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ERCOT, PUC, and deregulation got us here


cactusflinthead

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Just as a tiny FYI and explanation, that decision was 100% correct, as a matter of law. It all goes back to this: the system functioned EXACTLY how your legislature designed it. It did not “fail” - it performed according to plan, design, and established legal duties and obligations as designed and decreed by the legislature. The court essentially held “yep, that’s what it did. If you have a beef with that, take it up with the lege.”
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The Texas Supreme Court said Friday it would not consider Republican megadonor Kelcy Warren’s defamation lawsuit against former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke after a state appeals court dismissed it earlier this year.

The all-GOP court denied Warren’s petition for review without comment, bringing an end to the nearly two-year legal saga.

Warren, a Dallas pipeline billionaire, sued O’Rourke in early 2022, saying O’Rourke defamed him with his critical comments about his company’s windfall profits after the Texas energy-grid collapse in February 2021. Warren's Energy Transfer reportedly made $2.4 billion in profits as demand for gas skyrocketed during the freeze. Warren later gave a $1 million campaign contribution to Abbott, which O'Rourke used to argue Warren was bribing the governor to go easy on the energy industry as lawmakers were considering power-grid reforms.

 

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/15/kelcy-warren-defamation-beto-orourke/

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The Texas Supreme Court said Friday it would not consider Republican megadonor Kelcy Warren’s defamation lawsuit against former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke after a state appeals court dismissed it earlier this year.
The all-GOP court denied Warren’s petition for review without comment, bringing an end to the nearly two-year legal saga.
Warren, a Dallas pipeline billionaire, sued O’Rourke in early 2022, saying O’Rourke defamed him with his critical comments about his company’s windfall profits after the Texas energy-grid collapse in February 2021. Warren's Energy Transfer reportedly made $2.4 billion in profits as demand for gas skyrocketed during the freeze. Warren later gave a $1 million campaign contribution to Abbott, which O'Rourke used to argue Warren was bribing the governor to go easy on the energy industry as lawmakers were considering power-grid reforms.
 
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/15/kelcy-warren-defamation-beto-orourke/

The main thing that tells you is how cheaply our leaders are bought. Warren’s outfit made $2.4 billion just from that one event…and Abbott only got a measly $1 million from him.
At least expensive whores are usually stunning and classy. Our leadership is cheap street hookers giving blowies in a dirty alley.
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  • 4 weeks later...
On 11/30/2023 at 10:30 AM, Beau Vine said:

Is there really such a thing as a bad taco?

What Texans fear most is that their insistence on voting for Republicans who are anti consumer will miraculously stop biting them in the butt.

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3 hours ago, Satchel said:

What Texans fear most is that their insistence on voting for Republicans who are anti consumer will miraculously stop biting them in the butt.

To fear that, they'd have to understand it, first.

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1 hour ago, Surly Bevo said:

Everybody.  Please do your part to protect the cabal from accountability 

IMG_0042.thumb.jpeg.bcdea28a8e04717d28afeeb5d9f8f12b.jpeg

We were promised that the private market would ensure that there would always be enough electricity. The other promise was that prices would remain low because of competition.

Can someone remind me again of the benefits of our electricity system?

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We were promised that the private market would ensure that there would always be enough electricity. The other promise was that prices would remain low because of competition.
Can someone remind me again of the benefits of our electricity system?

Sure. Donors to the controlling political party have gotten absurdly rich. That’s the benefit. By design.
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10 minutes ago, immamac said:

The more time you spend around rich/wealthy people the more you understand that they are actually the problem not the shithead racist maga moron mouth breathers. 

MAGA pawn in game of life

200.gif

Edited by Surly Bevo
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58 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

We were promised that the private market would ensure that there would always be enough electricity. The other promise was that prices would remain low because of competition.

Can someone remind me again of the benefits of our electricity system?

 

IMG_8462.jpeg

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1 hour ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

We were promised that the private market would ensure that there would always be enough electricity. The other promise was that prices would remain low because of competition.

Can someone remind me again of the benefits of our electricity system?

We can just shutdown the Bitcoin machines. No fear.

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1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

 

Well, that's just fucking great.  I'm flying into DFW tomorrow for a family funeral.  In Austin and Corpus mid-week, then out of DFW on Friday.  It'll be fun to experience the failed state with BBQ & CFS & Tex Mex & Whataburger first hand.

The best part?  They have the day off tomorrow. But the grid will stay up.  No problemo.

image.thumb.png.df33dd89563c6c7b6e62e7c16c6cb22f.png

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so we're bussing undocumented immigrants to freezing cities to prove a point while the cities they arrived in inside Texas are also going to be freezing due to an incompetent and corrupt electrical grid unable to heat its own people?  

I have that right?  And this twisted logic is not part of a simulation that cannot actually keep our power system afloat?  But Jesus exists and hates dark people and is the light unto the cold darkness of the world?  Got it.

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13 minutes ago, YGIFS said:

so we're bussing undocumented immigrants to freezing cities to prove a point while the cities they arrived in inside Texas are also going to be freezing due to an incompetent and corrupt electrical grid unable to heat its own people?  

I have that right?  And this twisted logic is not part of a simulation that cannot actually keep our power system afloat?  But Jesus exists and hates dark people and is the light unto the cold darkness of the world?  Got it.

All so a man in a wheelchair can get the attention of a draft-dodging thrice-married public adulterer from New York City, who has married two foreigners and who can’t name a single verse in the Bible, and who for years was friends with the Clintons and Jeffrey Epstein, and who has publicly shit on the military and on Vietnam POWs.  

And that New Yorker will never give a shit about the man in the wheel chair, because the man in the wheelchair is…a man in a wheelchair.

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We were promised that the private market would ensure that there would always be enough electricity. The other promise was that prices would remain low because of competition.
Can someone remind me again of the benefits of our electricity system?

It’s the same plan to save education. Conservatives choose proven losers to save America.
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On 1/14/2024 at 4:27 PM, Surly Bevo said:

Everybody.  Please do your part to protect the cabal from accountability 

IMG_0042.thumb.jpeg.bcdea28a8e04717d28afeeb5d9f8f12b.jpeg

This is insane to me.  It's been below zero in CO for the past 3 days (we won't get our high temperature back up above freezing until Wednesday).  Not once have we been asked to conserve electricity.  

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8 minutes ago, Chewbacca said:

This is insane to me.  It's been below zero in CO for the past 3 days (we won't get our high temperature back up above freezing until Wednesday).  Not once have we been asked to conserve electricity.  

How could Texans possibly expect it to get cold in the winter?

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10 minutes ago, Chewbacca said:

This is insane to me.  It's been below zero in CO for the past 3 days (we won't get our high temperature back up above freezing until Wednesday).  Not once have we been asked to conserve electricity.  

 

1 minute ago, Bookman said:

How could Texans possibly expect it to get cold in the winter?

Right. I mean it’s not like this happens every year.

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5 hours ago, Chewbacca said:

This is insane to me.  It's been below zero in CO for the past 3 days (we won't get our high temperature back up above freezing until Wednesday).  Not once have we been asked to conserve electricity.  

Our power generators are under no contractual or legal obligation to provide power.

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  • 2 weeks later...

https://www.tpr.org/environment/2024-01-30/texas-just-broke-a-record-for-how-much-power-it-got-from-the-sun

 

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More solar energy powered Texas than ever before on Sunday morning, with over one third of the electricity running on the state’s power grid coming from the sun. Experts say it’s a Texas record that’s not expected to last very long.

Weather conditions were ideal for solar, with clear skies across most of the state, when the Electric Reliability Council of Texas recorded the record at 10:09 a.m. Sunday.

At that time, about 15,222 megawatts of solar ran over Texas transmission lines to homes and businesses. According to ERCOT, one megawatt can power 200 homes in times of peak energy use.

 

Quote

Later that day, Texas broke a record for the share of electricity on the grid that comes from the sun: 36.11%.

Joshua Rhodes, an energy researcher at UT Austin, said he thinks the state will be breaking more records in the near future “as we install more [solar facilities] and the sun’s higher in the sky during the summer.”

Rhodes said the new record is the result of recent years of meteoric growth in solar installations in Texas, which recently surpassed California as the state that produces the most energy from solar power.

 

Quote

“About five or six years ago, solar became cheaper than wind to deploy, so we started building a lot of that,” he said. “That's kind of the second wave of renewables that's come onto the grid [after wind].”

There was actually even more sun power in use Sunday than ERCOT's numbers suggest. That’s because the state’s grid operator does not include energy generated by rooftop solar, like you see on homes and businesses, in its grid-wide assessment.

 

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2 hours ago, drt said:

What? How do they count/track rooftop then?

I would imagine some dude throwing a few solar panels on his roof may not end up in the stats unless the grid he’s connected to includes it in their stats.  Do they all include some dude who is barely covering the power needed to run their A/C and a few appliances all day?

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3 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

I would imagine some dude throwing a few solar panels on his roof may not end up in the stats unless the grid he’s connected to includes it in their stats.  Do they all include some dude who is barely covering the power needed to run their A/C and a few appliances all day?

There is some accounting somewhere if they are grid tied and feed back into the system, which most in urban areas are. They get paid for that power, so there’s a record of at least that part. And I guess you could look at residential array numbers and have a decent estimate of overall MW produced.

 

Im sure someone here knows a more accurate answer. @Dahobbs maybe?

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43 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

There is some accounting somewhere if they are grid tied and feed back into the system, which most in urban areas are. They get paid for that power, so there’s a record of at least that part. And I guess you could look at residential array numbers and have a decent estimate of overall MW produced.

 

Im sure someone here knows a more accurate answer. @Dahobbs maybe?

You sign an interconnect agreement for home systems when you're tied in (e.g., I signed one with Centerpoint) . You don't register directly with ERCOT though unless your system is MW or greater in size. Although I'm sure ERCOT could get reports on home solar activity through the service providers if need be. 

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To add some more context to this conversation,

  • January 1, 2021, total combined utility solar capacity in Texas was 5,649 MW. 
  • August 31 2021, total combined utility solar capacity in Texas was 8,274 MW. 
  • January 1, 2022, total combined utility solar capacity in Texas was 9,323 MW. 
  • August 31 2022, total combined utility solar capacity in Texas was 12,410 MW. 
  • January 1, 2023, total combined utility solar capacity in Texas was 14,249 MW. 
  • August 31 2023, total combined utility solar capacity in Texas was 17,759 MW. 
  • January 1, 2024, total combined utility solar capacity in Texas was 21,173 MW. 

(data pulled from here).

So yeah, expect a lot more records breaking this summer. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

U.S. Rep Greg Casar files bill to connect Texas to rest of the country-

Increases reliability

Lowers costs by lowering energy scarcity

Allows Texas renewables to sell out of state

https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2024/02/u-s-rep-greg-casar-files-bill-to-connect-texas-grid-to-rest-of-the-country/

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On 1/31/2024 at 2:56 PM, Dahobbs said:

To add some more context to this conversation,

  • January 1, 2021, total combined utility solar capacity in Texas was 5,649 MW. 
  • August 31 2021, total combined utility solar capacity in Texas was 8,274 MW. 
  • January 1, 2022, total combined utility solar capacity in Texas was 9,323 MW. 
  • August 31 2022, total combined utility solar capacity in Texas was 12,410 MW. 
  • January 1, 2023, total combined utility solar capacity in Texas was 14,249 MW. 
  • August 31 2023, total combined utility solar capacity in Texas was 17,759 MW. 
  • January 1, 2024, total combined utility solar capacity in Texas was 21,173 MW. 

(data pulled from here).

So yeah, expect a lot more records breaking this summer. 

There is a lot more on the way as well.

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2 hours ago, Post Oak said:

 

It is important to point that zero or negative spot prices don't mean the actual electricity used was free. It just means we don't need any additional generation to come online other than what was previously contracted for. And zero/negative spot prices do also create some additional problems for the grid, particularly when the grid isn't necessarily designed to handle rapid changes in demand. Solvable problems to be sure, but it is important context to the idea that low spot prices are necessarily good for consumers.  

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https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/texas-natural-gas-electricity-patrick-18639857.php

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“If we can’t get an incentive program to attract investors to build, then the state would have to build (more gas-fueled power infrastructure) ourselves and then subcontract out for someone else to run it,” [Dan] Patrick said. “We can’t sit and do nothing.”

I actually agree with Dan Patrick that we need to ensure that our reliance on solar and wind doesn't lead to outages when we find ourselves with windless nights. However instead of the state govt incentivizing or even building natural gas generation units, I wish the state would invest in encouraging more battery production which in turn does effectively incentivize solar, wind and even natural gas.

And if the cutting edge battery technology isn't up to speed, build some old fashioned gravity batteries in the cities. Find a use for some older buildings.

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27 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I actually agree with Dan Patrick that we need to ensure that our reliance on solar and wind doesn't lead to outages when we find ourselves with windless nights.

"Windless nights" is pretty much a red herring designed to strike fear into the hearts of the ignorant, and it's obvious what industry is stoking that fear.  While any one local wind farm might see periodic reductions in power below baseline, the aggregate wind power generated across the grid is predictable and planned for.

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