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swraith

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by swraith

  1. It is going to be a great summer to not be in Texas
  2. Estes Park hit 90 degrees today.
  3. i'm sure you neighbors would love you if you tried
  4. Any of you want to claim this pool? (hoping this wasn't posted previously upthread). 25 Meter (Short Course) Backyard Lap Pool Construction Timelapse
  5. With the pipeline restarting, hope the people in those photos enjoy sitting on their stockpiles of gasoline.
  6. Wonder if that gets torn down for a new build on that nice corner lot.
  7. LCRA rain gauge I monitor says today and yesterday were a total bust which is about what I expected.
  8. Sigh. I get it. Beef industry wants its regulatory protections from competition. So nice of our "small government" officials using big government tactics to create barriers of entry.
  9. Harvested my last batch of sugar snap peas. Making room for some Thai basil plants. My first sun gold tomatoes are ripening. Also growing some black cherry tomatoes. Blackberry crop looks really good this year. Berries coming along nicely. Getting my first ripe mulberries as well.
  10. For those of us not familiar with procedural rules of the committee....why did he stop the vote? I assume its not based on the opinion of the Vice Chair.
  11. I've used five stone for the last 3 or 4 years. Can't remember. They auto file every year. They get the appraisal value reduced to some degree every year. I've never gotten a massive reduction in taxes via them...but I haven't had to pay them much either. Their fee structure changed this year. All that said, my appraised value is less than what I could sell the property for...so its hard to complain...too much. I recommend them.
  12. Sucks for those getting hail. Lack of rain in Austin...so far..is disappointing. I’m posting this to hopefully jinx it and bring the rainfall Thursday. Maybe the force field will go down.
  13. This is a screenshot from Redfin for a listing in Austin MLS. Redfin (if you create an account and login) will show both list price and sold price (per MLS).
  14. 2 of my 5 Texas Sage (Cenizo) appear to have not survived. Weirdly they are the 2 largest and oldest. No signs of green anywhere. The other 3 have been pushing out green leaves for 2+ weeks. St Aug is starting to perk up. I age started to out down some supplemental water. We appear to be very dry, behind in rainfall. I’m really hoping we don’t have a 2011 summer that followed our dev attic blast this year ...like the one that followed our 2011 feb winter.
  15. Today was rough. Sneezing and runny nose. Itching eyes. I was outside all week without issue. Today...totally different. Ugh.
  16. Got my 1st shot of moderna today in Williamson county. Was super convenient. Now I wait for the second shot. Glad to join the party finally.
  17. Presumably these would be tied to EEA events if ERCOT is going to dispatch them. ERCOT doesn't experience EEA events very often. With a mild summer you could easily have these plants sit idle for long periods of time. On the face of it....I can't see this getting through the legislature. It is effectively a capacity market paid to a single resource owner....as opposed to a competitive auction like in PJM. Historically, Texas Legislature has hated anything resembling a forward capacity market. I run through the list and think of all the other entities that would oppose this. Heavy industry, manufacturing, retail energy providers, existing generation owners, existing municipally owned utilities likes Austin Energy, Cooperatives like Pedernales. I have to think that if this got built...the dispatch of the plants...would require that prices remain high in realtime. The market would almost instantly see price drops in real time with this generation coming online....unless it is full on grid collapse....which again....isn't very often. ERCOT already has over 1000mw of responsive reserve (generation that is online but not dispatched...in case plans trip offline) and also procures non-spin...generation that can be brought online is a very short period of time. Obviously it does not procure 10,000 mw of these types of reserve a day....as that is absurd in a normally functioning market.
  18. 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.
  19. If my parents moved in with us....either they or my family would not survive long. Incompatible.
  20. Need more boomers to sell their houses and move to old folks homes? Free up some inventory.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
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