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swraith

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by swraith

  1. NRG and Vistra would be expected to fight that Buffet idea tooth and nail. Why pay for gas plants to sit idle for months or years at a time? If you want to subsidize natural gas generation, other more competitive means of subsidies could be created.
  2. If my parents moved in with us....either they or my family would not survive long. Incompatible.
  3. Need more boomers to sell their houses and move to old folks homes? Free up some inventory.
  4. VoLL is not purely based on residential load. 1mw of residential load is the same as 1mw of industrial load. Who is first to shed load and at what price? Its an open debate. Some of the pdfs I linked above get into that. $9k price cap or $3k price cap....likely accomplishes the same load shedding. Ultimately though, generators repeatedly told the PUCT that they needed higher prices to incentivize generation investment. When the $9k cap first came about, many generators were very scared about forward hedging and then tripping offline, and going bankrupt as a result. It didn't happen...until now. They knew the risk, it just took years for the risk to appear. Please don't take the above as me defending VoLL. I've never really bought into the concept, but its the academic vehicle that was used to justify raising the caps.
  5. The price cap level was justified using the concept of the Value of Lost Load (VoLL). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_lost_load http://www.ercot.com/content/gridinfo/resource/2015/mktanalysis/ERCOT_ValueofLostLoad_LiteratureReviewandMacroeconomic.pdf http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/training_courses/123737/Resource301_-_1_Overview.pdf http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/167026/2018_12_20_ERCOT_MERM_Report_Final.pdf Oh....you asked for a simple explanation. Yeah, no, you won't find one.
  6. I'm good with developing agriculture policies that target support for "family farms". Let's work on defining that. Anybody have statistics on the % of government dollars that go to large agriculture corporations? Can those dollars be re-directed to "family farms"? The above sounds very much like picking winners and losers. So maybe we just stop the dollars to agriculture corporations? But really none of this is going to change. There is no ground swell of support for major shifts in current agriculture policy....within the Senate.
  7. We are B2C...deregulated energy. So are aren't doing anything like client services. Our call center handles phone calls from customers. I report to President of the company and manage a portfolio of responsibilities from wholesale operations to legal activities to commodity hedging and risk management. Basically I participate in setting our corporate strategy and then schedule meetings to point people in the right direction to get the strategy executed. I don't do much real work anymore.
  8. I am on the opposite side of this. Email achieves very little productivity in our office. People send out emails. The emails get ignored. No real progress gets made. Email threads are just batting the ball back and forth. Maybe its just us...but email...doesn't get much done. Drop me into a Teams chat. We can sort it out fairly quick. Typing is too hard? Fire up a Teams audio/video call. Its an impromptu discussion...just like in the office. We get things straightened out...people get prioritized...and we make progress...via the virtual platform. I have shifted a large portion of my work from email to the Teams platform. I hated Teams when we were still in the office. I didn't get it. But I did get it...when I was 100% remote. Also...turn off Teams syncing and notifications on your phone. My iphone battery will go all day with Teams on all day. I will say...once your video meeting on Teams goes longer than hour...my laptop starts to get grumpy.
  9. I think this topic splits into segments. Our 2 offices, Austin and Chicago, have been closed for a year. Staff has worked remote 100% the entire year. We were 100% an 8 to 5, Monday to Friday shop pre-Covid. I can easily spend 6 hours a day on Teams in meetings, audio or video, managing staff from home now. We are putting plans in place to dump both office leases. Nobody except the top guy for each office has even been in the buildings the past year. Line level staff that just do their daily tasks/grind love the remote work. None of them voice any desire to return. They all love having zero commute. None of them seem to care about the lack of socialization but it does concern me. Even our call center is 100% work from home now. Those people are never coming back to the office. Waste of money. Creatives want a collaboration space. Our Marketing department. Our high level software engineers/architects. They want to do the bulk of their work remotely, but they want a whiteboard and conference room for collaboration sessions. So we will be looking for office footprints that are 25% of what we currently have. We have hired new staff during the last year. Integrating with the new team members takes a different approach. The people in our offices are not friends. They are coworkers. Our under 30 crowd would grab drinks after work...but anybody with kids...they stopped that so missing out on drinks after work...I don’t miss it. I plan to do work lunches before/after in person collaboration sessions. Flex schedules seem like they just suck. Never know where anybody is on any given day. At least now...with everyone remote...I know I can get anybody on Teams in a reasonable timeframe. I will never return to a full office schedule with my current company.
  10. damnit I continue to worry that Austin will lose the essence of Alamo Drafthouse even if some lender group takes ownership and continues to operate the business
  11. Was out at Inks Lake state park this past weekend with the family. I can tell you that the fields of prickly pear cactus out there appeared mostly fine. A few had some damage...but the cactus out there looked better than many of the ones in Austin.
  12. Uh. I think its 4GW of power generation. Per their website Brazos Electric is a 3,994 megawatt generation and transmission cooperative whose members' service territory extends across 68 counties from the Texas Panhandle to Houston. I'm assuming they had generation trip offline...leading to these invoices from ERCOT. Could be any of these Jack County (1 and 2) - 1240 mw gas fired combined cycle plant Johnson County - 258mw gas 1x1 combined cycled plant RW Miller - 576 mw gas/diesel plant Sandy Creek - 1000mw coal plant (brazos has 25% offtake) They had an RFP for energy in 2020. https://aces-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Brazos-Electric-Cooperative-2020-RFI-for-ERCOT-Energy-Resources-.pdf According to Fitch....BPEC has been "short" and taking advantage of lower ERCOT pricing in recent years https://www.fitchratings.com/research/us-public-finance/fitch-affirms-brazos-electric-power-cooperative-inc-tx-idr-at-a-outlook-positive-18-06-2020 So its possible BPEC was "short" and had units trip offline...which would be a double whammy. Just speculation on my part.
  13. Someone may be more of an expert...but if you are with Austin Energy (AE)...solar won't help in terms of reliability during outages. My understanding is that solar is basically on a separate meter and all production is sold to AE. AE still has your house meter for all your consumption from the grid. Basically you get your normal Austin Energy bill and then Austin Energy sends you a check for your solar production based on their Value of Solar tariff. AE does not allow distributed generation (solar) to serve their own load. I'm not up to speed on how AE handles batteries...aka Powerwalls.
  14. I have no power, no heat, no internet and trying to conserve cellphone battery. But I still needed to come say...fuck that cocksucker.
  15. I’m 78757 and been shit all day
  16. Checking in while charging phone in my car that is idling in my driveway. like many, power has been off since 2am. House is pretty cold but I think we can sleep with enough blankets. I fear for the pipes in the house. Nothing to be done at this point. taking leftover chili to a neighbors house to get it warmed up on their gas stovetop to get a hot meal for the day.
  17. Crossed the 3 hour mark on our power outage. This is not good for my chances of making it through this without frozen pipes.
  18. Power has been out for us in 78757 for over an hour. Austin Energy map has me covered with 3 different outage shapes.
  19. I want to do this and thoughts about it several days ago. But I can't. Inevitably my wife or kids would hit the garage door opener and everything would be fucked. I just have to accept the air penetration since my family is incapable of paying attention to details.
  20. With the abundance of streaming options and the volume of music and podcasts, I don't get the appeal of listening to local radio these days..
  21. Wait what’s going on with this necro bump? Is somebody knocking on Stacey after what happened in Georgia?
  22. This. It sucks...but today's reality is forcing savers to accept almost no short term return unless they are willing to accept substantial levels of risk.
  23. https://www.organicsbygosh.com/ https://www.wastetodaymagazine.com/article/austin-city-council-approves-composting-contract/
  24. I have three blue recycling bins. I could get by with just 2...but I don’t pay extra for them so 3 it is. I’m fairly certain the compost in the green bins all gets taken to the Organics by Gosh composting facility east of Austin. It’s not going to the dump.
  25. The Marvin Austin dealer you referenced...is that Amazing Exteriors on Burnet? I was just thinking about contacting them based on the upstream recommendation about Marvin.
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