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swraith

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by swraith

  1. Denver is going to break daily heat records the next three days and going to be in the 100s back to back days for the 24th time ever. 
    At least the mountains are slightly cooler. 

    Estes Park hit 90 degrees today.
  2. 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.

    bdedba546b518c9f99fca43269d2e544.jpg


    Blackberry crop looks really good this year. Berries coming along nicely. Getting my first ripe mulberries as well.

    • Hook 'Em 4
  3. 21 hours ago, SydneyCarton said:

    The most absurd part of this video is that it is clear Cain has little to no understanding of procedural rules and how they work. 

    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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 1 hour ago, pantone159 said:

    I doubt that the plants would be idle for years at a time. It sounds weird to talk about generating plants that are normally not used, but if they are normally used then they are not really surplus capacity. Ideally, I think, there would be a pretty liberal use of special conditions where ERCOT calls up these plants, so they can at least keep things in working order. And I would presume that BH wants to be able to spool up in minutes and sell electricity if the price goes to $8K again.

    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.

     

    • Hook 'Em 2
  8. 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.

    • Hook 'Em 2
  9. 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.

  10. 10 hours ago, FondrenRoad said:

    That all sounds miserable. What do you do?

    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. 

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