat sentences like this all the time is show everybody what a hypocritical cunt you are.
--------------------------------------------------
Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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Quote:You're such a Homer Simpson. Change your name to match, but that doesn't fit because no Marge Simpson would have you, no Monty Burns would let you near the controls of his nuclear power plant, and you will never have a child like Lisa Simpson. Maybe a Bart Simpson, if you're lucky.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
(Personally, I love this system. Republican politicians want to preserve it. Democrats want to end it.)
Nobody here believes that you have any money.
All you do when you repeat sentences like this all the time is show everybody what a hypocritical cunt you are.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Power prices on the ERCOT wholesale market on Friday afternoon spiked above $3,000 per megawatt-hour, far above the usual range of around zero dollars to $30 per megawatt-hour.
Friday afternoon, the six power plants that went offline resulted in the loss of 2,900 megawatts of electricity — enough to power about 580,000 homes.
ERCOT’s management of the grid has been under scrutiny since February 2021, when a historic winter storm led to millions losing power for days and the deaths of at least 246 people.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2022/05/13/ercot-asks-texans-to-conser
ve-power-after-electricity-plants-go-offline/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Texas Claimed It “Fixed” Its Electricity Grid. It Doesn’t Look Very Fixed!
Texas’ governor hasn’t seemed too perturbed. Back in February, in the midst of uniquely icy storms, Abbott publicly praised his administration’s electricity operations, stating that “The Texas electric grid is the most reliable and resilient it’s ever been.” It's not.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/texas-power-grid-electricity-erco
t-abbott-heat.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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After almost a year of analysis, three plans to overhaul Texas's wholesale power market have been pushed aside in favor of two new proposals -- each of which could cost power consumers an estimated $460 million more per year.
The new plans, one from E3, the San Francisco-based energy analysis firm hired by the Public Utility Commission to review the previous proposals, and another by the PUC itself, come more than a year after the state launched an effort to revamp the power market in the wake of the catastrophic February 2021 winter storm. The deep freeze caused blackouts across the state -- some lasting for days -- that were blamed in the deaths of at least 200 people.
The study's authors from E3 said their review fails to consider the effects of another deep freeze on peak winter demand, adding that "such analysis is beyond the scope of this study."
"Twenty-one months after the storm, they have not stopped to clearly define what the problem is, and without that problem statement, you have a lot of analysts, stakeholders and consumers who are not even talking about the same thing. Why else would you be grasping for new solutions this late in the game? That's why I think we're in this place where it doesn't seem like we're all that close to anything that would make a meaningful difference."
https://web.archive.org/web/20221111042654/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/energy/article/PUC-consulting-firm-recommend-two-previously-17574572.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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https://web.archive.org/web/20221204151309/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/opinion/editorials/article/Editorial-Untested-power-grid-overhaul-17626578.php
No risky experimenting with Texas grid. Here's how to lower bills, and keep lights on. [Editorial]
The Editorial Board, Dec 4, 2022
The first step was admitting Texas’ electrical grid had a problem.
For years, state leaders sold a vision of the Lone Star State as a haven for power generators. Bring us your natural gas, your coal producers yearning for low taxes, low costs, and minimal regulation.
Then Winter Storm Uri swept across the state in February 2021, killing hundreds of people and leaving more than 4.5 million Texas homes and businesses without power for three days. The denial stage was over. State regulators were forced to reckon with the fact that our cherished independent grid had serious vulnerabilities. Chief among them: thermal energy producers who failed to adequately winterize; skimpy power reserves; and minimal state oversight over the utility market.
The next step was to fix it. Yet more than a year after the state launched a two-phase plan to make the grid more resilient and incentivize power generators to increase production before a future Uri-level crisis, a taxpayer-funded report intended to serve as a blueprint for a grid redesign only added more confusion.
The Public Utility Commission, Texas’ energy regulator, commissioned E3, a San Francisco-based energy analysis firm, to evaluate several market design proposals that would help the state avoid widespread blackouts from severe weather.
Despite that mandate, E3 only analyzed weather data from 1980 through 2019, ignoring two of the most extreme weather events Texas has faced in the past decade: Uri and this past summer’s heat wave which pushed the grid close to emergency conditions several times. The consultants' explanation for such an inexplicable oversight? They did not expect “the same levels of outage would be observed during similar weather conditions due to improvements that have been made by the PUC” such as weatherization rules and incentives for energy producers to have backup fuel on site in case of an emergency.
Apparently, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s power grid manager better known as ERCOT, doesn’t share their confidence.
A winter report released by ERCOT on Tuesday, November 29 ( https://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/resource ) laid out several scenarios that could push the grid into emergency conditions. ERCOT officials acknowledged that if high power demand this winter is combined with power plant outages and low electricity output from wind and solar generators, utility providers would likely be forced to institute rolling blackouts.
While ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas called this a "very low probability scenario," he added that the winter report further reinforced the need to “redesign the market to make sure there is enough generation so there is enough power."
For decades, ERCOT, which covers most of Texas except for El Paso, the upper panhandle and parts of East Texas, has resisted connecting with the nation’s two other power grids. That independence has allowed the state to skirt federal oversight, but also leaves us unable to import megawatts from neighboring power authorities in the South and Midwest in emergency situations such as Uri. ERCOT is structured in a way that a power generator — be it natural gas, wind, coal, nuclear or solar — gets paid only for the amount of power it generates. Rather than pay power producers to ensure that a cushion is available when it’s most needed — the same “capacity market” employed by other grids, including California and New York — ERCOT has steadily refused to do this because it would raise electricity rates for customers.
Yet PUC’s preferred market design would still increase consumer costs. While the E3 consultants recommended that Texas pursue a capacity market, the PUC has instead settled on a system that doesn’t exist a
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